The above cartoon typifies the ’emotionally unavailable’ man of the 1950’s
as depicted in movies and tv programmes like ‘Mad Men’ If we look around today at the younger men who help with the cooking and looking after their babies, it seems that things have changed. But have they really? Maybe age old difference between men and women still exist:
Women fall in love with what they hear.. and men fall in love with what they see.
Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
Oscar Wilde.
And dozens of articles are still written, giving advice on how to communicate with an emotionally unavailable partner. From the tantra point of view, all this happens because both men and women cannot connect with the love inside themselves.
Love in relationship is a purifying process as it reveals the ways of the Self. Without this revelation, relationship has little significance.
But how we struggle against this revelation. The struggle takes many forms: dominance or subservience, fear or hope jealousy or acceptance, and so on…
The difficulty is that we do not love; and if we do love we want it to function in a particular way, we do not give it freedom.We love with our minds and not with our hearts.
J.Krisnamurti