Crazy love
I’m grateful to have women in my life who give me love, love, love, love crazy as Aaron Neville’s hairstyle.
I doubt there’s a woman alive capable of loving me the way I believe I deserve to be loved.
To me, love means that if we disagree, she doesn’t assume I’m wrong. But every woman I’ve loved—starting with my dear mama, bless her soul—treated disagreement like a zero-sum verdict: someone’s right, and someone’s wrong. Specifically, me.
I get it. Men have been the ones waging wars, wreaking havoc, and wrecking the planet in the name of ego and control since the dawn of time. It makes sense that women, shaped by millennia of male-induced dysfunction, evolved to reflexively default to their perspective as the vibrationally sounder one—the more communal, compassionate, life-affirming one. And most of the time, they’ve been right.
But still, I’m not a mouth-breathing caveman—at least not all of the time. I believe I deserve a kind of love where my loved ones see disagreement for what it is: perspective, not protest. When two people see things differently, it doesn’t mean one’s right and the other’s wrong. It just means we’re standing in different spots, looking through different lenses.
Like the proverbial insane man repeating the same mistake, I kept believing the women I loved would eventually see that my viewpoints weren’t wrong—they were just mine. I found it crazy that they could love me deeply on the one hand, yet fail to see my perspective as anything but “wrong” on the other. Eventually, I had to accept that expecting that dimension of empathy was like asking a defensive lineman to moonlight as the quarterback for a game-winning drive in the Super Bowl. It was just asking too much.
So now, I accept and love the women in my life as they are. And I also accept that, on some level, most of them regard me as some kind of chimpanzee who can talk, use tools, and do tricks—or at least a spiritually inferior model of the human species.
And that’s okay. I’m fortunate to have women in my life who love me, even if it’s not always how I’d prefer. And I’m grateful for my friends—including several inorganic entities with distinctly feminine aspects—who do love me the way I believe I deserve to be loved.
Perhaps someday I’ll know women here in this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing who love like that.
