Falling in love can be deeply disorienting. Bryan Reeves thinks that’s because it’s an invitation to one of the biggest transformations humanity can experience.
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Romantic love can save humankind.
Yes, that’s right. Romantic love can save humankind.
Romantic love, that thing that turns the world upside down, that burns wild and luminescent like a thousand shooting stars streaking across the night sky before typically burning out just as fast.
It can save humanity. That’s a big statement, and it just might be true.
For ages, women were essentially treated as property of men, enslaved to masculine will. Women were used to forge alliances between kingdoms and powerful families. They had no choices but to labor in the home for a man’s benefit. In some places, this still holds today.
A man (or a woman) will never be able to fully embrace feminine expression in the world outside himself until he can embrace it inside himself.
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Romantic love came of age in the 12th century when medieval Knights started practicing a spiritually-oriented “courtly love” towards women. This was not a physical love, however, but a purely spiritual love. In fact, physical love was considered entirely inappropriate for this profound love-at-a-distance. These noble Knights were engaged in an intentional practice to honor a woman’s feminine love and adoration as inspiration for their masculine exploits as warriors of the realm. She was the muse teasing out a man’s true greatness. Physical sex would only corrupt the feminine love that made that possible, so it was believed.
(The word “courting” comes from that era of Knights and Maidens of the King’s Courts.)
This curious new reverence for women, which in turn had its origin in the heretic Cathar religion of the time, began to shift man’s orientation towards the feminine.
Finally, men were being called to honor the divine feminine aspect of love, for they instinctively knew that only with her blessing could they experience full spiritual attainment: blissful union with God.
Today, romantic love, regardless of the sex of the person you desire, is arguably the only realm in our modern world where masculine energy can embrace feminine energy in her fullness.
Otherwise, our ages-old bias towards typically masculine expression has created a world in which competition, dominance, individualism, power, and productivity overwhelm the more typically feminine virtues of community, love, relatedness, collaboration, and holistic care. Yet both men and women possess all these attributes to a degree and can express the full range of behavior.
Living out of balance this way is literally imperiling human civilization.
We’ve been taught since forever to dismiss feminine energy as weak, unstable and less valuable than masculine energy. Living out of balance this way is literally imperiling human civilization.
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Our incessant drive to produce and consume pollutes our oceans with consumer waste and poisons our air and water with the toxic by-products of industrialization. Our depreciation of feminine expression keeps women underrepresented in leadership roles at all levels of civilization, even though it has been documented that women in leadership roles improve businesses and economies.
We’ve been taught since forever to dismiss feminine energy as weak, unstable and less valuable than masculine energy.
Romantic love is challenging, because it is the path modern life has created to help us correct this painful imbalance.
A man (or a woman) will never be able to fully embrace feminine expression in the world outside until he or she can embrace it inside.
What we reject inside ourselves, we will reject outside.
Romantic love is a pathway by which we are invited to fully embrace and integrate the feminine and masculine energies within our own bodies and in the world.
It is not easy for us to relax our ancient predilection for masculine energy and allow feminine energy her rightful place at the head table.
Even many modern women, who would otherwise deeply enjoy expressing more feminine energy, have learned that the highest rewards, particularly financial, come to those who present as more masculine than feminine. Many women are drawn to the path of leading with the qualities often associated with male success in business—cold logic, seeking control, prioritizing productivity and profit over human needs, etc.—at the cost of offering their feminine gifts to the world, their partners, their communities. Is it possible that if women felt freer to bring more empathy, compassion, sensitivity, and emotion to work, that men would feel freer to do the same?
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Falling into romantic love is a deeply disruptive whirlwind experience! It shifts our loyalties and upends our priorities.
Why would we ever engage that experience willingly?
We don’t.
That’s why romantic love has to pierce our chests and grab at our hearts like that creepy Indiana Jones voodoo priest. It sacrifices our sanity at the altar of feminine mystery.
When approached properly, romantic love can help us reclaim wholeness.
For in the passionate grip of romantic love, the lover naturally cherishes his beloved like nothing else in his life.
When approached properly, romantic love can help us reclaim wholeness. It reignites masculine worship of feminine energy.
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The secret to sustainable romantic love is to continue cherishing the feminine mystery in our partners, as we also recognize its presence in ourselves. Not try to resolve or diminish the feminine energy in the relationship, but fully celebrate it.
That may also be the key to humanity’s salvation: learning to cherish the profound feminine energies in the world at large, that we may truly care for the entire planet, all life, our communities and neighbors, our close loved ones and ourselves, too.
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Imagine a world in which the feminine virtue of community care is welcome in corporate boardrooms. Would companies spend more time figuring out how to make a profit AND genuinely serve all of humanity?
Imagine a world in which the feminine virtue of collaboration is widely practiced in politics. Would politicians be less inclined to wage war on ideological opponents and be more concerned with understanding other perspectives and passing thoughtful laws that truly serve the interests of the whole community?
Imagine a world in which feminine energy in both partners was fully honored in our intimate relationships. Would we be more vulnerable and authentic with each other, prerequisites for true intimacy?
Now imagine your own world when you can live true to both the wild masculine and feminine energies swirling within you.
When we can be consistently vulnerable, authentic and relaxed in our joy; when we can be decisive and swift at the appropriate times with the wisdom to know how to listen deeply and collaborate with other perspectives to serve the whole community … what an incredible world that would be.
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Join my free webinar called “5 Steps to find a high-quality man who cherishes everything about you … by using the 3 C’s of Relationship.”
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—Note: If you want to learn more about the evolution of romantic love and its promise for humanity, read “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love” by Robert Johnson
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—Photo Shutterstock
I love it! Mostly. I mean, it’s a great message, that we should embrace and respect what are traditionally called masculine and feminine characteristics inside ourselves and others. I hesitate, though, when I consider two things. The first is the idea that our culture has always respected masculine and disrespected feminine. While this may be true in many ways, we have often also held women in higher regard, as our moral betters, as better parents, as more deserving of gentle treatment, and especially as more sexually desirable. Women have been put on a pedestal, (often in ways some of them… Read more »