'Are Men Capable of Full Intimacy?'

'Angry Feminist' advice seeker replies to Monday's Ask Polly.

Kenningar (1961) by Dorothea Tanning

This is a reply to Monday’s column from the letter writer, ‘Angry Feminist.’ I’m making it a free post because those who read the previous column might also enjoy this deeper dive. Remember that one-year paid subscriptions are available to anyone who can’t afford one. Email askpolly @ protonmail.com. If you already wrote to me and I forgot to give you a free sub, remind me!

Dear Polly,

I have been poring over your response all morning. I'm extremely grateful. You're right, of course, that cultivating a spirit of fun-loving pragmatic experimentation coupled with a sacred commitment to my desires and my worth is a viable way forward. You were also so insightful in identifying some of my weaknesses as a partner -- the arrogance that's started to bloom in the absence of love and recognition.

I NEEDED the Wicked Queen analogy because I have ALWAYS seen this part of myself as a MASSIVE, EXISTENTIAL liability. Even though I'm kind of a hardo, I've always been a boy crazy and an intrepid dater. If someone was funny or fun or interesting, I'd find them lovable despite the frogginess (like the Star Wars guy! I get that!). I'd work with them, feel bad for them, coach them, coax them, take what I could get. Occasionally, I would blow up in rage because I felt policed or criticized (how could this be when I was bending over backwards?). For years I lived by a Simone Weil quote" Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness."

So, I get what you are saying and I may have taken the annihilation of my core desires a bit far. I hate the parts of myself that get so upset that I cry and scream, like they deeply embarrass me and I constantly apologize when it happens. I was so worried that being angry and hurt was going to swallow me up and ruin everything that I became performative as a dater and girlfriend. I'd play the game so well, I never took a break. I had boyfriend after boyfriend. My boyfriends start to notice this in me. They'd be like, "Do you do this with everyone? Is this just how you are? You make every guy feel good about themselves? Am I special?"

Many guys have used this distrust as a bludgeon, which has felt unfair. I did want to be in love. I embraced the FUN of dating because I didn't want to face the seriousness of my desire to be seen as equal and powerful and I was scared of what it would cost me. I always thought I was better than women who couldn't just get out there and date — I thought they weren't in touch with the IRONY of it all. I'd always say, you have an opportunity to be an artist, to be creative in your self presentation — that is worth something, that's the joy of it. Create yourself!

I am serious and sincere about sexism in a way I am not about love. It sneaks up on me sometimes, and it kills me. I have cordoned that seriousness off in order to date men with the levity that you suggest. I've been doing that since I was a teenager —trying to maintain my dignity when no one saw me as dignified, trying to seem like a fun, strong, force of nature, and mother of all, when I was limping along. I still am struggling to unite these two parts of myself in a relationship — the part that is hurt by men and the part that is trying obsessively to attract them to me. The therapy I've been in that has said “it's OK to let someone go who doesn't treat you well” has actually been radical for me. That is what has made me go WHOA, do I even need this? If my only way of getting along with men is through this INSANE level of performativity: sexual, emotional, intellectual, then what am I doing? Enjoying laughing with someone I also have sex with? That's nice and actually it's amazing, but is it ENOUGH for me to accept the other shit?

I'm scared of real intimacy because I have this deep fear that men are not fully intimate. That if you show them yourself, you should be prepared for that to be held against you in a court of law. You identified something truly correct: I'm starting to feel depressed by the frogginess. It's becoming an overdetermined worldview. I think it's OK to feel that way now and I likely won't feel this way forever. I'll commit to seeing the dynamism in the relationship (we're both individuals being shaped by social and structural forces in a multitude of ways) instead of privately reeling at the sexist horror. BUT I'll do that while saying GENUINELY SAYING, FUCK YA I AM A FUCKING QUEEN I AM EVERYTHING. I"M NOT SCARED OF MY DESIRES. I DESERVE a Prince and the Prince will be better than what came before. That is the part i've been missing, and it is so KEY and it gives me hope that no matter what, I will be OK. So, thank you! THANK YOU thank you. I love you.

Wicked Feminist Queen

Dear WFQ,

I enjoyed your letter so much that I had to post it immediately. I think a lot of readers will recognize themselves in your words.

Believing that your emotions are a liability makes dating and falling in love such a terrifying obstacle course, one that seems to get more exhausting and difficult the longer you’re with someone. As the gloss of passion starts to patina, it becomes harder not to tell the truth. And make no mistake, when you try to polish your emotions to make them more palatable — performing Chill Girl for the exact types of frogs who love Chill Girls more than they love real women — you’re basically setting a timer on a truth bomb that will go off once you get too tired to pretend you’re better than a human being.

What fake Chill Girls don’t understand is that being a human is THE BEST. When you’re a human, you’re a million times better than you are when you’re acting, pretending, and eating your feelings for the convenience and comfort of a slippery frog who fears feelings like they’re snakes in the night, out to murder him right where he squats.

So that’s the reality side of the picture: You have feelings and you need to show them. You have desires and preferences and you need to tell the truth about what they are from the start. A gentle early warning system is always better than a blaring alarm post-calamity. Here is my early warning system: “I am allergic to speed, danger, arguments that ramble on in the absence of clear ideas or principles, emotional evasion, and the words ‘Calm down.’” More to the point: If we’re sleeping together, you’ll need to take my emotions seriously, even when you might define them as irrational. If I say I’m crying because the sky is green, telling me the sky is blue isn’t helpful. I’m a different animal than you. Show some respect for my unique processor.”

Which brings us to my favorite line of your letter:

“I'm scared of real intimacy because I have this deep fear that men are not fully intimate.”

I have often feared that men were not fully intimate, for the exact reasons that Simone Weil addresses in that perfect quote you included: Some of us (all genders) imagine a vibrant and almost supernatural being inside ourselves and also inside our true loves. We wouldn’t necessarily use the word “supernatural” if someone asked us about it casually, of course. But we expend a lot of emotional energy to accentuate and intensify the qualities of those we’re in love with. We apply our imaginations to sex and love in order to make it brighter, more visceral, more saturated, more intense. Others (of all genders!) intensify their passion in slightly more concrete ways. Where the more imaginative and creative types might accentuate the pieces of a connection that feel the most soulful, life-changing, mood-altering, and emotional, transforming that connection into a form of art or a kind of religion, your more concrete and, ahem, visually-oriented types turn a connection into a glorious explosion of sights and sounds that adds up to physical bliss.

There’s less emotion, less art, and less faith in the second version. You don’t need faith when you are simply bowled over by what you can see and touch. You’re fueled by the many years you’ve spent imagining finally having access to THE BEST THINGS to see and touch. Yes, it’s more direct and more, uh, animal than spiritual, but the commitment to transcendence is still there.

Is it fully intimate?

When a human is in love and wants EVERYTHING from someone else, so much that they feel fully surrendered to that person, I’d define that as intimate, but only if it creates an opening for more truth, more honesty, more connection. In fact, even though both parties in this equation have their own imaginative and romantic ways of enhancing what’s there, I would argue that intimacy is always about truth more than anything else. Passion can be about accentuating and admiring and building an imaginative new edifice around a sturdy and delightful man, for example, but real intimacy includes accepting the man who is really there, without the edifice, without the flourishes of decoration you added after the fact using your imagination. And if you have a lot of trust and some energy and time, you can have both things: the honesty and the glorification, the truth and the surrender to forces larger than yourself, reality and magic.

Now it’s easy to take someone who’s, mmm, attached to the visual and the sensual and the concrete (so much so that they might love having sex with you but not love your personality all that much!) and reduce that to less than full intimacy. And if a person does not want the truth in the room when they’re making you into the sex princess of their daydreams, then you’re right: that’s not real intimacy in my book. Because a mature, emotionally courageous adult is not worried that the truth will render him flaccid. If he fears the truth that much, he will struggle to enjoy a whole person even in the best of circumstances.

But a real partner who dares to dive into a real intimate relationship doesn’t beat back his own enjoyment out of fear. He allows his emotions into the room with the truth, and dares to believe that he might relish the truth as much as he relishes the audiovisual and sensual feast that he encourages with, yes, his imagination.

Not to return to the “help him, coax him, support him” model, but some men really do need to BE TOLD how crucial truth is in building deep connection and intimacy. Many men equate talk of honesty and the truth with words like “You’re a bad person at your core because you don’t love me enough” and also ““I ate a burrito for lunch, let me list the physical side effects of that choice.” They don’t understand that the truth doesn’t have to be an after-the-fact alarm that says “You fucked me over with your wishy washy ways!” It can be an early warning system that says, “I want you to flourish with or without me” and “I’m here to honor your truest desires, and you’re here to honor mine. When that’s not possible, it’s simple and there’s no reason for either party to feel guilty or enraged about it, as long as we’re clear with each other.” and also “Sometimes I get pissed about nothing anyway and so do you, I’ll bet. We are animals and that’s okay.” An early warning system can also say, “I love you but you’re not as curious or passionate about me as I’d prefer, so I’m going to move on.”

The early warning system also delivers messages like “Let me describe how PMS feels and let you know when it’s here and how we can both avoid a blowout over something small” and “Tears are good for me and do not signal that you’re a bad person or should fix something. Just hang out and make some mild sounds of support.”

Early warning systems are explicit. True intimacy is detailed. Example: “When you rub the top of my hand, it feels like you’re sanding my skin off.” People actually break up and turn on each other because they feel insulted by the truth when many times, the words are as clear and dispassionate as operating instructions. So you sometimes have to say to a very concrete human “I am weird, I am illogical, I am a freak. My strengths make up for it. If you don’t think so, move the fuck on so I can live IN FULL COLOR like I need to.”

That’s half warning system, half alarm, I’ll admit it. It’s hard to get it right, because there is no right. You’re a human, you’re imperfect, you feel too much, you make mistakes. So is he. This is the one principle that matters more than anything else I’ve written here: Two imperfect humans fumble constantly. That’s not tragic, it’s simply the core texture and shape of being fully alive together.

If you want to know how allergic most people are to real intimacy… well, just walk out the door.

We aren’t hunting frogs here. The slimey fucks who are allergic to anything but a Chill Girl aren’t relevant. Every time you see one or hear one, whisper to yourself “Irrelevant. Calls for speculation. Let’s keep it rolling, here, judge.”

From your reply, I can see that you’ve been dating Chill-Girl-loving frogs. I did that for years, too. In order to marry a froggy prince, I had to address my allergy to love and affection. I suspect you do, too. Love and affection sometimes make you think a prince is just a ween, when he’s actually the princeliest and you are being cowardly and evasive. Examine these reactions and expose yourself to more supposed weens. Notice how delicious they are. Weeny princes are the only princes I can see now, the only princes I waste my verbal energy on. I love a weeny prince more than I love sunshine.

I am using strong words here, much like WICKED QUEEN, in order to steer against the formidable crosswinds of your HARDO (great word) hatred and disgust for VULNERABILITY and RAW EMOTION. If you see your own emotions as weakness, your imagination will reshape a seductive soft boy into a drippy wuss, just as it recasts your brilliance and courage and independence into the core traits of a dissatisfied bitch.

Don’t let your shame steer this motherfucking boat! Make room for your emotions and dare to feel real compassion for yourself, even when you’re droopy and lumpy and ridiculous and you want more, more, more. Allowing yourself to be absurd and soft and scared and angry, any and all of these things, will make it much easier to love a weeny prince or a swaggering soft boy -- men with enormous feelings and weird ideas who are made to love you. They are not soft and they are not weens, anymore than we are truly evil. They are humans who don’t pretend to be HARDOS around the clock. This makes them interesting. They are capable of full intimacy.

In order to recognize them in the wild and also love them for who they are, you will have to reckon with your knee-jerk disgust, which, again, comes from your own hardo hatred of emotions.

Will their intimacy take the exact same shape as your intimacy? No. Intimacy and passion are sometimes as good as the art we create inside our heads, but… can anything really touch the glory of art or imagination, once you’ve cultivated these forces with all of your being? I mean of course we want love to live up to art. Passion and true love certainly feel like art and religion combined. But many men will use words that make you believe that you were experiencing very different things at the exact moment that you thought you were both seeing god. They can be incurious, too, because they’re too afraid of surrendering to what’s real to become completely porous. But part of me wants to argue that this is why a hardo wicked queen so often craves a soft prince who is nevertheless nonporous!

We want something solid to counteract our softness, and we crave some softness in areas where we are the sharpest knife imaginable, the tallest, rockiest cliff, the deadliest catch (lol). True love is a dance between beautiful twins who are also complete strangers to each other. We want to be mirrored and we also want to feel the seductive vertigo of misunderstanding and slippage and distance. Isn’t that where passion comes from? Don’t we subconsciously crave a perfect match who also, sometimes, feels like an alien from a distant galaxy? Isn’t that what fucks us up, in good ways and bad?

Ultimately, it’s not all that useful to overanalyze exactly what your lover/ partner is feeling and why. Once you have a fully intimate relationship with yourself, you better understand and also forgive the capacities and missteps of others. A good relationship with yourself dictates that you’ll return, time and again, to savoring the acts of creation that you’ve always loved. You will create yourself over and over. You will reshape your world out of raw sadness and exuberance. These are strengths, not weaknesses. This is how it feels to be ten feet tall and royal and absolutely ridiculous. It’s all a gift.

The one thing I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt is that you will be deeply loved. That’s a message for every single reader out there. Some readers don’t want to believe that it’s possible for them, or they just don’t want love, full stop. I respect that. But if or when you decide that love is what you want, open your eyes and you’ll see that it’s everywhere. This world is made of love. Our work as a species is to break through the noise and rage and stupidity, every single day, in order to feel the truth of that.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Navigate this day fueled by your extra stores of love and compassion for the slippery fuckers all around you, and give a hug to a soft prince whenever you can. Everyone suffers to be who they are out in the open. Reward the brave. Tell them you see them, and you appreciate what you see.

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