156 The Superperimeter: Getting Your Needs Met

Polarity means asymmetry of responsibility: There are some things the man does for the woman that is not necessarily reciprocated. But what about men's needs? This episode covers how a man can get his needs met without violating the polarity of his relationship.

Transcript

Anytime a man such as myself speaks about polarity and relationships,

There's a certain expectation of some level of controversy.

Or at least I'll say I expect some level of pushback or criticism from maybe a hardcore feminist or someone who is ideologically attached to the notion that men and women are the same or that men and women are the ideas of men and women are just constructs or something like that,

Right?

But lately,

As my views on polarity have matured,

Largely inspired by having a child recently,

I've gotten the most pushback for men.

And maybe pushbacks in an extreme word,

I've gotten the most eyebrow raising for men,

Especially around the idea of asymmetry of responsibilities.

Just the basic idea that there are certain responsibilities that a man takes or certain things in a healthy relationship he would do for the woman that she doesn't necessarily have to do back.

For example,

Recently I was speaking to a good friend who's had this kind of recurring conflict in his relationship that otherwise is a very beautiful and healthy relationship,

Where they keep hitting on the same conflict over and over again.

And I suggested to him that maybe one of the reasons why they keep hitting this conflict is that he has this assumption that since he is there for her when she's feeling bad,

She should also be there for him when he's feeling bad.

I mean,

There's a bit of a simplification,

But basically the gist.

And I suggested to him,

What if everything would be much better and this conflict would not recur if you believe that yes,

You are supposed to be there,

I mean,

Supposed to in quotes,

But yes,

It would be healthy if you're there for her when she's emotional or having difficulty in something,

But she's not necessarily,

Actually,

She's not supposed to be there for you,

Right?

She doesn't have to be there for you.

That would actually be a lot more in line with reality.

And if the expectations could match the reality,

Of course,

That's just better.

And he brought up the very understandable objection or concern about that,

Which is,

Well,

Wait,

That isn't fair.

How is that fair?

And the truth is,

It's not fair.

It's certainly not fair under the consumerist set of beliefs that I think we've all been embedded with,

Given that we live in a society driven by consumerist cultural values,

Which is the general idea that we are all independent units that are meant to get our needs met by transacting with other individuals or things beyond us,

Right?

Mostly through money,

But sometimes like in relationships through some sort of reciprocation,

Like you do this for me,

I do this for you.

And that's what makes it in quotes fair.

But this consumerist model is actually not the most accurate model.

That's not what it comes to our intimate nature,

Because all of our desires,

Feelings,

Drives when it comes to sexuality and intimacy and love are driven by instincts that evolve for reproduction that are way,

Way older,

Millions of years older than any ideas or cultural means that people can come up with.

Our reproductive instincts often don't even make sense.

The things that you're attracted to or what turns you on or the way you want to be loved or the things that make you feel good or feel bad in courtship,

They often don't line up with our cultural ideas because they're just way older,

Right?

They were there way longer than humans had anything resembling consciousness.

And therefore,

When it comes to intimacy,

They trump.

And this whole idea of asymmetry comes from,

Well,

If we follow the chain of instincts and behaviors in human intimacy,

Well,

It is geared towards making babies,

Whether or not you decide to.

And if you go that far,

The woman takes on a huge responsibility,

A huge energy expenditure of creating life in her body.

And therefore,

What the man does,

The man's end of it is providing the perimeter around her,

Right?

The protection,

The provisioning,

All that stuff,

Right?

In modern day,

It comes more in the form of creating feelings of safety and being there for her.

And given that these reproductive instincts,

These wirings are so old,

If you try to enforce or act on some other model of relationship,

It usually causes things to go awry.

And even though I say all this stuff and I believe it,

I myself have at least 30 years of I guess subscribing to a more consumerist version of relationships.

And I forget,

And actually just the other day,

This would be maybe a week ago,

I was having a bad day.

Some things happened,

I was challenged,

I was all emotional,

I was ungrounded.

And I came home that day and I basically lamented to my wife because who else was there to lament to?

I was unloaded on her about all of my little complaints and whatever things.

And I did feel better afterwards.

Maybe I was,

Yeah,

I felt better after airing my feelings as everyone tends to do.

But she felt so much worse,

Right?

Maybe I was feeling 40% bad and then I brought it down to 5% by venting,

But now she felt 60% bad.

And then she had a hard time sleeping and then she had a harder time being there for the baby.

And it created this cascade of like,

It was definitely a net negative experience of me venting to her.

And I realized I really messed up there.

Because even though,

Of course,

In a relationship,

You are there to support each other.

For this specific kind of thing,

It was actually,

In my opinion,

Of course,

Wrong of me to expect her to soothe me or to seek her out to help soothe me in this way.

Because especially since she's nursing,

She's in a hyper-feminine state,

A super-receptive state.

And for me,

Me especially,

The person who provides the perimeter for her,

For me to then expect her to help me with my self-soothing needs,

It's kind of a violation.

It's almost like if she expected our child to meet her needs as opposed to the other way around.

It's a violation of the natural asymmetry of our family or life in total,

If you will.

But then here's the part where I often get eyebrow raises for men or a little bit of pushback.

I've had some maybe debates with other guys I know,

Especially even guys who are in the world of conscious relating and they're like,

Well,

They bring up.

So you're saying that men need to be perfect.

They need to always be strong.

No,

Of course not.

We all have moments of weakness.

We all have our needs met.

And actually,

I would say that we all need someone else to lean on.

It just shouldn't be the same person who leans on you.

And when Mac Liefel was on the podcast recently,

We spoke about the nursery rhyme,

The farmer and the dell,

Which is kind of a descriptive of polarity.

The farmer creates the perimeter for the wife.

The wife takes the child.

The child takes the pets.

And Naliah and I,

When she was on the podcast,

We spoke about the idea of concentric circles,

Which I think is a much better way of imaging this idea of healthy polarity as opposed to a hierarchy or a ladder or a pyramid.

Everyone,

Especially I'd say,

Especially if you're someone who's creating up the perimeter for other people,

For your feminine counterpart,

For your dependence,

You also especially need some other perimeter beyond you.

You need a super perimeter because the truth is we all have bad days.

We all have moments of weakness and we all could use someone to lean on who's beyond us.

But if we flip the direction of the polarity,

If we flip the asymmetry too often,

It ends up damaging our relationship because it ends up distressing the person who's normally leaning on us.

So if you hold what we could call the masculine role in a relationship for the sake of your relationship and also the sake for your own well-being and I guess this is a trickle-down effect of you being well so that you can well serve those who depend on you,

You need to find something beyond yourself to lean on.

I think this is actually one of the roots of a lot of,

We could say,

Male-oriented or patriarchal spiritual beliefs.

This also points to the need for men's groups and tribes because this consumerist idea,

We live in a consumerist world where just the setup of society is that we're all separate.

A lot of our issues come from the fact that we evolved to be in these tribes where even if you are the quote-unquote head of a household,

You're taking care of your wife and your children,

There's always someone above you or around you,

Whether it's your own elders because in these tribes it was intergenerational,

Your father,

Your uncles are all perhaps around,

Other older men,

Big brother figures are around.

The tribe itself actually created a perimeter.

Every man is contained by something and this actually allowed him to be a better man and to serve his dependents even better.

Because as mammals even,

We need to know who is above and below us.

We spoke about this in the dog brain episode from a couple of months ago is that a dog,

Especially a male dog,

Will feel very uneasy if he doesn't know who the alpha male is.

You could see this when dogs meet each other for the first time.

It's like the first thing,

Especially the males,

Need to determine their order because without the order they feel kind of lost and uncomfortable.

Even though every male strives to be at the top on some level,

If they realize they're not going to be the alpha male,

They're super happy and much more happy knowing who the alpha male is.

The alpha male in turn gets his metaphorical perimeter from his group.

It's like what is the thing beyond you that gives you a sense of security?

Especially if you've been around alpha male dogs,

Which I've only actually been around since coming to Thailand a few years ago because in America most dogs,

One are super domesticated,

Living in apartments or houses,

And two,

They're almost always neutered.

Here in Thailand I've come across many semi-wild dogs who have their nuts intact and you can see that the ones who are truly the alpha males of the territory,

Yes they're more vulnerable,

They might be more aggressive at times,

But they're actually the most loyal.

Once you get the allegiance of an alpha male dog,

He's usually super obedient.

I think on some level,

And this might be me personifying dogs too much,

But I think on some level an alpha dog knows the stress of creating a perimeter for other beings and therefore he's extra grateful to be around a human who does that for him.

It's kind of like good leaders make great followers.

And I also think this is part of the bias against young men.

Of course,

Young men,

Especially pubescent young men,

Tend to be the most reckless and wild and destructive in many senses,

But they actually,

In my experience at least,

Teenage boys tend to be the most obedient if they're met by a stronger male presence.

You see this in the military,

You see this in gangs,

You see this in combat sports schools,

Where almost the more tough a young man is,

The more eager he is to receive instruction and listen to an even more tough,

Usually older male.

Because while for a dog,

It just causes some level of,

It triggers some survival fear,

Triggered by the social brain,

For humans,

While the root of it is the same thing,

I think it also leads into what might be called a spiritual malady in people,

Right?

What 12-step refers to as a spiritual malady,

This feeling of isolation in the world.

I think this is kind of like our human perception of this dog brain survival fear of if we don't know who's looking out for our security,

Whether literal or metaphorical,

It causes this extreme stress that sometimes the behaviors don't make sense,

Right?

Someone like deep in spiritual malady,

Someone who maybe has an addiction problem,

The behaviors don't always make sense with how extreme one maybe is acting in response to some level of stress.

But I think this is essentially the core of it,

Which is why in 12-step there's this great emphasis on one,

Community,

And two,

Belief in a higher power.

Both of these things provide some perception of a perimeter beyond you,

Like some containment,

Where it's not just you floating off in space with all the dark and dangerous things that exist in reality.

It's like,

Oh,

You have a community that you can lean on,

Or,

And or,

You have this belief in a higher power.

Just to not feel or perceive some level of containment,

It creates this extreme level of dysphoria.

Maybe it's not always extreme,

Depending on the situation,

But I do think it creates this level of unease.

I'll even speak for myself now,

Because in the last year,

Nali and I have been traveling around Thailand,

And we're actually moving to Mexico soon to find our real home.

But all this moving around,

Which has been fun,

We've been traveling and seeing various things,

I've basically been separated from my friends,

And any group of friends,

For the last year,

Because we've been moving around a lot.

And I have noticed,

Actually,

Just like the lamenting I mentioned that happened a week ago,

I have been a little bit less stable.

Things that in the past would never have fazed me,

I think,

Have fazed me a bit.

What I'm realizing now is,

Part of it is,

I haven't been around a stable group of friends,

Consistent groups of guys who I respect and know and like.

And I think this has been leading to some level of unease.

Here I am,

Head of a household,

Looking out for these two dependents,

And there's no one immediately in my vicinity for me to lean on myself.

Another maybe extreme example of this,

Which I brought up on this podcast and various other contexts,

But the trope of the high power CEO or finance guy who's like super alpha in his social hierarchy,

Super alpha in society,

This is the type of,

This is kind of like the stereotypical customer of a dominatrix,

Who wants to be a guy who will pay lots of money to have a leash put on him and be humiliated or some way put down.

And there's many interpretations for why someone would have such a fetish,

But one of the things that at least in the BDSM world has pointed out,

And this is a perspective I've gotten from my friend Omar Pani,

Is that there's a level of imbalance,

Right?

It's like he's at the top of everything,

He's the dominant in every relationship that he has.

To not have some opportunity to be in the submissive role,

It creates this level of unease.

And perhaps for such a man who's so extremely in the dominant role in every relationship,

This is the easiest or this is one instinctual way to have that corrected in his psyche,

Right?

He hires a little Asian woman to stomp on him and call him names or something.

That's somehow how he creates this balance where he no longer feels like he is the perimeter,

Right?

It doesn't feel good.

And I actually think this is one of the functional roots or one of the catalysts that led to the creation or the prominence of,

We could say,

Patriarchal monotheism in society.

This is actually something I go into more detail in in the History of Man podcast,

Probably in a later episode.

If you look at the big monotheistic religions,

Namely Christianity and Islam,

Because they're much older or much more recent than Judaism,

Which is very old,

There is this idea of God the Father,

Right?

And even though in Islam they don't use those words exactly as far as I know,

It's this idea that there is this almighty,

Perfect male role model who's looking out for you.

And I think specifically for the heads of groups,

For the chiefs of tribes,

For the heads of states,

For leaders,

For men who were dominant males who created perimeters for their families or their nations,

This was especially important for them.

This was created by them,

For them,

Or inspired by this need,

This collective male need,

To have a super male who looks out for them,

To be the father of all fathers kind of thing.

And regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs,

It's hard to deny that there's an obvious function to this,

Right?

I mean,

I think this is also why 12-step enforces a belief in a higher power.

Even the Freemasons who are supposed to be religiously open to anything,

One of their requisites is that you believe in one sort of God,

One higher power.

Because you can see it's kind of created or formed as a boy-to-father relationship,

As opposed to if you compare this to polytheistic religions like Greek mythology or Hindu mythology where there's many gods.

That almost feels like,

I mean,

If you look at the Greek takes on the gods,

It feels like to me when I was in middle school,

Like 10,

11 years old,

Looking at the high school kids,

Right?

They were quite relatable.

They had the same kinds of feelings and desires and jealousies,

But they had more power.

They could just do more things.

They could go out late.

They could actually date.

They could do all the things that as a preteen I felt,

But they had the same issues and problems and they got into trouble and all that stuff.

It's almost like that kind of thing where,

Yeah,

I can look out to them.

Maybe I look up to them,

But it's a different relationship than the monotheistic view of like being a child where an all-powerful parent is there looking out for you and determining your safety and giving you guidance.

I think the latter,

The monotheistic view,

At least what it shows us psychologically,

Is more of this need that I think is greater in our modern world that is so driven towards isolation and interpersonal competition that there is this greater need for a belief in an omnipotent god as opposed to many conflicting kind of teenager gods.

To be clear,

I'm not arguing for adoption of any religion,

But it's looking at the function and looking at the common issues that people have,

Especially men.

Of course,

We're talking about men here,

Especially men who take responsibility for others.

It's important to find something.

Does it have to be a belief in a higher power?

No,

But it could be.

If you already have any of those inclinations or cultural upbringing or there is a code given to you that is something to lean on,

Yes,

Of course,

There are many negatives to any cultural dogma and many negatives to various religions as they've evolved.

But just the basic idea that if you can actually get yourself to believe that there's someone,

A higher power,

Looking out for you who's given you some guidelines so that you don't have to think,

You have some sort of moral principles to go off of,

That's a very useful super-perimeter around you.

It could be some sort of other kind of spirituality.

If we look at the original religions,

The animist religions,

They got their sense of awe and their feeling of being contained directly from nature.

Even if you're not a spiritual person,

If you've ever been in nature,

It's hard to not feel awe when looking at something huge.

I usually feel this when I go hiking and if I come across a huge rock formation,

Just looking at the scale of something natural,

It's way bigger than me,

That shows me how small I am,

Kind of diminishes whatever problems or demons I may have floating around in my head.

It's kind of this primal archetypal feeling,

I think it's also evolutionary wired into us.

There's been plenty of studies pointing to how people are a lot more sane and mentally well and happy when they spend time in nature.

I think it triggers that in us,

This recognition that there's something bigger and beyond us that is more real than whatever abstract problems or fears that we have.

A friend just recently shared with me an interactive image of the Milky Way and he was saying the same thing.

It made him feel this level of compassion about how all of the issues that make him feel not good really don't matter on the great scale of the universe.

But even if all of that stuff is a little bit too mystical for you,

Something as simple as having a mentor or having a men's group,

I think this is one of the key reasons for the rise in popularity of men's groups everywhere,

Is because as religion has been lost actually,

I think,

And as these kinds of direct connections to nature have been lost,

Especially if you live in cities or urban environments and if you live in an atheistic,

Rationalistic culture as most of us do,

There's this kind of need,

Especially for men who want to take responsibility for things,

Some need of some other stronger presence to put a perimeter around us to let us feel on some primal level that we're not floating off into space and it's not us against the universe alone,

Just knowing that we are contained by something.

So in closing,

If you are a man who's taking on the masculine role in an intimate relationship,

Meaning you are providing the perimeter for your feminine counterpart,

For other dependents in an asymmetrical fashion where you're doing things for them,

You also need that for yourself from something else,

From the outside.

If you're providing a perimeter,

You also need a super perimeter.

It can be in the form of a group of friends,

Guys who you respect,

Right?

It can be a mentor or a big brother figure or someone who you trust,

Someone who you feel can hold down the masculine role in that relationship and let you relax for some period,

Right?

Or times of need or just someone to talk to about stuff.

I think men need this,

Especially men who take on the role of providing for other people,

Whether it's literally or metaphorically,

You need that.

And it's not from this idea,

Modern coddling focused self-help.

I think they throw around these terms of self-care and it's not that that's wrong or – I just think it comes from,

Again,

This consumer's model of like,

Oh,

If I'm giving,

I need to take also.

There's this transactional element.

And I think it's a lot healthier and more accurate to look at it.

Again,

It's concentric circles,

Right?

If you're providing the perimeter for certain dependents,

You need to be within the chain of succession.

You don't want to be at the top,

Right?

To be at the very top causes this level of dysphoria and it feels like isolation.

The only people you interact with are people who would depend on you.

It triggers this level of unease,

This primal thing,

Even if it doesn't make sense.

So it's important to find,

Especially if you take on the masculine role,

Some person or people or perception of an entity that outmasculines you.

And it could be a group of guys,

It could be a mentor,

It could be a belief in a higher power,

Who gives you some sort of framework for behavior so that you don't have to figure out everything on your own.

Yes,

Of course,

There are negatives to religion,

But this is a functional use of religion.

And if that's not for you,

You could get it directly from the source of spending enough time in natural settings that give you the experience that is something bigger than you that's containing you.

And in that sense,

I'd say,

You know you're having the right experience.

I mean,

All of the word right has to be in quotes,

But you know you're having that experience.

One way to monitor if you're really getting that thing is if you get to basically turn off the words in your brain.

You know that if you're no longer spinning in mental masturbation or you're coming up with – if you're not having demons cycle in your head,

You know you've hit that place where you've entered deep relaxation in the same way that a baby calms down when hell is correctly.

Because even the most alpha male,

And I would even say especially an alpha male,

Needs a super perimeter around him to maintain himself.

Thanks for listening.

See ya.

Should be fun.

Reviews

Awesome topic. Thanks for sharing here.