(Of men, women and
relationships)
Listening to the woes
of a certain woman friend about the wretched emotional quotient of the men
she’s been involved with - a classic male-female paradigm! - I came up with
this theory of two tempos on the spot. It’s pretty simple (even men can grasp
it - unless they’re in the middle of a cricket or football match).
Men and women are in
different emotional tempos. Generalising largely, men are suspicious, cynical
and afraid (of emotions). Therefore they take a long time to begin to trust
their partner emotionally in order to start revealing themselves (that giant
monster called vulnerability!).
Women on the other
hand are totally out there. Their speed of emotional relating is not only
dazzling, but also threatening, for a man. So men come up with convenient and
disparaging labels like ‘needy’ to ward off this kind of behaviour (eg - horror
of horrors - calling three days in a row!). And women can get into a funk about
‘not wanting to appear needy’. Predictably, this kind of thing goes nowhere.
Relationships prosper
when the two partners trust each other emotionally. Before this state arrives,
there is the whole drama of ‘is it too early?’ or ‘what does she want from me?’.
Men need to learn that emotions are not monsters that are going to eat them up
(nor are women who are emotional). Actually, their whole culture needs to teach
them this, which it doesn’t. It does exactly the opposite. It tells them that
in order to be a ‘man’, it is necessary not to be ‘weak’. Needing someone,
wanting to be with someone, putting oneself in a position of even a little
vulnerability - these are absolute no-no’s. The only way you can ‘want’ someone
is like Shahrukh Khan in Darr or as a Don Juan - a stalker or a conquerer.
Women, on the other
hand, could learn to trust their own resources a little more, to find
themselves as much in themselves as they seek to do in relationships, and thus
not take off like an emotional jetplane that the man can never hope to get on
board with. They need to bring a full person to the relationship, rather than a
half one whom the relationship will somehow magically complete. Parvathy Baul
calls this finding the ‘purushatva’ in oneself.
Of course, these
gender binaries are quite artificial and the result of a lot of conditioning.
Still, one has to acknowledge that they exist, in different measures for
different people. On a lighter note, women can experiment with coming up with
creative names for the emotionally crippled state that many men find themselves
in - to match the label of ‘needy’ that they so easily get slapped with. How
about ‘emotionally challenged’ to begin with?
