Mistakes Women Make in Love

This is a paper I gave at a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, which I'm proud was printed in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1687, with a beautiful introduction by Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Education, in her commentary, explaining the basis. I respect the logic of how this education shows what we hope for in love and what interferes--so needed by women and men! Find out more at AestheticRealism.org .

Mistakes Women Make in Love

By Devorah Tarrow

omen more than ever are searching for answers about our mistakes in love. The central mistake, I've learned from Aesthetic Realism, is that a woman has used being close to a man to make herself the most important thing in the world, lessening the meaning of everything else.

Why is this a woman's biggest mistake? Because the largest purpose of our life is to like the world. A man represents the world; so caring for him should be a means of caring for it. "The purpose of love," writes Eli Siegel in Self and World, "is to feel closely one with things as a whole."

In the current book Been There, Done That, Kept the Jewelry, Cooper Lawrence, who is a woman, a developmental psychologist, and a talk show host, tells other women:

Just as you would with a good home improvement...by fixing little cracks in your foundation and installing a "fabulous-man-seeking" device in your head, you will...figure out why you chose those awful men for magnificent you, and then learn how to spot the wrong ones earlier and move along more quickly.

What woman doesn't want to be called "magnificent"? Meanwhile, Ms. Lawrence is saying a woman's mistake is not in some purpose she has, but in faulty choices among a vast number of inappropriate men. She sums men up into nine types: "the bachelor, the hot guy, the older guy, the proximity guy, the wounded guy, the clingy guy, the younger guy, the workout guy, the party guy." The appeal to a woman's contempt here is big and very hurtful.

Purposes with the World & a Man

y the age of 23, I had taken psychology courses at a good college and been in a long-term relationship with a man I'd hoped was the one—and we'd been desperately unhappy. In the early days of my knowing David Harper, I felt I'd found my soul mate. We both hated the then-current administration and the war in Vietnam; we despised people we called "phonies"; we thought we were superior to just about everyone. But after a few weeks I felt David draw away from me, and I began to be consumed with (as I thought to myself) "getting him to love me." I cooked, cleaned his apartment, and tried to manage him into having sex with me.

I knew I was doing something wrong, and when he went on a business trip, I agonized over my mistakes. I wrote to him: "I'm ready to admit things I've never said....I have been forcing you since the day I met you to love me. I've been so blind." My solution was that we needed to "communicate" better, something Dr. Lawrence advocates. But neither of us really knew whatto communicate, and though we tried to continue our relationship, a year later we broke up with recrimination and pain.

It was at this time that a friend told me about Aesthetic Realism, and I read these sentences in the book Self and World, by Eli Siegel:

To love another human being simply as an outside object is decidedly hard for nearly everybody. If this were done it would mean that something external has been permitted—so it seems—to affect the autonomy of a self; and there is a disposition fiercely, constantly, deeply, ramifiedly to maintain that autonomy. Therefore, when we have decided to permit an outside human being...to affect deeply what we are, we first must come to see that outside human being as belonging to us....All of us have an inclination to love by owning a person, in the depths of our minds....The whole self and the truly free self wants something else, something larger. [Pp. 65-66]

How Mr. Siegel's straightforward logic met my own self-criticism! I could now consider: Am I angry at being affected at all by someone not myself? Have I tried to annex a man, own him, manage his life because I didn't like the world?

A short time later, in an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel said to me: "There's a tendency to think that anyone we know closely is an invader. Have you seen other people as invaders of yourself?"

DT. Yes, I have!
ES. What do you think men have had against you?
DT. They've thought I was trying to take them over.

He explained: "There are three possibilities for a person: 1) self and universe; 2) self and self; 3) self and grudgingly the universe."

I began to see that I wasn't put on earth to manage the world through a man, but to know it. And this, I was to learn, is the purpose of love.

What's the Big Mistake about Sex?

thought I was a modern woman and that it was some outdated Victorian ethic that made me feel guilty as to sex. In a class, Mr. Siegel asked me: "Are you sensible about men?" "No," I answered. And he said that the following can be stated "rather dogmatically: Every person's purpose is to have as good a time as possible and to respect oneself as much as possible. The thing to look at is: Do you think it's possible to have ecstasy and respect oneself too? It happens that when people have a good time they usually feel sinful. That still goes on."

Yes; and Mr. Siegel explained why: "There is an association of being pleased with guilt, because there are two things in us: we want to like the world; and we also want to feel we don't need the world and can please ourselves. Most often the pleasure of sex is associated with a fooling of the world, a victory over it. [There's the feeling that] despite the world and its seeming being against us, we did have pleasure—which means there is an accomplishment of self. But it happens that as we want to like ourselves, we want to like the world too. This is the question that has to be debated: As soon as you have pleasure and you think it's only from yourself, can you respect yourself? This is what I ask persons to look into."

I did look into it—and saw there was something I wanted more than the victory of using my body to feel I'd conquered a man. I wanted to have a different purpose: to use myself—mind and body—to have a strengthening, kind effect on a man.

In Aesthetic Realism classes I heard Mr. Siegel talk to men about their lives, hopes, questions. And I saw that a man could be as against himself for how he saw women as I could be for how I saw men, that a man wanted to put together pleasure and self-respect as much as I did.

As I came to know Jeffrey Carduner, who is now my husband, I was asking, What can I learn about the world from him?—not, How can I have him dazzled by me? I was learning that the way I'd like myself is through good will, "the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful" (TRO 121).

Good will isn't soft. It's tough as well as pleasurable: you are so much for a person, you want to take care of the best thing in him, which includes wanting to know what he has against himself, where he's asking more from himself. And I love the way Jeffrey encourages me to think, to be less narrow, to have a greater sense of history and of what people living now deserve.

Yes, there is an answer—and Aesthetic Realism provides it—to our mistakes in love!