How do men love?

My current work-in-progress manuscript is slowly turning into an exploration of what it feels like for a daughter to experience the absence of a father’s love.

As part of my authorly research – although this is perhaps too grand a statement for the intermittent happenings I conduct – I am about to read Bell Hook’s book on male love called The Will to Change. Bell’s book should help me see deeper into this topic, learn new angles and perspectives. This issue – how men love, how we need men to love us – I have come to see has intrigued me for a while, possibly my whole life.

I have a theory which is that I and many women fail to understand or accommodate men’s perspective on love. In Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly she describes being approached by a man at one of her ‘vulnerability’ events. He asks why she doesn’t write about the male perspective on shame and vulnerability. Slightly flummoxed – and playing for time no doubt – she enquires why he asks this, to which, indicating over his shoulder to where his wife stands waiting for him, he says “My wife and daughters…they’d rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off. You say you want us to be vulnerable and real, but c’mon. You can’t stand it. It makes you sick to see us like that.” It knocked Brené back and it still feels extremely powerful to me too.

I was more of a ‘Daddy’s Girl’ when I was a kid, and in more recent times, when I have participated in guided meditation, shamanic journeying, the quality of the spirit I am honoured to encounter is undoubtedly male, significantly so – a representation of the elemental, ancient father figure for me, maybe?

In my adult life, I have had reason to be pissed off with men. For starters, I spent much of my corporate career being the singular ‘token’ woman on the team and therefore had to put up with lots of ‘male’ behaviour. Some of it, most of it, was innocuous and bounced off me without too much damage. Mostly it was the kind of ‘organisational’ issues that disadvantage a woman in subtle ways, occasionally though it was entirely personal; usually when I was saying something that endangered a particular man’s power-play, making him look bad. I have to admit; it made me pretty cynical and slightly bitter about men.

A bigger reason was the quality of my first marriage, by which I really mean my first husband’s ability to love. I have a friend who describes an individual’s manner and behaviour of loving as their ‘blueprint’. Some have a complex love-blueprint, full of intricate architectural details and superb plumbing. My then husband’s blueprint was more akin to a garden shed. Basic. Difficult to fit the stuff of life into, with dark spider infested corners and the occasional visiting rat. I’m taking the metaphor too far! But hopefully, you see my point; for whatever reason my first husband did not have the capacity to make me feel loved. For a long time, I thought that was because I didn’t deserve anything more. Because of the two decades I lived that marriage’s reality, I still don’t think I deserve to be loved. Although the last six or so years living with my second husband have begun to heal this, I wonder if I will ever rest easy in total confidence of this universal birth right.

Next on the list - I have a son who does not really speak to me anymore. I shall not attempt to tell his story, because frankly I don’t know it. When asked, I resort to bland platitudes such as ‘the marriage break-up impacted him,’ or ‘teenage boys prefer their fathers’. The plain truth might be that he just doesn’t like me very much. I mention this painful emotional wound only because it again raises the question in my heart – does my son actually love me? Is his behaviour down to male teenage hormones which by necessity drag the mother’s boy kicking and screaming out of his heart, or is it due, again, to my undeserving ‘love status’ from the men in my life?

Finally, I have an ailing father. As the inevitable comes closer, although I pray not for a long while yet, I face the prospect of losing the original source of male love in my life. As you can imagine, I am helpless. No matter how I attempt to prepare myself, I know it will be an emotional storm of considerable size and duration. I hope I’ll weather it with as much grace and capability as I can muster, but I’m doubtful.

These are the main reasons I explore what male love is, what it can be and what it means to both men and women.

It is perhaps why my first three books feature a character somewhat disappointing in his ability to love, despite being a massive success in all other areas of life. It is also why my current manuscript is about a middle-aged woman whose father died – swept out to sea on the night of her birth - so she has grown up without paternal love. It is why I have her meet an enigmatic man who has an uncanny ability to anticipate the riptides of her heart. He is not what you might at first expect him to be. I think he will heal her.

I think he has been healing me.

Dostoevsky said, “There is only one thing I dread; not to be worthy of my sufferings.” I hope this research and this story-writing help me become worthy of mine.

Rachel x