THE CATASTROPHIC STATE OF LOVE, OR THE TROUBLE WITH MEN THESE DAYS

TORSO OF VENUS, ANTIQUITY

I. THE RITUAL

There’s a scene that unfolds before me day after day at the cafe. A ritual, with careful steps. And yet these days, it’s so badly broken that I can predict how it’s going to turn out the moment it begins.

The Date.

The Woman arrives first. Almost always. And she’s trying. It’s a curious turn of phrase, which we’ll examine in a moment, but first let’s discuss what it means. The girl, woman, lady, and by this I mean the ritual of The Date cuts across generations, is making an effort.

She’s put on a nice dress. Wearing carefully chosen shoes. Make-up, tastefully done. A little bit of lipstick, just so, some eyeshadow.

And she’s shining with excitement. As she should be. This is the evening, night, afternoon, that her life might suddenly change.

She orders a glass of wine, a coffee, a tea. And pretends, impatiently, to wait patiently.

And then the Man arrives, and it all goes to hell.

II. THE BROKEN ARCHETYPES OF DESIRE

There I am, sitting at a table nearby, precisely the same “in real life” as online me. The cool intellectual. Smoking a cigarette and just…thinking. Not trying to overhear anything, not eavesdropping. I can’t help but notice, still.

The very first thing that happens is…that the briefest look of dismay crosses Girl-Woman-Lady’s face. Her eyes veil over. Sometimes, there’s a grimace. It only lasts a nanosecond. She goes back to trying.

But in these social rituals, first impressions count. And The Man is already…done. She knows it. I know it. Anyone looking knows it. The only one that doesn’t know it yet is him. Finished, unless he can redeem himself.

Why? Because the goddamned guy showed up just emanating…radiating…like a thermonuclear supernova…pure man-child energy.

He looks like a baby. Sometimes, my lovely wife is with me. She’s a nice person, OK, not always, but mostly. And lately? She’ll let out a kind of yelp-slash-giggle. In the beginning, I’d frown. Puzzled. Now, I completely get what she’s sort of horrified by.

The Girl Woman Lady is there, trying. She’s already made an effort. In our capitalist argot, she’s “invested” in this ritual of a “marketplace” for “mating”already. She’s tried to look pretty, attractive, to just…you know…not emanate the vibe that she’s a goddamned little baby.

Meanwhile, the Man has showed up apparently as a Boy Child Savage. He’s wearing some combination of the following. A nylon vest of some kind (men! NEVER WEAR THIS ON A DATE. Are you idiots?) Some kind of T-shirt or maybe a weirdly ill fitting shirt underneath, that looks like it hasn’t been ironed since 1994. And if not the awful sneaker-loafers that men these days wear, then just…pretty terrible shoes, like sneakers (MEN! never wear sneakers on a date! Are you idiots?).

He’s unkempt, and not in a good way. No, he hasn’t been in the forest chopping goddamn cords of wood. No, he isn’t disheveled from just giving a concert to adoring fans. He just hasn’t….bothered very much. Please understand me, because while this sounds superficial so far, it’s anything but. Understand this isn’t about looking a certain way. It’s about kinds of presence, ways of being in the world, how you inhabit yourself.

The Man is emanating Boy Child energy. You can smell it in the air, see it a mile off, intuit it from a glance. This is not really a man who is one yet.

There is nothing that kills the female libido faster than what just happened. Oh my god, I wanted to spend time with a man, just a man, and who arrived was a Boy Child in the shape of one. Do I have to be this guy’s Mom Mommy Mother Nurse Maid?

Nobody wants to be your mommy, guys. Not even your mom, most of the time. Do you even know how many times my wife tells me this? And I’m like the veritable prototype of Not a Man Child. Men: this is how insanely lethal the goddamned stakes are of Being the Wrong Archetype are for your love life.

See this colossal mismatch in Archetypes already? Eternal Boy Child meets Girl Woman Lady? How do you think this is going to turn out?

We’re going to talk about that, and it’s going to suck.

Stay with me, because…

This is where things get funny.

III. WHEN EROS TURNS INTO “SOS”

And I know what’s gonna happen next, because it’s happened so many times by now. It happens so predictably, and so often, that by now, my wife rolls her eyes when we leave to have coffee together.

(This is the good scenario, by the way. The bad ones? A “MAGA coded” guy shows up, wearing fascism lite stuff, and by the way, Ralph Lauren Branding Team, you might wanna think about this. She shudders and leaves. A guy who looks suspiciously like a wannabe manfluencer shows up, and she tries to hide under her glass of wine.)

The Girl Woman Lady is already disappointed. But suddenly, she brightens up. Decides to give the Child Boy Savage another chance. Maybe there’s a Man hidden in there, somewhere. Maybe I just need to let the stone reveal the statue, and chip away at it a little bit.

She asks him a question. And he makes this ritual of The Date, which is already going off the rails, into the trainwreck that’s by now becoming a cultural touchstone. He just…gives some kind of inane, half-mumbled reply. She’s sort of lost.

And then he tries to recover the Ritual. By talking about a) his job b) how much money he makes c) sports d) some status symbol he aspires to, like a Rolex collection or e) something else incredibly boring and completely fatal to the libido.

Now comes the part I sort of dread but also chuckle at. The Girl Woman Lady starts looking around. And she looks at me. Remember, I look like the one guy who doesn’t ever need to be part of this Ritual. I’m wearing my obligatory leather jacket because the sunlight can kill me, I’m having a cigarette, and I have a tiny white dog with me. I’m weirdly safe.

Her eyes begin to…sort of…plead with me. Rescue me! Dude! Do something! Alright, if you can’t help me, then help him. You look like the kind of guy who’s interesting and fun and cool and smart and thoughtful and has had a life. Jesus! Just…fucking…be this guy’s wingman slash big bro slash cool friend already! Tell him what to say! I’m trying to give him a chance! Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with men these days!

Now. Forgive me for writing all that in such excruciating detail. It’s funny and it makes my wife groan because it’s true. I could tell him what to say, and I wish I could, too, to do my part to just sort of play my role in putting the world right today. Hey, I’m happy to be your cool big bro. But of course, I can’t.

The Ritual is the Ritual, and by now, it’s reaching its conclusion.

The Girl Woman Lady makes her excuses. The Eternal Boy Child looks deflated and bewildered and disappointed. Angry, even. He doesn’t get what just happened to him. I sort of raise an eyebrow and look wryly at Snowy or my wife.

You know how many successful dates I’ve seen in a year of watching The Ritual unfold before me almost every single night? One.

And do you know how many times I’ve seen the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IV. MEN, WOMEN, AND PLACES IN BEING

So what should the Eternal Boy Child Savage say? Look, this isn’t dating advice. But it’s what you probably want to know, which is fair enough. The answer is: it’s a lot less complicated than you think. The short version is: it’s not about what you say at all. It never is.

It’s about…

What’s going wrong between men and women? What really happens when the ritual of The Date goes so wrong as it does above? A lot more than you think.

Women are closer to being than men. And all the macho bullshit of every culture that has ever existed is only there to mask this fact.

Freud famously theorized Penis Envy, which was also the name of one of our teenage bands. He was wrong, though, as was his larger general principle of reducing Eros to a mere sex drive.

What is going wrong in this ritual of The Date Turning Into a Trainwreck, so often and so fast and so much that by now “heterofatalism” is a trendy social more, is Eros itself.

It’s more accurate to say that men have Womb Envy than to say that women have Penis Envy. Yes, I really mean that. Let me explain what I mean. Women, like I said, are closer to being than men. They are braver and tougher and right at the edge of life and death, just by virtue of existence.

Women risk life and death in the act of pregnancy. It is natural and inevitable for (most of) them. Women bleed. The stuff of life pours out of them. I’m close to the edge of being, in a way, too: my blood turns to dust. This place in existence, the edge, is real. You suffer there, you exist in a totally different way, and women do this every month, for much of their lives, when they bear children, when they reckon with creation itself.

Men have to make wars to get to this place of the edge of existence. For women? It just happens. It’s where they are. Go ahead and chuckle, it’s only funny because I’m not kidding. Why do men love making wars, anyways? Have you ever wondered? Now you know. Womb envy. They need to prove how tough and brave they are. Women don’t.

We don’t think of women this way. But we should. The macho bullshit going back eons in history is precisely a way to repress this most basic set of facts about existence. Men are not at the edge of life and death just by being alive. Women are, very much so. Over and over again.

Their “facticity,” or their raw facts of existence, the way life feels, is, to them, if you like, in this way, is utterly different to those of men. Just living can kill them, bleed them, wound them, end them, finish them. Like I said, men have to make war on each other to draw blood and be at death’s edge in order to then be lauded as this “tough and brave,” which for women, is just existing in the first place.

So men have spent millennia repressing and denying this elemental and unchangeable truth, in almost comically absurd ways, when you think about it, as a way to redress the cosmic scales and elevate their own place in existence, hence, the birth of the macho, from the Spartans right down to today’s internet manosphere dorks. It’s war! I’ll make you bleed! Dude, I’m already bleeding, hand me a pad and give me a fucking break.

This is why in our oldest myths, creation herself is female. The God-made-the-universe-in-seven-days mythos is derived from the Babylonian myth, which predates it, and parallels it almost exactly. The difference is that the primordial being in the older myth, Tiamat, was female, and she was the raw stuff of creation, a turbulent, roaring ocean, “salt water and chaos.”

So. Men and women are different in their Eros. They are not the same, and one of the myths of our age is that they’re the same people, just in different bodies. I don’t think that’s remotely true, because the facticity of our raw existences as men and women is so radically different.

What the fuck does all that have to with dating?

Everything, actually.

V. WHAT DESIRE (REALLY) IS

What is a “man” in relation to a “woman”? I put that in quotes not to relativize genders, but to reinforce the point that we’re talking now about our deepest, primordial ways of being. Eros.

What is it that makes us desire each other?

Women, existentially, are closer to the edge than men are. Just by virtue of being women. They can die through the consequences of the act of love. Many do, in fact.

What does that mean a man should be, if he wants to genuinely “attract” a woman, a word I don’t like, so let’s restate it, be able to draw her into a place of being-in-the-world-together? What does that mean a “real man” is?

Is it just someone who represses the facticities I’ve spoken about above? And says: no, Girl Woman Lady, you’re the weak one, and I’m the macho one? And just goes on trying to play out this patriarchal fantasy? Or is it…the opposite…a gentle soul, a pushover sort, the Nice Guy? Of course, it’s neither.

Our models of manhood now are deeply muddled. They’re idiotic, many of them, offensive, plenty of them, and ludicrous, almost all of them. Is a man what the manosphere thinks he is? Trump? Your AI boyfriend? What the fuck is a man?

Let’s cut through the bullshit, then we’ll come back to talking about all this with some depth and rigor and beauty and truth again.

Eros, like all things in our unconscious, is symbolic. It’s not rational or logical. It operates both beneath and below but also beyond, above, through these lower levels of mentation. That is why the ritual of The Date goes so badly wrong. When the Girl Woman Lady arrives, and then the Eternal Boy Child shows up, instead of The Man, and she grimaces, it’s because the poor guy showed up in all the wrong forms symbolically.

A trainwreck in Archetypes just occurred. And it’s not a superficial one.

(Am I saying, hey guys, act like psychotic billionaires? Of course not. They also behave like fucking children, too, by the way, they’re the biggest Boy Children of all, Boy Children with fantasies of omnipotence, Oedipal complexes in hoodies written all over them in Greek tragedy which our entire civilization is now suffering. I want to kill daddy. But I digress.)

The point is the symbolic, or what “money and power” symbolize. So now let’s put two and two together. Women are closer to the edge of life and death than men are, just by existing. They are looking for a symbolic sacrifice from men. The consequences of love for women are mortal, infinite, existential. And until a man can show that they are for him, too, Eros misses its mark. This is where men become men, or stay boy children.

Archetypes must fit together. Just as individuals “integrate” towards a whole, so do lovers. Lovers only form a unity when Archetypes fit. And today, they don’t anymore between men and women.

Make me whole. Make me one.

But let me tell you the mystery and the secret. Logic doesn’t work here anymore. A higher mathematics hold.

I am whole in my incompleteness. I am one.

You are whole in your incompleteness. You are one.

We can only be whole and one together in this way.

One plus one equals one, which also equals infinity.

If you understand this, you will never misunderstand desire again.

Our hunger to be one never moves one inch. It’s immovable because it’s the deepest thing in us. With each other, with the cosmos, with being itself. The transcendent mathematics of unity.

This is what desire is.

VI. BECOMING AN INTERESTING PERSON

What the fuck…Jesus, someone make Umair stop! I will soon. But we still need to answer the question.

What does the Man need to sacrifice to become one? To become one. Key words. To become one, as in, the one, a unity, with himself, that he can offer at last to the Woman.

A man only becomes a man when the Boy Child in him dies. Is killed. Is dead and buried with honor and gratitude. His presence may remain, it’s true. But that’s all. Now someone new has emerged, which is The Man. It’s true this also happens for The Woman, but here we’re talking about men. This process is called “integration” in Jungian psychology, which is what we’ve been talking about. The Boy can live within the Man, but the Man is more and greater than the Boy.

Let me give you my own example to make it clear. When I wrote my first books, when I helped run one of the world’s biggest companies, when I keynoted some of the world’s biggest conferences, when I did all these big and wonderful things…interestingly, I was still a boy.

None of these things made me a man. So it’s not what a lot of guys think, the accomplishments or the money or the accolades. Sorry, completely wrong.

I became a man only after I went to the underworld and found my way back. After I got sick, learned I had a weird condition where the light could kill me, spend years in pain, then lost everything, all the money I’d made, my career, all of it, then failed three, four, five times in a row at trying again. In that sacrifice, and only in that—and it was fucking agony—did I even start to become a…man.

A prince is just a Boy Child wearing a little crown. Slaying the dragon is when the journey of manhood begins. Do you see the point I’m making? I’m not sort of saying that “you have to be hazed,” and I’m not boasting. We’re just talking. What's interesting is what the women in my life say. You were a boy then, you looked like a boy, you acted like a boy. They laugh about it. All of them, friends, my lovely wife, my mom, my sisters, everyone.

This sounds…radical…almost manosphere-ish…pretty bad…actually…fuck, did I get it wrong? I don’t mean it the way you think, so let me try again.A man becomes a man when his concerns rise above the fucking trivial, and reach the existential and the universal. In Jungian terms, we say: a person’s grown, they’ve integrated their fears, anxieties, concerns, anger, disappointment, failures, shortcomings, even hatred. And man, was I angry in some of those days when life was just tearing me down and pulling me apart.

In plainer English, we call this “becoming an interesting person.”

VII. BECOMING YOURSELF, OR, THE PRIMAL SACRIFICE

The best dating advice used to be: just be yourself. There’s one big problem with that these days, though, which is: men aren’t anyone anymore.

Men need to offer Women oneness, beginning with themselves. And they’re not doing that, which is why we have this constant complaint that men aren’t men anymore.

Too many of them, anyways. They’re all trying to pretend to be the same person, which is some insane combination of American Psycho by way of Elon Musk met a looksmaxxer on the way to Covert Resentment Against Everyone City, or, I Spend Too Much Time Online Guy. Too Much Time Online Guy is the same person, a billion times over. The same anxieties, fears, hungers, and wearing the same boy child outfits, emanating that energy, too.

Too Much Time Online kills you. It kills your soul, mind, body, intellect, all of it. And this where men are becoming…nobody at all.

Let’s revise yesterday’s dating advice for today. Just Develop Yourself. Become your…self.

Be an interesting, cool, funny, thoughtful, smart, intelligent, warm, charming, normally abnormal person. In whatever way you like. Me? I’m still the teenage goth I always was. That’ll do. Read a book, for fuck’s sake, instead of Reddit. Don’t have a fucking favorite, I don’t know, pundit, have a favorite artist, poet, thinker, and no, fucking Seneca doesn’t count, because nobody wants to hear how Stoic you are on a date.

Have a life. A bold and daring and intrepid one. That doesn’t mean you have to be goddamned Errol Flynn, playing Blackbeard the Pirate, but it does mean that you tried stuff, you failed at stuff, you gave it your all, you went to the very edge of existence and came back from the dead. This is what makes women swoon. And it’s not a matter of “making” them. It’s just a matter of becoming a man.

Becoming a man is hard. You have to suffer, to reach the edge of existence, to let the boy child go. A man isn’t just a jokester or a trickster or a cute little cherub. There’s something else in him that has finally had the courage to go to deeper, darker depths. The deepest ones of all. Down to giving it all, losing it all, and that is when you, in that heat and test and fire, finally begin to become yourself. And by the way, in this way, becoming a man is a choice. A difficult and dangerous and hard one.

Women’s facticity is different, remember? They’ve been at the edge their whole lives. That’s why they’re not looking for boy children to be mommies to. They’re looking for equals, in an existential sense. Eros, erotic love, in relationships of this kind can only be between equals. One plus one equals one or infinity, remember? But for men to be that, they have to become equals, they have to try.

They have to slay a dragon and risk it all.

They must make a primal existential sacrifice.

Themselves.

VIII. YOU EITHER HAVE IT OR YOU DON’T

There’s a strange thing about masculinity.

You either have it or you don’t. Real masculinity never shouts about it, does it? And yet.

We know it the instant we see it, feel it, sense it. And we can see through its caricatures so easily, too. (I know, I know, there are going to all kinds of people who object. But should they? Is Trump a real man in this sense, or just playing at being one?)

Why is that? Because like all things existential, it either is, or isn’t. There is no in between. Either one is a man, or one is not. And this is precisely the point of what I’m trying to teach you, that there’s a threshold at which one becomes a man, a point of sacrifice and a surrender. (Hence, the “manhood rituals” of so many cultures and civilizations.)

For women, I think you should understand by now, this threshold, this turning point, comes naturally. It’s involuntary. It happens whether they like it or not. A girl becomes a woman existentially even if she doesn’t want to. But a boy does not become a man until and unless he wants to. These are such radically different ways of being that they are in fact opposites.

(By the way, I’m emphatically not saying that you can’t be whatever gender you want. Sure you can. In fact, if you read the above closely, that’s exactly what I’m saying.)

And this is the precise point at which manhood itself is breaking down now. Men aren’t crossing this threshold. They’re staying trapped in an eternal boyhood. But of course Eros there is possible only in a very different way—Mother/Son, Caretaker/Child, etcetera—than between equals.

A man is just a person who says: I became a man by sacrificing the boy child. He is still here, and I keep him close to me. But he is gone, in the sense of who I exist as now. I have been to the edge of existence. Only one of us returned. I am not him. I am as tough and brave as you now. I know what life and death are. I have risked it all for something, and I know what it means to stand at the edge of the abyss of mortality, fragility, and nothingness.

Not in the way of acting tough, or throwing your weight around, or bragging about how you killed people or what have you. Please understand I don’t mean macho bullshit at all. I mean: in this act of becoming an interesting and full person, you sacrificed the boy child willingly. You didn’t stay trapped in infantile bullshit, in plainer English, but risked deep and essential parts of you to exist in the world in a more powerful way.

Now you have shown you have power over yourself. In an existential way. And you exist with responsibility, self-respect, and dignity. No, you can’t prove this with Rolexes and money and muscles, by the way.

You either have it or you don’t.

When you do, everyone knows, without a word having to be said. Remember the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IX. THE ORIGIN OF EROS

This is wayyyyy too much for a little essay. LOL, sorry about that. Let me try to sum some of it up.

I think that men are the primordially weak ones. They have the privilege not to have to risk everything just by living. Women don’t. That is precisely why men are the ones who must show that they are strong. And have had to throughout history. If they were the strong ones, we’d all know, and they’d never have had to show it at all. Hence, war, violence, empire, patriarchy, etcetera.

We all know that women admire strength in men, but this is really why, and it’s not just physical, about muscles or brawn. If it was, LOL, guys like me, who’ve never had a muscle in their lives, would never have had a chance, by the way.

This is what real masculinity is. Existential strength, we might call it. It’s a quiet thing. Real men don’t have to say a word. We all just know.

And it is strength in this existential sense that makes Eros flow.

Because it balances the scales at last. Women look for strength in this deep way because then a loving relationship can happen. Then two people are on the same plane, if you like, in being. Women these days put this eternal truth like this: hey, wow, I don’t need to be his Mommy Mom Nurse Maid. What that really means is: here is someone who can walk with me where I am, which is closer to the edge of life and death.

It’s the primal sacrifice of the Boy Child that makes mature Eros possible. It always has been. Men today have forgotten that.

The Woman is pushed to the very brink of self sacrifice without a choice. And so The Man must choose to sacrifice if he is to become one, and the sacrifice must be himself. The Woman is bound to the power the Man needs, over life, just as the origin myths say. But the Man must develop the power the Woman needs, which is over death. And together these become freedom.

Eros is about oneness. It’s primordial. Remember our transcendent mathematics? One plus one equals one equals infinity. Love is always an act of symbolic and transcendent sacrifices. Between Father, Mother, Child, Husband, Wife. But in the beginning, between Man and Woman. Women are women, but men are not always men. They must choose, and that choice requires sacrifice. Of themselves.

You can’t be both. Either you get to be the Boy Child, or the Man. And becoming the Man is precisely surrendering the Boy Child. This is the first step in the slaying of the dragon. In the transformation of the soul towards its truest self.

That is why when a Boy Child shows up on the ritual of The Date, the Girl Woman Lady is so instinctively disappointed. It’s—literally—the last thing she’s looking for. She’s looking for what we’re all looking for, which is oneness, primordial union, but to offer it, men must first have it within themselves.

One plus one equals one equals infinity.

This is the origin of Eros.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)