He wants to go. He always wants to go somewhere. Staying is equivalent of stagnation. He loves freedom, and change, and ironically he finds it within the structures. Within linear lines, on highways speeding away somewhere not sure where, anywhere but here.
She wants to stay. She doesn’t want structure. She wants to wake up and take her time. Stay in bed, stretch. Maybe snuggle, make a cup of tea and go back to bed. Then slowly move through her day as if she is dancing.
He is smirking. He has to be somewhere. “Gosh, doesn’t she know we don’t have all day?? We don’t have all life. Time is ticking and there are still so many places to see, so many things to do.”
He is always in a rush. Chasing sunsets and sunrises, unseen lands, and stars in the night sky. He is a wanderer, adventurer, pursuer.
She is a nurturer. She wants to stay and feel. Feel the love, smell the roses. Create and build. Love and dance.
She doesn’t need to go anywhere, although she can go anywhere. But she needs to feel safe.
He doesn’t make her feel safe. Always taking her out of her environment. Never letting her build a home. As soon as she starts feeling comfortable and safe, there is a new destination, new point on the map, new endeavour.
She doesn’t understand why cannot he do it from here.
Why can’t he go on his adventures and then come back home?
Why does he need to drag her along all the time? Uproot and start over again.
Why cannot they have both? Stability and safety, and adventure and change.
So far she has just been following him along. The obedient daughter, wife, sister, the internalized figure of patriarchy. Or perhaps it is the patriarchy that is the externalized version of that inner split.
The split between Masculine and Feminine. Between the two parts of me that cannot reconcile.
Masculine has been in the driver’s seat for so long. Feminine is still there but she doesn’t feel loved, safe, protected, valued.
She is like a trophy wife. Getting invited just for a show. He brings her along because he is aware of her beauty — of all those gazes she gathers from strangers. But he doesn’t really let her be. He guards her but doesn’t protect her. He uses her to get what he wants. The pursuit that is the only thing that matters, and she is just a means to an end.
In the situations where he needs her qualities, he pushes her out as if saying: “Here, it is your turn now, you can drive”. But he still controls the brakes. She cleans, she cooks. He even lets her come out at times to take care of their body, at times he lets her be there caring for others. But then he puts her back in the cage, at the back seat, in the closet.
He always pushes her away. His desires are the primary. They never compromise.
And even when she falls in love, the truth is it is not her who leads the way. At first, it is him. He chooses the target, he pursues. She is still not healed from the last heartbreak, she is still hurting but he doesn’t care. He sees someone he likes so he needs to conquer. Along the way, she falls in love. But then it doesn’t matter anymore. He either drops it and moves on, or he is angry with her because she is making things complicated.
Now she has needs, now we cannot just have fun and good time. Now her emotions are getting hurt. Now he is being pressed to leave.
Before it used to take him a very long time to do it for her — to leave. He would stay and tell her to suck it up. Until she cried too loud.
Until the so called self-sabotage, but really we are not sabotaging ourselves, it is two parts of us that are at war with each other. It is unacknowledged feelings that are trying to be known and come to the surface through behaviours that we might not understand.
The toxic manifestation of the Feminine is in using her beauty and creativity to seduce and manipulate. The energy of creation becomes destruction. Shakti becomes Kali.
Kali is a Hindu Goddess and one of the many embodiments of feminine primordial energy, Shakti.
Similarly, many goddesses (and gods) in various traditions have parallels to those in other cultures, where they are depicted in sometimes destructive manner. For instance, Artemis is a goddess of hunt and a protector of wild animals in Greek mythology. She is particulalry associated with chastity. The parallel hunting goddess, Dali, comes from Georgian culture, where despite many similarities to Artemis, Dali is known for her seduction, jealousy and destructive powers.
What can be drawn from these myths that there are various manifestations to Feminine energy as there are to Masculine. The question is not about our ‘true’ nature, but rather which aspect of ourselves we feed.
When the Feminine sees that her needs are being ignored, that she is hurting and the Masculine doesn’t care, she needs to take herself out of the situation. She manipulates and uses her seductive power to get what she wants.
She brings him back home. He sees how badly she is bleeding, how hurt she is. He promises to never leave again, to protect her.
And then the cycle starts again.
The truth is he doesn’t like her. He may love her — in the kind of love that is born out of the habit, the kind of love that has big words but lacks actions.
We talk a lot about the importance of loving ourselves but do we like ourselves?
The part of me that I identify with the most — my Masculine — doesn’t like my Feminine. He rolls his eyes every time she gets emotional. He rolls his eyes when she needs him to be there for her.
He doesn’t like her sensitivity, her sensuality, her fragile nature, her tenderness.
He loves her beauty, her sexuality, her creativity — the things he can use for his own pursuit and leave the rest.
Imagine, such inner relationship between the two — what will it bring into an external world? What kind of relationships with others can you foster when this is the type of relationship you have with yourself?
The partners who too don’t really care. Who are there to use and take as they please, but not cherish and love. Who are there but not really there.
My Masculine has been staying at home more lately. He cannot wait for his next pursuit. Endlessly searching for destinations to take off to, new things to conquer. Even when with her, he manages to escape. Escape through the fantasy of being somewhere else, through working, through setting goals and achieving them.
He nervously looks at her once in a while, as if to say: “Are you done yet? Your heart healed yet? Can we get over this already?”.
But she is still hurting. He knows he needs to be there for her. He knows it is the right thing to do. He held her crying to sleep day after day. He knows her wounds are still raw. It is too early. She needs time.
But he is scared. His desire to take off is really fear. He is scared that if he stays, she will cage him. Tie him up and then he will never be able to leave.
He is scared that she will take revenge and do what he did to her all these years.
Did you know that one of the premises of white supremacy is “the idea that should black people ever get power, they will immediately enact revenge among the white populace for all the years of toil, rape, murder, slavery, and terrorism”?
Perhaps the same goes for patriarchy.
Perhaps the same goes for any mind that doesn’t want to take responsibility for the damage it has done, that ultimately doesn’t want to give up the power.
The same goes for the relationship between my Masculine and Feminine.
The thing is it is much easier to swing around to the other side of the extreme. I have a model for that. She can just do the opposite of what he did.
To bring them into partnership, into conversation, to make them trust one another again that is however a very difficult task. Where do you even start?
Perhaps you start from a clean slate. They both need to move forward towards each other. He needs to give way and surrender without the fear of being trapped, she needs to give way and surrender without the old resentment of always doing so.
And maybe it has to start with baby steps. He needs to show his commitment at first through his actions. She needs to show her willingness to forgive and reconcile by remaining open and gentle.
Otherwise they are constantly at war — pulling and pushing in different directions, but really both are in the pursuit of the same thing — freedom. Not realizing it is to be found together.
If you run, you are not free because you are still running from someone. But that someone is always with you. You are bound together. If you run, the other drags along. You either run together, or you both stay. Perhaps you still want to take off but you choose to walk instead. Perhaps you can honour both of their desires — the masculine quest for freedom, adventure and conquest, and the feminine desire to create, love and nurture.
Perhaps the Plato’s Other Half was never about soulmates or romantic love between two people. Perhaps the split that he envisioned between men and women as a split of an original human being is really an inner split we all experince within our psyches. The split of consciousness that happens when one of our parts is no longer welcome so we repress and put the other in the driver’s seat.
Culturally, as we absorb our environment, it is more common for boys to identify with their Masculine and push away the Feminine, hence the established gender norms. Hence, the ideas that boys are ‘just’ by nature a certain way, and girls are the opposite.
Feminism often tries to flip this over — pushing women to identify with the same toxic Masculine that we see in the society. The same toxic Masculine that pushes away and disregards the Feminine, that takes his own desires as primary. In a sense, that very well fits in with the whole capitalism narative and therefore serves it too. Imagine, a whole society — both men and women— is living predominantly in their Masculine energy, in the constant pursuit of achievement. Building to conquer but not to nurture.
Can such world even survive? Well, looking at the state of our planet right now perhaps not.
I too have lived in my Masculine for a very long time. Not in the healthy Masculine that is much needed and can provide a safe container for the Feminine to flourish, but the oppressive one.
As a kid my Feminine wasn’t welcomed. Her sensuality, sensitivity, creativity wasn’t welcomed. Achievement, good grades, pursuits and detachment were rewarded. The environment itself was hardly supportive of the Feminine. Survival was primary and I had to step into the role of an adult so early on. So I cut her off, I pushed her away.
And that split only got greater and greater as the Masculine took over. Since my Masculine didn’t acknowledge the Feminine, it didn’t really care providing a safe environment for her. So she hasn’t been around all that much. And when she first started to come out, she was like a trauma survivor with severe PTSD — hypervigilant and jumping at every unknown sound, scared that any moment she would be interrupted and dragged along yet to another place on another mission.
Today she is doing much better. She paints, she writes, she dances. She is given time and space to be. She is even allowed to do what not until long ago used to be unthinkable, she can stay in bed all day. But she is not bitter. She acknowledges his needs too. She doesn’t deny that she needs him as much as he needs her. She needs him to create safety and stability, to provide for her. So she lets him go on his pursuits, and she supports him. When he is working, she brings her creativity to him. When he is stuck, she aids him with her inspiration.
At times they still argue and fall back into their old patterns. But they are growing. They are committed to being there for each other every single day. They are committed to building a new type of a relationship where both feel loved and valued. Where although different and separate, they are one.
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Previously Published on medium
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Photo credit: by Scott Broome on Unsplash