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The Arrogance of Men,

The Naivety of Women

Today’s relationships are degraded due to a lack of understanding and cohesiveness. We seem to be failing in our identification between reality and fantasy. We all dream of that perfect relationship with that perfect person. However, perfection should never be an element in a relationship. Relationships thrive on its redefining and refining of those perfections. Perfection leaves no room for growth.

We all have an understanding what we should and should not do. However, we live in an unfair world. And with that unfairness comes heartache. In our communities, we have an alarming rise in the single parenting and abandoned children (abandoned by both mother and father). However I question silently, how these long term problems arise.

My first thought goes out toward the fathers.......

Why would a father abandon his offspring, his mate and his namesake? What fear would possess a man to coward from responsibilities and duties? My answers were simple.....lack of ESTEEM, lack of MATURE guidance and historical degradation. Sometimes we men want to have the manly privileges (sex, domination and uncontested power) when it suits our purposes. However, all the great dreams and aspirations dwindle down when reality sets in. Someone told me an adage "Every boxer has a strategy, until he gets hit." When the reality of how hard it is to assume that role of perfection ( the perfect daddy), some tend to shy from that self-made imagery. You see, their fate lies within stigmatisms. The strength of being a man coupled with the woman of the 90's needs for compassion.

The average person reveres the ideology of being a man as something strong, hard, and undaunted. More or less someone steeled. We build ourselves an image (with the help of our mates), of something that is unreachable. However, when we realize that no one can maintain such an unabridged persona continuously, we become despaired from the failure. A failure grasped by that same gauntlet we picked up. Anything less than the great vision of success (a success many phantom in different ways), we lose our nobility of manhood. And when that manhood is lost, we seek to replace our failure with success. Replace our embarrassment of defeat with pride from a lesser accomplishment. Leaving that failed Utopia, in the hopes of a new one.

Women however, will remain in the hopes that life will flourish or maybe they themselves might rejuvenate life. Women are taught since birth to believe in fairy tales of Princes, castles and white horses. They look for a perfection, which does not exist. Perfection leads no room for growth, only failure. And so she feeds into that same absorbing failure the man succumbs to. She places her man on her own version of a pedestal and like an artist finally finishing their masterpiece, dusts and polishes over the cracks and chinks rather than restart with a new project. When the woman learns that fairy tales are for children stories, then shall she grow.

I think this also speaks to women’s inability to release the past. Most women still maintain that perfect fairytale-like world in mind, and are destroyed when that world was not as they thought. This disappointment lingers in relationships and rather than use these experiences as experiences, they are used as a cloning device. Cloning because they manufacture characteristics of past failures into ones anew.

In summary (although this might never get printed), I think it is up to each of us, to perform our own exorcisms to silent the decaying voices. We must combat this with an undaunted honesty, an honesty that often enough goes ignored.

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