Everyone I've ever been in love with gave me something I couldn't have gotten on my own, or at least I thought I couldn't. Speaking strictly for myself, though I know this applies to many others as well, I came into adulthood with so many missing pieces that for decades my love relationships were all about trying to making up for my own deficits through loving another person. In the process, I became an expert caretaker, attentive and committed to boosting the other's self-esteem, while rarely giving voice to my own needs -- since I was barely conscious that I had any.
This profile is a dangerous person to be in relationship with. He easily becomes resentful that he's doing too much and not getting enough back in return.
In fact, the women in my life have always given me at least as much as I gave them. It's always been equal, or as equal as we could make it. But after my last breakup, I started wondering whether men and women have messed things up so much in our culture that it might be better to try and meet women from other cultures.
I still love American women; don't get me wrong. In so many ways they are the best potential partners for American men. But the gender wars of the last 30 years have worn us all down, so much so that maybe we all need a break from one another in the form of seeking relationships with other kinds of people from other parts of the globe.
No matter how you slice it, our way of doing things in parochial America is only one way to do them. Having been fortunate enough to have traveled to at least two dozen countries, several of them multiple times, I'm well aware of how arbitrary each culture's governing assumptions and customs truly are.
There are all sorts of other ways to be in a couple than the norm we employ here. Of course, with this country, we've been able to develop a diversity of relationship types in modern times, some of which are as progressive as anywhere in the world. But I doubt I am unique in appreciating the potential cross-cultural benefits of getting to know people from radically different societies better. Of learning how to create intimacy across not only gender but culture.
I think that path might hold the promise of more satisfaction for me than would the business as usual routine between American men and women. Maybe this is all theoretical, at present. But knowing what you are looking for in life is an important part of finding it. I had lunch with a friend of mine yesterday, a lovely woman aged 45, divorced, mother of two sweet daughters, and two years into a relationship with a new man.
She argued that as we grow older we know much more about what we want in other people, and we don't dilly-dally around as much as when we were young. We get serious pretty fast, and we recognize 'types' -- the commitment-phobic type, the cheating type, the marrying type, the unreliable type, the caretaker type, the charismatic type (watch out for them), the narcissistic type, and on and on.
We've all had enough experience to sort the people out we meet more efficiently than in the past. When we were young, hormones drove us into all sorts of impulsive choices, and while that can still happen in your 40s and 50s, other factors soon overtake the purely biological attractions that (apparently) never stop happening.
This makes breaking up at older ages much more painful than when we were young. Then, we might get hurt, or hurt somebody, but neither of us truly knew what we were doing.
Now it's different. We know, or we ought to know. Otherwise, we ruin the risk of "obliterating" somebody, as I've previously noted. When you give your heart away, you've entered extremely dangerous territory. We're all old enough to know this. And yet some of us keep doing it!
Are we the weak ones? Is it a bad trait? Shouldn't we learn how to be more guarded, to spot the danger signs, to hold back, be cool, remain somewhat aloof from our lovers?
Maybe. For my part, I don't care to live in such a world. I'd rather find cultural pockets elsewhere that contain at least the promise of true romantic love. Sharing emotional intimacy is as good as it gets in this life.
I intend to experience that again...
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