We all know it – but some of us are afraid to admit to it.
We all want to feel loved; many of us feel afraid that we won’t be. But some men seem to think they should bury this need, even though it’s a basic part of what it means to be fully human.
It’s like a thirsty horse standing next to a pool of clear water, but looking in the opposite direction because of a belief that if they turn around and start drinking, they’ll somehow lose their strength and independence.
We often put on an emotional suit of armour to hide our real feelings, because we don’t like appearing needy or being rejected. But we not only harm ourselves with this denial, we may also hurt the people we’re closest to.
My explanation for this fear of closeness is that, at a formative age we were completely dependent on the love and protection and breast-given nourishment, of our mother; and at some developmentally appropriate point, she had to cut us off as an essential step to helping us become more independent.
in a perfect world, we would have then gone into the arms of our father, who could provide a balancing sense of male safety and love. But in many cases, he wasn’t around, so we felt abandoned in an uncaring world. It seems understandable if we then made a decision never to be that vulnerable with a woman again; with some even deciding to extract some kind of revenge from other women later in life.
All of us have a psychological and an emotional component to our lives. If we think of those as the two legs that we all stand on, and imagine one of them being cut off, we know we’d become unbalanced and fall over. This is what emotionally stunted men experience, and sometimes they try to prop themselves up with the feeling of power they get from harming people who are more vulnerable than they are.
The only real solution is for us to develop more emotional self-reliance, so we’re no longer afraid to trust the women in our lives, or to risk opening up our hearts to them in a way that will ensure we’ll be emotionally balanced, and can become the best man we can be – for ourselves and everyone we’re close to.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
Well said Steve. I would like to add one more twist. Unfortunately, many men are not aware of the degree to which they have repressed the need for love. This leads to a continuous undertone of detachment (which may work for a while) or an unreasonable and aggressive need for attachment (does not work). Either way, most relationships under this kind of pressure blow-up, and even then many men just don’t get it.