Dear Women: You’re Not That Special

I’m sure some people reading this were taken aback to hear those words coming from me. After all, if you’re at all familiar with my content, you know that I’m not about promoting ill will towards women — not in the slightest. And as you’ll see, this piece is no different.

Earlier today, I was reading a piece by

𝙷𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚊𝚑 𝙼𝚘𝚘𝚛𝚎 ❤️

. I found that a man had left a comment, and in her reply, Hannah mentioned:

I think any man can win a woman over if he tries hard enough.

I was tempted right then and there to post the following comment:

Why should a man try that hard? No woman is that special.

But whenever I feel tempted to post a comment right away like that, I make a point of sitting with it and letting it marinate until I’ve unearthed what I really want to say — and if I even want to say it. This time was no exception.

As I’ve related previously (see here and here), I went through a phase where I apparently couldn’t land a first date if my life depended on it. It culminated in an experience that I liken to the scene in Book 7 of Harry Potter where Harry “learns” that his prospects for a happy life (after the crappy childhood he’d endured) are nothing but a beautiful illusion, for his only path forward is to allow Voldemort to hit him with his best shot — and how could that possibly result in anything other than the end of Harry’s life?

In my case, I wasn’t facing actual death, but emotionally, it didn’t feel much different: I’d “learned” that my prospects for a happy life — which supposedly required a woman’s romantic love — had been nothing but a beautiful illusion. Sure, other men could look forward to that — just not me.

It didn’t matter that I knew I could be the kind of lover that women wanted; whatever the X factor was that made a man desirable to women, I clearly didn’t have it. Women saw me as a friend, but nothing more.

My only path forward was to stop running from the fear — the fear of always being alone and never getting to experience true happiness — and allow it to hit me with its best shot. And how could that possibly result in anything but a life of bleakness and desolation?

But if you know the rest of Harry Potter’s story, you know that the seemingly inevitable result — his death — doesn’t materialize. And it turns out that that ordeal had been necessary in order to exorcise him of something that needed to be exorcised.

Likewise, my own seemingly inevitable result — a bleak, desolate life — didn’t materialize. Quite the opposite, in fact. And it turns out that I too had something inside me that needed to be exorcised: my belief that I could never be happy without a woman’s love.

While girls are fed the fantasy that their prince will someday come for them, I was never fed anything similar. I don’t know of any boy who ever was. What I was fed instead was:

For you, as a boy who will one day be a man, love is like meat to a carnivore living in the wild. If you don’t hunt, you don’t get to eat. Period. A woman showing up in your life wanting to love you is about as likely as a gazelle walking up to a lion and saying, “Please eat me”.

You see, contrary to what you may believe about men, I wasn’t a natural born “love hunter”; I was conditioned to believe that hunting was my only shot at love, and that without love, my life would be barren and meaningless.

I think this is why I had such a visceral reaction to the following words from

KAT

You [women] are the petals, you are the scent of woman that men crave. In their world, their [sic] are no flowers without you.

I won’t deny the craving, but the idea that a man can have no beauty in his life without a woman? I felt that KAT was pushing — albeit unwittingly — a myth that had crushed my spirit when I was younger. A myth that my little “death and resurrection” finally shattered.

When that myth was shattered, I felt a little bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, once she’d seen behind the wizard’s curtain. I say “a little bit” because what was revealed to me wasn’t that women are a fraud; just that they aren’t that special.

In other words, women aren’t so special that I need one to bestow the gift of her love upon me or my life will be empty. And that’s actually good news — not just for me and other men, but for women too! Because I’m living proof that a man can break free from the soul-crushing delusion that his life will be devoid of beauty without a woman’s love and yet still desire a profound connection with a woman.

It’s true that I lost the will to “hunt”. But I retained something far better: the will to invite. The will to invite a woman to share something beautiful with me. To share a paradise in which we experience the wondrousness of living in our human bodies. To share a deep bond of both love and friendship that can last a lifetime.

That’s one of the reasons I’m such a vocal advocate of men learning to use their libidos to bring healing and light into women’s lives.

It’s why I’ve been able to have beautiful sexual and romantic relationships with wonderful women who are also good friends.

But at the end of the day, it’s nothing more than an invitation. I’ve heard women lament that men don’t “pursue” them anymore. But I would rather see a woman happy without me than unhappy with me. My desire for a woman is not more important than her boundaries, so at the slightest whiff that I’m in danger of crossing her boundaries, I back off.

As such, there’s only so far I’m willing to go in pursuit of a woman. I’m not going to try to win her over. I’ll try to make my invitation as appealing as possible. I will make time for her. I will make her feel safe, warm, desired, and loved. But ultimately, she either accepts my invitation, or she doesn’t.

If she doesn’t? No hard feelings. I was never entitled to her yes, and she was never obligated to give it. But I won’t spend much time pining over her. She’s special. If I hadn’t felt that, I wouldn’t have extended the invitation to her in the first place. She’s just not that special.

With Love,

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.