Last week I went on a date with a guy who has US/ Iran dual citizenship, but has not lived in the US since he was a child. My writer investigation agenda was on high with the questions I asked about culture, trajectory of cultural sentiment, cuisine, industry, the mineral resources which have always been untapped, logistics and distribution channels. The world of my current project has start differences from reality, considering that I am posing an alternate history of the trajectory civilisation could have taken under different conditions. However, this was a date.
He had already demonstrated that he was a complainer. He does not enjoy being in Germany. It is not the cultural dynamic he prefers - that was clear before we met. There are people who are critical that Germans are reserved and all that entails, and chose to see the worst in the people rather than appreciating the good cultural qualities. As someone who has chosen to re-immigrate, and feel connected and at home with a culture that fits my personality better, it is a contrast which has become abundantly apparent with me to the perspective of many expats.
It was not a big shock when his recounting of dating experiences and conversations with women in this culture was something additional he wished to vent about. Certainly, that aspect of conversation killed any romantic potential for me, as I pivoted to a position of calm critical debate, and explaining points of view to him which were different than his own. (Since being open minded and empathetic are on my list of attributes I seek in a romantic partner, it was immediately clear we were not compatible) This is the context for our discussion of gender roles, his very particularly interpretation about balance of gender energies, and discussion of archetypes.
Then there is my cultural perspective. Personally, I grew up in a culture that celebrated a "benevolent misogyny" which comes with heavy penalties for not following the rules of the "benevolent patriarchy." Tall athletic boys were the favored archetype as were the "cute" blond cheerleaders who showed up dilligently to fawn over them and participate in an antequated "coming out" pagentry at the age of 19 to announce their "elligibility" to society. I was none of those things. The women in my family were none of those things - those descriptions have been explored in other posts. I finally found my tribe as a teen in the athletic community, connecting with tall, athletic women who were confident in their stature and abilities, and unapologetic.
Starting my university athletic career, my first year there was in fact a fourth year who welcomed being hailed as "Artemis, goddess of the hunt." One of my teammates was a tall women standing at 183cm+ with dark hair, a student of Classics, and welcomed comparison to Greek folklore figures. In the ill fitting culture of youth, women with these physiologies were categorized as "other."
I met a man who had been homeschooled, studying to be an engineer, who, according to my mother, was infatuated with me. When we were 22, he organized an outdoor expedition weekend with our friends, which resulted in my leaving by medivac helicopter with lacerations to my head. He made the dreaded call no parent wants to receive as my parents sped to the several hour drive to the hospital only knowing to expect their daughter was in the ICU with a head injury and fearing the worst. Our friends of course all returned home. One of the guys lived nearby and came to visit and tell me jokes. My mother checked into a hotel to stay bedside with me during my recovery. (I did have a large laceration on my temple, and a concussion). My mother was apparently taking mental notes about the fact that he had driven several hours to see me, and a certain look on his face looking at me. When I returned home, he organized a barbeque for our friends to see that I had recovered, and invited my parents. My parents decided it was an appropriate time to get into one of their regular spats, about something I do not even have any idea what it was about - but certainly had nothing to do with the purpose and focus of the event which was the fact that their daughter was not a vegetable in a hospital. Because priorities.
My mother did stay, and the man showed her an entire photo albulm of his childhood. She made comments to me about what she was observing. Then came the night of awkwardness. He called to ask to get together - he suggested to cafe near my house. I always made every effort to avoid having any men in my life around my mother, so I drove to the cafe. While I was waiting for him, a different scene was unfolding at my house, where he appeared at the door to pick me up. He arrived and explained that scene, which played out in my mind as so awkward, I had to turn it into a comedic narrative to ease the tension. On that night, I cannot recall what happened exactly after we left the cafe. I believe I rode with him to his university lodging and met up with other guy friends, who all had good values toward women, based in shared faith values. However, I do remember sitting in the car in the parking lot with him discussing something I found irritating about how women were viewed, and he asked me if I was the "f" word, which I would never use to associate with myself until I started taking on male public figures who were bullies many years later. I moved away, and had my own very difficult journey. A few years later he took a job close to me, and met a young sheltered woman. They came to have dinner with me after they were engaged, and she looked at him the way a woman should look at someone they want to marry. I never would have looked at him that way. They invited me to the wedding. Going through the receiving line, I told his mother (who I met one time on a day when I had split the skirt I wore to church and had safety pins holding it closed) that I thought he had done well in finding a woman who seemed very compatible with him. Her response caught me off guard, finding it creepy and startling. She said my opinion had always meant a lot to him. The longest stretch of time I had ever lived close to him was 3 month stints during summer recess. I wondered why he would ever consider my opinion carrying such weight, and why it was anything he would have been discussing to that extent with his mother.
My mother and I have had crazy fiercely independent road trip stories gone awry on multiple continents. She drove a roadster convertable through a blizzard, requiring assistance of a band of truck drivers to retrieve said convertable when it spun out of the tracks in the snow on the road, and ran out of gas in East Germany. I drove across North America with a transmission that broke, and with a boat on top of my car and a fault Accelerator, calling highly influential people on the road to dermine my destination.
The man seated across from me last week said he got into some heated debate with a woman on a dating app who told him she expected 50/50 partnership, and she was very defensive and not expressing her views in a calm way. He was unable to hear or understand what her points were, in the context of his worldview. However, many of the women of my previously mentioned tribe are married with children, and establishing their own sets of boundaries. They mostly marry confident men who are not trying to hold them back. A friend visited me last summer, who I thought had had a similar path of relationship development, to find that her husband had been emotionally abusive, while they were dating, and she never told me, and she was in the middle of a messy divorce, so not all have had success stories. Others examine, even if monetary, career, and childraising responsibilities are divided more equitably, the expectation that persists that somehow they are supposed to provide emotional support and oversight, sometimes on a level that certified professionals are highly compensated. I relate to that experience.
His comments were that he found women who were on the attack very difficult to understand and reason with. However, he then expressed to me that he felt gender energies were not meant to be a 50/50 balance. He continued by expressing that women were "inherently" "better" at emotional intuition. I asked him was that nature or nurture? Was that because, like the women in the culture of my youth, was that because they had been told since they were three that those were the expectations of the skillsets they possessed? Like how most parents and fathers raise sons by encouraging them to take risks from a young age, but not daughters. Even in the recent risks I have taken in my life, I was only fully free and supported after my mother died, and my father could fully encourage and support my abilities to take risks and fail. https://www.scarymommy.com/dont-tell-girls-to-be-careful-teach-them-how-to-take-risks/
First, I mentioned that as adults at this stage of life, the only discussion between two people should be about if they are partners in life trying to figure out what works, what actually works, not whatever cultural expectation they had been told since they were three. I gave him the perspective from which I came, being more like my father than my brother was as a risk taker, being competitive and aggressive. That was when he said that of course different kinds of women were attractive, because throughout history there had been archetypes - he referred to goddess figures like Artemis. However, he still had some expectation that a woman who would go out, perhaps be more aggressive in her day job, take on perhaps more mental and emotional strain in her profession, would somehow have more capacity than him to come home and be the emotionally responsible partner carrying the burden of the emotional well being of the members of the family unit.
He said that in his view of yin and yang, he interpreted balanced gender energy for a man to be 70% male and 30% feminine, based on this definition as feminine meaning willing to follow every family member around and wipe their nose. The treatment I have given this topic in my current project is drastically different than this definition, and I would never argue that balanced gender energy meant that men lack emotional intelligence, or the degree of lack of self-awareness as this man in front of me. Having been a member of the tribe with which I could finally identify, and finding a cultural and personality fit and home in Germany, where I am not tall or short for a woman, but the same height as most of the women walking down the street... I am also aware how often men view these archetypes as something to be worshiped and idealized. Which does not fit any archetype any woman would seek out or find attractive... In a critque group where there was a similar topic of discussion about archetypes, they observed how archetypes are observed across history vary drastically. In Greece, how Artemis was viewed is not at all how the modern woman might interpret the archetype. Personally, in my writing, I do not rely on archetypes, because I write based on real life inspiration and people I know personally. They are not as flat as archetypes, or the attempt to take an archetype and deconstruct it, and I encourage writers to explore the depths and variety of human beings in real life over trying to interpret archetypes.
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