Autonomy is a paradox.
Jordan and I are in the car about to drop him off at a weeklong arts program working with teens on a small gulf island off the British Columbia coast.
In front of us through the windshield is a farmstand: berries, eggs, a hand painted welcome sign on sun-starched wood. Sun drifts through tall cedar trees.
Every year for the last six years we drop him off here on a July day, and he goes into a black hole of noncontact for seven days, and I or one of our other close friends pick him up on the other side. He will be one of a group of staff who will enter the full-on schedule and be completely present to the participants for a week, uninterrupted.
Camp schedule is intense. Staff run program all day and plan the next day at night. It is, by design, a highly social and immersive experience, in which the adults create and maintain a container of safety for the group, so Jordan asks us not to bug him while he’s there.
In the car beforehand we make that possible.
“So, if I actually need you, you’re always there, right?” I ask.
I have a serious abuse and neglect history and serious attachment trauma – I don’t take this question for granted.
“Of course,” he says. “Look, I really need to be able to focus on being here. But if you really need me, of course you can just come by the desk and ask where I am and I’ll come help with whatever you need.”
“Whatever I need” from Jordan typically means one of two things:
- To seek physical proximity. Literally to be near. Like ducklings. Because I trust him, when I feel shaken or just need trusting human connection, I need to quietly sit next to him and feel connected.
- To be cuddled. That thing where you get to lie on his chest like a little kid and he puts his arms around you in a comforting way.
Universal human needs, in other words. Regardless of gender or of attachment style, if you have a tripartite brain, you have these needs. How individual human beings experience these needs, how conscious they are of them and how comfortable they are with them, varies. The needs themselves – being able to be near someone you trust, being held in a comforting way – are universal. He knows these needs are normal, so he meets them easily.
Their little limbic brains tell them: nearness is safety!
“Ok.” I say. It has been true as long as he’s been in my life. In the 12 years I have known him, he has consistently had my back and acted in an accessible, responsive way.
In the first few months we were together, Jordan got an incredibly cool job installing science equipment on a glacier in Norway for a month, near the Arctic Circle. It was an exciting job and he was virtually out of connection. The only contact possible was via satellite phone when weather allowed. When the credit card company called the house to say “someone used his card in Norway, card frozen, he must contact directly,” I could yell a short message to a colleague of his through the sat phone, if the clouds stayed clear, for about a dozen dollars a second. Pretty much the definition of logistically out-of-reach.
I already trusted that he was consistently available by this point because he had from the start been willingly reliable and there when it mattered. So this time apart was easy and pleasurable even though we still, in retrospect, hardly knew each other. I taped his first postcard up – a blue polar moon scene – on the headboard and kept his shirt next to me in bed. He left me a surprise box of special cookies I could eat a bit at a time if I missed him, and a card on my pillow to keep me connected while he was away.
These same ‘acts of care’ by a guy who was afraid to be relied on would have had a very confusing and destabilizing effect. What matters was not the acts, the postcard, the cookies, the card. What made these objects work and gave him autonomy was that he kept up his end to be emotionally available the whole time, and thus infused these objects with his accessibility.
Current attachment science names how this kind of safe presence looks and its pivotal role in creating trust and autonomy. Wired For Love, possibly the best attachment book to cross my desk, describes this as being attuned, accessible, and responsive. Jordan is not actually unusual: according to attachment research, about 50% of the men on this earth work this way. Those who do not yet have this capacity may be inclined to believe no one else does, either; and this selective blindness prevents a realistic understanding of reality. Look around at the couples and families who are, on the whole, feeling trusting and loved in their intimate bonds, and you’ll begin to see that this is what they are doing. (Really: if you don’t already know how normal and healthy this is, start looking around. You’ll see that most families are quietly doing this for one another.)
Because he openly greets every single attachment need I have as the normal, healthy, eminently meetable things they are whether he is logistically available or not, he could go away for a month with no distress from me.
He was teaching me how an adult man does safety.
As a result, this month of solitude was a deep pleasure for me of feeling loved and held and safe and knowing I had a responsive ally in this person, even as he was away having an adventure and I couldn’t call him up.
I’m a massive introvert and I love alone time. I loved feeling safe and held and getting to be in the quiet of our room, the peace and stillness of this free time by myself, which I could enjoy because I was held in a human bond.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t call him up at the Arctic Circle to tell him about my day, because by being consistently attuned, accessible, and responsive from the day he met me, he had firmly and quickly established beyond a doubt that he was always emotionally available, whatever the details of our logistical situations.
That is how he creates his autonomy. It is the hallmark of an emotionally adult man: a peaceful way of relating in the world in which he can have his autonomy because he maintains safety for himself and those who rely on him.
This is called the dependency paradox. It is a reality of human relating. It isn’t going anywhere.
It is also, as it happens, what it means to be a safe man.
Here is where things get interesting.
He has responded to those needs and been accessible, responsive, and attuned whenever I need him from the very first day he expressed interest in me. This is effort at times, but it isn’t scary for him, because it is how he was raised.
Because he has always been accessible and responsive, I am capable of assessing whether I really need him or whether I can handle something on my own.
Since he is willingly there for me and accepts greeting my normal emotional safety needs as what they are – normal and meetable – I become increasingly able to meet his need for space, willingly and voluntarily. We do this for each other, and both benefit from the freedom of interdependence.
In other words, we both become increasingly autonomous.
This is what autonomy means.
Stop and absorb that for a second.
In order for Jordan to experience autonomy, he needs to willingly and consistently meet my need for unlimited availability.
He doesn’t determine for me when I need him; I decide that. He just responds. Even if the need is simply for connection and physical assurance that he is there.
He trusts me in turn to respond to his need for space by assessing his current needs and mine, and if it’s an inconvenient time, coming for connection only if I do actually need him. He doesn’t tell me I need any particular logistical reason to need him; connection and emotional safety is understood as its own reason, and as completely normal.
This is how he gains autonomy.
It makes sense. Since I have experienced him from the very beginning just being there, accessible, responsive, and attuned, his job at being a safe man is easy because now I can rely on imaginary him to comfort me.
When he is emotionally available in a very consistent way, and has successfully inculcated in me the knowledge that I can readily count on him, I need him less. I can rely on a shirt that smells like him or a familiar habit we have together for connection and safety even when he is busy. I can comfort myself with a kind of tea we drink together, or a favourite cup I have seen often in his hands, or a special place we usually sit together, because I know that real him wherever he is in the world at that moment willingly welcomes my safety needs as the perfectly normal thing they are. Completely normal, without shame, any time I need.
This only works as long as he fully wants me to rely on him. That wanting to be relied on, that subtle turning towards and full owning of his responsibility, is the condition that makes his autonomy possible.
I have a memory of a few years ago, a time I was much more shaky emotionally, when I did need him while he was at camp, and it was not easy for him schedule-wise, but he found a way to come be with me until I was ok again.
He expressed to me while he did it that it was really hard for him because camp demands his full attention, but he heard and saw I needed him, so he sat with me in a field together near the treeline for around a half hour before a performance and let his presence comfort me in a responsive way, even though it was extremely inconvenient for him. Because he readily does meet the need – with a subtle inner turning towards me, recognizing my body’s signals and greeting them kindly – it doesn’t typically take very long.
I remember that moment, now, at the farm stand and the handpainted welcome sign, as I say “Right. I know you’re always there when it matters.”
And we say goodbye, unload his bags, and I drive off to go sit by the river.
Jordan is safe. He doesn’t only treat women this way temporarily when he is excited about them or lusting after them or in love with them. They don’t need to do or be anything in particular to be treated this way. It is a quality in him, that he learned is normal from his parents growing up, so he doesn’t withdraw accessibility when he gets bored or when you fight or after he’s used up your worth to him as a conquest. That is not safety, and only a culture folded backwards on itself could possibly normalize using women in such a disposable way.
Watching him spend time with his mother makes it clear where he learned this; they are connected, they respond to one another, the tether never breaks. It is quiet, this kind of bond, easy to overlook in its incredible significance. Only in seeing a whole, healthy bond in action does one understand what all the rest of us are hurting over, what the shape of the whole picture is that so many of us spend our lives attempting to complete.
He does his best to treat every woman he gets romantically involved with well, by being attuned, accessible, and responsive to their needs, regardless of the status of their relationship or the strength of his romantic feelings at any given time, because that is what he expects is normal.
That is also what it means to be an emotionally safe man.
Children wrap themselves around his neck like scarves. After playing with him for an afternoon children begin to say his name reverently, stretching the vowel out like his name is sacred.
Because Jordan has created so much emotional safety around him, this week while he is working at camp, autonomy emerges between us. I love knowing I am meeting his need for space. I love it because I love taking care of him and this freedom is what he needs.
There is great pleasure in meeting his need for autonomy, because it means I belong. My responsibility to meet his need for autonomy means I am connected in the most human sense.
I love the luxury of knowing he is always there if I need him, and I love the utter freedom of fulfilling my responsibility to create his autonomy.
It is thus precisely in this binding we do with other human beings that our autonomy lies.
This week while he’s at camp I can use an old beach towel he has dragged around from place to place ever since his childhood home. It’s an endearingly ugly towel, dating from his 80s childhood: black and green rectangular shapes and red lines on a faded white background, thinned by many washings.
Because of his consistent emotional availability, wherever I am and wherever he is I can wrap this old comforting familiar thing around my shoulders, that he has put his very real emotional availability into, and feel comforted and loved by him, whether I can access him logistically or not.
Limbic brains make ‘rules’ about relationships before we reach our first year of age, and these appear to us as unquestioned laws of reality, encased in ‘neural cement.’ Since his unquestioned limbic pattern holds that people who care about one another shall of course remain connected, he does this for me consistently, and I become able to give him his autonomy. I keep his funny 80s towel as a pillow and I ask myself happily: do I need him right now, or can I wait?
I give this freedom to him; he does not take it against my will. If he were to take it, to angrily and firmly tell me “my needs matter and I will meet them regardless of the impact on you,” autonomy would never emerge. Instead, he would remain endlessly trapped by ballooning guilt and by terrifying, ever-growing needs that appear to expand behind him as he runs.
Because he gives me this power to access connection with him any time I need to, I can now almost always give him his space when he needs it. As a loving adult I understand and empathize with his need to be left alone while he’s at camp, or on a work deadline, or in a meeting, or on a train between Paris and Lyon when he can only send “wifi cutting out sending love” before losing his signal.
I know that without inner withholding, he is attuned, accessible, and responsive, so I can receive the safety he is trying to give. Logistics are irrelevent as long as he never withdraws acting in an emotionally safe way.
This may sound like a small or hard to pin down distinction but it is the only distinction that matters. To be safe, and to get autonomy, you must want to be relied on.
He knows this. So he can, like an adult, think ahead. Because he was raised in a healthy way, he understands that if you want autonomy, you meet emotional safety needs promptly and consistently, and your task gets smaller and smaller. So it was a pain to be there for me at camp last time. But here we are next time and I can use an ugly old towel to meet his need for space. Because he showed up then, he has autonomy now.
If you do not want to be relied on, you can do all the same ‘acts of care’ – a towel, a postcard, cookies, wifi from the train – but you will find those whose trust you want to gain never get safe and neither do you.
If you do not want to be relied on, if inside you, you turn angrily away from connection instead of lovingly towards it even as your body mimics the gestures of care, everyone close to you will get more and more hurt and more and more unsafe, no matter the effort you put in to do ‘acts of care.’
Without genuine attunement, accessibility, and responsiveness, acts of care don’t land as emotional safety. Your autonomy will spiral further and further out of reach as you fight harder and harder to get everyone you care about away from you.
Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand. They may blame everyone outside them, never perceiving their own inability to create safety is the cause, as needs and hurt spiral up around them.
If instead of greeting my normal, meetable needs as what they are: normal and meetable, he were instead to get angry with me because I need him, or to try to ‘teach’ me not to rely on him by being unreachable, he would find his carefully-built autonomy evaporating.
Even if he went back to being loving and supportive the next day, all of his efforts at building autonomy would become shaky and unstable because – hello? – trust is by its very nature about consistency. Trust is fragile, alive, and powerful and needs to be handled like any object whose strength lies in its subtlety. Like your own eyeball, or a glass art piece whose power derives from fineness rather than force, it must be handled with great care to protect its structure.
If you unilaterally ‘take’ autonomy, hurting people when they need you, rather than building autonomy by being attuned, accessible, and responsive, needs around you will appear to grow and grow and expand behind you, ballooning, terrifying. Each micro-moment that your intimate tries to create a normal and healthy connection with you, and you respond with unavailability or anger, you create a spiral that takes you further and further from your wished-for autonomy, in exponential leaps. People who care about you may forgive and forgive and forgive, but if you do not understand what you are doing and do not repair the harm, eventually, creating safety begins to feel impossible.
Like a mythical creature whose body creates volcanoes everywhere they walk on the earth, you do not understand why the world appears to be made entirely of volcanoes.
Trust is a kind of magic; learn the subtle art, or it blows up in your face
The first few days and weeks of a new relationship are crucial. This is when you solidly establish that you are always accessible, responsive, and attuned. If you do this properly, the rest of your relationship begins on the right footing, calm, safe, connected. Good faith and trust in your emotional reliability makes rebuilding breaks in trust not too hard.
As David Howe writes in Attachment Across the Life Course, in practice, people do not have to be perfect. The phone rings, people are at times distracted. However, if your underlying belief is that you want to be relied on, and your limbic brain holds as an assumption that human connection is healthy, normal, and expected, then you will note small breaks in connection and quickly mend them.
These small ruptures are moments when you do not greet your intimate’s bids for connection with accessibility and responsiveness. These are moments when she turns to you to connect and you abandon her emotionally. These ruptures can be loud, as when she is in distress and clearly needs to be held, and you flail and lash out or run instead of coming close to nurture and connect (dismissive-avoidant attachers, I’m looking at you). These ruptures can also be quiet, as they are not about the location of your body but about your inner orientation to and beliefs about human connection. “The hallmark of a sensitive caregiver,” Howe writes, “is that the ruptures are managed and repaired.”
Stop. Take that in. This is key.
If in these early moments of harm and disconnection, whether they are quiet or loud, instead of doing prompt repair you make the additional mistake of acting like nothing has happened, or worse, angrily blaming the woman you’re hurting for her expected feelings of fear and hurt at your hurtful actions, you may create serious harm by not seeing your own limited capacity is the cause of the distress.
If you deny this reality to make it somehow her fault that you are not acting in a safe way, this is unconscious gaslighting.
It is emotional abuse, and it will be very hard for her to trust you after you do this to her, even if she doesn’t quite know why, even if she continues to believe you are trustworthy as you are doing this to her.
Patriarchy teaches women to be pliant and receptive, to adapt to maintain relationship, and most brutally, to doubt our perceptions. It may take a while before confusion and mistrust builds up to a point that can no longer be sustained. If this is a routine mode of operation for you, she may just feel crazy, or like the earth under her keeps shifting as you say you are being good to her and acting safe.
If you do this unconscious gaslighting repeatedly without owning it fully, you actively break fundamental trust. If the larger patriarchal fabric of our culture – if the people around the two of you – allow this process to be naturalized, you are contributing to psychic violence against this person, and you and those around you may not even realize you are doing it.
Because water; fish.
Because a sky-blue marble does not show up against the sky, and that does not mean it is not blue.
Because patriarchy.
I cannot express the incredible feeling of insanity and powerlessness of hearing everyone in a community laud the tremendous nurturing feminist qualities of a great guy who secretly gaslights his partner in ways he doesn’t even see, ways only she, alone and exposed in this vulnerability with no reference points as anchors, can feel. In a world that tells her she is crazy, he’s being so good to her, he’s so good, what a crazy girl.
What a relationship looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside can be incredibly mismatched. We so badly want our feminist men to be as whole and loving as we need them to be. As friends, looking on from the outside, we may assume the private inside of an intimate relationship is healthy and nurturing, because it hurts too much to know how far there is to go.
Because patriarchy is in all of us, her distress may show up visibly to others while its causes in your action get silently disguised. This is what it means that we are all inculcated into systems of power. Unless we choose to see, privilege, which is in all of us, disguises its operation. We are never forced to see how we enact it in our own lives, unless we live with integrity, and learn how to deeply believe those whose experiences we do not share.
This kind of betrayal from inside trust is extremely damaging to people. If this is you, you will find your desperately-hoped-for autonomy always out of reach.
If you talk up your feminist commitments or have cultivated a nurturing, feminist reputation, be aware that you can gain trust much more quickly than most guys. If you are known in your community as a great nurturing guy, women who know you socially may come to you already primed to be receptive to your self-talk about how great you are.
If you gain women’s trust by talking about how safe you are while you are also unconsciously doing this to them, the gap may lead them to slowly begin to act ‘crazy’ around you over time.
You’ll think it is them. You may tell them it is them. You may really believe this, even if some part of you suspects you are hiding something from yourself that you have yet to understand.
You may tell your friends or family how ‘crazy’ your ex is.
And because we live in patriarchy, in which women’s normal emotional needs are routinely deemed crazy, people will believe you. Policing women’s normal emotional needs to protect male fragility is a long and well-established tradition. Just because a paradigm is dominant and naturalized and happens to work in your favour, that does not mean it is real, or healthy, or just.
What is real is that when men treat me well consistently, I am easy to comfort. When men are good to me, I trust, and I get comforted in seconds. Jordan and my other long term partners have been teaching me how normal these attachment needs are by meeting them, which is the only way the nonverbal limbic brain learns. Because my distress is and has only ever been about having healthy normal needs met – proximity, eye contact, being cuddled in a safe way – when guys who ask for my trust meet those needs early on and consistently, I get comforted. It is easy. All it takes is showing up.
All it takes to be a safe man, in other words, is to meet the normal emotional safety needs involved in having a mammalian brain.
You can begin to build autonomy at any time, by beginning to act attuned, accessible, and responsive. You can realistically expect, however, that rebuilding trust after you damage it is a lot more work and takes a lot more time – logarithmically more work and time – than just keeping it in the first place. Imagine repairing an eyeball.
The longer you act unstable and unreliable, damaging trust without doing prompt repair, the greater your task becomes. You must own, fully without deflecting or minimizing, if you want to live up to your own values of being an accessible, nurturing, feminist man. If you have caused a lot of harm, you have a lot of cleaning up to do.
That does not mean it is impossible; it just means that by the time you have this click moment and recognize the impacts of your actions, you may have spilled an awful lot of milk, and need a longer while of mopping up if you want safety to emerge. You don’t need a bigger mop, or grandiose one-time gestures. You just need to trust time – days, weeks, months of willingly acting in a consistently safe way, knowing it is normal, deriving your inner good feeling from these acts of connection for their own sake.
You do not get to be a safe man by wanting to be. Or wishing you were. Not by telling me how safe you are, how good of a feminist you are. That’s like getting a hot body by wishing you had one, or telling me how often you work out, without ever actually exercising. And in a culture that loudly rewards men for even the smallest acts of reliable nurturance while attacking women who do not quietly, invisibly hold together the world around them, you have an extra responsibility to keep your integrity whole: to name these shearing moments between perception and reality.
If women you get involved with actually get safe around you, because you are attuned, accessible, and responsive, you are a safe man. You don’t get to determine this. They do.
Faced with the prospect of a new potential lover, the male capacity to bullshit can fill galaxies. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
***
Jordan and I haven’t been partners in three years. To my knowledge we haven’t thought of one another sexually in at least two.
When we broke up we went on a camping trip together, and at the top of a volcano at sunrise did a divorce ceremony in which we told each other what we were no longer giving each other, and what we were continuing to give each other.
What we are no longer giving each other is sex, romantic feeling, and partnership – we are no longer committing to live together or have children together or make our lives in the same geographical location. His new girlfriend and eventual life partner will have priority decision-making power over how close he and I can be. We cried and grieved those parts.
What we are continuing to give one another is connection, trust and safety.
The grieving of our sexual and romantic relationship did hurt – we both cried on the mountain that day, and I grieved in many small moments over the following year – but it was healthy and manageable, because our breakup involved no betrayal of trust or catastrophic pain.
He never retraumatized me by repeating the high-betrayal harm I had had done to me growing up. We remained connected, attuned, accessible, and responsive to one another throughout the change. He knew he had accessed the inside of my trust, and understood this great gift and the responsibility it entails. He handled it with the skill that this honour deserved. This is safety.
There has been healthy grieving, the kind that keeps you whole and lets you move on. There was no traumatic grieving, no getting all the way into one another’s trust and then smashing everything up from the inside. He was and is still an utterly safe person in my life.
Held securely this way, I become able to range further and further afield. I have room to expand my inner resourcefulness. Knowing a human bond is there for me at the shore, I have the security I need to swim further out into the middle of life’s current: to develop my inner self-love, build my connection inside myself and my direct connection to the universe.
Particularly for those of you who choose to get close to women who have histories of sexist violence in their bodies, or who have a comittment to be part of women’s healing: this is what it means to not retraumatize a woman you get close to. It is a normal amount of emotional maturity, in a culture of exceptionally immature men.
As we have grown accustomed to the parameters of our new relationship, he has needed room and time to date and build relationships without his ex girlfriend hanging around.
I am responsible to meet this need.
I won’t lie, I didn’t get it right at first. At first I got triggered watching him with his arms around a new person, and I had growing to do here. Had we frozen in despair at this stage we may never have gotten to where we are now.
I had to push myself hard to get here, but I owe him his autonomy, and I want him to be happy – and he never gave up on me or on himself, so I got here after a while.
I can now hang out with him and his girlfriend, know my safety with him is solid without needing to check, and duck out happily when he needs me to. I no longer get triggered watching him with someone else, not because we shattered the trust we had built, but because in our current configuration, we deepened it even further into something sustainable and free.
We kept at it without giving up – him asking for his need while consistently meeting mine.
We kept at it, and I love him, so I adjusted, and here we are.
Part of how we got here was we decided together that it would be a good idea if we were in different places for a while as he was dating new people. I teach at a community college, a job that lets me be elsewhere part of the year, so I arranged to spend six months in another city as he was building his relationship with his new girlfriend, so I could keep out of their hair and explore my own autonomy as they were building trust.
He continued to be rock-solid emotionally available for me if I needed him, which happens less and less often these days, organically. We were in touch maybe eight times over that six months. Mostly just for fun, saying hi; a couple of times it was because I or he had a connection need and we comforted and supported one another in the way we always have. I get to be the best friend who gives him relationship advice, and he gets to model for me – not tell me in words, but actually embody – how I deserve to be treated by future men I date. He’s still utterly, utterly reliable.
At this point I get comforted just by reaching out to him in email even before he writes back. Because I know as soon as he gets the message he’ll call me up, with kindness and empathy, and will meet normal needs for nurturance in a normal, healthy way: quickly, kindly, in person, and with goodwill.
His new girlfriend gets a guy who is deeply emotionally mature, and who will always be capable of working things out without running or cutting ties. In this world full of children in grown-up men’s bodies, who start families and then take off, or who live as though they have no ties, or who become cruel when they are no longer excited about you, a man who can see their ex through to safety like that is a huge fucking catch.
This is how autonomy works.
Jordan and I can now stretch the tether effortlessly for a week, a month, six months, longer. The bond can co-exist with other intimate relationships, even if neither of us is (or wants to be) poly. I can comfort myself easily with this knowledge of his welcome and consistent availability, and so our autonomy works effortlessly for weeks and months at a time.
And Jordan has the special knowledge that he has gained and kept my trust so successfully that he is capable of talking me down from the worst crises in – we have timed it – 15 minutes. More commonly in two. I can get calm in seconds just hearing his voice.
This emotional reliability – attunement, accessibility, responsiveness – is the core, the absolute core, of being a safe man.
This is what we mean when we say ‘don’t be rapey’ does not get you a cookie. ‘Don’t be rapey’ does not make you a fucking feminist. That is kindergarten.
Shit is so bad we are trying to get a lot of men into kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean that is the bar. So ok, lots of men are getting good at kindergarten. Yippee.
Being a safe male presence in the lives of women you get close to – attuned, accessible, and responsive – is the bar.
That is what is expected. It is the minimum, minimum requirement expected for men who get into women’s trust (or pants) by talking up feminist commitments.
If “don’t be rapey” is kindergarten, then “attuned, accessible, and responsive” is elementary school. Somebody’s gotta set the bar.
And some of all y’all need a little remedial.
If you are thinking right now: holy crow, that is me, what do I do? One of my early readers asked for a second half to this piece, called What To Do If You Realize You’re Hurting People You Care About This Way.
If you would like some books that you can share with others to help you along this path to autonomy and interdependence, these are ones I’ve found helpful in making sense of limbic reality:
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Bell Hooks
Wired for Love, Stan Tatkin
Hold me Tight, Sue Johnson
A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon
Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller
Profound thanks to the clutch of early readers who gave me excellent and honest (and at times amazingly vulnerable) feedback about how to make this piece most useful to men:
Abe Lateiner, David Gray-Donald, Dru Oja Jay, Martin Lukacs, Shaun Geer, Lily Schwartzbaum, Lisa Baird, Rebekah Hart, Tom-Pierre Frappé-Sénéclauze, and other early readers.
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*men: I want to be clear here that I am using this term, and all gendered terms, in a trans-inclusive way. Here “men” refers to masculine-identified people. I have chosen not to write ‘men and trans men’ etc in the piece above because I’ve been told and understand trans men do not need their own separate signifier as that suggests they aren’t already part of the main signifier. I also want to recognize and own that the piece above is written from inside a gender binary that isn’t actually real. The dependency paradox works for all kinds of people with all kinds of bodies, but I write best from inside what I know. Gendered violence and power dynamics in binary relationships is where I have insight because it’s writing from inside my life experience – and it’s a serious limitation in my work for folks who want to see themselves in this and who are not properly represented here! Queer, genderqueer and nonbinary folks who have insights as you read, and want to write from inside your experience, your expertise is very welcome. If you have a post to propose, please get in touch – I’d be honoured to promote and amplify a post of your own.
New interview with the author in Australian magazine The Vocal expands on the original Nurturance Culture piece: http://www.thevocal.com.au/violence-nurturance-turned-backwards-nurturance-culture-solution-toxic-masculinity/
See the original viral posts The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture and Dating Tips for the Feminist Man
Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.
I love hearing from readers! Reach the author at nora.samaran@gmail.com
