Letters to the Editor
KarenBMaui
Published Letters: 1
-
Is it men need to feel needed, or we have to admit that we need them?
[Read the article: Single? Hand over your briny vegetables!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If we don't need each other at all, then why mate? Why marry, why cohabitate, why hold hands in the movies?
I have spent most of my relationship life proving that I *don't* need a man, for the pickle jar or to carry my luggage or to do any damn thing for me. But now that I have a son (and daughter) and a divorce under my belt, I am slowly learning that I, in fact, do need and want men around me--and that I have to learn to make space for them to "be" men, if that makes sense, as much as I have to learn to relax into being a woman.
My 6-year-old son feels really great about carrying heavy stuff for me, as well as cooking dinner and making pancakes. He loves that he can get the centipede and cane spider out of the house, and that I prefer not to, although I certainly can. So I let him do that. I notice that thee acts somehow help him assert this very primal part of himself--his boyhood. And when you have a son farting on your leg (his great pleasure) and trying to pee on his sister, there is no doubt that we have some stuff that defines are maleness and femaleness in varying degrees.
We are all vulnerable dating and coming into relationships, and it is a nice thing to feel needed and create space for each of us to be feel like a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, or a transgender and whatever!
I think Broadsheet was a little reactionary. Certainly I'm not interested in having someone pick movies for me, but I *am* interested in knowing what it might feel like to value a man for his maleness in the same way that I want a man to value me as a powerful woman.