kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with manhood

I once knew an old, married couple who fought bitterly. The man was constantly down-dressing his wife, calling her stupid, fat, and ugly. She did not give it back all that frequently, but every now and then, I would hear her sass him back and the fights would escalate in tone and volume. Misery radiated from the two of them as if they were nuclear waste. Anyone who overheard their bouts would think both parties would be better off alone... or would they? The miserably married who get divorced often find themselves married again and divorced again. If they do not seek to remedy their status, they go to a lonely end of sorrowful, decrepit singlehood. For women, who obviously live longer than men, going it alone can be wonderful, but it can also be terrifying. Those of us who are not rolling in dough and who lack essential skills when our homes demand to be maintained are in a precarious situation. I had two single aunts, one rich and one poor. The aunt with money died in a far better set of circumstances than the poor one. As much as it is fashionable to believe in the independent woman who can kick ass on her own behalf until the day she croaks, I have seen for myself that sometimes elderly women become extremely dependent, usually through no fault of their own. Senility happens. Old men aren't the only ones found wandering on the side of the highway, forgetting why they left the house to begin with.

Old men without a woman (or a gay man who is an etheric male) to take care of them quickly suffer extreme etheric starvation. Most women and girls are etheric males, which is to say that their energy signature is male. I discussed this in a couple of posts here and here. Old people in general are skewed toward the etheric feminine or yin energy. The energy of homemaking is male on the etheric, which is why women and girls tend to be the best homemakers. When an old man does not have an etheric male influence in his life, he becomes the stereotype of the codger rotting away in a destitute heap, slumped over his table and drooling on a pile of yellowed papers. This is classic etheric starvation and it is not a pleasant way to die.

The lesson here, I think, is we aren't always better off alone. It is horrendously difficult to know where to draw the line of what constitutes abuse. In the case of the married couple I mentioned above, the man was abusive and to my mind, the choice was clear: she needed to run away from him and never look back about 30-50 years ago. Other cases are not quite so clear. I knew an old man who liked porn long before it was cool; he and his wife still stuck it out until one of them died and they were not worse off for it. There were and are a great many couples who got divorced who probably should have never split. There is also the disturbing statistic that children are 100 more times likely to be abused if one of their parents is a stepparent known as the Cinderella Effect. In the Cinderella Effect, we have a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation where people who divorce already have a propensity for distancing themselves in family relationships are unable to reconcile the distance between themselves and someone else's child. The result is a rate of child abuse several orders of magnitude above what tends to happen in marriage between biological parents.

They're Not Helping

Far too much of relationship and marriage counseling amounts to making lists of grievances and then coming up with baroque labeling and procedural terminology for addressing those grievances. Yes, it does help to put names to phenomena, but it is a classic cart before the horse strategy to put so much focus on the negative. Allow me to save any couple in marriage counseling hundreds if not thousands of dollars (and not by switching car insurers) by saying if you focus on the negatives more than the positives in the relationship, YOU ARE GOING TO SPLIT. As much as ostensibly well-meaning professionals think their credentials, degrees, and professional status help them to help others, the bottom line is that they are not helping if:

1. They do not live as they preach/advise
2. They do not find the positive within the person and situation and encourage it

All too often, counseling is a blame game where one partner is made into a scapegoat and the other luxuriates in endless lists of why breaking the union is justified and necessary. In other words, counseling is often a funnel into the divorce attorney's office with some pit stops at the drug store for psychiatric medications. Can't leave Big Pharma waiting beside the gravy train!

There are plenty of abusive women and men who deserve nothing less than to be shoved rudely to the curb and if they die Forever Alone, that is their just comeuppance. Some relationships and people are not worthy of being saved. But in many cases, society and perhaps our civilization itself has made it all too easy to burn down the marriage house with everything in it, including the kids. We have arrived at the statistic that more marriages end in divorce than death do us part. Kids are the sacrificial lambs on the altar of divorce. Even in so-called amicable divorces, I have seen kids utterly destroyed and their worlds torn apart. The following is merely my opinion: most people should stay married for the children's sake and try to work out their problems by focusing on the positive. Once the children are out of their teens, then it is the proper time to begin the process of divorce if the relationship has not been saved. Children need two parents, preferably a man and a woman or at the very least two people who adequately represent those opposite roles.

There is a great deal of false transcendence around divorce, especially among women, who frame it as the inevitable consequence of a series of oppressions dealt to them by their marriage partner. Never is divorce considered as the potentially avoidable outcome of a failure to communicate and heal. Yet we all want to heal; that is why Aphrodite, the goddess of healing, is also the goddess of love and marriage.

I have known plenty of happy divorcees. I have also known my fair share of unhappy divorcees who refuse to face the music of "wherever you go, there you are". Those who keep running from personal culpability and lack of gratitude in relationships will come head to head with those things in other situations and relationships. Yes, men take women for granted, but women do the same thing to men. I speak from experience as I am 100% guilty as charged of taking my man for granted. I am trying to turn over a new leaf and avoid taking him for granted because I myself don't like being taken for granted. If I want to be valued, I need to recognize others for their value while appreciating my own worth.

The moral of the story is sometimes we are better off sticking together. Not always! One size definitively does not fit all. However, if you can take anything away from my 24 year marriage to a poor man and my parents' nearly 60 years together until my father passed through the Gates in 2023, let it be to focus and be thankful for the good in all around you instead of dwelling on the bad. The bad needs to be acknowledged and addressed for sure; just don't make it into an obsession. The gods want us to love and cherish each other. They encourage us when we encourage each other because like attracts like. I believe that to no small degree, our self-realization as human beings involves deliberate ignorance of our fellow human's annoying traits and an amplified focus on good deeds, sweetness, goodness, and inner beauty.