He’ll be fully present once this project ships. By then she has stopped waiting.
A man stays late at work, then comes home still half inside the project. He tells himself it is temporary: once this deadline passes, once the business is stable, he will slow down and really be with her. Most men, David Deida argues, are almost constantly postponing their depth of presence for the sake of tasks and projects. His partner learns to acclimate. 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 him feel even more burdened, so he retreats further into the work that was supposed to set them free.
Why does working toward a better life so reliably hollow out the one you have? Deida’s answer is the center of the book: 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.
Burdened and unloved
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 it to “How can I be ultimately free or successful?” The man at his desk is in the masculine mood, where every obligation, including her, registers as weight between him and some future freedom. She, watching him leave in spirit, falls into the other mood, and each partner’s bad mood feeds the other’s.
The obvious objection is that this is essentialist gender theory in spiritual language, and some of Deida’s phrasing invites that reading. The more useful reading 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 way out is not a better project
The man might try to fix this by working on himself, but self-improvement is just another project pointed at a future self who has finally arrived. Deida’s way out is to stop waiting, which is the point of Already Free: the freedom is available in the middle of the mess. That changes what the difficult emotions in the house mean. Anger is sharp love. Sorrow is hurt love. Fear is contracted love. His irritation when she interrupts his work is love gone sharp; her withdrawal is love that has been hurt. The task is not to eliminate these emotions but to recognize the love inside them and let it flow. Even the hungry, aggressive energies belong, because Without love, passion is destructive. Without passion, love is wimpy.
Underneath all of this is death. You are always dissolving. Every moment you are dying to all that has been. The man at his desk lives on the buffer of tomorrow, the day the project ships and he can finally be present. Contemplating death removes that buffer, and without it he can be the love he is tonight, which is the only night his partner can receive it. Whether that is wisdom or a beautiful excuse to stop building anything is the question each reader has to test at their own desk.
References:
- David Deida, Finding God Through Sex: Awakening the One of Spirit Through the Two of Flesh