Let's address one of life’s overarching themes. The Battle of the Sexes. Unfortunately, this intense subject is undoubtedly introduced to us in our adolescence, and it continues all the way through our miserable adult lives where we can truly say man and woman have been bested. In any human relationship, there can be a potential, disruptive dynamic that can, and often does, threaten the idyllic peace and tranquility in which a couple attempts to endeavor.
However, the weapons at hand that might be utilized to try and settle this quandary are age old. Male authority, superior physical strength, and control of the purse strings are often pitted against feminine wiles, sexual allure, crocodile tears, and a gentle nature that demands a gentle response from a gentleman. Like I said, these tricks are age old.
Nevertheless, cultural values change over time. Therefore, some of these weapons are viewed in different ways, by different people, in different places, at different times. It’s largely up to couples, however prideful, to determine for themselves who wins what battle, as well as who, if anyone, wins the war outright.
Another baffling subject in love relationships concerns self-identity and other various facets that help create, maintain, and/or change our self image. Let’s start with this establishment: our place of birth, our gender, our physical appearance, our name, our siblings, our parents, our relatives, our friends, our abilities, and our accomplishments, as well as our experiences in larger social groups like schools, churches, teams, etc. These involvements have vital bearings upon not only how we view ourselves, but who we view ourselves as. Self identity, thus, is complex and multilayered. To make things even more complicated, our movement through society everyday is accompanied by our having to wear metaphorical masks as we move from playing one role to another, like a skilled actor playing several different roles in a dramatic production.
On any given day, we find ourselves playing child, sibling, parent, and relative, but that’s just a few of the basics. Think about it. You get up in the morning, get in your car, stop for a drive-through latte, drive to work, do what must be done, grab some lunch, and then head to your dentist appointment. On the way you’re pulled over by the policeman for not coming to a full stop at the last intersection. And so your day continues. Just in one example, you’ve played a family member, a customer, an employee, a customer again, a scofflaw, and a patient. On and on it goes. We play so many different roles so often that we don’t even think about it anymore. We just live like an actor who learned his part long, long ago. And that, dear friend, is one of life's major messages.
It goes further, though. We know who we are, right? We have a solid sense of self identity. The problem arising, though, concerns the accuracy of another person’s reading of who we are. Since we play so many roles, it would be easy for someone to see us in only one specific role and mistake us—our real selves—for the role we play. We, of course, don’t identify ourselves wholly by any, or at least by most of our roles. Thus, to be thought by someone to be a person whom you don’t identify with in your own mind is going to lead to a fiasco, right? Right.
This facet of mistaking a person’s true identity because the difficulty of seeing past the mask that’s been donned in the performance of a role is closely connected with another life theme: illusion versus reality. Not only can we be fooled by appearances and feelings, as in my case, but we can even go out of our way to create a willful blindness, to willingly embrace an illusion. For example, there are some things that we just don’t want to know about or believe. Many reports exist that tout the dangers of smoking, drinking, eating too many Big Macs, and having unprotected sex, yet millions of people indulge in these activities every single day. Why?
Some might have a death wish, but for most people, it’s because of willful blindness. Many people wrap themselves in the safe and secure illusion that nothing bad is going to come of this behavior. So how does this relate to the you? It all has to do with how you can be wrong in your perception of reality.
If we can make ourselves see things the way we’d like them to be, despite evidence to the contrary, we can construct our own private individual world—a world that only we can perceive, for it’s different in subtle or in overt ways from other people’s perceptions of reality. Yet, we insist that we know each other, despite the very complex dynamics that go into self identity and into the full make-up of a human being living the human experience.
Shakespeare perhaps said it best in his play, As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and we merely players on that stage.” Life demands that we assume roles; the challenge is to see accurately beneath the mask of another player, or to find a person who, for you, will willingly unmask so as to reveal his true identity. What makes the latter action so touching is the fact that our ego—where our self identity resides—is so fragile that we usually protect it to the death.
There’s no role in the human experience that puts forth more masks than dating or loving, of course. For therein, we’re always trying to put our best foot forward, to impress the object of desire in some way, and to appear to be someone that is worthy of that person’s affections. For one to remove the mask, then, can have dire results if the other party rejects him for the affection of another. The unmasked suitor suddenly feels betrayed, for the one for whom the mask was removed seemingly did not also remove his mask. They were never the person they pretended to be. Thus, we are introduced to the proverbial thin line between love and hate.
Good luck with that.
Swanky
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