I have a friend that believes all men are self-centered mama’s boys. He uses this reasoning when rationalizing (explaining?) his own behavior in his romantic relationships. I argue that while he may fit this description, there are men who do not. I suggest that he could choose to be different, as other men choose. My friend thinks that I am only fooling myself. He claims that I doggedly pursue storybook romances that exist only in novels written by spinsters and Nicholas Sparks.
We, both he and I, are convinced the other lives in his or her personal bubble world. And each of us continues to try and drag the other into what we recognize as the real world.
He tells me that I am the man in the cave of Socrates, watching shadows on the wall and mistaking these shadows for real people. I tell him that he is incorrect and full of shadowy excuses for the harm that he causes real people. I suggest that perhaps it is I who live in the real world while he lives in a corrupt and chaotic nightmare of his own making. He laughs and says that there is nothing nightmarish about his life—at least not for him.
It’s an odd friendship, but one that I value. Whichever of us is right about men and women and romance and the real world, whatever that is, will never be known (or rather, acknowledged).
But at least the self-centered mama’s boy and I can co-exist despite our separate world-views. Plus, a nice benefit to our friendship is that neither of us will ever be too vulnerable or near-sighted when it comes to romance. Neither of us can get too comfortable with our world-view as the other is so adamantly out to destroy it. As they say in football, The best defense is a good offense.
If I sense a potential romantic partner refuses to assimilate to my bubble-world of romance, love, and all that schmaltzy stuff, I can deport him. The self-centered mama’s boy deports poor women from his egomaniacal bubble world all the time. “She must assimilate or I will devastate”, he explains. He works in public diplomacy.
Conversations with the mama’s boy always get me thinking. To substantiate his ideas about men and romance, the mama’s boy egocentric uses examples from his life. His experience as related by him, do indeed lead to a poor and painful view of the male half of the human species. Yet I also use my life experiences to validate my belief that he is not completely accurate. I use my life experiences and his examples to argue that he is simply trying to lessen his own guilt by sharing it with the rest of his male colleagues. “Take responsibility”, I tell him. “Don’t blame your gender”.
“You take responsibility,” he grins, “stop trying to change my gender. Take what you want and leave us alone. That’s all we want from you.”
He’d be funny if he hadn’t broken so many girls’ hearts. Oh, hell, they weren’t my hearts. He is funny. But I’ll jettison any boy who openly agrees with him from my Socratic cave of romance.
For both he and I, the argument is essentially nature versus nurture. I think people, men or women, are nurtured, not biologically programmed, when it comes to relationships (and really, in life, what else is there? Relationships are the lines with which we draw ourselves. Without them, we wouldn’t exist. Or rather, it wouldn’t matter if we existed. But anyways.)
I pontificate at him:
It is not in the inherent nature of any man or woman to be a self-centered mama’s boy. A person becomes a self-centered mama’s boy through observation and personal experience. Because he experienced a particular type of relationship so frequently, he began to believe that there were no other real options when it came to relationships. If you live in the forest, you learn to build your house with wood from the trees. If you live in a stone quarry, you build your house from stones. People can move from the forest to the stone quarry, but most people don’t. As many migrants as there are in the world, there are always more natives—unless there was an earthquake or a war or something.
I preach that people are built and not born. A smart person should therefore be willing to forgive individuals (including him or herself) for most weaknesses. But at the same time, a smart person should be less inclined to trust that a person is willing to overcome these perceived weaknesses. If people are produced by their past experiences, they are not entirely to blame or to be admired for their present behaviors. At the same time, they are probably not going to change, at least not anytime soon. Human error is an unavoidable social spin-off, one that can be treated but never completely cured.
My self-centered friend claims that my officious argument shows that I am both extremely gullible and very suspicious. He wonders that I have any friends at all, much less romantic relationships.
I tell him that he is not funny. I then return to my oft-repeated argument that society constructs the individual as well as what the individual expects from society. Then the individuals, already built by their society, go on re-building the same society that made them. And we wonder why we repeat our mistakes. We can’t help it; our community coerces us. It’s not our fault; it’s the fault of everybody around us, everybody else. And yet everybody else is, at least a little, our fault.
It’s the chicken and egg debate. It’s an argument that my friend and I have more for our own amusement than anything else. He’s not going to change his behavior and I’m not going to change my expectations. But it is a fun way to occupy my time when I should be studying or doing whatever it is people do to move ahead in this human race.
0 comments:
Post a Comment