The masculine error is to live life as if it is going somewhere fundamentally different from this very moment. No matter how much your life or woman changes, you will not be satisfied as long as you are waiting to be satisfied.
The Two Bad Moods
The fundamental feminine bad mood is the feeling of being unloved. The fundamental masculine bad mood is the feeling of being burdened.
The feminine reduces life to “Do you love me?” in its many forms. The masculine reduces life to “How can I be ultimately free or successful?” These are not pathologies but orientations — they become pathological only when they dominate without the other’s counterweight.
At lower levels, relationships are rife with neediness. The feminine is needy for constant reassurance of being loved, desired, attractive. The masculine is needy for admiration of success and attainments. Relationships based on the need to feel loved are always relationships based on fear — even in moments of completeness, another part fears its loss. This is desire-vs-love given its energetic polarity: the wound chasing intensity, each partner seeking from the other what they cannot generate internally.
Three Stages
First stage: a man wants to be strong in other people’s eyes. This is neediness — external validation as the measure of worth. The mask optimized for the audience.
Second stage: a man seeks inner strength. Self-confidence, self-reliance, the courage-to-be-disliked. Better — but still a project of the self.
Third stage: a man opens to the strength inherent in deep being. Even self-confidence is an obstruction to relaxing as the force of open consciousness. This is already-free: you do not have to wait until you are healed. The freedom is available now, in the middle of the mess, if you stop waiting to be free.
The daemon journey follows the same arc: first you build a mask for the world (stage one), then you discover the daemon and try to integrate it (stage two), then you realize that both mask and daemon are movements of something deeper that was never broken.
Anger Is Sharp Love
Anger is sharp love. Sorrow is hurt love. Fear is contracted love.
Every emotion is love in a different shape. emotional-wisdom says emotions carry information — Deida adds that the information is always about love. The angry person is loving sharply. The sorrowful person is loving through injury. The fearful person is loving while contracted. The task is not to eliminate these emotions but to recognize the love inside them and let it flow.
This converges with no-bad-parts: there are no bad parts, only parts whose love has been distorted by the conditions they faced. The firefighter’s rage is sharp love. The exile’s sorrow is hurt love. The manager’s vigilance is contracted love. IFS and Deida arrive at the same place from different directions.
The Collapse of Radiance
Most men are almost constantly postponing their depth of presence for the sake of tasks and projects. A woman learns to acclimate to her man’s shallowness and his moods of dissatisfaction — burden, frustration, unfulfillment, anger. In response, she collapses her radiance by shutting her body down so as not to feel her own pain, disappointment, and the lack of trust in her heart. Her closure makes her man feel even more burdened.
This is the three exiling projects in energetic language: the man forces the woman to change (project 1), the woman sculpts herself into what he seems to need (project 2), and both gradually give up (project 3). The radiance that attracted them to each other is consumed by the mutual accommodation.
Without a woman’s strong influence, men tend to become divorced from the flow of life. Men like to pursue “ultimates” — ultimate spiritual attainment, athletic victories, scientific theories. The feminine counterweight is: depth is now or never. You cannot achieve your way to love. This is pleasure as organizing principle applied to relationship: if the relationship requires constant effortful maintenance, the direction is wrong.
Passion and Love
Without love, passion is destructive. Without passion, love is wimpy.
Most people are dissociated from their dark side — the energies of anger, aggression, and hunger. Passion pounces, crushes, devours. It is dangerous. But since most of us are unaccustomed to the bliss of direct spiritual surrender, we settle for substitute breakthroughs — breaking through a defensive line instead of breaking through our fear.
Allow desire to be a doorway through which to give your gifts, rather than a needful urge through which to acquire something. This is Watts’s play insight applied to desire: when desire serves expression rather than acquisition, it stops being a trap and becomes a vehicle.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “men need to be more masculine and women more feminine — just embrace your polarity.”
The midwit take is “this is essentialist gender theory dressed up in spiritual language.”
The better take is that masculine and feminine are not genders but orientations — forces of direction and reception, presence and radiance, freedom-seeking and love-seeking — and every person contains both. The stages of growth apply to both orientations: from seeking validation → seeking inner strength → relaxing into open being. The relationship between the two is the laboratory where both are refined — which is why intimate relationship is a life task, not a lifestyle choice.
Main Payoff
You are always dissolving. Every moment you are dying to all that has been. Consciously participating in this death without resistance is love. The contemplation of death strips you of all false pursuits. Without the buffer of tomorrow, unclothed of expectation, no longer waiting for things to be different, you can fully be the love you are, right now.
Giving love — to the point of recognizing existence as love — is the purpose of your life.
References:
- David Deida, Finding God Through Sex: Awakening the One of Spirit Through the Two of Flesh