Nimue Brown is fascinated by men who turn human awareness into inspiration.
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For me, love and inspiration have always been largely interchangeable words. It may come as little surprise then that creative connections have largely been key to my falling in love with people. I’m married to the chap I create graphic novels with.
For me, the creative man is always going to be attractive. I can be deeply emotionally attracted to a person without that turning into a romance. I’ve had a number of close friendships with guys where that’s been based on shared creativity – music, writing, or occasionally something else. The creative relationships have always been the richest and the most rewarding.
Creative guys care about ideas; they’re interested in all sorts of things. Perhaps it helps that the arts aren’t traditional macho, nor is cooking, or gardening, or any other arty, crafty procedure.
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The key to this is the correlation between emotional literacy and creativity. Good creativity has the power to move and inspire people. Any of us might achieve that by accident now and then, but the person who can reliably get the emotional results they want out of a viewer, reader, audience … that person understands feelings. I’ll go further. I tend to find that creative people who understand the inner lives of humans are endlessly fascinated by the processes of human emotions and the possibilities of human behavior and action. To get there, they’ve become self-aware, and alert to their own reactions as well.
It’s true that they might be listening in part because they can turn what you’re feeling into a song, or because they’re trying to work out how to capture that exact facial expression. Even so, on the whole, there’s empathy to be had, and insight to be shared and it all tends to work out rather well.
Creative guys can have a reputation for ego and self-obsession, but once you’re away from the celebrities and the crazy rich, the culture changes. Most creative people are barely scraping a living and have to have more down to earth and realistic relationships with themselves. What you tend to find is a lot of humanity.
Creative guys care about ideas; they’re interested in all sorts of things. Perhaps it helps that the arts aren’t traditional macho, nor is cooking, or gardening, or any other arty, crafty procedure. Men who step into these spaces have already decided that the narrowest male stereotypes don’t interest them. They aren’t afraid to do, say and explore things that might be considered feminine—all the sensitive, nurturing qualities too often associated with being female. I’ve always found this more attractive and found that it also means I’m not lumbered with narrow gender stereotypes either.
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Photo: Getty Images