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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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The right woman in a man’s life brings out the best he has to give

By David McElroy · November 13, 2020

Men and women are equal, but the two will never be identical.

Are the two 80 percent alike? 90 percent? More? Modern culture seems to want men and women to be interchangeable, but it’s simply not true in my experience.

Is an apple or an orange more valuable? Neither. Each has value. Each is a fruit. Each is wonderful in its own way. But they’re different, just as men and women are different — despite the best efforts of modern philosophy and leftist politics to claim gender differences are a cultural construct.

Men are physically stronger, but women have more power and strength in other respects, at least in heterosexual relationships. That’s the only kind with which I have experience, so that’s my context. Some people believe that men hold the power — in politics, culture, relationships, whatever — but my experience is that it’s a delicate trade-off, at least in healthy relationships.

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida was popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and she understood this secret.

“Man does not control his own fate,” Lollobrigida said. “The women in his life do that for him.”

I first understood this when I realized years ago that I am a different person depending on which woman I’m in love with. That bothered me at first. It puzzled me. Was I changing over time to become what different women wanted me to be?

I eventually understood that the pairing of any woman and man produces something like a chemical reaction. Some chemicals mix together safely. Others produce something that’s poisonous to anyone around. Even when two chemicals are safe to mix, they might produce entirely different substances. Some mixtures are weak and useless. Some have great power.

That’s the way I am with different women. I’ve come to believe we’re all like that.

When I look at the relationships I’ve had with different women — at least the few who have been vitally important to me, the ones powerful enough to change me — I see that I’ve been something slightly different with each. Each one has brought out something different in me.

The most powerful effect a woman can have on a man is to evoke the desire in him to become a better version of himself. When I finally understood that, I realized the full meaning of the lines Jack Nicholson’s character spoke in the movie, “As Good As it Gets,” when he made his fateful confession to a woman, “You make me want to be a better man.”

About 12 years ago, a woman introduced me to a sculpture called Eternal Idol, by French artist Augustine Rodin. He created this masterpiece — that you see above — in the early 1890s. There are two versions of the work, but I prefer the one in bronze to the one done in plaster, because I like the way the woman is depicted in that one better.

Eternal Idol gives us a man and a woman — presumably lovers — who have an interesting relationship. He is the bigger and more powerful character, but he idolizes her in such a way that she has a symbolic position of power over him. Nobody doubts that he could dominate and control her if he wanted to, but we know he doesn’t want to — because he idolizes and adores her.

I don’t want or need to dominate a woman, but I certainly have no intention of being dominated, either. I need a relationship in which we each play complementary roles — not because we’re competing or manipulating one another, but because we understand we are better together than we could possibly be on our own or with anybody else.

A woman does control my fate in life. I don’t yet know who she is. And it’s not that she’s dominant and will force me to be something I don’t want to be. The right woman who will control my fate — to use Lollobrigida’s terms — will make me want to be a better man.

The right woman will make me want to be the best version of myself. She will want me to be my best self, not something to selfishly please herself. She will make me want to be someone who I cannot become alone. She will be the one who I idolize — and the one to whom I bring whatever I make in the future and say, “I made this because of you.”

Without her, I’m a bit like a ship without a rudder. I’m capable of doing anything I want to do, but without her, something’s missing.

Purpose. Motivation. Desire. Magic.

I don’t know what to call it. I only know that a key is useless without the lock it’s designed to open — and I’m just about that useless without a partner to play the role of my eternal idol.

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Briefly

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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