I M Perfect lady

There is another section that I loved from Robert Bly’s book “Iron John”; he speaks of the becoming passive to your own hurts.

“The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it.  As a compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work, but that isn’t really what he wants either. 

We can go farther.  The passive man may ask his children to do his loving for him.  Children often observe the parents with great acuteness.  The family therapists around Murray Bowman, working on anxiety in families, stud how much anxiety there is and who carries it.  They conclude that an adolescent “in trouble” who is “acting out” may in fact be transferring some of the anxiety between mother and father to himself, and in that sense carrying it.  Children are active in loving to the point of sacrificing themselves.

The passive man may skip over parenting.  Parenting means feeling, but it also means doing all sorts of boring tasks, taking children to school, buying them jackets, attending band concerts, dealing with curfews, setting rules and behavior, deciding on responses when these rules are broken, checking on who a child’s friends are, listening to the child’s talk in an active way, et cetera.  The passive man leaves his wife to do that.

He then goes on to a section called “Naiveté”

We see more and more passivity in men, but also more and more naiveté.  The naïve man feels pride in being attacked.  If his wife or girlfriend, furious, shouts that he is a “chauvinist,” a “sexist” a “man,” he doesn’t fight back, but just takes it.  He opens his shirt so she can see more clearly where to put the lances…..

He feels, as he absorbs attacks, that he is doing the brave and advanced thing; he will surely be able to recover somewhere in isolation.  A woman, so mysterious and superior, has given him some attention.  To be attacked by someone you love – what could be more wonderful?  Perhaps the wounds may pay for some chauvinistic act, and so allow him to remain special still longer.

The naïve man will also be proud that he can pick up the pain of others.  He particularly picks up women’s pain.  When at five years old he sat at the kitchen table, this mother confided her suffering to him, and he felt flattered to be told such things by a grown-up, even if it showed his father up poorly.  He becomes attracted later to women who “share their pain.”  His special ness makes him, in his own eyes, something of a doctor.  He is often more in touch with women’s pain before he checks his own heart to see if this labor is proper in the situation.  In general, I think each gender drops its own pain when it tries to carry the pain of the other gender.  I don’t mean that men shouldn’t listen.  But hearing a woman’s pain and carrying it are two different things.  Women have tried for centuries to carry men’s pain, and it hasn’t worked well.

The word special is important to the naïve man, and he has special relationships with certain people.  We all have some special relationships, but he surrounds the special person with a cloying kind of goodwill.  The relationship is so special that he never examines the dark side of the person, which could be a son, a daughter, a wife, a male friend, a girlfriend.  He accepts responses that are way off, conspires somehow with their dark side.  “Some people are special,” he says.

We might say that if he doesn’t investigate his son’s or daughter’s dark side, perhaps they will not investigate his.  He may also have a secret and special relationship with the wounded little boy inside himself.  If so, he won’t challenge the little boy, nor will he point out his self pity, nor actually listen to the boy either.  He will simply let the boy run his life.

Sincerity is big with him.  He assumes that the person, stranger or lover he talks with is straightforward, goodwilled, and speaking from the heart.  He agrees with Rousseau and Whitman that each person is basically noble by nature, and only twisted a little by institutions.  He puts a lot of stock in his own sincerity.  He believes in it, as if it were a horse or a city wall.  He assumes it will, and should protect him from the consequences that fall to less open people.  He may say, “It’s true that I betrayed you with your best friend while you were away, and even after you were back, but I was frank with you and told you about it.  So why should you be angry with me?”

This book may be for Men, but all women should read it too, it will give you a greater understanding of what men are up against.  He even comments that the men need a movement similar to the feminist movement. 

Here is a short quote by Antonio Machado,

Look for your other half

Who walks always next to you

And tends to be who you aren’t.

 And one by Juan Ramon Jimienez

I am not I.

        I am this one.

Walking beside me, whom I do not see,

Whom at times I manage to visit,

And at other times I forget.

The one who forgives, sweet, and when I hate,

The one who remains silent when I talk,

The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,

The one who will remain standing when I die.