By way of preface, and to address the needs of any reader who might have turned directly to this section for clarification, the short answer to the question “Can you love two men at the same time” is “Yes-- Sort of.”
Usually what happens is that one man offers security and dependability, and the other offers adventure and freedom. We all want everything. Is that so difficult to understand? Examining the reasons why we carve people up into these categories is the first step in understanding the emotional menage-a-trois desired by some women, and lived by others.
Real men are not meant to be husbands, according to the folk wisdom pervading our culture from the frontier days onwards; Shane rides away unmarried. Heroes move towards the far horizons of experience without the shackles of marriage; Bruce Springsteen's songs emphasize that the man who travels alone can travel fast.
We can see that such mythologies fit neatly into the conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior and psychology described earlier. We understand that it isn’t just the Garden State parkway that makes Springsteen see himself moving swiftly through the night in order to avoid the ties that bind.
To find the truly erotic lover, we are encouraged to look for the truly exotic lover. We’re meant to find the Feral Man, as close to the Wild Man as possible, but one who can still be tamed.
We also should be told, however, to get all necessary shots and use a Have-A-Heart cage if possible.
Women’s apparently paradoxical reluctance to enter a calmly satisfying relationship when they seem to want one is a point made repeatedly by one of the bestselling self-help tracts of the eighties, Smart Women, Foolish Choices. The two men who wrote this book, both California psychologists, describe a pattern they see as creating havoc for many women. They argue that women sometimes “seek out states of tension, challenge, and excitement in relationships because as girls they were geared to see relationships as a primary goal in life. Boys, on the other hand, were taught to look for excitement in their jobs and in athletic competitions and so tend to view relationships as less primary. Most men don't look to relationships for excitement and thrills.”
Women seek out drama and adventure in their relationships since they are taught to see emotional territories as the only ones open for their exploration.
Invoking Ellen Moers’ brilliant book, Literary Women, we can agree that in their emotional lives, women “could enjoy all the adventure and alarms that masculine heroes had long experienced, far from home.”
To put it another way, women are encouraged to regard relationships as the defining force of their lives. They fear that too tepid a relationship will not provide them with a sufficiently breathtaking plot or breathless pace.
If their relationships are boring, their lives will be boring.
If their relationships are stormy, then the days won’t so easily blend into one another. Such a woman will create crises in her emotional life in order to feel “more alive” the way a physician whacks your knee with a hammer to see if your reflexes are working.
The crises of such a woman’s emotional life is indeed a sort of reflex response to her fear of boredom.
...to be continued...
adapted from Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales
