Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 1

Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 2
Gendered Sex and Love Symbols part 3

Gender stereotypes, like all stereotypes, have a kernel of truth in them, and though which parts of the stereotype is the true kernel is often debatable, I wonder if the kernel difference between how men and women think about sex might contribute to some couples’ choice for female led relationships, perhaps even why female led relationships may be better for certain men and women.

If men stereotypically want passionate sex while women want compassionate security, then perhaps men experience the pleasure of passionate sex as a symbol for love, while women perhaps use sex as an only occasionally pleasant tool to obtain compassionate security as a symbol of love. The comparative specificity and singularity of male sex symbolization, of their sex drive and sexuality reflecting only desire to love and for love, contrasts with the plurality of female sex symbolization. For women 'being sexy' may symbolize their sexuality and their sexual drive, but it may possibly also symbolize their desire to simply be desired, to capture and hold the attentions and resources of a willing mate.

But since being 'sexy' isn't the same thing as being 'sexual', sex is often a contentious issue in relationships; women discover they need less sex to obtain the comfort and security they desire while men discover they need more sex to continually express love. And I think it is at this point men disenchanted with their partner's lack of sex drive and women disenchanted with their partner's constant need for sex discover female led relationships as a way to continue the collapsed male sex-love symbol (without sexual frustration, porn, affairs or other symptoms), but also give the woman the control she needs to obtain the comfort and stability she desires.

The Expectation of Happiness

Everyone thought about what they were going to be when they grew up, thought about the difference between their dreams and what they might settle for, about why they might settle, what cost benefit analysis might make them settle. We knew our ideas of happiness would change, but we looked at our parents, our friends, our parents' friends and our friends' parents, and came up with ideas of converting money, education and opportunity into happiness, ideas of how many children we'd have, how we'd raise them, what our spouses might be like, where and how we might meet them.

I wondered why I'd be happy with my wife, why anyone was happy committing to, settling for, settling down with, any one other person for the rest of their lives. As a child I understood that would have to be a very special person, but when I looked around at the people around me, I didn’t see anyone even close to such a person, perhaps because I didn’t know how to look at people then, didn’t understand love's worth or intimacy's beauty. These things I wouldn’t know until I had tried committing and settling a few times, with each attempt comparing to the happiness goal, noting how things were different than I expected and readjusting the relationship course a little bit, or a lot, or even starting over.

Yet now I realize I am no longer comparatively happy but happy in uncharted and unexpected waters; I no longer expect there's more relationship happiness different than the kind I already have, perhaps broader or deeper but not different. I have all I was ever looking for, all I ever expected (and perhaps why other women no longer tempt me), and not only is my relationship different than I expected as a child or any other time in life, but things now, finally, are better than I thought they ever could be, better than I ever expected, as a child or at any other time in my life.

Other Women

I have always found other women than my current partner attractive, but for the first time I don't feel tempted by them. Already in the maintenance of loyalty I have learned to focus on love rather than the love symbols, to preserve the soul of our relationship without distractions like porn, and to see the worth of our love rather than its mere fact. Yet other women, other attractive women, are another kind of distraction which overlaps all these and adds more, for it's only the possibility other women represent that is tempting, not their skin beauty but the possibility of intimacy with their interior beauty, a more or different intimacy, and a different interior or different beauty with lure of variety.

But like porn it is a soulless lure, a distraction wherein one gives away the value of the love they already have, and difference isn't better, no difference could be better, than the fate and destiny I feel with my wife. I don't need to know any other interior space as I know, love, and know the worth of the interior space of my wife; other women may be attractive, but they simply couldn't have the value to me that I already have.

Thus I know the moment I attempt to investigate the value of another woman's interior space will be the moment I devalue the interior space of my wife and devalue of the soul of our relationship. Looking for more, different or better, anywhere but with my wife not only shows a lack of loyalty or an assumption she is somehow lacking or deficient, but shows the assumption our fate and destiny together is somehow lacking or deficient.

Dreaming Monstrous Me

I recently dreamt I had (rather dramatically) sacrificed another commitment for the sake of more time and intimacy with my wife. I am less disturbed by the commitment sacrificing dream than I am that my dream self feared consequences more than the internal 'moral flexibility' permitting such sacrifice - which I think is the point and why I had the dream.

 Time with my wife is the lovely cookie of my life, and I enjoy paring down things and commitments we don't need, because it frees up more of our selves for intimacy between our selves; yet there are some things and commitments that can not, should not, be shirked. Thus though monsters may lie in wait for such missteps, we maintain our balance, our meaning and purpose, and we slowly journey forward, toward our destiny, to our fate.

Uxorious Social Patterns

We all have a limited resource of self, a finite amount of time and energy that I believe more likely to vary by how we spend it than by the total amounts we each have. It's almost a proverb how new couples spend less of themselves upon their older social relations, but I wonder if uxorious men are simply more disposed, predisposed, towards having intensely intimate relationships but less contact with other people overall, whereas other people might tend towards having fewer intimate relationships and more contact with people overall.

On one hand, I myself have never been a very social person, never so much a matter of choice as just who I am, and so I've never  really felt any lack in circle friends, extended family or even acquaintances, before or after I after I dedicated myself to my wife. It isn't only as if having more but less intimate relationships just 'wasn't my flavor', it's more as if it tasted lackluster to me, though surely I had nothing to compare their luster to save with what I wanted and desired.

Yet I know everyone is different and different isn't wrong; perhaps I've simply attached more internal meaning and significance, more interior worth, to intimacy than to something different. Or perhaps it's more complex than this: perhaps people experience significantly different interior satisfaction by having either more relations with less intimacy or fewer relations with more intimacy; but I have no idea how anyone would ever discover such a thing or whether it has any uxorious correlation.

Love's Fate, Love's Destiny

'Fate' and 'destiny' are words and symbols of powerfully felt experiences and emotions, whether we deeply believe ourselves truly fated or destined or not. Romeo and Juliet were 'star-crossed lovers', and their appointment by the very stars of heaven not only fittingly reflected the transcendent nature of those powerful interior emotions, but also was befitting of the exterior circumstances of their untimely demise. Yet in the context of love the difference and similarity of fate and destiny are significant.

Fate, often with unfavorable connotations, is decided by an outside agency; a 'fatality' is an unwelcome end not chosen, we accept our (regrettable) fate, and we decide another's fate. Fate refers to a predetermined future, an inevitable final outcome, status, or situation, the terminal full stop; yet as such 'fate' may also refer to events that are past or presently occurring but since they are 'required' for the final future fate they too are predetermined and inevitable: 'it was fated they should meet now, for thirty years hence they would know each other upon their final field of battle.'

Destiny, often with positive connotations, is willfully participated in and accomplished by a person for themselves; we 'make our own destiny' and chose travel destinations. Destiny refers to one's chosen course of action, yet as such it also may refer to past or present events that enable a person to achieve their chosen destiny, or even what must still yet happen before they accomplish their chosen destiny.

Thirty years is a lot of fate and destiny to have in my past before falling so deeply in love with my wife. Yet my experience of fate includes being who I am, and my interior composition, uxorious among many things, is something I do not feel I could change if I wanted to, and in the process of becoming more at ease with myself and becoming myself more fully, I experience a sense of fate revealing itself. As I choose (destiny) to increase the intimacy in our relationship, I experience a sense of our 'having arrived' (destination, destiny), but also a sense of all things past combining to arrive at a coordinated present (outside agency, fate, inevitability). Thus I find an accurate statement of my experience is: The destiny I have chosen seems, to me, to be my fate.

Love's Interior Meaning

My attempt at experience learning, at attaching the 'right' meaning and significance, won't necessarily result in the same meaning and significance that she attaches to her standards. The goal, my goal, is to find any combination of meaning and significance on my interior that gives me the amount of organization and prioritization that result in her standard being met to her satisfaction, that result in her happiness and pleasure.

This is partly why I don’t believe being uxorious will dissolve my personality and leave me her blind, unthinking automaton. Though I seek her happiness and pleasure and I want to give love to her in symbols and gestures that she understands, and don't want to guess at what symbols would be effective, I still do what I do for my internal reasons and choices, for my interior meaning and significance, not for hers.

I may receive some validation and approval from her as I seek her happiness and pleasure, and so long as these things overlap on my interior compass I'll take as I give, but I will not sell my worldview and personality to attain or do either. Indeed, it is precisely because I am not compromising, and have not compromised, my interior self, and instead I have only become more myself at every interior turn of increasing meaning and significance that I feel so 'destined' to be right where I am in our relationship.

Love's Intuition