Sidewalk Love Affair


From the original article on February 3, 2016. Author: Chateau Heartiste.

Recently, I had box seats to a brief lovers’ spat on the sidewalk. The couple starring in the show crossed my path perpendicularly. It was a telling scene, flush with unspoken truths about the differences between men and women. She’s following him, begging for his attention. The girl has that frantic look like her baby is floating down the river in a basket and she’s chasing after it.

All the while (not a long while, maybe twenty seconds total), he’s striding purposefully ahead of her, oblivious, or affecting an air thereof, to her fevered pleadings. He stands tall, a confident posture and a neutral facial expression leading his way. He looks kind of like a dick.

I couldn’t make out what the drama was about, but it didn’t matter. There was a larger message in this theatrical release. I thought:

“This is the direction love should go. It’s natural. Woman to man. Woman gives love, man receives love. (Man gives desire, woman receives desire.) No matter what happens next, this woman desperately chasing down her man will eventually fall into his post-coital arms, the both of them happy with their respective statuses in the relationship.”

I tried to imagine by way of thought experiment how my perception of the scene would have changed if the roles had been swapped. If instead he had been pleading with his girlfriend to slow down, and she kept walking ahead of him. I twitched at the thought with instinctive revulsion. There was only one-way love in that reverse scenario, him to her. Submissive Male to Dominant Female. A guarantee of relationship extinction.

No one loves a needy man, not even himself.

How will you know your relationship is on solid ground? If she’s running after you, red-faced and trembling with love and yearning and desperation and desire and, yes, fear. The sexual polarity is aligned. The love amplified.

If you’re running after her, afraid to lose her love? You already have.

A good, if abstractedly imperfect, test of a woman’s love for you is to ask if she would she die for you. You can ask yourself this question, and if you’re honest you’ll know the answer.

Would she die for you?

Because most women wouldn’t.

I watched TED talks today and a woman there defined love as you would give your life for that person. I would die for my son without question..but for my husband probably not. I do love him, but I wouldn’t die for him..would I die for my husband when we first started dating when I was CRAZY in love with him? Nah..

You’ll know you own your woman if she’s so in love she’d at least claim in online scribblings that she’d die for you.


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