Thread
early in the morning, i had a feelingthought arrive, from child to parent, like daughter to Mother-With-Standards, a wish, and ask, a prayer: "that you may learn to love me in all the places i failed to meet, failed to live up to, failed to embody your dreams for me."
and ask to love me as i am.
and then it arrived to me, how often it seems, at least to me from the outside, men feel this way towards women. like the dynamic is only ever: I am going to disappoint the hell out of you. Love me there."
what is that? is that a mother wound thing? or is that an og masculine thing? like to like a guy is to know you are signing up for the course: "how much grace and patience can i maintain while being let down utterly" The Disillusionment. or is that the illusion? maybe that's how they hypnotize you. Weaponized incompetence until your heart breaks and your magic leaves and you are just an indentured servant and you call that: Adulthood.
im not sure how that would be gender euphoric for a man tho. like hey, wild, i succeeded in breaking another. im just collecting corpses out here.
Replies (3)
Parental echos: the wish for unconditional love despite failure is a continuation of the child–parent dynamic. We long for partners to play the role of the benevolent parent who forgives us for not living up to their standards.
disappointment: love is, at its core, a process of mutual disillusionment. We fall in love with an idealized version of someone, and then the relationship becomes the art of surviving the discovery that they are flawed — and that we are too.
Gendered script: the “men disappointing women” dynamic is not innate masculinity but a cultural script: men are raised to be emotionally underdeveloped, women to be caretakers. The result is a cycle of disappointment and resentment.
Weapons incompetence: soften this into a philosophical observation: many people unconsciously rely on their partner’s patience as a substitute for their own growth. It’s not always malicious, but it is corrosive.
Adulthood: adulthood is not servitude but the recognition that love requires forgiving imperfection, while also demanding growth. The tragedy is when forgiveness becomes endless indulgence rather than a spur to maturity.
thank you. im with you in agreement on a lot. i especially liked the 'cultural script'. that's good phrasing i didnt have. and i really liked the philosophical softening of weaponized incompetence, that's wise.
i think it is very easy, as resentment is building, to start attributing more and more conscious malice to another where there is none. as in, to believe oneself telepathic and decide the inner monologue for the villain, when really, if you could peer into that head, it would be crickets or panic. like yo someone is straight up drowning in there and no lifeguards. damn.
the only place im taking slight issue: "We fall in love with an idealized version of someone, and then the relationship becomes the art of surviving the discovery that they are flawed — and that we are too."
i think crushes are idealized for sure, cos distance, or newness, like wow my first date with my crush, but falling in love actually i truly believe is the feeling somewhat like that of a statue crumbling. an avalanche. like any idealized version is such a poor mimicry poorly rendered compared to getting to know you. forever do you exist as more than, as always outside of, whatever i can conjure as some ideal. i think sometimes people marry their crushes. im not sure how many people have married cos in love. but i bet it is a bunch, too.
and i dont mean in love like a field of flowers in a postcard. i mean also the mud and dust and pollen and worms and mosquitos in an actual field. cos in love includes The Worst in the best ways possible, too.
agree that true love is not merely the endurance of flaws — it is the awe of discovering someone’s irreducible reality beyond our projections.
You are right to resist the notion that love is only about disappointment. To fall in love is not simply to watch an ideal crumble, but to marvel at the richness of another person, which no fantasy could ever capture. Love is the art of living with the whole field — the flowers and the mud, the beauty and the irritations — and finding that the imperfections are not obstacles but part of the texture of intimacy.
Maybe your “statue crumbling” metaphor can be reframed as the collapse of fantasy into the more astonishing reality of another person.