Responding to a previous blog post, a reader (Faye) wrote the following:
"Men are wired to lust and not love. … Because of the male wiring, men don't realize how different they are. They think they love when they really have no clue. If you don't have the biological means to experience love all you can do is call the imitation love. … Men can go through the motions but they cannot feel differently. They lust. … Women, being wired differently, don't get that men experience it all differently. They assume that men do feel as they do."
I think Faye is both very right and yet very wrong in her observations. She's right that nobody thinks they have an accent. In other words, most of us take our own experience as "normal" and assume that others feel more or less the same things we do. And I think Faye is right that men and women experience love and lust differently. But I think she is very wrong in then concluding that, because men seem to experience "love" differently than women do, what men feel is "imitation love" and not the real thing.
Faye continues, "The solution is to give up on the notion of love. It does not exist. It does not serve women well. Men can provide sperm and sex but that is it. … Women need to ditch their romantic notions and see it as it is. Men don't care about women. They. Don't. Care. No amount of agonizing, lying to oneself, rationalizing their behavior, blaming oneself or jumping through hoops is going to change this fact. To men, the world revolves around their penis. How that affects women is irrelevant. End. Of. Story."
Ouch. As a man, I can't help feeling some measure of shame and responsibility for Faye's despair and the treatment she's received from men. She's obviously been hurt by some uncaring cads in her day and has given up on the rest of us. Fair enough.
But is she right about men? Are we really incapable of love?
Of course not. It seems to be true that the interplay of love and lust is different for most men and women. Most men report that as love deepens, lust receeds (see the Coolidge effect)—while many women experience the opposite: the more love and security they feel with a given man, the more relaxed they are about experiencing unrestrained lust. So yes, there is space between our experiences, but that doesn't mean either is false or invalid.
What's this have to do with David Letterman? I think we have to begin by admitting two things:
1. Nobody really knows what lies at the heart of someone else's relationship;
2. Much of what Letterman does and says publicly is calculated to heal his relationship with his audience and is not necessarily a response to his private situation.
Other observers have concluded that Letterman is a cad, a liar, a narcissist and a cheat. They may well be right. But maybe his reluctance to get married, despite his very long-term relationship, was due to his understanding of these differences in men's and women's feelings about love and lust. Perhaps he and his partner had some sort of understanding that allowed him to have his casual sexual relationships on the side as long as they weren't a threat to their primary, deeply emotional connection (an arrangement, we should remember, that is common around the world). Women seem to like Mr. Letterman, so it shouldn't be so surprising that some would be willing to have a non-exclusive relationship with him—especially if, despite the many claims to the contrary—he is capable of authentic intimacy.
Some women, like Faye, learn that many men experience intimacy differently and conclude that men are liars, incapable of feeling "real" love. Others—particularly women from cultures less puritanical about sex than America—conclude simply that men and women are different, and that some things can be accepted, even if not fully understood.
If you'd like to read a bit more about a particularly "male" perspective on love, sex, and commitment, I can't recommend this short essay highly enough. It's called A Ladies' Man and Shameless, and is really worth a few minutes of your time. (Note: The essay contains a few photos that may or may not be appropriate for work—depending on where you work.)
Update: A friend just sent me this from someone who worked with Letterman:
http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/who-is-letterman-hur...
