Men need to know the inner geography of their own emotions, and this knowledge requires language. Without language, a man can’t express himself. But even more, without language, he cannot name his experience, and therefore, he doesn’t know what he is experiencing. That is, he cannot know what he feels.
To know ourselves better, men need a language of emotion or what I call an eloquence of the heart.
Men’s Emotions and Flavors of Love
This series of essays on the Flavors of Love begins to build such a language. Most men experience six categories of emotion: love, grief, pain, anger, fear, shame. I know this from hundreds of hours in men’s groups, many of them recently discussing #MeToo. Each category has many flavors, and a knowledge of those flavors creates eloquence.
Endearment, the topic of this essay, is one of nine flavors I want to address. The nine flavors are shown here:
1) Captivation: the experience of being arrested by beauty, intensely attracted, lost in wonderment
2) Endearment: Amorousness, affection, fondness, tenderness, endearment — qualities of a gentle love
3) Infatuation: fascination, obsession, enchantment
4) Sacred love: The experience of other-worldliness, or the sense of sacred power; could even be a kind of spiritual rapture.
5) Desire: covetousness, lasciviousness, ravenous, rapaciousness, rapturous
6) Seduction: allure, temptation, lust, passion
7) Yearning: The heart is missing, longing, or wanting after the love who is not present
8) Devotion: adulation, adoration, cherishing
9) Commitment: allegiance, attachment
What Is Endearment?
A previous piece focused on captivation — a fiery experience for men that aligns with the sense of being captivated by a woman’s beauty. Unlike captivation, which can occur without even having met a woman, endearment arises from the fertile soil of intimate relationship. Endearment has the strong qualities of much more gentle love. It is joyful, peaceful, and warm, and it tends to grow over time between two people, provided that they are not overwhelmed with the shadow of unstated frustrations. Endearment needs time to grow because it is reliant on familiarity. One must know a person to hold them dear. The longer a couple is together, the more familiar they become, and the more endearment has a chance to grow.
Endearment can be cultivated, but like all emotions, it tends to rise from within. One can choose to be more directive — you can decide to be more gentle, and that will probably help a relationship. But that decision is not what I mean.
Endearment as an emotion will occur to a man and overtake him. He experiences it; he does not create it. True to its nature, the seizing is far more gentle than captivation, but as an emotional experience, it comes from within. It bubbles up into your being. You can’t start it; you can’t stop it. It happens to you.
An Example of Endearment
Here is one way that endearment has occurred to me. I wake up I the morning with a general sense of happiness. Life is good. I’ll lay there in bed next to my love and in my joy, I begin to sing these silly little make-up songs, just because happiness is coming out of me. It bubbles out, and the little songs are about the love I feel for my lady. We snuggle affectionately. My fondness for this woman is felt throughout my body. That’s endearment.
The prerequisite familiarity that underlies endearment comes with a deep, fundamental respect for the other person, which usually requires time to develop. Endearment may thrive only in certain aspects of the relationship, or across the whole range of the two people. For example, early on it may be confined to aspects of the other person that are familiar — usually, the strong, good side each has shared with the other. But if it continues, the endearment may extend to those areas you don’t even know, even extending to the unseen parts hidden because they are not as acceptable. When those new aspects of the person are discovered by the endeared lover, they are treated as enrichments, joys, and intimate mysteries. A sense of wonder about the other person opens up as well — a feeling and experience that I imagine can be very wonderful as you discover more deeply who the other person is.
That wonder and sense of revealing mystery make affection grow. A man feels and experiences true fondness, and he may find himself thinking: “I really like her!” Endearment has that quality.
The Heartbeat of Endearment
A man who holds his partner in an endeared place is not only soft with her, he becomes more gentle with himself. Gentleness with her begets gentleness with himself. Tenderness with her begets tenderness with himself. It is a unique place in the heart that goes easy on everyone. There’s nothing to defend. Nothing to control. No orders to give. No success to accomplish.
This is its joy — familiarity with the other person becomes acceptance of the other person, just as familiarity with the self becomes acceptance of the self. Endearing love gives and receives, gives and receives, like a heartbeat, all in the same experience.
The Cultivation of Endearment
To cultivate the eloquence of the heart, you will need to practice the language. Some of the words that describe your feeling in this area include amorousness, affection, fondness, tenderness, gentleness. Start to use the words.
Here’s an example. The next time you are asked how you feel about your partner, you will probably say, “I love her.” That’s because you do and you may not have any other language. But try taking it further. Explore the language we are discussing. Try saying: “I am very fond of her,” and see what happens. How does that feel? Or, “We are very affectionate with one another,” if you are. It won’t feel right to say it to assert the feeling. You are saying it to test it. If it resonates within you, you may have found something.
If you are not used to using language like this, you’ll need to go beyond the initial awkwardness you may feel. Open your senses to something a bit deeper. It may be awkward because the language is new to you. But if you say, “I’m very fond of her,” the verification lies in whether or not that captures part of your feeling. It may or may not feel that way immediately. You may need to settle with it for a day, even a few days, and see how it feels to you.
Similarly, you may try describing your relationship to a friend. “You know, we are very tender with one another.” Again, see how the language feels. When you say it, does it feel true? Does it capture an aspect of your relationship that maybe you didn’t see before? That is one side of the beauty of language — it can help you experience your relationship in new ways.
The other is this: You will probably know inside immediately if the word is inaccurate. It just means that you haven’t found the word for the flavor of love you are living at this moment in this relationship. You are feeling something else. That’s okay. Go find the words for that feeling. That’s how you cultivate eloquence.
Many women I talk with crave this kind of expression from their men. But the beautiful thing for men is that eloquence of the heart is its own reward. You will feel better, richer, and more deeply than you did before. Emotional eloquence is the way out of bottled-up stress. It is the way out of the frustration of not being able to express yourself. And it is the road to a better sense of who you are.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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