The Romantic Ideal by Gregory V. Diehl — Introduction
My new book, The Romantic Ideal: The Highest Standard of Romance for a Man will release in just two weeks on November 19th (International Men’s Day). It’s available as a 99-cent ebook preorder right now, but the price will go up after launch. Paperback, hardcover, and audiobook narration will also be available starting on the 19th. However, even if you plan to buy one of the other formats, I ask you to consider also doing the 99-cent ebook preorder. Your small contribution will make an enormous difference in getting the book visible on Amazon to the right kinds of buyers who have never heard of me. It will also make you eligible to leave a verified purchase review after the 19th, which is essential to the book’s lasting popularity.
Please enjoy the introduction to the book below. On November 19th, I’ll be releasing the first chapter for free as well.'
Introduction
There has probably never been a major civilization in history that did not have a strong conception of the gendered differences between men and women and how they applied in a cosmic way. It goes much deeper than, for instance, the domestic rules imposed on women and career freedoms allotted to men in 1950s America. Cultural, philosophical, spiritual, and religious associations of men, women, masculinity, and femininity can be found at virtually any time and in any place that one is willing to look.
Archetypal contrasts demonstrate the universal human tendency to understand the world through the lens of complementary opposites such as up and down, light and dark, hot and cold, active and passive, and (drum roll please…) masculine and feminine. The obvious example is the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang, represented by the iconic symbol of a circle divided into two swirling halves of black and white. In Hinduism, Shakti represents the feminine, dynamic, and ever-changing aspect of existence, and Shiva is the masculine, conscious, and unchanging one. Ideas about the “divine masculine” and “divine feminine” appear throughout various iterations of New Age spirituality. Psychologist Carl Jung developed the concepts of anima and animus to describe his ideas about the opposite-gendered influence subconsciously present in men and women, emphasizing that integration between the two was necessary for self-realization.
Of course, the fact that an idea has had a history of being popular does not constitute a logical argument or offer proof of its validity. It does, however, mean we cannot be quick to dismiss the differences between men and women as some recent, superficial blip on the radar of humanity’s understanding of itself. If homo sapiens was not a sexually dimorphic species, we would not need complementary categories to understand and classify ourselves by gender besides the physical differences in our downstairs plumbing. Because males and females are different in many notable ways, our minds have come up with distinct methods of associating them. Beyond the sex organs, there are several important distinctions between males and females of most species on this planet. Naturally, our minds start categorizing those traits found more prominently in men as belonging to a “manly” category and those found more prominently in women as belonging to its complementary opposite.
Beyond the social reinforcement of gender roles and limitations, there exists a natural biological and psychological division of traits[1] between the sexes — and it’s a good thing so long as we can arrange things so that our respective strengths work in each other’s favor. Instead, the male/female dichotomy has often been embodied as a fight for control, each side employing strategies suited to their strengths. Problems arise when we stereotype and prescribe these traits, shaming men for not embodying the furthest possible extreme of masculinity and women the same for femininity. Because most men naturally grow more body and facial hair after puberty than women, we might too quickly conclude that women having any body hair makes them masculine or that men not growing enough body hair makes them feminine. The same applies to various personality differences that might be more likely to show up in men or women and that we, therefore, come to associate as masculine or feminine ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Though this book primarily addresses the masculine experience, it is intended for everyone. It’s for men, of course, to understand themselves better — to find healthy ways to deal with what they are experiencing or likely to experience throughout life as a masculine entity. Many unhealthy habits we’ve stereotyped and socially accepted (and even disastrously encouraged) about men are things we can learn to deal with more responsibly. For women, this book aims to shed light on what the men in their lives endure so that they can better empathize with and support them. Feminine women frequently underestimate how the masculine experience of life can be so different than what they experience. It will also help them know what qualities to look for in good men and be confident about how men should treat them.
As I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be a woman directly, everything I write about women and femininity comes from informed guesses and an external masculine perspective, not personal experience. I can only infer certain principles about the feminine experience and compare them to my lived experience of the masculine one. When the woman who wrote the foreword to this book, Svetlana Sevak, finishes her similarly themed book from the feminine perspective, I’ll be the first to read it. I suggest every man and woman reading this book does so, too.
The behaviors and experiences I describe in this book are, so far as I can discern, part of the quintessential masculine experience. If you are actively embodying your masculinity (even if you are female), you should recognize the principle in yourself and see how it applies across your lifestyle, including how the failure to apply it leads to struggle and unfulfillment. Your life will be harder than it needs to be if you fail to embody who you are at your core, and you will not feel at home in yourself. Not every man is going to be horny all the time. Not every man is going to view sex and women the same way. Not every man is going to deal with his anger by punching holes in drywall, which would be a clear sign of immature masculinity and the inability to manage masculine frustration. It doesn’t make me any less of a man if I don’t watch sports, drink beer with the boys every weekend, get into bar fights, or go out hunting for pussy. I experience the same impulses that other men do. The difference is what I do with them. Being a man does not have to mean glorifying the worst things about men just because they set them apart from women. I hope to offer a superior, positive alternative to addressing the masculine burdens of existence.
For whatever reason, masculine traits are naturally overrepresented in men and feminine traits in women. If they are the product of our evolution, experts more qualified than me can only speculate about the advantages they’ve provided that have led to their proliferation in our species. Though the potential for endless diversity and individuation exists and should be respected, there are still broad categories of personality, values, and experience that most people will primarily identify with. Most masculine men are attracted primarily to feminine women, and most feminine women are attracted primarily to masculine men, for instance. Both natural genetic/hormonal expression and social conditioning likely play significant roles in this — though that’s not a can of worms I’m ready to open here. Still, neither masculinity nor femininity is exclusive to men or women. If you don’t feel like you belong squarely in the categories I describe, apply your own judgment and self-analysis to see how what I am talking about could still broadly apply outside of you.
Most people probably wouldn’t think me to be particularly masculine from afar. I’m average height with a slim build (though I can put on muscle when I try to). I’m not excessively hairy, I don’t have a square jawline, and I can’t even grow a decent beard. But my personality, the mind that sees the world and makes sense of all its workings, my default emotional responses to sensory experience, my orientation to reality, and the types of goals that bring meaning to my life are almost entirely masculine. My weaknesses and failings are masculine, too. My experience of the world is alien to most women, especially those who are inversely skewed toward the feminine, just as their experience is alien to me. The further we stray in either direction from the neutral androgynous center, the more important it is that we understand and empathize with each other to reap the benefits of our respective strengths and specializations.
I’ve written this book at age 35 — a nice, level station from which to assess my own experience of masculine development thus far. I’ve been an adult man long enough to have settled into it, past the chaotic sensitivity and hyperactivity of my teenage and early adulthood years. I’ve seen how my sexual interest and masculine demeanor have stabilized over time. I haven’t yet experienced the decline I anticipate will come in my twilight years as I descend into being what I imagine as a helpless curmudgeon, when my hair goes gray, and I lose much of the virility that presently defines my experience as a man.
Throughout this book, I’ll address pertinent examples from my own detailed romantic experience in cultures worldwide that primarily influenced how I formed my present worldview in this domain. All personal anecdotes included really happened. However, except for public figures who have freely disclosed their private details, names and details have been changed and mythologized to protect anonymity while getting the point of each story across. The lesson contained in each matters more than the specifics of what occurred. I will also draw on many examples from ancient and modern mythology and philosophy, usually in the form of parables, movies, books, and music, that illustrate timeless archetypes and truths about gendered romantic experience better than could ever be captured by something that just so happened to happen to me or someone I know. Though these examples do not offer scientific truth, they demonstrate that these ideas have been floating around in human culture and mythology throughout history. That’s the point of mythology: to showcase a concentration of the most important aspects of the truth that are normally hidden from view.
Appearances of Sexism
While writing this book, I’d occasionally come across someone who seemed offended by its very premise. Some people took issue with me not only acknowledging the differences between men and women but actually promoting them as qualities worth celebrating in pursuit of total self-expression and social harmony,[2] likely because they saw them only as sources of historical conflict and strife. Male readers would often praise me for the passages denouncing toxic feminine behavior but take offense at the passages denouncing toxic masculine behavior. Female readers frequently did the opposite: They thanked me for shedding light on how men mistreat them and became volatile when reading about how their own sex is often responsible for mistreating men. It would be easy to take certain portions of this book out of context to make the person who wrote them look like a diehard misandrist or misogynist. This is a book that has to be interpreted holistically to receive it as intended. If you find yourself getting offended when I generalize and criticize aspects of your gender and not just as much when I do so with the opposite gender, ask yourself why.
Men and women alike have the capacity to be despicable creatures, though typically in different ways that are manifestations of their immature masculinity and femininity, respectively. Which gender we’re allowed to criticize more harshly seems to change with the times. Personally, I am an equal-opportunity hater. I am quick to criticize all things worth criticizing and call all spades spades, disregarding momentary cultural narratives around these things. At my core, I’m a timeless humanist[3] — a universal champion for conscious self-expression in whatever form consciousness is to be found: male, female, big, small, round, square, and any color of the light spectrum. I know that everyone who does not radically assess their capacity for acting irresponsibly threatens everyone they interact with. And everyone who harms another when such harm was reasonably preventable should be held accountable. If you feel called out by condemnations of certain negative gendered behaviors, ask why you identified yourself in them.
Any advice presented in this book is only valid if following it would be an authentic expression of the self in each reader’s particular case. This is a disclaimer that, realistically, should be included in any book written in the genre of personal or sociological development. Any book that appears to tell you who you should be or how you should act only makes sense if those instructions are in line with who you really are. No one has the authority to try to change someone into something they are not.
The Semantics of Generalization
The English language is pretty bad at distinguishing generalizations and absolutisms.[4] It is the difference between when something happens often and when something happens always by definition. When Isaac Newton said that an object in motion remains in motion until an outside force acts on that object, he meant that it was true for all physical objects and all forces. It’s part of what defines them. But if I say that men are physically stronger than women, I clearly don’t intend to apply the claim on an absolute scale to all men and all women as a facet of their definition. I mean that it is generally true, even if I don’t explicitly say so. We have enough data about men and women to broadly describe the scientifically informed sexually dimorphic differences between them. Beyond what we can directly confirm as laws and hard statistics with experimentation via the scientific method, we must venture into the weeds of philosophy, personal experience, and interpretation. That men and women are demonstrably different in a variety of biological and psychological aspects is a scientifically informed conclusion — one that goes well beyond the scope of this book. However, what it means to be masculine or feminine and how men and women can best express themselves and get along together is a matter of personal values and interpretation.
Imagine the chore of reading a book semantically required to include the qualifier “generally speaking” in every sentence. My solution is to apply generalization as a disclaimer unless statements are clearly emphasized as absolutisms. Every claim I make about men and women in this book is intended as broad generalization, and most generalizations are descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not usually saying that things should be the way I portray them here. I am describing what I observe, the truth as I understand it. My wording should make it clear when I am projecting a preference or ideal instead of describing a fact. Perhaps your observations and understanding differ. Perhaps you can read mine and still gain something from them.
Generalizations are not stereotypes by necessity. A generalization is a pattern you identify that broadly categorizes your experiences. A stereotype is a generalization you apply before experience because someone passed it on to you. They, too, most likely had it passed to them via reports from others, biasing their interpretations of their experience. Sometimes, the patterns we identify from our experiences can align with existing stereotypes. Ironically, we might deny what we observe as true because we are extra cautious against being influenced by stereotypes. We stop trusting the evidence of our senses and our own ability to reason, which is the best we have in the absence of hard scientific data. Just because people think something is true doesn’t mean it is true. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true, either.
[1] Many will recognize “division of labor” as an economics term that refers to how any process is most efficient if you separate types of value according to who is best suited to provide each. Sexually dimorphic organisms, like people, have unevenly distributed traits between their sexes, from the functions their bodies perform to how they think and feel. Each approach provides some natural advantage the other lacks.
[2] “Social harmony,” as I use the term, means individuals getting along with one another once they are self-expressed. We can ignore historical examples of totalitarians and social engineers using “social harmony” as justification for forcing people into roles to fit their particular vision for civilization.
[3] I would argue, though, that even the term “humanist” is an oversimplification of my position. I value humanity because it contains the highest concentration of certain virtues in the known universe, such as emotional depth, intelligence, morality, consciousness, and volition. My bias toward humans would naturally extend toward any other beings, now or in the future, who display such human-affiliated qualities, which we might broadly refer to as their capacity for humanity. Perhaps a more appropriate term for me than “humanist” would be “humanityist.”
[4] In fact, as far as I am aware, no world languages contain a clear grammatical distinction between statements meant to be interpreted generally and absolutely. They all require additional semantic distinctions that can muddle meaning when such distinctions are left out.