So I guess I bother caring and show interest simply because I have a heightened appreciation in this area. I get something from it. It’s meaningful to me. It makes me oddly happy in a deep, existential way, like a beautiful piece of art. I appreciate it so much asthetically, and it also gives me an odd sense of personal value and fulfillment knowing that, in some way, it’s for me, to be my joy. It’s like seeing a sunset or hearing a song written just for you. Maybe that’s a good way to understand why it actually has a benefit and impact outsized to its actual significance (something to wear while in the water, that handles those conditions well).

So, the actual significance of a swimsuit is very small. But the amount of meaningfulness it can impart to me is unusually high. It’s not a necessary or negative value, it’s not like anything is lost or harmed by being this or not this. It’s just an easy opportunity to give particular pleasure and satisfaction. In some ways, it’s a bit like how I’ve learned to understand how the extra value of having the house really picked up and things taken care of benefits my wife. Yes, in a purely practical sense, it’s nice to have it done effectively. But at some point I realized that the meaning for her was greater than the perceived absolute meaning for me. It makes her feel good, it makes her happy, it affirms her peace and view of the state of the world.

I used to be a bit annoyed at how things that seemed merely practical questions were apparently loaded with some level of extra emotional and personal significance for her. But then I realized one day that that’s just how she was, and that it wasn’t a burden, a negative standard to miss, it was an easy opportunity to do her good and improve her life, to make her happy.

Like many men throughout time, I appreciate the benefits of civilization and order in my environment, but I don’t feel any great emotional benefit or gain from gaining or losing them to some degree. They have some real, tangible, practical meaning, but no larger existential meaning to me; they don’t affect my sense of value or well-being that much. They don’t mean anything about me and my universe to me. But they do to my wife.

In this way, I guess we’re both just typical examples of some deep biological and psychological dimensions of our sexes. So I see now that that’s an opportunity. Presumably, as a husband, I should want to do some things just because I know they will make my wife specially happy and feel specially good about life. I can weigh the cost to myself, as well as the benefit of how much making her happy will also make me happy. And as it turns out, there is a pretty good return, even if I’m just being selfish and not purely altruistic.

If I had to be perfectly honest, I used to view things the other way round. I saw how she was as a slightly annoying and unnecessary extra burden of meaning and emotion. And because I didn’t share her feelings, I resented being affected by them. It’s not easy to burden yourself with significance you don’t share. I don’t know that I ever said how I felt, but I’m sure she experienced it in one way or another. Instead of working with who she was and being understanding and using that to my advantage, I wished she different than how she was, more like me, and fought the current instead of using it.

But my outlook has shifted over time. The central thesis of a French book on love I have been reading is that love is about experiencing reality through difference, not identity. Love isn’t about reducing your partner to who you are, it’s learning to see and appreciate the world through who they are, adding that to your own life experience and how you live, and so enriching it and transcending yourself.

When I consider how I’ve approached things in the past, to be honest, I’m filled with a lot of shame. And I can’t help but see what great struggles and barriers I must have presented and still present my wife with. I add a lot of chaos and uncertainty and messiness to her life. I threaten her order, her civilization, and I demand my own unearned fulfillment in my turn, increasing her burdens. She’s far more ambitious and industrious and conscientious than I am. She’s far better at providing for herself than I am. I might even be a net negative.

And that fills me with regret. Things haven’t always gone how I had planned, and I haven’t always done a good job with life and myself even when they have. I’m a most inadequate husband. And so when I finally had my first breakthrough and started really accepting who she was in the ways she differs from me and trying to do something to reward them instead of punish them, I gave myself ten thousand pats on the back for being so enlightened. It was quite a farce.

But I suppose I was just so shocked to find that the results of accepting them were so much greater than the results of resenting and fighting them. My greatest regret is that I didn’t start doing so sooner, and I’m very sorry for it. I just didn’t want to bother. I didn’t want to add her burdens to my own. They seemed somehow unjust and unnecessary, so I resented them. And they still often do. What I never realized was that, by lifting them, even just a little, I lifted her, and she would lift me back in return. I was being lazy and selfish, and I still struggle every day with it.

These are the sorts of judgments you can only make about yourself and your own attitude, not someone else’s. From my perspective, she’s done everything she can to carry both sides of our lives. She works hard, she takes care of the home, she’s ridiculously competent and creative (a rare, rare combination, almost a miracle), she’s a beautiful, sweet wife, she takes care of the kids. She kind of does everything.

And I’m just impressed with myself any time I’m not an active burden! And I live with an immense sense of fear and guilt because of that imbalance. Yet somehow, because of the type of person I am, that fear and guilt don’t help me do more or add more (which they might inspire in her), it just makes it even harder for me to do so. And I perceive that a lot of how my wife relates to herself is through fear and guilt and judgment, and so I assume that that’s how she relates to me also. And that makes me perform even worse.

If you could check my personality type, you would see that I operate in a cyclical state between my two dominant aspects of emotion and analysis. When they’re working together, they reinforce one another through their differences. But, like a marriage, when they’re not working together they create a cycle of denigration, of self de-inforcement. I feel fear and guilt, which makes me less able to act and think, which results in bad thinking, and that makes me feel even worse, which makes me think and act even worse. It’s a volatile combination, and one that risks much because it allies the two ways of being that are farthest apart and least alike. So there are enormous potential benefits and results, but they come at enormous risk and vulnerability.

And I think marriage is like that too. You take a bigger and bigger risk the further from your own identity you reach for connection. The understanding and combining becomes harder and harder to achieve. But the potential benefits also become greater and greater. And they can only be achieved by leaning in and loving those differences and developing them.

Anyway, I think I somehow got sidetracked I to talking about something completely other than what I meant to be talking about.

Getting back to the original subject and away from my own inadequacy as a husband, I think what I want to address goes back to a brief, misunderstood discussion about the movie “What Men Want” that I once had with my wife. There was no point to that movie, I asserted, because it was obvious what men wanted. I think the point I was trying to make was, unsuccessfully, was not that men are disgusting (which is how she interpreted it), but that men are simple.

It’s not a huge mystery how to make a man happy. You may not understand the answer or may even despise the answer, because you don’t share their structures of meaning, you may resent the burden of value difference it represents and seeks to add to your own outlook (often a problematic one that makes you feel insufficient, much as I feel for things to which I have my own challenges of performance). But we know fairly well how to please men and give them joy. It’s not some great mystery to be disentangled. That doesn’t make them gross or something to be despised. It just makes them themselves, and that self is fairly straightforward.

It’s even more simple than many women might imagine, because the bar really is set so low. Men aren’t looking for some specific content or features, they mostly just want availability. They want something they are free to love and appreciate and participate in. They just want it to be for them and make them feel special, and also to be taken out of themselves and back in by bring free to love and appreciate and worship that thing, their partner.

Why does it mean so much to them? We don’t know. It’s just one of the realities of humanity. Why do order and provision and comfort and security (emotional and physical) matter so much to women? We don’t know, it’s just one of the realities of humanity. And together, they somehow provide for the very future of our species and draw us close to one another, who might otherwise not be so enticed or united in common purpose and function and end. They’re meant to be the tools we use to draw us to one another, not the differences we use to push us apart.

My desire for and appreciation of my wife, my innate desire as a man, was made just for the purpose of drawing me closer to her, to bind me to her and make me pursue her and seek her and leave who I am by finding it in her. And, to be honest, sometimes it’s a burden I resent. It seems unfair. I feel enslaved by it sometimes, because of its apparent inequity and the need it forces upon me whose fulfillment is not within my own power, but is at the discretion of someone else.

Sometimes it makes me feel very stupid and silly, as well as resentful and vulnerable. Because what could make you more vulnerable than having some deep need whose fulfillment is not at your command but is at the caprice of another? And there’s a lot in the direction of human effort that represents our attempts to throw off that hostage situation and return the means of our fulfillment to our own personal control. Artificial, substitutionary, or altered structural means for meeting those needs. Fundamentally, they’re about freeing you from your reliance on someone else, your need for someone else, especially someone who’s pretty different and is going to make things more complicated and demand a lot in ways we don’t value.

Often other people are not themselves even very interested in being the object of those needs. Rather than appreciating the innate power of those needs as a means to drive humans together, it’s easy to resent being made the object of need as much as resenting being the possessor of it. We don’t want to need each other. It threatens our identity. Men don’t really want to need women. It’s humiliating. It often ruins our lives to do so. Women don’t really want to need men. And both sexes use the advantages of our technological advancement to find ways to circumvent and blunt that need and free ourselves so we may be independent of one another.

Which, of course, reduces relationships to an easy exchange of commodities, absent any risk. We don’t really need each other. It’s just a pleasant contrivance. We could get the things we need somewhere else, someway else. We’re independent, not vulnerable, complete in ourselves. We have no burdens we can’t lift within ourselves, and no burdens outside ourselves we need to lift. I’m not advocating for codependency, of course, just observing the built-in needs endemic to our nature, how we often resent them, and how we seek to solve them within ourselves when maybe their intent was to bring us together and to stretch us a bit by both needing and being needed in ways we don’t ourselves fully understand.

I think my feelings were a little hurt when my wife’s instinct was to not hear what I was saying to her about “What Men Want”, but to be disgusted and disappointed by men. Mostly by the implication that how I am, how men are, their needs and desires for fulfillment, are something to be despised. And I understand. The depths to which men are frustrated in that need and their wild and resentful and misguided attempts to meet it often result in terrible ways of being and terrible actions. Which in itself is a clue to how deeply felt those needs are, despite seeming shallow and even bizzare at times to those who don’t share them.

Marriage is meant to be the proper way to fulfill those needs, a safe place, a place where those desires find their home and work for their goal of bringing us together wnd bringing value to one another and making us stretch and grow and become better. So the feeling, even if not intended, that even in that context that need is a thing to be despised, a disgusting, misguided, abberant, stupid thing, is to suddenly feel hopeless about your whole esistence and nature. We’re born with this terrible, deep need, whose strength is such that it can drive us to sainthood or to ruin, and we’re given a path by which to legitimately express it, to give it a home where it will work to better us and find fulfillment instead of destroying us. A place to let loose.

To then have that safe space be threatened as unsafe, to learn that even there we’re wrong and destructive and stupid and disgusting, and this deep part of us is rejected; that hurts far more than it should, as small and simple a thing as it is. The meaning of the fear is far outsize its real world presence. But the positive meaning is also far outsize. Sex pleases us absurdly, validates us absurdly, fulfills us absurdly, so much that even if the rest of the world tells us we are without value and our needs and desires cannot be met, we can survive and keep going, having this comfort.

I don’t know why my wife’s beauty makes me feel so good about me; I’m sorry for any burden it places on her, but it isn’t meant to be a burden. It’s a gift, an opportunity, and I don’t really need more than for her to simply let me delight in her and delight in my delight. It isn’t about her being something she isn’t but reveling in and appreciating and raising up and anointing and celebrating what she is to me, letting my vision of her divinity overwhelm her own pragmatic assessments of what she appears to be.

A women or a man presenting themselves as a god or goddess finds truth and virtue when it proceeds, not from their own view of themselves, but from another’s understanding of them. So they can experience the fires of divinity and adoration without the misperception and corruption that comes from finding it unquestioned in our own hearts. By finding ourselves loved in the eyes of others, through means we may not even share, we gain a vision of ourselves that elevates us and worships us without becoming self-worship. I mean, not that we can’t make anything go wrong, but there’s still an amazing potential to go right that is otherwise hard to find when we seek it only in ourselves.

Anyway, that was all far too long, and got too deep into personal feelings, and into my own personal theories on the purpose of relationships and relational differences (and of course a lot could be said for similarities; it’s just much easier to see the value of similarities and much harder to see the value of something that differs). Me picking up the house a bit or doing some laundry, pretty insignificant. Not a matter of great moment for me. My wife wearing a swimsuit? Pretty insignificant for her. And often both endeavors have to bow to other concerns. But they both have the potential to mean more. They don’t always have to. But when we want them to, they can. It’s easy to make them do so.

Transcendent realities ultimately have to find expression in fairly mundane things and acts because of the sort of creatures we are. A meal, a walk, a small favor, a clean toilet, a pretty outfit, a nice surprise. These are the rough incarnations of the transcendent love we experience. I think it’s fairly clear that my wife is the overall winner in every category of life and I’m a bit of a confusing mess who struggles to contribute at every turn. I’m also not good at expressing myself, because I don’t seem to be able to share my thoughts and feelings without explaining my entire worldview and theories about the whole interconnected subject.

And that places an enormous burden both on me and on my spouse, because it elevates all acts and all moments not as mere discrete things to be handled or expressed, but as scions of infinite meaning. I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to express my thoughts and feelings. Because my analytical mind and emotional self are both so keyed up and are connected, everything spirals internally into an interconnected web of infinite meaning. And I can’t talk about things until I’ve grasped that whole hierarchy of significance and understood it and have it in my control.

And often what I uncover is so absurdly transcendent to myself, because I’m essentially seeing behind the scenes of the daily back and forth that for most people is unconscious to the underlying psychological and philosphical and spiritual significance of those things, that I’m afraid to approach it or reveal it. My hyper-awareness creates paralysis and I intimidate myself by understanding so much of what I’m experiencing that I can’t just let myself intuitively experience and react to it.

That’s why all my deep emotional revelations are typically couched in huge analytical expositions like this one. Because I can keep my emotional and analytical sides separate, and they drive one another in an upward or downward spiral of significance that overwhelms me. I can’t even seem to figure out what I think or feel without going through that spiral. So this is me doing a typical spiral. This is why I spend so much time thinking and have such a hard time expressing myself and often need to block it out or shut it down. It’s why the things I think affect my feelings so deeply and why how I’m feeling affects my thinking so deeply, and both very quickly.

I’m always spiraling, alternating between the two halves of my mind and experience, using one to pull more and more significance from the other, then back again. It’s a godawful, idiotic way to be and makes me nearly useless and terribly troublesome to other people. Add on top of it my own inherent selfishness and laziness (that’s a big one for me, and relates directly because I would often rather be lazy and avoid sharing than go through the terrible effort of trying to understand or express myself), and I’ve just got a recipe for a big mess that I’m 38 and haven’t figured out how to clean up yet. And I suppose that’s life.