If you have to ask for it, it's not love

There is, of course, a necessary qualification: there will be things that the person you love can't guess. Sometimes you may have to tell them what you like and don't like.

But if it doesn't happen if you don't ask, she doesn't really love you.

Jealousy is often really about you

I was listening to an interesting podcast at The Art of Charm about retroactive jealousy. That is when you get jealous of your girlfriend's or wife's past partner.* If you have any reason to believe that that applies to you, check out the podcast.

What interests me here, however, is how the case of retroactive jealousy allows us to see in particularly clear light that a large component of all jealousy it is really about you. It stands out in this case because you don't typically know much about this person you're jealous about. In some cases, you've never met them and, even if you did, it was probably a limited and strained conversation. So the jealousy you feel about this person is mostly your insecurities projected onto them.

It's perfectly normal to feel a little doubt at the start of a relationship but that should fade over time. But if you still feel jealous about someone's ex months or years into a relationship there is a problem. When that happens, it is your insecurity, your sense of being an impostor that is at work. And the solution is to work on yourself. Self-love is crucial. Yes, it can be overdone but I am convinced that there are far more people who are suffering from a lack of self-love than an excess of it in this world. You cannot love anyone else, not even God, if you cannot love yourself.

In a small number of cases you can be consumed with jealousy and unable to see it because it feels like you have lots of objective evidence to confirm it. The jealousy you feel, instead of the anger you ought to feel, is really driven by your fear of leaving her. You think there is something wrong with you, that you only lucked into getting this woman to be with you, that you'll be all alone forever if you dump her. And that is blinding you. You can't see that she is the problem and that the sooner you get rid of this selfish jerk who is sucking all the energy out you, the happier you will be.

* I'm a man and unapologetically write as one. You can always reverse this and apply it the other way if you are a woman or gay or lesbian. That would require some adjustments because there are huge differences between men and women. 

Another image: What are they selling?

 Okay, this may seem obvious. They're selling a birthday card.

But what is the woman who buys this card selling?

It doesn't help to know that the inside is a cheap joke about calling Chicken Delight because they have the best legs around. Ha ha.

But step back and consider the larger message. It's suggestive and slutty on the outside and cold-hearted denial on the inside. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what a man wants in a relationship. And, for an added bonus, she's mocking you for wanting what you want.

Why would that be appealing? Why would you want to get into or stay in a relationship with a woman who is sending you that message?

Ethos?

I was asked to comment about an exhortation directed to Catholic men by the Thomas J Olmsted, Bishop of Phoenix. These opening words give you a good sense of what it's about:

I begin this letter with a clarion call and clear charge to you, my sons and brothers in Christ: Men, do not hesitate to engage in the battle that is raging around you, the battle that is wounding our children and families, the battle that is distorting the dignity of both women and men. This battle is often hidden, but the battle is real. It is primarily spiritual, but it is progressively killing the remaining Christian ethos in our society and culture, and even in our own homes.

My short answer is that there is a lot of good in the piece and that it's well worth your time to read it.

My longer answer is to wonder about the word "ethos". It has two meanings. In one sense it is a place, a cultural place, where you truly fit. If you were a sports coach who cared little for weddings and you go to wedding planners convention, you would be out of your ethos. If you went to a clinic about coaching young athletes, you'd be in your ethos. You'd walk into the room and you'd fel at home. And that would be true even if you were a neophyte coach and you were quite certain everyone else in the room was more qualified than you because, even then, you'd know you had a place. But it can also mean proving you have the right to be in the place you are. When I stand up in front of a group of young Catholics to discuss marriage and their plans for marriage, I need to show them that I'm worth listening to.

So the question is, in which of those two senses is "the remaining Christian ethos in our society and culture and even in our own homes" at risk? Is the problem that safe Christian spaces are being undermined from within and without. It certainly feels that way sometimes. And there are people, one of my nephews for example, who would like to see Christians driven from the public square, seeing us as no better than con artists. But it behooves us to ask the question from the other side as well: Has Christianity lost its credibility to speak to the larger culture and is that what's really making the assault Bishop Olmsted worries about so successful? And here, I'm afraid, we must answer in the positive.

It's interesting, in that regard, that Bishop Olmsted, is appealing to lay men for help. For what motivates this exhortation is a belief that the health of Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, would be improved if Catholic laymen manned up.

For decades now, a model for manhood has been fashioned in the fictional British spy character named James Bond. Various actors have taken turns portraying this man who, in several adventures, has proposed what it means to be “manly,” yet Bond remains an enigma. Like the women that he uses in the films, the ones who watch him find themselves wanting to know him. He is never a father, nor does he accept responsibility for or love one woman. In him, we see a man whose relationships are shallow and purely utilitarian. Indeed, “James Bond is a male character whose name is the height of irony. He is 40 years old and has no bonds. He is actually pathetic.”

I don't disagree with that but, whatever else you might say about him, James Bond has ethos in the second sense. Sure, it's fantasy ethos and there is something no-quite-grown-up about it but Bond, like all action-heroes and superheroes speaks to a real desire that men have. That so many men seek it in such a ridiculously fake form as James Bond tells us a lot about how hard it is for them to believe in this in real life. It's not just that Bond is fiction as that he couldn't be anything but fiction. Outside of a tiny percentage of certifiable nut cases, every male Bond fan knows that he is embracing a  whacky fantasy. That so many have given up on finding any real hope for ethos in the real world is telling.

And that is the question I have for the Catholic church: what opportunity for ethos does it offer lay men? I ask because I don't think Catholic lay men will come riding to the rescue of a church where they don't feel they are in their ethos and where they feel that their credibility as men is constantly undercut. If all we have to offer such men is a long list of responsibilities that they shoudl man up and fill, they won' be coming to help us any time soon.

Women who won't sit facing backwards on the train

You meet a lot of women, and even a few men, who think that making a fuss about sitting facing backwards on the train is a reasonable thing to do.

If you challenge them, they won't even try to pretend that their position is reasonable (because it isn't) but neither will they waver. The final authority is their feelings. They will admit the arguments for why they should get over it but will insist that they just don't feel comfortable. And that is where the reasonable person (meaning you) gives up.

But here's the thing: it's easy to get over the feelings of discomfort. You just force yourself to do it and the feeling of discomfort goes away—we all train ourselves to get used to far more difficult things. You know this and you know that she also knows (or should know) and that is why it irritates you when she makes a fuss. In the end, though, it's just another discomfort to put up with so ypu give in.

But do you make a judgment about her? I think men generally don't consciously reach judgments about women in our lives at moments like this and I think we should. Judge but don't condemn. Notice it and add it to your file on her.

What this tells you is that she is scared of being out of control but, rather than directly confronting this problem, she likes to play little games that allow her to maintain the illusion of being in control even when she isn't. And now, having established the principle, it's a matter of determining degree. How much of this sort of game-playing does she indulge in? In the long run, that is a far more important consideration than how hot her body is.

Of course, there is also the beam in our own eye. I also play games rather than accept that I can't control what life is going to throw at me. And yes, I should do something about it. But, if I do, that not only entitles me to make judgments about others, it obliges me to because that is what it takes to love others as yourself.

What's really behind the Man Rules

I think something interesting is going on in male culture right now. And it isn’t what it appears to be. The men driving the renewal often speak of what they are doing as something that has never been seen before but I think what they are doing is more of a renaissance of manliness. They are rediscovering something that was lost.

I caught an interesting example of this on a podcast at The Art of Charm that I listened to yesterday. It was posted on July 29 of this year and is called The  Man Rules and featured a sociologist named Dan Griffin. Griffin argues that there are a series of socially derived rules for being a man that we have all internalized and that these have positive and negative aspects about them. In order to not be sabotaged by them, a man needs to know about the rules and to be conscious of the ways they affect his life. So far so good.

You can guess a lot about where Griffin is going to go with this just in the language he uses. Note, for example, how he uses negative and positive formulations of the same rules. He didn’t intend to set these up as vice-virtue pairs but I’m going to do that for him and, when I do, you will be able to see that Griffin has accidentally uncovered some ancient wisdom.

There are two things going on here. The first, as is obvious when we look at the chart above, is that Griffin has rediscovered virtue ethics without realizing it. The second is something that Robert Glover showed us in No More Mr, Nice Guy years ago: that hiding your vulnerabilities is no way to be a man—that concealing your weakness is no way to be strong. To be a man is to accept that there are risks and that there are no safe ways to live if you want to have meaningful relationships.

That second point is not obvious from the above chart alone for it shows only binary pairs. To get it, we need to consider that there are two extremes for each vice. If you are swept up by everything that provokes an emotional response in you, that will destroy your integrity. You'' be able to tell one woman that you love and treasure her and then go across town and say the same things to another lover. So you have to know how to control your emotions in order to have integrity. Paradoxically, you also have to nurture your emotions to have integrity. If aren't afraid of losing someone, you'll never value her in your actions and you'll betray her not by cheating on her but by failing to love her adequately. Your claim of love will be an empty sham.

Griffin, interestingly, takes the manly values, beginning with the ones listed in the chart above, to be socially given, “from your parents, from the schoolyard". And that they certainly are but they are also built on a solid biological foundation. A powerful hint that this is so can be found in Griffin’s saying that the man rules are universal; that while there are local variations, you find these in every culture. And that ought to give us pause because the odds against every culture throwing up more or less the same set of gender rules are very high. These aren’t gender rules, they are sex rules. These are the rules that derive from your having both an X and  Y chromosome and all that follows from that.

And that jumps right out at us when Griffin and Art-of-Charm host Jordan Harbinger discuss sex. Griffin lays it out as categorically as he can:

You can take all the rules of sex and you can condense them into one sentence: have as much sex as possible, whenever possible with as many hot women as possible.

He’s wrong. There is a second sentence he doesn’t know about and I’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing to grasp is that what Griffin treats as a cultural determination is a biological fact. For men, there are two successful evolutionary strategies and one of them is the sower strategy, which is to attempt to impregnate as man women as possible so as to created better odds of your genes being passed on. And that is Griffin’s one sentence.

The second sentence, the one he doesn’t know about, is:

Form a solid and lasting bond with one woman, protect and feed her and help her raise the children you produce together.

That also improves the odds of your passing on your genes because any children you and this woman have will have a better chance of surviving.

Civilizations tend to be built on the latter of the two options. When civilizations crumble, the first will reassert itself. But the first never goes away. When things start to get unsettled—because social norms are abandoned, because the economy collapses or because the culture is put in danger because of war or disease—you see the first come back with a vengeance. Because it never goes away, all civilizations attempt to regulate and, where it can’t be regulated, accommodate these drives. Thus we have marriage and divorce laws, child support payments, prostitution, pornography and so forth.

One of the reasons these things never go away is that women have complimentary drives. The best way for a woman to get pregnant is to have sex with as many men as possible. On the other hand, the best way for her to ensure she has a partner to raise her child, and thereby increase the chance of their survival, is for her to be monogamous. The temptation to pretend to do the second while actually doing the first is always present. (The central sexual myth of our culture is not a false belief about masculinity but a false belief about the supposed moral superiority of women when it comes to sexual behaviour.) If you were to do a thorough-going genetic analysis of your family going back a few generations, you would almost certainly find a man in your family tree who was there in name only.

And I’ll end for now on a very MacIntyre note. What if there was a cataclysm in our culture and we didn’t notice it? Suppose that economic prosperity and peace concealed from us the fact that our moral culture was severely wounded. Perhaps what someone like Griffin is doing is not, as he thinks it is, a process of cultural criticism but an attempt to rebuild a manly culture out of the ruins.

Yes, strength is a virtue. And this is especially true for men.

Someone commented on an old post about strength being a virtue and asked if I still thought so and if I had any further thoughts on the subject. The answer is yes on both counts.

One of the perennial questions about virtues is whether you can have them in isolation. Now, that may sound dry and academic and it certainly can be dry and academic but it needed be. Think about the police. Are you glad we have a police force? You shouldn't have to think about that. The only correct answer to that question is yes. But you also worry about abuse of police power. And you worry even though you know it's pretty rare.

Strength is like the police. It's unquestionably a good thing and yet you know that strength can be misused. Strength is scary. When I first started squatting I was shocked at how quickly I got up to weights that really scared me. The potential for damage was huge. To have strength is good but you need to figure out how to use it and you need to figure out how to develop it in a balanced way. Getting stronger is part of being better in every way but it isn't a guarantee of anything.

Learning how to use it

First, a massive qualification: My experience is that weak, snivelling little shits do a lot more damage in this world than strong men do. You will probably be a better man in every way if you get stronger. Probably. I say that because having  physical strength is going to force you to think about moral issues that you've been ducking until now.

When I started lifting many years ago, two huge moral/psychological changes followed. The first was that I started standing up to people. When I saw some jerk pick on someone, I started speaking up. I'm six foot one and I'm big. And, without really thinking about it, I started using that size and the strength I'd gained. If someone crowded me on the bus, I'd stand up tall. It seems like a little thing but I realized that for years I'd been backing away or contorting myself to accommodate pushy people and, now that I was strong, I stopped doing it.

I did the same socially. And some people got really upset. I had one woman I'd known for years start yelling at me and threatening me simply because I no longer put up with her verbal bullying. She soon made it clear that either I was going to revert to my former ways or lose her friendship. I chose to let it go. And that hurt her. It hurt her a lot. And I had to think that through. It wasn't my fault that she was unreasonable but she was pretty stuck in her ways and it was unlikely that she would change. I felt that I was just finally standing up for what was reasonable all these years but I quickly figured out that doing so was going to be devastating for her. In the end, I decided that my standing up for myself was more important than her feelings and did so even though I knew she'd go through some psychological suffering.

Strength forces you to think seriously about hurting people. You still hurt people when you don't have strength but it's easier to dodge responsibility. Once your strong, you know you can do it. You may think, that doesn't apply to me because I'm never going to be strong like an MMA expert. And that's true, but MMA fighters are in the top two percent in terms of their ability to inflict pain. Only an idiot would challenge a guy like that. But most men aren't like that. Most men are weak and pathetic and four months in the gym will make you stronger than most men. And if you do that, you have to start thinking seriously about violence and what you might do with it.

The second moral challenge was sex. Your testosterone goes way up and so does your sex drive. And so do your opportunities for sex. Women become more interested in you. In fact, any man in his twenties or early thirties who takes the trouble to be strong, get a good job and learn to be be socially adept will soon find the number of potential sexual partners available to him to be a little staggering. And then you suddenly find yourself faced with moral challenges about sex in a way that you never were before.

Balance

If you start getting stronger, one of the brutal truths you will soon be forced to face is that some other men are lot stronger than you are. That may seem obvious but our narcissism plays tricks on us. Before we try, we know that we aren't strong but part of us believes that we could be as good as anyone else if we tried and that isn't even close to true. Yeah, somebody has to be the strongest guy in the gym and it might be you but it almost certainly won't be. More likely, you'll be working out someday and some relatively ordinary looking guy who weighs 60 pounds less than you is going to come in and lift a hundred and fifty pounds more than you. And, no, you're never going to catch up to him.

Getting stronger should teach you lessons about yourself and you should use those lessons to become a better person. Not the best man there is but the best man you can be. One of the most important lessons is about reasonable limits. If  you've never worked out, you'll make huge gains at first. And then that will taper off and then the question becomes how do I manage myself now. For me, physical training was the first time I had to ask that question.

Now that I'm getting older—some stores now give me a seniors' discount—I've had to start facing getting weaker. No matter how much I train, I get a little weaker every year. That's true of people who don't train but they can hide it with self denial. You can't do that with weights: you can either move them or you can't.

Now, it doesn't follow that being forced to face this stuff will lead to wisdom. I meet people in the gym who do really stupid shit fairly regularly. Virtues don't exist in isolation. But the thing about virtues is that you don't get any of them if you don't work at them. You may still fail at becoming a man if you get strong but you will almost certainly fail if you don't.