Regarding irresistible qualities in the opposite sex. Corri asked what is the irresistible quality she sees in this tv guy. I don’t know, but I’d like to address irresistible qualities in women.
At a place where I worked about 30 years ago there was a woman volunteer who was absolutely irresistible to men. By this I mean that at any gathering where there were men, she was always at the center of the group. My girlfriend and I were mystified by this, probably because we were not men.
This woman, I’ll call her Jane, was NOT physically attractive. She was skinny (not in a good way—very lanky and bony); her skin was lined from years in the sun (she was about 45 when I knew her), and she was one of those people who wore bright blue eye shadow and her lipstick always bled outside her lip line. Her clothes were not particularly flattering--- polyester as they only made in the 70’s. Oh, and she wasn’t too smart either.
But men adored her.
I think I finally figured out why, and someone alluded to it a ways back: men (and women, too) just felt terrific in her presence. She was happy, upbeat, a great listener, had a great sense of humor (a bit bawdy), free with compliments, and had a huge, loving heart. She wasn’t a doormat by any means, but she was emotionally generous and easy to connect to. It was also clear that she was very physically open… she was very sexy in an earthy, unself-conscious, jolly (cf. Mojo), easygoing way.
There was a guy who worked with us who was very unconventional. He was a Chicano (is that term still p.c.?), had a chip on his shoulder, talked tough, had a couple of children by his girlfriend (back before out of wedlock kids were so mainstream), wore a bandanna on his head, drove an old Camaro with the floor on the front passenger side full of empty beer cans. When they reached the level of the seat, he’d throw them out.
Anyway, my girlfriend and I thought he would be immune to her charms. Surely a middle-aged, polyester-clad woman with lipstick all over her face wouldn’t appeal to him. We took him to a picnic where we knew she would be. Like all the other men he (along with my girlfriend’s husband) just flocked to her like a moths to a flame.
When our Chicano friend went over to the beer, we joined him and he said, “Wow! That Jane is really something!”
“What is it about her?” we asked.
He looked puzzled. “I don’t know. She’s just really cool, lots of fun, easy to talk to.”
Jane was very happily married for many years and when her husband died of cancer, of course she was devastated. I knew her husband (I had a mad crush on him), and I asked him what was the secret to a happy marriage. He was in the Air Force and had traveled a lot. He said, “A strong commitment, great sex, and frequent separations.”
I went over to her house one time and she showed me something that her husband had had made for her for their anniversary. She kept it in the closet hanging on the wall. The reason will become obvious in a minute. The plaque read: “To my lovely wife Jane, for 16 years of wonderful—“ and then vertically it listed, “Friendship, Understanding, Cheerfulness, Kindness, Inspiration, Niceness, Generosity.”
Do you see why it was in the closet?
I don’t know if this story can be flipped over to the male side to answer Corri’s question or not.
I'm going to pitch in here and say I don't think confidence is what it is - I think it's courage. Courage means what Hairdog said: "I can handle it". Keeping going in the face of adversity takes courage rather than confidence. You may be completely confident that bad things are gonna happen but you face them with courage.
When my mum was dying I emailed my French penpal about it (she's the penpal I had when I was 14 and we're still in contact). She'd lost her father about 5 years earlier so knew what I was going through. Her sign off to me was "bon courage". Which summed up exactly what was needed to face the pain of losing a parent.
When you see a bunch of little kids playing sport you can see the wimps and you can see the courageous kids. The kids with courage just keep getting better and better. They have the courage to face the balls that whack them in the face, falling off the skateboard and landing on their azz for the umpteenth time. The kids with no courage just go into it thinking "this is gonna hurt" and because of that they're all tensed up and they've failed before they've begun. If we go into every potentially painful situation in our relationships thinking "this is gonna hurt" we can't relax enough to develop the skills we need. We are going to fall on our azzes we are going to get whacked in the face but we just have to have the courage to face it.
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
Fran: And all this time, I always thought I was the Tin Man, not the (ugh) Cowardly Lion. Now, you've uncovered the truth. "But I could show my prowess, be a lion not a mou-ess, If I only had the nerve."
I think it is true that courage is what is needed but we have to remember that courage takes different forms. I would say that I'm most courageous when I follow my curiosity rather than my preconceived notions or knee-jerk reactions in pursuit of fun or happiness or fulfillment. The only way to experience a new paradigm is to let go of the old one and the only way to let go of an old paradigm is to let doubt and therefore also wonder invade your soul.
I remember towards the end of my marriage after a sexual encounter I asked myself "I wonder if that was the last time I'll ever have sex with my husband?" Being able to ask myself that question and only experience a bit of mild melancholy was directly reflective of the extent to which I had let go of control and desire to maintain the old paradigm. Probably if I had been able to keep myself from exerting too much control over the formation of the new paradigm, there would have been more of a chance of saving my marriage. But, hey, I'm only human. It's scary to live in a world you can't control but only observe and it's really f*cking scary to realize that you can't even control yourself much of the time.
Last edited by MJontheMend; 08/09/0703:06 PM.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
there would have been more of a chance of saving my marriage
Mojo, you keep slipping in these little comments, "If I could have done/been [this or that], then there might have been a chance of saving my marriage."
From over here (and I think I speak for everyone, except possibly cobra and fearless who always seem to have a counter-opinion) that you did EVERYTHING possible to be/do whatever seemed necessary to save the marriage up to and occasionally including doing emotional harm to yourself.
I don't believe your marriage was save-able as long as your H refused to meet you at least halfway. And no one could have made him do this unless he wanted to.
From over here (and I think I speak for everyone, except possibly cobra and fearless who always seem to have a counter-opinion) that you did EVERYTHING possible to be/do whatever seemed necessary to save the marriage up to and occasionally including doing emotional harm to yourself.
I agree that my marriage almost certainly woulda/shoulda ended no matter what. Here's what I'm saying. Fusion issues are control/power/security issues. When you are "working" on your relationship with the goal of saving/maintaining/fixing your relationship you are like a bad scientist who is over-controlling an experiment towards a result towards which the scientist has a bias. The moment I was able to think "I wonder if my marriage will survive?" without fear, I became a good scientist, more differentiated, more guided by curiosity and less controlling. The mistake that I made (even though I do believe that the results would have been the same) was that I almost immediately flipped my thinking towards a bias towards divorce and over-controlled the experiment in the other direction.
I think Cobra's stance is that when you reach that point in a relationship you should consciously "re-fuse" a bit and reclaim a bit of your pro-marriage bias about the results of the experiment but remain self-aware that you were able to be more differentiated. I disagree for the same reason I would disagree with a scientist who informed me he was running an experiment under that protocol. I think the best thing to do would be to just try to stay in that differentiated, un-biased, curious state of wonder as long as possible and then try to get there again once you inevitably slip as often and for as long as possible as you can. If a person could do that in regard to everything they would have, literally, the most wonderful life possible.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
