I originally wrote the following last night as a comment in a friend’s Facebook thread. The topic, broadly speaking, was the age-old one of relationships between the sexes; more specifically, it began with my friend’s perspective on the way many women today view men. The subject stirred up something that has been living in me for years about the nature of love. I could expand on it immensely, but the two paragraphs that follow say it well enough in brief….
Ladies and gents, allow an old duffer to provide a perspective from the pre-tech era. Let me be frank: hormones have always run hot. But there was a time when sex was something sacred, not a given; when “friendship with privs” would have been recognized as pure BS; when women were seen as something awesome by men, and men by women; when a guy’s voice used to rise a minor third with nervousness about asking a girl out; and when care, respect, and honor, not me-first, what-I-want, and what-I-think-love-should-look-like, guided man/woman relationships.
We’ve lost track of what love is. This nation has become tremendously self-centered. So men, if you say you’re a good man, then know for sure what that means, and then be it toward women in a way that can’t be easily moved by circumstance and shifting emotions. Women, know that it is no easier for a man to be a man than it is for you to be a woman. Have respect for yourself–and have respect and care for us men. And both men and women, if you wonder what love–real love, not Hollywood love, not hormonal love, not love that’s all about emotions and how you feel–looks like, consult that outdated book for non-sophisticates called the Bible, specifically 1 Corinthians, chapter 13. The ancient wisdom there will frickin’ blow your postmodern millennial minds and challenge you to a higher vision than anything our trendy, self-deifying culture has to offer.