1 - Why do women love men?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2023
Summary
I have known Carmine for 27 years. It is longer than half of my life. We are having coffee. It’s a Saturday morning. The sun is shining. We are sitting on the stoep [veranda]. We will move into the house at some point.
Why do you love me, I ask her?
Let me count the ways, she says.
We laugh.
I love you because you laugh at my jokes. When I saw you for the first time in Pretoria I thought: what a cute young man. You were so handsome with your dreadlocks. And then you opened your mouth. You know I like men who have brains. I don’t like men who can’t think.
When you are young and trying to have a close relationship, you tend to ask this question more often. Not so much later, when the burning passion of the first days has dissipated. Maybe it has something to do with life stages. Younger people may be more disposed to probe the meaning of intimacy, which is entwined with the meaning of identity and its development. The tendency to ask why one is loved is possibly more pronounced among individuals who have been influenced by a certain conception of love. This belief about love is defined by a molecular attention to the life of feelings, more broadly to psychological elements of love (as opposed to giving privilege to material acts such as washing dishes for another person). Feelings are, in this worldview, considered to contain the truth of intimate relationships. It may be of interest to note that such a consuming preoccupation with the psychology of love, the fine details of emotion, intimacy as something to be searched for, in fact originates in bourgeois Western society. In his influential theory of psychosocial development, ego psychologist Erik Erikson, whose name is associated with the concept of identity crisis, contends that following the adolescent wrestling with identity and role confusion, love becomes the central crisis of young adulthood. During this stage of the ‘eight ages of man’, which begins during late teenage years and young adulthood, young men and women turn toward the search for intimacy, ‘the capacity to commit [oneself] to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments even though they may call for significant compromises’.
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- Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2022