The deconstruction of love: pathological or wise?

I suspect that you are a spoiled arrogant little punk. You will need all the help you can get in the romance department. For one reason: Women do not find your mechanistic thinking at all attractive or desirable much less romantic.

Right they don't. But then again women's need to see men express romantic passion is at least partly self-serving, isn't it? It is probably not going to be a surprise to you that men don't simply enjoy seeing their lover in sexy clothes just because it enhances her self-esteem either. Let's acknowledge that such signalling serves both the sender and the receiver. Turning Carey's attempt at detachment into a criticism seems a bit shallow, especially with someone you don't know.

It does seem that many women hate it when men intellectualize about love. Understandably, they want the poet whose passions they can understand and rely on, not someone who tries to deliberate on the most intimate feelings and decides by calculation. Even if the poet is deceiving them to get them into bed, they prefer it to the man they can't control at all. I think this is the same reason most of us don't trust non-believers. We don't understand their passions, we don't trust what drives them. If they don't share a faith in something unseen and pervasive, whether it is God or Love, then how can rely on them?

It does sound very much like we're either denying the reality of love or its importance, or that we're somehow trying to separate ourselves from its power. Some of that may indeed be true, although from my perspective we don't succeed. It is still part of us.

Consequently, my guess is that it isn't being "mechanistic" that women disdain, it's what being "mechanistic" means about the man's motives to them. It means that she has far less understanding of what drives him and far less control over his behavior and that she is comfortable with. She may well know that he is driven by those powerful emotions in spite of himself, but she can't tell where they will take him.

So long as he is intellectualizing the powerful emotions of love and pair-bonding, a young male isn't committing to a partner (or at least he assumes he isn't), so he feels in some semblance of control, however illusory.

On the other hand, if mechanical understanding gives us some small measure of real detachment and lets us avoid mistakes of the foolish heart, then perhaps it is not entirely the character flaw it might seem at first.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re: What a girl wants?, by Leah, 06/23/04

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