Man + Woman = Confusion?
There are few issues so hotly debated in today’s society as the roles of men and women toward each other and in society. The arguments range all the way from those who maintain that man is created to rule and woman to serve, to those who maintain that there are no significant differences between men and women besides the physical differences required for human reproduction. In other words, we humans are mightily confused about the roles of women and men!
Traditionalists in the largely Christian parts of the world often point to the Bible in support of their view that man is meant to be in charge and woman is meant to serve man. But a look at how men and women were first created tells a slightly different story!
In many ways, the roles of men and women have not changed all that much over the centuries. Yet today, in this era of change, one thing is new: both women and men have far more choice as to what roles they will play and what they will devote their lives to. The grip of church and state on our personal lives has loosened—and this opens up new possibilities for how men and women will relate to one another, and how we will each contribute to society.
How to Get into Trouble
Want to get someone mad? Just publicly say anything definite about the differences between men and women, and someone will get mad! The relationship between women and men and their roles in society has been a touchy subject for well over a century now.
That’s not surprising. Our gender is a core part of who we are. We identify ourselves as male or female, and that colors everything we think, feel, say, and do. If we are confused about our sexual identity, it spreads confusion over our whole life. And when we feel blocked or trapped because of our sex, it can create intense frustration and anger. Why should our whole life be determined by whether we happened to be born male or female?
When it comes to religion, gender roles are an especially loaded issue. It’s one thing if we humans have set up a system in which there are certain expectations of women and different expectations of men. But if our religion says that God has set things up so that women and men are obliged to play certain roles, it takes the struggle over this issue to a whole new level. Many people have rejected Christianity over this very issue.
Can we say anything at all about gender roles from a Christian perspective and not just get people mad?
Let’s give it a try, and see how we do.
Ancient Views of Men and Women
In today’s society, gender roles are in flux. Many women are out in the workforce doing traditionally male jobs. Men are often reluctant to take on traditionally female roles, yet many men find themselves serving as caregivers, or taking orders from female bosses at work.
For many centuries and in many cultures, the roles of men and women were much more distinct. Men were in charge and women served them. Women bore children, cared for them, and did most of their work in and around the household and the neighborhood. Men worked out in the wider world, interacting with the larger society and engaging in its business. Men provided for and protected the households and communities where the women engaged in their duties and raised the children. When the men returned home from their labors and their battles, women took care of their needs.
These roles of men and women toward each other and in society have been consistent enough throughout enough of history that they may seem to have been ordained by God from the beginning.
What does the Bible say about this?
The Bible has had a profound influence on Western views about the roles of men and women. Yet what we find in the first three chapters of Genesis may surprise you. It is true that in the Bible story women soon become subservient to men. But that’s not how it was from the beginning. Let’s take a closer look.
From Genesis 1 to Genesis 3
Many Christians look to the creation of Eve from Adam in Genesis 2 as the story that defines the relationship between men and women. Yet that story is put second, after the initial creation story in Genesis 1, for a reason.
It helps to understand that these early chapters of the Bible were not originally written to be taken as literal accounts of historical events. Instead, like the myths of many cultures, they are stories that speak of the spiritual origins and journeys of humankind using a symbolic language that reads on the surface like primeval history in poetic form.
From a literary perspective, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were not originally meant to be read sequentially. Each is a self-contained creation myth telling its own story. These two ancient creation stories were collected from two different oral traditions, written down, and placed one after the other in the Bible. Despite the valiant efforts of Biblical literalists to harmonize the two as if they were two different angles on same story, they simply don’t agree with each other in the overall order in which God created things or in the details of exactly how God created the earth and all the plants, animals, and humans that populate it.
From a symbolic and spiritual perspective, though, the two stories harmonize perfectly. They are like two different verses of the same song. The story of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 and the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2 represent two different phases of human spiritual and social development, one following after the other.
With this in mind, let’s look at the first three chapters of Genesis with a specific eye to men, women, and their relationship to each other and to God.
Genesis 1: Man and Woman are Created Equal
In Genesis 1, the creation of man and woman comes on day six. It is so compact that it would be easy to pass right over it without noticing the specific meaning contained in it. Here are the words from Genesis 1:26–27:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And God created humankind in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Did you notice it? When men and women were first created by God, they were created equally in the image of God, and both together were to rule over everything on earth. Men and women were originally created equal.
However, that early stage of equality in which “God saw everything he made, and indeed it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) did not last.
Genesis 2: Woman as a Helper and Partner for Man
In the second creation story, God also creates humankind—though in Genesis 2 the same Hebrew word is sometimes translated as “man” or “humankind” and sometimes as the name “Adam.” If we read these stories as spiritually symbolic rather than as literally descriptive, it all makes sense.
After each day of creation in Genesis 1 God pronounces the things he has made that day “good.” The first thing in the Bible that God says is not good is found in Genesis 2:18: “And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper for him as his partner.’” This helper, of course, turned out to be Eve, who was created out of a rib taken from Adam while he slept (Genesis 2:21–23). We can gather two points from this story:
- In Genesis 2, the original equality of man and woman in Genesis 1 gives way to a situation in which woman is assigned to be a helper and companion to man.
- This takes place only after humanity fell away from the original “very good” state that God created us in, into a state in which something was “not good.”
But even this shift toward some inequality in the relationship between man and woman is mild compared to what happens next.
Genesis 3: Woman Ruled by Man
In Genesis 3 things go seriously wrong. You know the story. The serpent tempts Eve. Eve eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and gives some to her husband, who also eats. Having disobeyed God’s direct order not to eat from that tree, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden . . . but not before both they and the serpent have received harsh words from God.
What God says to Eve includes these words: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).
“Aha!” say the traditionalists. “God did say that man should rule over woman.”
Not exactly. God said that because Eve had disobeyed God by eating from that (symbolic) tree, her husband would rule over her.
In other words, the thousands of years of history in which woman has been ruled by man are a result of humankind willfully disobeying God, and falling away from the kind of life for which God originally created us. In Genesis 1 God created man and woman to be equal. It was when humankind progressed first to things that were not good in Genesis 2, and then to open rebellion against God in Genesis 3, that the sexes fell from their original equality to a state of inequality.
The rest of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, speak to humans who are in that fallen state. Accordingly, much of the Bible treats woman as subservient to man.
A Choice of Roles
Yes, most of the Bible presents rather traditional roles for women and for men. Yet our walk through the first few chapters of Genesis shows that the God of the Bible offers—and even prefers—other possibilities.
What it boils down to in practical terms is that the Bible gives us choices in our roles. Those choices are on a sliding scale from God’s original will right down to what we humans do when we’ve mucked things up pretty badly. Depending on where we fall on that scale, we can use any one of the three general role arrangements presented in the first three chapters of Genesis—and whatever variations on them that we may come up with.
Some people prefer a traditional setup in which men are in charge and women serve them. In this setup men provide and protect while women care for the home, the children, and their husbands. If everyone involved is happy with this arrangement, who’s to say it’s wrong? It can be very satisfying for both the women and the men if both take their responsibilities seriously and there is mutual respect.
Some people prefer a little more equality. Perhaps the woman’s life does revolve around the man’s more than the other way around. She sees herself as his helper and partner. She has a greater role in making joint decisions, and likely works part-time outside the home, adding her part-time pay to her husband’s full-time pay to make up the total family income. This, too, can be satisfying for both the women and the men if there is mutual respect and both take responsibility for their own contributions.
And some people prefer full equality, in which all major decisions are made jointly, the income is more or less equal between the two, and both have their tasks and duties within as well as outside the home. There may still be a division of labor based on the types of things each prefers to do—though that division of labor may sometimes involve a reversal of the usual male and female roles. Whatever tasks each takes on, these will be equally valued, and neither the man nor the woman will be seen as primary. Each will be an equal half of the whole.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that today, especially in the West, instead of the church or state imposing particular roles, both women and men have choices about what roles they wish to take.
Man + Woman = Completeness
The biological and social evidence so far suggests that even when there is no external pressure, women and men will freely choose varying roles in marriage and in society. And even when doing the same jobs, men and women tend to approach things differently. These different approaches often do follow the traditional view of men taking a more intellectual and goal-oriented approach while women take a more emotional and relationship-oriented approach.
Does this mean that men can’t feel and women can’t think? Obviously not. That idea comes from an old, one-dimensional view of men, women, and their relationship to one another. Women excel in colleges and universities, and men can be quite passionate about life and relationships.
Let’s look at it a different way. Physically, women and men have almost all the same body parts, but with subtle differences. In particular, both have heads, hearts, and hands. Both can think, feel, and accomplish things. But the way each thinks, feels, and goes about doing things is different, just as the heads, hearts, and hands of men and women are different.
Yin Yang
Here’s an idea to take home with you: Hidden away within a man is a love and passion that drives him to accomplish his goals, great or small. But he tends to express himself outwardly in cooler, more intellectual and mechanical ways. Meanwhile, the intellect that a man presents outwardly a woman holds inwardly as a wisdom that can give her deep insight into human minds and hearts. But she tends to express herself outwardly in warmer, more emotional and relational ways. Like the ancient symbol of yin and yang, one hides inwardly what the other expresses outwardly.
And also like the yin and yang, we are not complete individually or as a society without the presence and contributions of both male and female. Yes, sometimes man plus woman does equal confusion. But from a deeper perspective, man plus woman equals completeness.
This article is © 2013 by Lee Woofenden
For further reading:
- Curses or Consequences: Did God Really Curse Adam and Eve?
- Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis
- “Wives, submit to your husbands.”
- What Do Women Really Want?
- Is the Bible a Book about Men? What about Women?
- A Test for Religious Groups: How do they Treat Women?
- A New Model of Manhood
- The Mother of All the Living
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
I agree with many of the things you said. Many commenters say that men and women were EQUAL before the fall. As far as value goes, men and women were equal before the fall and after it. The fall had absolutely no bearing on a man or woman’s worth in the eyes of God. God’s eyes being one thing and men’s eyes being quite another. God established Adam’s headship authority before the fall. Several things illustrate that:
1. Adam was made first.
2. Woman came out of man, and not other way around.
3. Adam was instructed to tend garden (Gen 2:15). Adam named the animals (Gen 2:20). He was given a job and responsibility before he was given a wife.
4. Adam received instruction directly from God about not eating from tree firsthand (Gen 2:16-17). Eve hadn’t been created at that time.
5. God gave Adam the authority to name the woman. The woman didn’t name Adam (Gen 2:23).
6. After sin was committed, God questioned the man rather than the woman. (Gen 3:9)
7. Sin entered the world through Adam and not Eve. (Rom 5:12)
I’ve heard so many teachers talk about the fact that man and woman were equal before the fall. However, several things illustrate a very distinct difference in Adam’s sphere of responsibility and authority and Eve’s, and those things were established Pre-Fall. As you mentioned, Eve was created as a Helper for Adam. Helpers submit and/or yield to the needs and plans of another. Teachings that suggest Adam and Eve were equal (equal being a very humanistic word. Bible speaks of oneness more so than equality) Pre-fall fail to acknowledge the very distinct duties and authority that God gave Adam and not Eve before the fall ever came into play. These were not slight differences, but very distinct and demonstrative ones. I do agree with your interpretation of Genesis 3:16.
Unfortunately, far too many Christian men and women see a wife’s service and submission to her husband as part of her ultimate punishment (curse of Eve) rather than part of God’s original design and divine order for marriage. Unfortunately, that’s why so many men feel justified in abusing their wives, and many wives feel discouraged and believe that God doesn’t love women because He’s only out to punish them for Eve’s transgressions. The way we view the concept of submission (or anything else for that matter) as punishment or original design/ divine order will surely affect how we carry it out. Thanks for your post and time.
Hi Kim,
Thanks for your long and thoughtful comment. I have responded it to in it a new post titled “Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis.”
Enjoy!
“Woman came out of man, and not other way around.”
Before she came out of man she was……. a portion of the man. This is why it takes the two (male and female) to become one flesh (complete being). Neither ‘gender’ is complete in their own and neither inferior or superior, ( different but equal) Generally speaking, where man is weak woman is strong. Where woman is weak, man is strong.
When in harmony, the genders compliment each other. Note, compliment, not compete. Men are not women and women are not men. Never have been, never will be regardless of what pop culture or feminism would like you to believe, or try to force in reality.
Simply put, no matter how hard you try to put the square peg into the round hole, it ain’t gonna happen.
It’s always fascinating that feminists knee jerk over ‘wives submit’ and never bother to look what was required of the husband. You might be amazed.
Honestly, feminists get all a flutter over ‘submission’, but incorrectly define it because it suits their purposes to do so and because they simply do not understand what true submission is. It is not weakness and it is not an admission of inferiority..
It’s an acknowledgement that we are different, yet equal.
It’s not a power struggle for dominance, it’s team US, one flesh, building each other up, not tearing each other down because of our own insecurities.
My wife submits to my authority in matters that I am the authority of. Likewise, I submit to her lead where she has the expertise and is clearly the authority.
True story, she taught me how to dance because she knew how and I did not. It was incredibly difficult for her because she was leading me while trying to teach me how to lead her, without it seeming as though she were leading me, while also trying to do her part.
I did not feel slighted, or emasculated. I had a real desire to learn because it is something that she enjoys. It was a lot of fun as well.
Anyway,
Originally, Adam was complete. The Eve (feminine) was taken from him for a worthy companion, ( and how wonderful she can be). Also to procreate the species.
Woman means Man with womb (womb man).
God makes the point several times through out the old and new testaments that he is no respecter of persons and that he does not favor, or hold in higher esteem, one (gender) over the other.
Hi here and now,
Thanks for your comment.
I agree with you that in God’s eyes, man and woman are different but equal. (And with the French, I say, vive la différence!)
Unfortunately, we human beings seem to have a very hard time seeing men and women as being equal in our differences.
That’s why I can’t get all aflutter about feminists—who are, after all, a very diverse group, with a wide range of views about female, male, and the relationship between the two. The fact is, men on their own have not put an end to the pervasive gender inequality and abuse of women that has persisted throughout the world from ancient times right up to the present. This is a wrong that must be righted. And though I often don’t agree with various feminists’ views on the nature of male and female, I fully support the effort to bring about justice for women in our society and throughout the world—an effort that the feminist movement has spearheaded.
Now about “Woman came out of man” (Kim’s words, not mine), while I think I may agree with what you are saying on the subject, it can easily be read the wrong way.
Based on the Hebrew words used in Genesis 2, woman did not come out of “man,” but out of “humankind.” There’s enough variation in the way the various Hebrew words for man, woman, and humans in general are used to prevent any truly hard-and-fast conclusions. However, from a spiritual perspective and from a linguistic perspective, there is almost as strong a case to be made that “Adam” or “humankind” was not originally male, but included both genders or was genderless, as that woman was created out of man. This would mean that when Eve was created out of Adam, a humanity that was formerly not specified as to gender was being divided and distinguished into male and female. This, too, cannot be made as a hard-and-fast conclusion from the original Hebrew text. I’m bringing it up more as a cautionary note not to read too much into the traditional idea and interpretation that woman was created out of man.
For more on these issues of male, female, and the relationship between the two, I invite you to read my article responding to Kim’s comment: “Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis.”
Oh, and the word “woman” is not actually derived from “womb-man.”
Thanks again for your comment!
Reblogged this on Sophia's Voice.
Interesting posts but I should say that one of the best ways to understand the role of man and woman (husband and wife) is to simply look at the relationship and role of our Lord Jesus Christ toward his Church and vice versa. If God used this as an example, it surely has one or two things to tell us as pertaining to how God expects us to play our roles in marriage. We cannot deny that Jesus is the head. We cannot deny that the church must submit to the head who is Jesus and never claim “equality” with him although we are one.
The church is one with Jesus but must submit and recognise that He is the head.
Yet we must also not lose sight of Jesus’ genuine love for the church. That loves makes him our servant. Love serves, submission tend to do the same as well.
So I think we should not shy away from admitting that man is the head. I also feel that when we think like the world we will struggle to accept that woman should submit to the head (husband). Similarly, many men fail to understand that if they should love as God has commanded, they will never demand submission from their wives – Jesus never does.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your comment. I agree that the marriage of the Lord and the Church is one way to understand the marriage between a man and a woman. But it is not the only way.
The Bible does talk about the marriage between Christ and the Church. But it also talks about God creating man and woman together, both in the image of God, and giving both of them together rulership over the earth and its creatures (Genesis 1:27-30). It was only afterwards, when humankind fell away from the ideal situation in which God created them, that inequality entered into human marriages.
For more on this, see the article:
Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis
Further, if we do model our marriages after the marriage between Christ and the church, we must keep in mind, as you say, that the Lord himself did not exercise authority or demand obedience from his disciples. In fact, as you say, he said that he was among them as one who serves. And to show what he meant, he washed their feet–which was the work of servants and the lower classes in ancient Mediterranean societies.
In short, those “Christian men” who think that they can order their wives around, and that their wives must obey them and wait on them hand and foot, are very far from following the example that Jesus Christ set for us. If these “Christian men” truly want to follow the Lord’s example, they should be getting their wives’ slippers for them and massaging their wives’ tired feet, and not the other way around.
“From a literary perspective, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were not originally meant to be read sequentially. Each is a self-contained creation myth telling its own story. These two ancient creation stories were collected from two different oral traditions, written down, and placed one after the other in the Bible.”
You refer to Genesis 1 and 2 as both myth and story. Believing that the Bible is God’s word, I detest referring to anything in the Bible is “myth”, and find “story” to be less than idea. Both words connote that these accounts (my preferred word) are not truth, but ideas that someone created.
“What it boils down to in practical terms is that the Bible gives us choices in our roles.”
I disagree with this idea. It might be a reasonable concept based only on what is found in Genesis, but there is significant teaching in the New Testament telling us about the marriage roles.
Hi OKRickety,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment.
I am not using “myth” in the popular sense of “something untrue,” but rather in the literary sense of “a story with deeper meaning.” Especially the early chapters of Genesis, I believe, were written in a symbolic style in which the meaning is not in the literal imagery but in the deeper meanings behind the literal imagery. For more on this, please see the article, “Can We Really Believe the Bible?” In that article, see especially the section titled, “Where is the Bible’s meaning?” and the example of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”
Viewing the Bible in this way does not make it less the Word of God, but gives it far greater divine and spiritual meaning and power than does the ordinary literalistic view of today’s conservative Christians. Here are two more articles that delve into this further:
As for story, in the Gospels Jesus makes extensive use of stories, better known as parables, to convey his message. And the Bible as a whole is more a story (about the ancient Israelite people, the life of Jesus, and so on) than a theological treatise. Clearly, storytelling is a powerful way of conveying deeper truths about the human condition and our relationship with God. Otherwise God would not have made such extensive use of storytelling in the Word of God.
On the other subject you bring up, yes, there is more material in the New Testament about gender roles. But it’s not as cut-and-dried as many Christians seem to think. However, that is a huge subject, to which I can’t possibly do justice in a brief comment. For now I would encourage you to read this follow-up article: “Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis.”
One thing for sure, any responsible man will always love and cherish any woman that is submissive to him as he will not stop to have that feeling of love in him coming out toward his woman. every good woman is so mindful and willing in giving her husband the very support she is able to give been it finance, loving, caring self-concerned about the family.
Come to think of it, if a woman have no concerned, submissiveness to her husband, she will make the man to get frustrated and definitely grow annoyed.
Women do all to be submissive, loving caring and supportive to your husband so that you both can contributes resourcefully to the humanity.
A submissive woman make a loving man.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment.
However, the idea that a submissive woman makes a loving man is simply not true.
There are many men who have submissive wives and who treat their wives badly, insult them, abuse them physically and emotionally, and treat them like miserable slaves. And this is an evil in those men. It has nothing to do with whether or not their wives are submissive. In fact, it has nothing to do with their wives it all.
To say that a woman’s stance toward her husband determines his character is not only utterly false from a spiritual and psychological perspective, but also implies that men have no character or freedom of their own. It says that a man’s character is dependent upon the woman he is with rather than being something he chooses and builds for himself.
The reality is that God has given each one of us, men and women alike, the freedom to choose whether we will be loving or hateful, good or evil. No one else can make us loving or make us hateful.
In short, men are responsible for their own loves, beliefs, and actions toward their wives and toward everyone else. And any man who abuses and mistreats his wife will be subject to God’s judgment, no matter what his wife’s character and relationship with him may be.
A real man does not blame his behavior on his wife or girlfriend. A real man takes responsibility for his own behavior.
For more on this, please see: “God Hates Divorce” vs. “Do Not Be Unfaithful to the Wife of Your Youth”
Man was created in the likeness of God them women was created for man in 1 corinthians 11
Hi Shadrach,
Yes, the situation after humanity’s initial fall from the perfect state into which God originally created us is reflected in the New Testament as well as in the old. For more on this, please see the follow-up article: “Man, Woman, and the Two Creation Stories of Genesis.”
It is not until the New Jerusalem comes that humanity is finally restored to God’s ideal.
Hi Lee, I’ve been reading a lot of your articles about men/women/marriage, and I have a question…well, a request for advice, really…
(By the way, yes, I’m the same anonymous wife who submitted a Spiritual Conundrum about a different but related topic under the name “A wife that is losing her patience”…sorry, I didn’t realize until later how obnoxious that name is and that I should have just gone with “Anonymous wife” to begin with… But I hope it’s OK that I’m asking my question via comment this time… I mean, I don’t need a fancy, formal answer, any ideas off the top of your head would be great…)
I see from one article about submission, that you don’t believe that wives have to be submissive to their husbands, and from another about the Red Pill MRA’s that you believe that men need to take responsibility for their own character, for their marriages, etc., and I see from this article that we have choices about what roles we want to take on.
So…my problem is that I don’t know what role would be best for me to take on, with respect to my husband…
I don’t really want to have the dominant role, I’d prefer equality, but…sometimes I wonder if it would be good for him if I could somehow tactfully require more from him… I’ve been getting an inkling that perhaps I’ve been doing too much…”enabling” might be the word…? I fear I may be making it too easy (and not painful enough? but I don’t really want to cause him pain) for my husband to live the way he’s been living – spending most of his resources on himself instead of the family (time, money, etc.)…
But on the other hand…I feel terrible just thinking about making things any harder on him, because he’s already had to deal with quite a bit of trauma and misfortune in his life, some fairly recent, and I’ve always wanted to be a blessing to him – I just don’t know anymore, whether the obvious blessings of continuing to give him resources and favor (or not demand more of his resources be contributed to the family), are truly good for him or not, in terms of his long-term character growth…
Buuuuut back on that other hand, I worry that maybe he really does need those resources for himself worse than the family needs them, since he generally seems to be under a low-to-medium-level depression, and I worry that if I push him farther, he might just leave the family entirely, or something…which I think would be even worse than the current situation, for him and the kids at least. Sometimes it even seems like he could be capable of committing suicide… 😦
So as you can see, I’m very conflicted!! I’m desperate for some kind of advice or guidance… I don’t want to be overly controlling or demanding or push him toward divorce or anything, but I don’t want to be pushed to it myself, either! I realize it’s not healthy for him to be the kind of person who would push someone to want a divorce, but to be honest – if it weren’t for my determination to make sure not to dominate him, I probably wouldn’t even feel tempted to divorce him, because he scarcely defends himself, and I have to really work at it, to keep from trampling all over him on accident. But if I stopped being so careful, I do fear I might push him to the edge even as I pull myself away from it.
Sigh… I really just want to respect his human rights and freedom, while defending my own boundaries and human rights as well…but I wonder whether I could do more to support healthy character changes and growth, without crossing over into the territory of coercing him into doing what I want…
Oh, and I should mention that my husband doesn’t have any of the huge, famous vices, like drug/alcohol addiction, or gambling, or even smoking… He just has these hobbies and collections that his resources tend to go to, apparently to try and make himself feel better in terms of his depression… Any advice you could give me to guide my decisions in these circumstances would be greatly appreciated!!
Hi Anonymous wife,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and questions, as well as your submitted Spiritual Conundrum, which I may refer to here as well. It’s a bit too long, involved, and personal to write a post about anyway.
First, the best thing would be for you and your husband to find a local marriage counselor who can help you with your situation. There’s only so much I can do in this forum. Plus, if things are going to get better, your husband is going to have to get invested in the effort as well. If he’s willing to go to couples counseling, that shows some acknowledgment that your marriage is in trouble, and some willingness to do something about it. Of course, if it becomes clear that he’s just going through the motions, and has no intention of actually working on the marriage, you might as well stop the counseling because you’re just wasting your money.
Your marriage is in trouble. Though you say here and in your Conundrum that you want to keep divorce off the table, realistically that might not be possible. If a marriage continues to slide downhill long enough, eventually something’s going to break so badly that it can’t be fixed.
Further, not that I’m recommending divorce (I’m not in your shoes), but if divorce is off the table as far as you’re concerned, that does put considerable constraints on you in your efforts to turn the relationship around. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as long as the sex keeps coming and divorce is out of the question, many men will simply stick with the status quo, regardless of how dissatisfied their wife might be, and how problematic the relationship is. I would suggest thinking very carefully about whether you are indeed willing to continue in this marriage for the rest of your life, or at least until the children are grown up and out of the house, even if the marriage does not get better, and (more likely) gets gradually worse.
Having children in the mix does make it much more difficult. However, if a marriage deteriorates badly enough, there does come a time when it is no longer, on balance, a positive thing to “stay married for the children.” It is not good for children to grow up in an atmosphere of tension and conflict between their parents. As much as I hate to say it, sometimes divorce is better for the children. Sometimes it is the only way they will be able to grow up in an atmosphere of peacefulness in the home. But once again, I’m not in your shoes. I can’t make that sort of decision for you. These are just things for you to consider.
If there is enough common ground between you and your husband that the marriage is salvageable, of course that would be the best outcome. That would depend upon a commitment both from you and from your husband to do the work necessary to salvage the relationship. You can make that commitment for yourself. You cannot make it for your husband. It would have to be a decision he came to himself, out of his own free will.
While you can’t make that decision for him, you can make it clear to him what you are and are not willing to live with, and what you are and are not willing to do. Once again, weighed into this will be whether you are ultimately willing to end the marriage if it continues to be a source of frustration and pain for you. “Through thick and thin” is a good and admirable commitment. In the end, though, it will depend upon whether you and he have enough common ground to make that work, and whether both of you are willing to make the commitment and do the work to make it work.
If you believe that if you drew certain lines, this would case him to commit adultery or to divorce you, you have to think about whether those boundaries are important enough to you to take that risk.
But you do have to draw some sort of boundaries. You can’t let him just walk all over you. Nor is it right for you to pay all the bills and cover all the expenses while he spends all of his money on himself and his hobbies. That is not a partnership, and it’s not a marriage. Eventually you’ll lose patience, and the relationship and the marriage will break down whether you want it to or not.
As for your husband’s depression, that is something he needs to face and deal with if he doesn’t want his marriage and his life to end out in the toilet. There are counselors, psychiatrists, and therapies available to deal with depression. It’s not easy, but it is possible to face and overcome it. But only if he’s willing to take the steps to do so.
My belief is that beyond counselors, psychiatrists, and therapies, the best “cure” for depression is to have clear goals in life, and to devote oneself to accomplishing those goals. And not just any old goals, but goals that involve doing something that benefits other people in some way. This can be through job and career, or through volunteering, or through some sort of engagement in the local community. The best way to feel good about oneself is to be doing something good for others on an ongoing basis.
Oh, and getting regular physical exercise and fresh air makes a big difference in depression, too.
The reality is that if your husband doesn’t make a decision about his life, and take specific and concrete steps to do something about it, sooner or later he’s going to lose you, and likely the children too, and probably the rest of what he cares about in life. That’s just how things work. Men (and women) who don’t take responsibility for their own life and their own contribution to their relationships and to the wider community will sooner or later lose what they have.
You also need to make some decisions about what life you are willing to live, and what you are and are not willing to do to keep your marriage together if your husband doesn’t make a decision and a commitment to face his issues and move forward in life. You can’t assume that things are just magically going to get better. If he doesn’t make that decision, they’re going to keep getting worse, not better.
Are you willing to live with that? At what point does it become more than you can bear?
You have to be able to live your own life with integrity and purpose, even if he is not willing to do so. You can’t nag or dominate him into changing. You can’t fix him. But you can make your own decision about what you will do with your own time, life, and money. And once you’ve made that decision, you can tell him what you’ve decided. Then he’ll have to make his own decision about what he is and is not willing to do.
This is all very difficult and risky, I know. But the alternative is a marriage that continues to slide downhill, and that will likely end in divorce anyway.
I hope this is of some help to you. Once again, I would recommend that you find a local counselor who can give you more specific and ongoing help with your situation.
Also, don’t avoid learning about ideals of spiritual marriage. If we don’t have some idea of what marriage is meant to be, it’s awfully hard to work toward it. We may or may not achieve it here on earth. But once we give up our high ideals and goals, what’s left of life but to trudge on through the mud until we die?
Hi Lee, thank you so much for your reply… Yes, we did actually try marriage counseling for a while, and it did help some, but one problem with it was that, as a secular therapist, she did not share a similar enough moral/theological background for me to feel I could trust her completely, whereas you do – I’ve been studying Swedenborgian theology and moral ideals for a couple/few years now, and I feel like it’s a revelation. I’m anxious to find out all the ways my traditional Christian upbringing got it wrong, haha… So with regard to marriage, I read all your articles and positions about submission and roles, in order to try and find out to what extent it would be right, or wrong, for me to take a more dominant or controlling stance in our marriage.
But in the end, after reading everything, including your last reply, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that it isn’t just a matter of what’s right or wrong, but also, what we can each tolerate living with, and what we’re each willing to do for the children…
So, thank you for your input… I will go ahead and start reading up on the ideals of spiritual marriage more as the next step. And I think it will be helpful for me, that you seem to have validated (I did interpret this correctly, didn’t I?) that it’s not morally wrong for me to put my foot down about some things, even if I risk the possibility that he might move in a direction of wanting a divorce or temptation toward adultery…as long as that’s a risk I’m willing to take from my end…right?
Thank you!!
-Anonymous wife
Hi Anonymous wife,
If I were to boil it down to two sentences, here is what I especially wanted to convey to you in my previous reply:
If your husband decides he wants to make some changes in his life, of course you can support him in that. You can also make it clear to him what you will and won’t put up with, and that may become a factor in his decisions about his own life. But ultimately, his life is in his own hands, as it is for every reasonably functional adult.
In answer to your concluding question, no, it is not morally wrong for you to put your foot down about some things, especially those that relate to your own beliefs and actions, and to anything your husband says or does to you, or that directly affects you. What you can’t do is tell him what he must do, and what decisions he must make.
You can make statements in the form of, “If you do/don’t do x, I will/won’t do y.” Even this, however, should not be to coerce him into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Rather, it should be to inform him what your own decisions and boundaries are within the marriage, and what you are and aren’t willing to live with. It should not be a constant stream about minor things, but only to confront serious marriage-threatening issues that are likely, if not corrected, to lead to eventual divorce anyway. You are informing him that if things don’t change, the end result will eventually be divorce, regardless of whether either you or he want that to happen.
It will then be his decision what to do, but it will be an informed decision in which he knows the consequences of his actions. Then, of course, you must follow through, or he will not believe you or listen to you. It is critical that you become clear of your intentions and boundaries in your own mind first, and that you do not say anything that you don’t actually mean, and aren’t ready to actually do. Men get used to, and quickly learn to ignore, a stream of empty threats from their wives.
On the other hand, men are often taken completely by surprise when their wives tell them they want a divorce. So if your mindset is, “I don’t want a divorce, but it’s awfully hard not to go that direction given the way things are,” then you’ll be doing him a favor—if an unappreciated one—if you let him know. That way he can do something about it before it’s too late, if he actually does want to stay married to you.
It’s also important to consider and decide in your own mind whether you think the marriage is ultimately salvageable. Are you attempting to have a good marriage with your husband? Do you believe that is possible? Or do you believe that the two of you are disunited in spirit, and that there never will be the spiritual connection (common values, goals, motives, loves) that constitutes an actual marriage from a spiritual point of view? If you conclude that a real marriage with your husband is possible, that will lead in a whole different direction than if you conclude that there is no inner marriage there. If the latter, you may still not have breakup as an immediate goal, given the family situation. But your effort will be to make the best of an ultimately temporary situation for reasons other than a commitment to eternal marriage with your present husband.
Marriages with no internal connection and oneness can and sometimes do last to the end of life here on earth. But they do not make it far into the spiritual world. There, only oneness of minds and hearts counts. All legal, social, financial, and family ties that hold spiritually mismatched couples together here on earth are no longer in effect in the spiritual world. If you decide to attempt a “till death do us part” marriage, you’ll have to set your sights considerably lower in this world than if your aim is to have a real, eternal marriage with your husband.
I should mention that I come from the most liberal of the Swedenborgian denominations. If you get very far into the Swedenborgian literature you may encounter other, more conservative views. And you may encounter some that are more liberal than mine as well. This is just one of the reasons I am saying that you’ll have to make up your own mind about these things. Only you are standing in your shoes.
If you decide you want to go all-in and read Swedenborg’s book on marriage, at the moment I would say the best translation in print is the one by David Gladish, for which I served as Latin consultant many years ago. You can get the Kindle version very inexpensively on Amazon here, and the paperback version here. Just be aware as you read that it was written and published over two centuries ago, in a considerably different social and cultural context.
Hi Anonymous wife,
Now to say something about the sexual issue from your submitted Spiritual Conundrum.
Sex can have two drivers:
The first one we share with other animals. The second is uniquely human. In the absence of the second, the first will commonly drive people to pair up and have sex with each other. A desire for children is part of that drive. After all, in nature reproduction is the primary, and very nearly the only, reason for sexual intercourse.
In human beings whose spiritual side has been opened, however, biological drives are not sufficient to sustain interest in sexual union with a partner. For human beings, beyond the common animal drive to mate and reproduce, sexual intercourse is meant to be, and is at best, the physical expression of a spiritual union of two people into one.
If that spiritual union does not exist, desire for sexual intercourse among women, especially, will commonly follow the biological cycle and wane after the woman feels she has had enough children (which, for some women, is zero children), or after menopause, when she can no longer have children. Men are able to father children right into old age, so men’s biological sexual drives are more likely to continue on into old age. These, of course, are generalizations. We humans are a complex species, and nothing about us is more complex than our sexual nature, drives, and feelings.
However, for women, especially, it is quite common to have no interest in sex with a partner for whom there is no feeling of closeness or oneness in mind and heart. This can also be true of men; it’s just more common in women. (And contrary to old attitudes, women do also have sexual drives and desires that don’t always depend upon a sense of closeness to a partner.)
Sexless marriages are usually troubled marriages. But the real problem is not a lack of sex. It is a lack of the sense of connection and oneness that naturally expresses itself in the connection and oneness of physical sexual intimacy.
In a heterosexual relationship, it is more often the woman than the man who is the gatekeeper of that sense of inner connection and oneness. (This is not necessarily true in marriages in which both partners have a strong and deep shared spiritual life.) The man will figure everything is okay as long as there is a “love life” in the marriage. The woman may feel that the marriage is dead even while going through the motions of a sex life in which, as far as she’s concerned, there is no life. It’s not that men aren’t capable of comprehending this. It’s that they’ll tend not to if they don’t have to.
In saying this, I’m not advocating that you cut your husband off. This is something you alone can decide. Rather, I am (I hope) putting some context around the situation you describe in your submitted Conundrum in which your husband wants sex daily, whereas you don’t want it at all, and what actually happens is somewhere in the middle. This situation is not likely to get better unless you and he are able to repair your marriage. Failing that, it boils down to the decision you’re already faced with: Do you continue to go through the motions with him in order to keep the marriage together for reasons other than a connection of love with your husband? I’m not saying that is right or that it’s wrong. Rather, I’m saying it’s a decision only you can make, and it’s best to make it with the clearest mind possible.
Hi Lee, I do feel like I need more clarity on one point… It’s a short and relatively straightforward question this time…
Is sex a “conjugal right” and conversely then, a “conjugal duty” for the other person?
That’s the view I was raised on, and I don’t want to “shirk” any legitimate obligations or violate any human rights, so if it’s an incorrect view, I guess I need to hear that in “so many words” in order to feel that I have clarity on this issue… Or if mostly correct, I need to understand its limitations… Thanks in advance!
Hi Anonymous wife,
From a traditional Christian perspective, the answer is just as short and relatively straightforward as the question: Yes sex is a conjugal right and duty of married partners toward each other. This is based on this statement by Paul:
That passage is why you were raised on this view.
However, even this scripture is not as straightforward as it seems when it is read out of context. Here are the two verses that come right before it:
And here are the verses that come right after it:
In short, Paul believed it was better to be celibate than married, and that marriage was simply a concession to sexual drives, to keep them in check and contained within a legitimate relationship. This is in line with the general view of sex in biblical times and throughout the Christian era up until very recently: that marriage is a social and legal institution for the purpose of bearing children, carrying on family lineages, forming inter-clan relationships and alliances, and so on. To this day, all of the major branches of traditional Christianity view marriage as an earthly institution that ends at death because it is unspiritual. (The LDS, or Mormon, church does believe in eternal marriage if one is married by the LDS church here on earth.)
Therefore Paul’s statements on marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 must be read in the context of a culture that views marriage as a merely earthly and biological institution. In the context of such a culture and such a view of marriage, yes, husbands and wives do have congugal rights and duties toward each other as spelled out in 1 Corinthians 7:3–5, quoted above. They are not to deny sexual relations to each other except for any set times they may mutually agree upon, after which they are once again to resume sexual relations with each other. This, Paul says, is a “concession” to human sexual passions.
This provision of conjugal rights and duties continues to be in force for merely external marriages today. Without it, wives and husbands will cut each other off for various reasons, commonly resulting in infidelity, adultery, and divorce.
The situation is different in marriages that are based on internal rather than external connections. Marriages based, not on legal, social, and financial structures, but on an inner oneness of minds and hearts, are not subject to the old covenant “Law” of marriage that imposes duties and rights, but are under a new covenant based on faith, love, grace, and so on. In other words, internal, spiritual marriages are not driven by external obligations, but by internal loves and connections between the two partners. In such a marriage, sexual intimacy flows, not from obligation and legal requirements, but from an inner oneness that naturally expresses itself in the physical oneness of sexual intercourse.
In biblical terms, true Christian spiritual marriage is no longer under the Law, but under grace—which is another word for love.
Boiling this down to a more straightforward answer:
Here are some related articles that go into more detail on the differences in marriage over the ages, providing some of the background for the above points:
I hope this helps, even if it is not quite as straightforward as you might have liked.
Well, I guess we don’t have an inner, spiritual union right now…but I’m trying to figure out whether it’s something I should continue to aspire to, or … well I do hate to give up completely, but it’s hard to see whether there is really any hope…
I mean, he does say he doesn’t want to “impose” sex on me, and he certainly recognizes that it’s not at all satisfying for either of us when I do it purely out of feeling obligated… So he shares some of these ideals… But the main reason I worry is because our values and what we get joy from are so different…
In “How do I Love God with my Whole Heart?”, you said:
“We’re all different. We each feel joy in our own unique way. Real love does not expect others to be happy because they’re just like us and want the same things we do. Real love seeks an understanding of what truly makes the other person happy and what gives them joy, and feeling joy within ourselves when they experience their own unique joys.
In other words, real love values the differences and uniqueness of the other person, and wants the other person to be happy in their own best self.”
That’s the kind of love we can and should feel towards lots of people, everyone really – right? But what about in marriage love? Does that still apply? Can we really achieve an inner, spiritual union, just by fully respecting each other’s different joys? Or does there have to be more commonality in terms of what gives each person joy, in order for there to be a true union?
Last night, I actually asked my husband some questions to try and explore this question of whether there is hope, or how much hope there is, of us ever achieving a spiritual union, and I’m quite worried… What started it was when he found it amusing to joke about the way some Jewish characters were being treated in Schindler’s List…to me, it was horrifying… It’s just an example of the kinds of things that make me worry…
So I asked him, if he were to imagine what my interior life – spiritual or emotional or whatever he wanted to call it – would look like if described in physical terms, and what his would look like…and he said he would describe mine as white, and his as more gray.
And I asked whether he liked it there, where he’s at, or whether he would want to come into the lighter area, but just hadn’t been able to yet…and he said he didn’t know. (That’s his answer to a lot of the spiritual, introspective questions I ask him…sigh…)
I told him that for my part, I would not want to move to where he is at, spiritually, in order to achieve more spiritual closeness…and tried to ask if he could understand why…no clear answer there either, but at least I asserted my position on that point.
So in terms of being fellow human beings, yeah, I can see the need to respect each other’s preferences and joys, and I can do that…and he can respect mine…but in terms of being united in eternal spiritual marriage, I sense that it’s valid to expect that there can’t be any spiritual closeness unless he decides to move closer to the “light”, because I’m not willing to move towards the darker areas, nor do I think it would be a good or desirable thing, as much as he would probably love it if I were to do that, because he claims to want us to be together forever, even after we die.
But from what I read in “Marriage in the Resurrection: The Deeper Meaning”, it might not even be possible for us to be united in true spiritual marriage unless we are both in the Light, so it doesn’t seem like his wish would even be possible to grant, am I right?
Hi Anonymous Wife,
That’s a lot of questions! I’ll attempt to cover at least the main issues I see in your comment.
Yes, we are to love other people for who they are, and not for how much they are like us. However, in a real, spiritual marriage, this mainly means loving a wife as a woman, and a husband as a man, rather than wanting them to act as if they were our own gender. In a true spiritual marriage, the two share basic loves and motives in life. They are of one mind, and this means especially sharing the same “ruling love” or primary goal and drive in life. For such couples it is not necessary to love their partner despite different goals and outlooks in life because they share the same goals and outlook in life.
Of course, here on earth this is not always perfectly attained even for couples who do have a real inner connection. Especially here on earth we are moving toward full marriage union, and often have considerable work to do in order to achieve it.
This is why your husband’s response about you being (inwardly) white and he being gray may or may not be a deal-breaker. The more important question is the one he didn’t answer: Does he want to come into a lighter area?
We are all “in process” here on earth. We come from dark areas, and from gray areas, and if we are on the spiritual path, we are moving toward the light that is God and heaven. The important thing is not so much where we are right now, as what direction are headed. If we are in a gray area but are headed toward the light, then all is well. But if we are in a gray area and are just staying there, or even moving into darker shades of gray, then that is a real problem.
As I’ve said in previous responses to you, it sounds to me like your husband has a fundamental choice to make about his life and his spiritual path. If he decides to put in the work to move toward the light, then it is possible that you and he could come into spiritual union with one another if there is at least some basic oneness of mind and heart between you. But if he chooses to stay in the gray, and not make any effort to move toward the white that he sees you as being in, then there will remain an unbridgeable chasm between you that will bring your marriage to an end at some point, whether here on earth or in the afterlife. Of course, it is not a good idea for you to backtrack into the gray.
In short, if he truly does want the two of you to be together even after you die, he’s got a big decision to make, and a lot of work to do.
He can’t just say “I don’t know.” That is tantamount to deciding not to walk the spiritual walk with you. In the end, saying “I don’t know” to that big question will lead to his losing you. Once again, you can’t make him make the decision you want him to make. But you can make it clear to him that if he decides to remain in that gray area rather than making the decision and doing the work of moving toward the light, he is choosing not to have you as his wife to eternity. It may sound harsh, but it is the reality.
Having said that, life is an unfolding and developing thing. The only final deadline is death. It is possible that although he is not making that decision now, he may make it at some point in the future, before his death. In that case there may be some hope for his marriage with you. Then it becomes a matter of how long you are willing to wait for him to move forward with his life. And once again, that is a decision only you can make, because you are the only one standing in your shoes.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response, it validates a lot of what I’ve been thinking/suspecting…
I hope you don’t mind another question – and let me know if it belongs on a different post – but you said “The only final deadline is death.”
I’ve seen this sort of statement here and there, on your website, but I don’t quite understand why that would be the case… Elsewhere you assured us that the journey doesn’t have to be completed before death, but that whatever direction we establish in this life, is the direction in which we will continue afterwards… Why would a person’s spiritual direction be unable to change after death, if it is able to change here? What kinds of things can provoke such a change here, that would never happen there, or that wouldn’t work there if they did happen?
(It’s not actually as irrelevant to this conversation as it might seem though – for one thing, because I’m wondering if there’s anything I could do to help provoke such a change, and for another, I have long suspected that my husband would be able to forgive God for letting his parents die, if he could see them living happily in the spiritual world…and then I would expect he’d be able to open his heart to God’s influence more. I’ve tried explaining how he can be assured that his parents are fine, but so far he doesn’t seem as convinced as I am… So if he can’t find out for sure until after he dies, but by then it’s too late, it seems like a bit of a catch-22…)
Hi Anonymous wife,
I’ll respond in two separate comments. First about why death is such a clear deadline:
Philosophically speaking, there has to be some point at which we’ve made our decision about who we want to be and which way we want to go in life. Otherwise our future would always be uncertain. We could never just relax and enjoy our life. We would always have a fear in the back of our mind that at some future point, we will decide to go bad, and destroy everything we’ve built up. Therefore God mercifully provides a deadline—death—that defines the moment when the decision is made, and we can simply live the life that we have chosen, with no fear of losing it.
Evangelical Christians have a great debate about “once saved, always saved,” or “eternal security,” which is the idea that once you’ve been saved by Jesus, you can never lose your salvation. This idea is unbiblical and false here on earth, as is clear from Ezekiel 18, among other passages in both the Old and New Testaments. But the debate about it points to the time when our salvation is eternally secure. That is the point of our death.
Of course, this means that if we do not choose salvation before we die, we can never be saved to all eternity. However, for the people who choose evil over good, that is not as dire a fate as literalist Christians think it is. In fact, there are pleasures in hell. It’s just that those pleasures are inevitably tied to pain. For more on this, see:
Is There Really a Hell? What is it Like?
The reality is, the evil spirits in hell get pleasure from their life and activities there. They choose to be there, even if they also have to bear the painful consequences of their selfish and evil actions. The biblical descriptions of hell as a fiery chasm are metaphorical, not literal.
Further, if good spirits or angels were to try to convince them to leave hell and go to heaven instead, the evil spirits in hell would only sneer at them and attack them for their naivete. They have the life they want, thank you very much. This is what Jesus was talking about when he said:
Pigs like to wallow in the mud, and they have no interest in pearls, however much we might prefer pearls to mud.
In short, the deadline of death is a merciful and loving provision of God so that we can finally let down our guard and go on to live the life we love to live, whether that life is good or evil.
More technically, it is necessary for us to be in a physical body, in the material world, in order to make and “cast” or “fire” our decisions. The physical, material level is the lowest level of reality—the other two being the spiritual level of reality and the divine level of reality, which is God. The physical level of reality is like the skin and bones of our life, which give it structure, boundaries, and fixity. Whatever life we live here, that forms our spiritual skin and bones, which cannot be changed after death because we are no longer living in the physical world.
To use Swedenborg’s words, we take with us into the spiritual world an “envelope” (Latin: limbus) of “the finest/subtlest things in nature,” which forms the skin or boundary of our eternal spiritual life. That envelope or boundary can no longer be changed because we no longer have access to it when we are living as spirits in the spiritual world.
But that’s just the mechanics of it, according to Swedenborg. The main point is that death is the point at which the decision we make for ourselves during our lifetime on earth is finalized, so that we can go on to live the life we have chosen without fear of ever having it taken away from us.
For another angle on this, please go to this article:
The Bible, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Reincarnation
Scroll down and start reading at the section heading, “What’s wrong with reincarnation?”
Hi Anonymous wife,
Now for where the rubber hits the road: your husband’s situation.
Yes, it may seem unfair that we don’t have proof of an afterlife, so that there is room for doubt. Many people blame God for this, and justify their lack of faith and lack of willingness to do the hard work on their own life and character by the excuse that “God could tell me plainly if he wanted to, and then I would believe.”
Jesus addressed this sort of excuse directly in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus:
The fact is, God has told us plainly about the afterlife, first in the Bible and in many other ancient sacred texts, and more recently in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and in the testimony of thousands, if not millions, of people who have had near-death experiences. If we choose not to believe the massive amount of testimony and information God has given us about the afterlife, that is our fault, not God’s.
For more on this, please see (and have your husband read, if he is willing):
Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?
There are many articles about the afterlife here on Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life that give clear and detailed descriptions of the afterlife and what it is like, based on first-person testimony of that afterlife, mostly from Swedenborg, but also from the thousands of near-death experiencers who have told their stories. If your husband wants to know what is happening with his parents, the information is available.
You can lead that horse to water. It’s up to him whether he drinks. And if he wants to take a full immersion bath in the river, here is the book for him:
Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg
Now about the death of his parents, that certainly can be heard to bear. Here is an article that might be helpful to you, and to him:
What Does it Mean When My Parents Die? Will I See Them Again?
Your husband can’t just hide behind “I don’t know.” There is plenty of information and inspiration available if he is willing to avail himself of it. And if he’s not, that’s on him. He can’t abdicate responsibility for his own spiritual life. Doing so is a choice in itself—a choice not to have spiritual life.
How come the Rich man didn’t turn and repent, confess his sins, and ask God for forgiveness?
At the end of the Millennium, ALL of those in Hades will be released and be given ONE MORE CHANCE to turn and repent, and BY GOD they will repent! Why wouldn’t they repent? Would they really consciously choose hell over Heaven? Can’t they weigh the costs and benefits? I’m talking about, even a lifeboat over a sinking ship. Couldn’t God bring the sinking ship back?
Hi Lee,
I guess that makes sense…thank you for explaining the mechanics side of it…
I agree he’s making a choice by saying “I don’t know”, and sometimes the frustration of it is nearly enough to make me say “I give up, trying to discuss things is going nowhere”, and resolve to find some kind of arrangement where we can both stand to live together without any further discussion of romantic/sexual/emotional sorts of things… But he doesn’t want to just be “roommates”, and I don’t want him to move out, because I’m concerned about that phenomenon where children whose parents divorce tend to marry people who are just like the lost parent (whereas growing up with that person and getting sick of that personality style causes them to make sure NOT to marry someone like that).
He’s not abusive by any stretch of the imagination, and our home is actually pretty peaceful, so there’s really no justification for me to divorce him to make sure the kids don’t grow up with too much conflict…
So I guess I just have to continue on as I have been…conjugal duties for external marriage and all that… I wish there were someone else that could help with that particular duty, haha… It has occasionally caused me to fantasize about polygamy, haha…and one of those recent comments you wrote about it being unspiritual and physical, but not so much evil, brought that fantasy back up in a way that I almost wonder if there’s any way that could be a kind of last resort instead of divorce… If this is a ledge, can you talk me back from it? Haha…
Thanks…
Hi Anonymous wife,
You’re welcome. The reality is, it’s just not an easy situation that you’re in. Unfortunately, it’s a situation that is all too common.
About polygamy, it’s likely that the law where you live has already made that decision for you. See the map at Wikipedia’s page on the legality of polygamy.
I will say, however, that one of the more controversial parts of Swedenborg’s book on marriage love is where he says that under certain circumstances, while it is not ideal, it is permissible for a married man to have a mistress. That has gotten Swedenborg—and some segments of the Swedenborgian Church—into big trouble over the years! However, it is a very pragmatic teaching in that in some instances, a marriage is unsalvageable, and yet divorce is not possible. This is less true today than it was in Swedenborg’s day. And yet, some married couples have tacitly or explicitly allowed one or the other or both to have an outside lover due to their particular circumstances and the nature of their relationship.
Am I recommending this?
Hell, no!
I doubt that Swedenborg’s conditions for allowing a mistress apply to your marriage. Mostly, I bring it up to recognize that sometimes “desperate times call for desperate measures.” However, I hope your marriage doesn’t become that desperate. And in our day and age, I would generally recommend divorce before infidelity—even controlled and sanctioned infidelity—anyway.
Haha…that’s so interesting…so pragmatic…
Well, I’m pretty sure my husband wouldn’t go for amicable polygamy anyway, so I had really just been wanting to get an idea of how bad it would be if I said something to him along the lines of “I don’t want to have sex in the absence of a spiritual connection anymore, so if you’re not willing to work on that, you are free to take care of your sexual drives however else you like, as long as you leave me out of it.” But I don’t know if he would be able to bring himself to do that work, or if he would evaluate the options of adultery or divorce, and just commit suicide instead…and then I would feel like it were my fault for pushing him to that point… I know you already talked about how I just have to make a choice about whether it’s worth that risk to me, so you don’t have to answer that part again…I already know it’s not…
But I do have a new question that has come up because of all the studying and introspection that I’ve been doing lately… And actually, it can kind of be applied to different relationships too, not just marriage… Basically I’m wondering about that stage in the afterlife where people are no longer allowed to hide their true feelings… Is this something that we should voluntarily try to start earlier in order to have healthier relationships, or do we actually need to (sometimes) exercise that ability here while we can, until it’s time for it to go away?
I see so many people I know struggling with this, and I generally try to encourage them to tactfully tell the other person whatever is on their heart, as lovingly as possible…but I find that I can almost never bring myself to follow my own advice when it comes to telling my husband how uncomfortable it makes me, when he does certain things to try to express his affection physically… I’ve recently realized that these…squeezing sessions for lack of a better word… are actually more bothersome to me than having to have intercourse itself…
The main exceptions – the times I can easily bring myself to object – are when he does it too hard and I have the excuse that it’s physically uncomfortable… But I hate to tell him how deeply, emotionally uncomfortable it is the rest of the time, because he’ll feel rejected, and that hurts him in ways that nothing else seems to do. He acts as though he needs that kind of intimacy like he needs air. And I don’t know, maybe he does?? But I feel like if he thinks he is truly getting that kind of intimacy from me, it’s just an illusion, and I hate to let him live in a lie, too, although some people say “Fake it till you make it”, but after this many years, if faking it were going to help me “make it” to that point, it would have happened already…
I’m struggling to figure out how legitimate, or how wrong and selfish, it would be for me to say something like, “I love you and I care about your well-being, so it’s hard for me to say something so upsetting to you, but I need to tell you the truth about our physical relationship… I don’t feel like we have a strong enough level of internal intimacy for me to be comfortable with this level of physical intimacy. I need you to step back to a more respectful distance, until we can establish a better alignment of our core values and priorities. The problem is not with displays of affection in and of themselves, but (if you still feel any affection to display after me saying this), the types used during a respectful courtship will be better received than the more aggressive displays you’re used to.”
I already know he would be crushed, but he might get over it, and he might even cooperate with the request, at least for a while… But he might just stay mad at me until I relent and go back to letting him believe what he wants to believe (which he will, without me even saying it, if I physically allow him to go back to his same habits – it wouldn’t be the first time I have implied that I don’t enjoy physical intimacy, but he willfully forgets as soon as he can, and historically, I haven’t had the confidence necessary to maintain my position when that happens).
So, I know it’s generally best to be honest, but is it possible that in this case my reluctance to express my true feelings is an instinct that’s motivating me to do the right thing for my husband, even though it’s uncomfortable for me? Or is it more likely that I need to do the other uncomfortable thing (for both of us), and speak up, and stand firm in my position, in order to prevent even more discomfort (for both of us??) in the long term?? Would speaking up truly be the right thing for me to do for his sake as well as my own, or am I just looking to justify myself by being too rigid about the principle of honesty??
Hi Anonymous wife,
You’re probably getting tired of hearing this, but once again, these are decisions you are going to have to make, based on your own goals and your own sense of the situation. I can’t tell you what to do.
I would put an emphasis, though, on that word “goals.” What are you trying to accomplish? In the end, that will determine what you say and do in relation to your husband.
If your goal is to build an actual, spiritual relationship with your husband, then “fake it until you make it” might make sense. In the midst of the faking, you can gradually tell him more of the truth, and put it on him whether he is willing to join you spiritually, and not just physically. If he is, and is willing to do the work, well and good. If not, then he will have to realize sooner or later that this marriage is not an eternal one, and may not even last “until death do you part.”
If your goal is to make the marriage last until the children grow up and are out of the house and on their own, then it will be more of a “fake it until you break it” situation. You do what’s necessary to keep the relationship together until you feel it’s served its purpose—raising the children. Then your reasons for faking it are over, and your husband will get a rude awakening. This is a very common scenario. And though you may feel bad about it, it’s not as if you haven’t tried to communicate the real situation to your husband . . . but he just isn’t listening.
If your goal is to stop the emotional pain and discomfort, regardless of the consequences, then it’s the “rip the band-aid off” treatment. Confront him with the truth, and don’t back down. Then it’s up to him how he responds. If worse comes to worst, and he commits suicide, that is something you’ll have to live with, even though it really wouldn’t be your fault. Still, it is always good to consider the possible outcomes, and whether you can live with them, before you make such a major move.
These are only some of the possible goals you might have, and permutations they might lead to. The main question is, “What do you want to accomplish?” Whatever you decide your goal is for the relationship, that will inform what you do.
It will also give you some inner peace of mind, even if the situation itself may be anything but comfortable and peaceful.
For example, if you decide to “fake it until you break it,” you can have the peace of mind of knowing that you’ve made a decision, and you are acting in the way that you believe is best, if not for your husband, then at least for your children. Your husband has to take responsibility for his own life. But your children are in your care, and are your responsibility, until they grow up and become self-responsible adults. It is not wrong to make the decision to sacrifice your own comfort, and even to some extent your sense of personal integrity, in order to provide them with a stable and loving upbringing. But once again, this greatly depends upon the actual situation in the home. And of course, adult children can be blindsided when their parents divorce as well. So it is in no sense a no-brainer.
I should add that I certainly support your telling your husband when he is making you extremely uncomfortably physically and/or emotionally. If he is doing things that are a real problem for you, he needs to know that, because sooner or later you are going to reach your limit anyway, and rebel. Better to keep things within boundaries that you think you can sustain for as long as you intend to stay in the marriage.
Hey Lee,
In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, why is Paul against equality? Why can’t be women pastors or leaders of Church? Why are men allowed to have authority over women and not the other way? Is Paul’s view morally and spiritually considerable?
Hi Aruthra,
Just to get 1 Timothy 2:11–15 in here for the benefit of people reading in, here it is:
In response to your question, I don’t think Paul was against equality. It would be more accurate to say that equality between men and women simply wasn’t contemplated in those days, as it is today. It wasn’t a “thing.” It would be more accurate to say that Paul simply accepted, without thinking about it, the inequality between men and women that was a part of that culture, and of just about every other culture on the face of the earth up until very recently.
For more on this, please see:
“Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Hi Aruthra,
To answer your other questions:
In a society in which women are considered inferior, and men superior, it would be, as Paul said, an inversion of social order for women to have authority over men, and to teach men. This would cause social chaos in that type of society. That’s why Paul spoke out against it.
However, today’s society is rapidly moving toward equality between men and women. And in a society in which men and women are considered equal legally, socially, and spiritually, there is no problem with women being pastors and teachers, including teaching men. This does not create any social chaos in a society that views men and women as equals.
As for why men were allowed to have authority over women, and not the other way around, that is a complex question. It goes all the way back to the second half of Genesis 2 in which woman is created out of man (really, out of humankind), and especially to Genesis 3, in which the serpent tempts the woman, and she takes the lead in violating God’s commandment, carrying her husband with her.
This is a delicate and controversial subject. But you asked the question, so I will do my best to answer it even though my answer will likely anger some people who read it.
Basically, it has to do with both the symbolism and the nature of women and men in relation to one another.
To be very clear right from the start, both men and women have an equal capacity to love and to understand things. There are no significant differences in the brain capacity and function of female vs. male brains. Women have shown themselves capable of studying and excelling in all of the subjects men excel in, including the technical ones. And men are capable of great love and affection just as women are. So what I am about to say is not about women’s or men’s capacity to think, or to love, in comparison with one another.
However, there is a general difference in men and women as to how the heart (love) and head (understanding) work in relation to one another internally. Here is the short version:
Once again, this does not mean that men are smarter than women or that women are more loving than men. Rather, it means that men tend to focus on the head side, and lead with it, whereas women tend to focus on the heart side, and lead with it.
As a result of this difference in emphasis and approach, women generally symbolize the heart, or love, and men generally symbolize the head, or understanding. (Sometimes this symbolism is reversed, but that’s another subject.)
Now, here’s the issue:
When we lead with the heart, it is all well and good as long as the heart is good. But as soon as the heart begins turning toward evil, leading with the heart becomes seriously problematic. The heart wants what it wants, and it will go ahead and do it without restraint. This is as true when the heart is evil as when it’s good.
Unfortunately, among the early people represented by Adam and Eve, in whom the heart led, the heart began going bad. We see this symbolically in the story of the serpent tempting Eve (the heart), not Adam (the head), and Eve looking at the tree of knowledge of good and evil with longing, and placing it in the center of the Garden of Eden, when God had placed the tree of life in the center (See: “Which Tree is in the Middle of Your Garden?”)
Symbolically, this represents a time when people’s hearts began turning away from God, and instead toward external sensory input and pleasures (represented by the serpent, or snake, which crawls upon the ground). People started thinking that they could decide what is good and evil based on outward appearances and visual and sensory appeal, rather than based on what God says is good and evil. This is the meaning of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
When the human heart turned this way, and turned its back on God, humanity quickly became entirely corrupt, as covered in the next few chapters of Genesis leading up to the Flood. That’s because the heart, which had become evil, led, and the head simply went along with whatever the heart led it to do, just as Adam simply went along with what his wife led him to do in eating from the forbidden tree. This led to a situation in which “the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
In order to deal with that situation, God brought about the Flood to wipe out that rampant wickedness, and also commanded Noah to build an ark with floors and rooms, which represents making a separation between the head and the heart. On this, please see:
Noah’s Ark: A Sea Change in the Human Mind
Short version: Ever since the Flood, we humans have had the ability to want one thing and think another—an ability that we didn’t have before that time period in human spiritual history. Now, our heart can prompt us to do something that isn’t good, and our head can tell us, “No, we’re not going to do that, because it would be wrong and harmful.” This ability is necessary for us to be able to reform ourselves, and be reborn. Without this ability to separate the head from the heart, “every inclination of the thoughts of our hearts would be only evil continually.”
Symbolically, then, the man, representing the head, or understanding, had to take the lead, and the woman, representing the heart, or love, had to follow. Now instead of just doing what our heart wants to do, we have to discipline ourselves to do what the head says we should rightly do. And this situation has to prevail throughout most of our process of “regeneration,” or spiritual rebirth, until we have reformed our heart, and it once again wants the good things of loving God and loving our neighbor. At that point, but not before, the heart can once again take the lead, as it did in the Garden of Eden.
This is why symbolically woman had to be subject to man, and not the other way around. And that expressed itself in the near-universal reality of human culture ever since that man was dominant, and woman was submissive to man. The head had to rule the heart.
Today, I believe that we are finally arriving at a place in human spiritual history that the heart can begin to take the lead again. Saying why I think this is so would take much too long. But it is, I believe, a key element of the Second Coming that the Lord is now making upon our earth in human society. (See: “Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?”)
This, I believe, is why men and women can now begin to relate to one another as equals, departing from the previous paradigm of man ruling and woman submitting.
And no, I don’t think this means women will now begin to rule over men, as some men fear. Love, when it is good, does not want to rule, but to be in partnership with truth and understanding. For more on what all of this means for the relationship between men and women, please see these two articles:
All of this, I believe, is why for thousands of years now, men have been allowed to have authority over women, and not the other way around. Once again, I recognize that this may not sit well with some people. But this is my understanding of the answer to your question. And once again, I believe that we are now moving into an entirely new era of human history in which it is no longer necessary for man to rule over woman.
As for Paul’s view of the relationship between men and women being morally considerable, I would say that it was quite advanced for its time, but is now largely superseded because the culture has moved forward in the very direction that Paul was pushing it to move. There are still some old-fashioned societies and relationships in which Paul’s advice to men and women will be helpful. But for societies and relationships that have moved beyond the unequal, hierarchical structures of Paul’s day, much of what he said can be adhered to in spirit rather than to the letter. And the spirit of what he said is for us to love one another as God has loved us (John 13:34–35; 15:12).
In this modern world, there is “society” that consists of a large number of local places conforming to a number of rules and standards.
But in Heaven, is each community independent of each other, in that one community doesn’t have to follow the standards of another? In other words, is Heaven truly more free and less conformist than the modern world?
Hi K,
It’s more complex than that. Communities in heaven are interdependent with one another, just as they are here. However, just as in the spiritual world people are closer to or farther from each other based on similarity and difference of character, so whole communities are closer to or farther away from each other based on the collective similarity and difference of community character. So even though the communities are not independent of one another, but interdependent upon one another, there is complete freedom in each community for the people who live there to fully express their individual character in the way they live.
This type of freedom is a key element of what makes heaven heaven. After all, the very reason God created each one of us different, and each community of people different, is that each has a unique character and contribution to make to the whole. To impose any kind of conformity would be to work against the very design of heaven.
What about people who march to a different drummer than anyone else? These people can still live their own unique life and lifestyle, which they will generally do, not in a city or town, but way out in what we on earth would call the rural areas. There, no one else is around to impinge upon their idiosyncratic thoughts, feelings, and lifestyle.
Another way of saying this is that there are no rules and standards external to the people of any community in heaven, or of those who live alone (usually with their partner in marriage). The rules and standards in any community are expressions of the character of the people who live there. They are not imposed on the people from the outside, nor do they constrict the people and prevent them from freely expressing themselves in the way they live. Rather, the rules and standards are themselves expressions of the character of the people who live there, and of the principles they live by based on their own internal character and motivation.
Women are meant to nurture, men are meant to serve and protect, right?
In romantic relationships, women are to nurture their boyfriends or husbands, and men are to protect and serve their girlfriends or wives, right?
Hi World Questioner,
That is a common pattern, but it is not a hard-and-fast rule.
Read the “Ode to a Woman of Strength” in Proverbs 31:10–31. The woman being praised is doing far more than nurturing her husband. In fact, there is not a word about her loving or nurturing her husband in the entire piece. She is managing the household servants, engaging in business, buying property, planting crops, teaching wisdom and kindness, and so on. Many of the things she does are activities that Christian conservatives consider to be “men’s roles.”
Although the roles you mention have become common male and female roles in various cultures, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with them for men and women who willingly fulfill these roles, there is really very little support for those roles in the Bible itself.
Maybe that’s not all what I meant. But women are to nurture their children, and men are to protect them.
Women as the givers of life, and men as the takers of life…
Hi World Questioner,
As I said elsewhere, women are not givers of life. They are nurturers of life. Both men and women give life through the meeting of their egg and sperm. But really it is only God who gives life.
And though men do kill more than women, women do also kill.
So, no, I don’t agree with that characterization of women and men.
The three main Hindu gods are Brahma (creator), Vishnu (protector), and Shiva (destroyer). I would think of a creator as female, and a protector and destroyer as male.
Hi World Questioner,
Brahma and Vishnu can be mapped onto qualities of the Christian God. But Vishnu, or the destroyer, would generally be seen as a quality and function of evil rather than of good, and therefore of hell rather than God and heaven.
However, for people who are bent on evil, God may appear to be a destroying force, since the love, wisdom, goodness, and truth that is God will dispel evil and falsity when they touch it. So from the perspective of evil, God could be seen as a destroyer. But what God is really destroying is destruction itself, which is not really destroying things, but repairing and saving them.
I also would not identify destruction as a specifically male thing. Females can also be very destructive, though usually in more psychological and less physical ways than destructive males. Also, females of various species, including humans, are usually very protective of their young, in some cases putting their lives in danger to protect their young. I would therefore not peg protection as an essentially male attribute. Males and females also share in creation. So . . . I would not agree with your gender identifications of the primary Buddhist gods.
Protector as neuter?
Hi World Questioner,
There is both a male protective instinct and a female protective instinct. It doesn’t have to be neuter.
Silly me.
I meant of thinking of Brahma the creator as female, Vishnu the protector-maintainer as genderless, bigender, nonbinary, or neuter, and Shiva the destroyer as male.
Wait! Doesn’t Hinduism mention consorts/wifes of the gods of the trimurti?
I forgot to mention, do Hindus believe Vishnu to be the one who keeps everything in balancer, including the dual forces of Brahma and Shiva? Kind of reminds me of the Father, Son, and Daughter of Mortis in Star Wars the Clone Wars, and the Candle-maker, Xibalba, and La Muerte in the Book of Life, a day-of-the-dead movie by Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Guitierrez (if I spelled it right).
Hi World Questioner,
It would probably be best to ask a Hindu these questions. Maybe a Hindu who is a Star Wars buff. 😀
Women as the givers of life, men as the protectors of life… Men are the protectors of life, but they can also take lives that are not worthy…However I explain it. Can you respond to my other comments from a week or more ago?
Hi World Questioner,
Women don’t really give life. They nurture life.
A new human life starts when a sperm fertilizes an egg. This means that both the man and the woman are “givers of life.” (But really, only God gives life.)
What women do is nurture that life within themselves until it has developed enough to live outside the womb, and then continue to nurture it until it can live on its own.
Women don’t do this only physically. They also do it emotionally, intellectually, and even spiritually by loving their children, guiding and correcting them, and teaching them many things about how to live as a human being both on this earth and in the spiritual world (if they have spiritual awareness and knowledge).
Men also do this for their children. So although women usually are the primary caregivers for children, men also participate in it. Growing up without a father is not a good thing.
And yes, men protect their wives and children, not just individually for their own family, but also collectively, such as by serving as police or firefighters or soldiers that protect the community and the country from criminals, threats, and invaders. But although men are the primary protectors, women also serve in protective roles. A much smaller number of women serve as actual police or firefighters or soldiers. But on an individual level, if some person or animal attacks one of her children, a woman will protect her child if she is able, even to the point of getting physically injured or killed in the process.
What I’m saying is that although there are generalized roles for men and for women, men and women also participate and assist one another in these roles. It’s not some absolute division between men and women. Rather, men and women work together, hand-in-hand, to accomplish our common goals as human beings. Yes, men and women are different. This is not a division between men and women. It means that each contributes something unique to the work of the other, and to the common good of the family, community, and country.
Is God neuter or genderless?
I have an idea of a god that has a masculine side and a feminine side, like modalism but, instead of three modes the father, son, and spirit, it’s two sides masculine and feminine. The feminine side gives life, is kind, nurtures her creation, lavishes her love towards all who do good, has compassion, mercy, and grace, while the masculine side is the judge that gives the law, upholds justice, protects the created order, hates evil, and is angry at and brings judgement to the evildoers. The feminine ruling Heaven and the masculine ruling Hell…
That’s just my imagination. Nothing to do with the Christian God, but something that might be good for a fictional story, like a fantasy or superhero show. What I presented is not ditheism, just like modalism is not tritheism.
Hi World Questioner,
God is not neuter or genderless. But God is also not a man or a woman in the ordinary physical sense.
Male and female, and their relationship with one another, ultimately come from the relationship between love and wisdom in God. Love is the substance of God. Wisdom is the form of God. Although traditionally love is the female characteristic and wisdom the male characteristic, at that level it is the reverse. The third “essential component” (not mode) of God is power, which consists of God’s words and actions. This flows from love through wisdom.
This forms the original trine in God that existed from eternity, which is reflected in the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that came into being in time. These are not “Persons,” nor are they “modes” of God. They are more like parts of God, but not in a mechanical sense. They are parts of God in the same way that our soul, body, and actions are parts of us. These aren’t parts that can be put together like Legos. They are different elements that together make us who and what we are. They cannot be separated from one another, and without any one of them, we cannot exist as a human being. Nor, on God’s level, would God be God if any one of these were missing. That is why in Latin Swedenborg calls them three essentialia literally “essentials,” of God.
Back to the gender question, male and female and their relationship with one another are expressions of the relationship between love and wisdom in God, which are the core elements of God’s being. The children that are born of the union of man and woman are reflections of the power of God going out, meaning God’s words and actions. In this way also, then, “in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
On what post of yours should I comment about the Buddhist concept of Anatta, or non-self? Buddhism teaches that the Self is an illusion.
Hi World Questioner,
Perhaps this one would be the closest:
Containers for God
But read it before commenting on it.
Also, maybe men don’t need to be nurtured by their partners as much, because they are grown. They still need to protect both their partners and children, and the women must nurture the children.
Could I say it in a better way.
Hi World Questioner,
I would say that men need to be loved by their partners.
A male as ruler of hell, and a female as ruler of Heaven…
Have you ever read SporeWiki. The demonic Xhodocto that rule hell and whatever is the heavenly counterpart (can’t remember the name) that rule Heaven. The leaders of both are male, and these are fictional concepts. But I gave my own concept above.
Hi World Questioner,
Neither male nor female is any more heavenly or hellish than the other. Both men and women can equally go to heaven, and both men and women can equally go to hell.
The only ruler of both heaven and hell is God. No angel or heavenly being wants to rule heaven, and no demon or evil spirit can rule hell. Only God has the power to rule both heaven and hell.
I was silly. But what I’m talking about is that men ought to be more like Elijah, and women more like Elisha. Elijah confronted kings, while Elisha advised kings. Elijah brought judgement, and Elisha brought compassion.
Anyway, men ought to be more like Kerchak from Tarzan, while women ought to be more like Kala.
However, every person is different. Diversity is good.
The goddess gave life, but the male God can take it away… I don’t want to be silly. In the human race, most animals, and some other living things, both male and female are required to make new life.
The Book of Life by Jorge Guitierrez (if I spelled it correctly) and Guillermo Del Toro is a fictional movie, but Xibalba and La Muerte is an example of male bringing judgement and female bringing compassion, or however you say it.
Justice and fairness as masculine, harmony and forgiveness as the feminine.
Then again, everyone is different.
Hi World Questioner,
These ideas do seem closer to what male and female are all about.
I wasn’t serious about that, but I feel ashamed or embarrassed. Thinking of hell as masculine and heaven as feminine.
But for another thing. We tend to think of masculine as hard and feminine as soft. Just as we think of anger as hard and sadness as soft.
Hi World Questioner,
There’s no shame in exploring various ideas and angles. Only in clinging to ones that are clearly not true.
Yes, even physically men’s bodies are harder, and women’s bodies are softer—although that’s a generalization, not an absolute. Similarly, men are more prone to anger, and women are more prone to depression, but that’s also a generalization.
Underneath both anger and sadness is the feeling of having our loves and desires blocked (see the section titled “What is anger?” in the article “What is the Wrath of God? Why was the Old Testament God so Angry, yet Jesus was so Peaceful?”). In men this is more likely to come out as anger, whereas in women it is more likely to come out as sadness. But of course, women also get angry, and men also get depressed.
Recently (or maybe not so recently), radical feminists have been claiming that men are all stupid, perverted, and cannot lead or socialize well. Hopefully such claims are false, as God making an entire sex utterly inferior to the other would not be good.
Hi K,
Yes, those claims are false.
Perhaps they are “claims.” But they’re more like emotional reactions. There is no factual evidence to support them. Just because some men are stupid, perverted, and cannot lead or socialize well, that doesn’t mean this is true of all men. Far from it.
This view of men is a reaction to the perception that women have been oppressed and abused by men throughout human history. This is also mostly false. It is true that women were relegated to secondary social status in almost every human society since the Fall of Humankind. It is also true that there has been (and still is) abuse of women. Human evil is real. But women have also been (and still are) highly valued, if for no other reason than that they are the bearers of children, without whom neither an individual man’s lineage nor the species as a whole could continue.
Men can easily father many children very rapidly. Women take at least a year and a half, and probably more like two or three years on average, to produce a single child. Women are therefore the bottleneck and the scarce commodity in the continuation of the human race. Hence their great value to men and to society.
This is why, for example, throughout history, and even to this day, men have done the vast bulk of the dangerous jobs and the fighting, whereas women have been protected and sheltered from war and danger as much as possible. The continuation of the clan, nation, and species depends upon this.
Of course, there’s much more to it than reproduction. Women are also the “relational” ones that hold families and clans together socially and emotionally, even as men sit in the positions of titular power.
Have women been oppressed and abused by men? Yes. But men have also been oppressed and abused by men, and to a lesser extent by women. Pitting one against the other accomplishes nothing good. Both are critically needed for any society to continue and to function.
Eventually the pendulum will swing back the other way, and men will be valued as men in academia and in popular culture once again. Meanwhile, the reactionaries are having their moment. It will not last forever.
One specific claim is that in the Bible women are oppressed and abused by men, and are mere slaves of men. This is false. Women play key roles in the Bible that change the course of the biblical narrative and of the Hebrew nation. See:
Is the Bible a Book about Men? What about Women?
Another claim I heard is that conservative men have been scapegoating women for all the world ills for decades now. I think such a claim is also false, as I personally never heard of that before I heard that claim.
(Reminds me of how a number of Christians may blame Eve for the ills of the world.)
Hi K,
I wouldn’t say “conservative men.” I’d say “red-pilled men.” They’re the ones who blame women for everything. See my series on the red pill, starting with:
The Red Pill Movement (MRA): Men Waking Up as Victims
And yes, some “Christians” want to blame Eve for the ills of the world—even though Adam went along with it. But mostly, that’s part of their argument that men, not women, should run the world.
All those biological advantages of women are highly exaggerated. Gender studies are biased towards women and against men. They only cover the advantages of women and weaknesses of men, they don’t give due weight to the strengths of men. Check out https://genderlovesexuality.wordpress.com/2023/04/01/gender-studies-are-biased/ and https://wqcontroversialthoughts.wordpress.com/2021/10/02/women-are-not-the-stronger-sex/
Why does no one talk about using eugenics to strengthen men so that they are on par with women?
An alternative to killing the weak, an alternative to abortion and forbidding weak people from having offspring, would be sperm selection. Don’t allow the unfavorable sperm to fertilize the egg. Select the favorable sperm to fertilize the egg. No, this is not a chance for racism. We don’t want to eliminate traits of different races that are not harmful, whether it is black, brown, blonde, or red hair, or whether it is blue, green, gray brown, hazel, or amber eyes, or whether it is straight, wavy, curly, or kinky hair, or whether it is epicanthic folds or shape and fullness of lips, or body portions, etc. We don’t need to select neutral traits like those. So I understand the dangers of sperm selection, how it would allow people to eliminate certain outward traits.
What about genetic modification? Transferring genes from person to person, much like the horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance genes in bacteria, but not in the same mechanism?
Adding X-linked genes to the Y-chromosome, such as normal color vision and no-hemophelia?
I’m talking gene addition and substitution.
I don’t like to be off-topic?
Hi World Questioner,
Certainly the authors whose articles you link to in your posts have an ax to grind. They’re trying to “even the score” by emphasizing the strengths of women—which, in their accounting, are in the areas of endurance and longevity. The endurance part I think is a bit overrated. But women do have an advantage in longevity.
Of course, one of the major reasons for women’s longevity advantage is something one of the articles mentions without elaborating on it: men do most of the risky and dangerous jobs, whereas most women do safer and less dangerous jobs. Far more men than women are injured and die on the job.
From an evolutionary perspective, while both men and women are necessary for reproduction, an individual woman is more valuable than an individual man. When it comes to reproduction, women are the bottleneck. It takes each woman nine months of gestation, and another year or two of nursing, to produce each child. Men, by contrast, can quickly and easily father many children. This means that individual men are not particularly valuable for the continuation of the species, but individual women are highly valuable.
This, I believe, is one of the reasons women have the health and longevity advantage. In order to produce children, they must survive to adulthood and remain healthy enough to bear multiple children. Every woman lost before or during the childbearing years has a direct effect upon the success of a family or clan in reproducing itself. Meanwhile, even if nine tenths of the men were wiped out, the remaining ten percent could impregnate all the women, and the clan’s lineage would continue.
The articles do admit that when it comes to physical strength, men are stronger than women on average. Obviously some women are stronger than some men. But the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women, and the average man is stronger than the average woman. Significantly stronger. That’s why there are separate women’s and men’s sports. The greater strength of the male relates to his roles as primary hunter and primary protector of the family or clan.
The main point is that women and men are different, but mutually complementary to each other. Where women are weaker, men are stronger. Where men are weaker, women are stronger. People who have an ideological ax to grind can argue all day about which is “the stronger sex.” It’s a stupid argument.
Were my words about sperm selection and gene addition and substitution off-topic? Is that why you didn’t respond to them?
Hi World Questioner,
I’m not a fan of eugenics. We understand so little of how our biology works from a systemic perspective. Any tinkering we do with it is more likely to make things worse than better. Those unknown unknowns can really bite you in the butt.
Continuing from the discussion started here.
Thank you for your response, it has been very informative, and I appreciate that you took the time and effort to write it. Thank you also for clearing up my misconception regarding ruling loves and conjugial love, I will concede that I was mostly mistaken there. To make things clear, what I will discuss in this post are if any essential psychological, and by extent spiritual differences exist between men and women, at least ones that we can perceive, and whether or not these differences are beneficial.
This is going to be a very long comment as well, and I’ve taken a lot of time to word everything carefully to avoid any misunderstanding. I do want to clarify a few things before I get into the root of the issue though.
I’ve been planning to read Marriage Love for quite some time, it has been on my backlog of books to read for, honestly, an all too long time at this point, as I’ve had to prioritize reading for my studies over subjects that I am otherwise interested in on the side. I’m aware of the now rather sketchy parts of it, for instance I recall from having skimmed it a bit that Swedenborg says, and correct me if I’m misinterpreting things, that men are objectively ugly and that women can’t learn unless through their husbands, claims which I assume are to be taken with a grain of salt today like many other claims that Swedenborg has made. Either way, I’ll definitely read it when I have the chance, but I decided to make do with what you’ve already told me for now.
I’ll also clarify that I was attracted to women similar to me since long before I discovered Swedenborg, I just didn’t think about it and the overall topic of gender nearly as much before that, though my interpretation of his ideas more or less put it into words for me that led me to where I am now. I also don’t believe that I am obligated, by reason or otherwise, to be attracted to women like this, but I have never had any interest in dating a predominantly feminine woman, at least because of her femininity specifically. In the past if I was ever attracted romantically to someone more feminine, it was always the parts which I could relate with that I was most attracted to, which more often than not would be what we consider masculine, and of course there are feminine traits that I am drawn to as well, but these are also ones that I myself already have. I assume this is largely because I’ve actually experienced being friends with girls in the same way I was friends with other boys a handful of times since I was very young, and I’ll talk more about that later, but I honestly can’t imagine being in a romantic relationship with a woman that I am not friends with in this way. That’s of course not to say that others can’t enjoy a relationship that isn’t like that, but personally, I don’t find any appeal in the prospect at all. It isn’t exactly fun not being able to find a woman who’s life and personality I can relate to, like I can with my male friends.
Lastly, I don’t want all people to be the same, much the opposite in fact. If our differences are what strengthens us as a society, which I agree with you on, then I don’t see why this vast array of differences should be inherently polarized between men and women by divine design, when it would be much more rational if they were designed to be able to manifest in different levels among different people according to what they freely will. I think this is possible, and I’ll elaborate on this more as we go on. But don’t get me wrong, I’m obviously not trying to say that just because one scenario is preferable to the other, then that scenario must be true. In the end, whatever the underlying reality says, I think we have to accept it, but I’d be quite mystified if the situation we have now is what God intended.
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So, to begin, I can’t say that I am convinced by the reasons you have given for any innate, essential psychological difference between men and women as a whole, at least on a spiritual level. I’m not convinced either that the stark difference we see in this regard is of any benefit either. Let’s start with what you said here, and further in the example you gave with SpaceX, that women are more practically inclined where as men are more inclined towards ideas and theoretical matters.
But one way I’ve heard it expressed is that men plant ideas in women’s minds, and women nurture and develop those ideas into practical realities, in exact correspondence with a man impregnating a woman with his “seed,” and the woman producing a whole new baby out of it. She, of course, adds her own “seed” to it as well.
The main idea is that it’s not just physically that men and women complement each other in essential ways in producing something new that neither one could produce by him- or herself. This is true psychologically (which is the same as spiritually) as well. Each contributes something to the relationship that the other cannot contribute, and that together produce spiritual “offspring.”
I’ve actually gotten the opposite impression in my life, but regardless, I don’t see how this translates to reality. I’ve never noticed much of any significant sex difference in these regards, and I wasn’t able to find any research done on the subject either, let alone any that indicates that the supposed difference is innate. In fact, most people I know and meet, regardless if they are male or female, seem to be much more inclined towards practical matters than theoretical, idea-oriented ones. So by that alone I’m not sure why I should believe that this is the divider we are looking for.
To elaborate further, if you gather enough men in a room, I don’t see why you wouldn’t eventually find every supposedly feminine psychological trait in that room, and vice versa for women, at least ones that have a visible effect on behavior and cognition. But no matter how many males you gather in one room, you will never find one that can produce an egg cell, and I can’t think of any psychological trait that serves as the spiritual equivalent of that, in that it serves the same purpose on a higher level, and can thus only be found in males or females respectively. If there is one, then I think that would be a very good candidate for the innate, essential difference we are looking for, but I highly doubt that the theoretical/practical distinction brought up here is it, because it isn’t much of a challenge, in my experience at least, to find theoretical women, and most certainly not practical men, whereas we will never find a woman who can produce sperm cells or a man who can produce egg cells. Even if we were to find just one exception to this rule, then the whole system would fall apart. I find it somewhat puzzling as to how you accept the possibility (though in my view it should be obvious, most successful corporate executives are male after all) that a man could have done the same job just as well of running SpaceX, but also that this distinction is tied to mutually exclusive sexual reproductive function.
There also isn’t anything I’m aware of that would prevent someone from being inclined to both theoretical and practical matters at the same time, and sure, becoming more or less equally skilled at both is probably hard for most, but I doubt it’s impossible, so I don’t understand how difference in this regard is mutually exclusive in the way male and female reproductive systems are. One could of course say that just because one can be skilled at both, that doesn’t mean one enjoys doing both, which I agree is what really matters on the spiritual level. But the vast majority of people probably already have interest in both to at least some degree, even if at least very small, so I still don’t see how the comparison holds. Again, you won’t ever find anyone who can produce both sperm and egg cells. If one part in a relationship likes theoretical matters and one practical matters, that’s all well and good, and if they don’t have much of any interest in the other area, that’s fine too, and it could very well serve as a complementary aspect of a relationship in this regard. But what reason do we have to assume that this is universal to heterosexual relationships in any way, rather than one of many ways in which two people’s differences can complement each other?
Likewise, if I lack some mental quality that would be useful to me, my first instinct would be to learn to harness that, rather than to rely on a partner to make up for it, much less seek a partner out for that purpose. Until I have evidence that any psychological weakness is innate to me, then I have no reason to not try and work on them within myself. I will admit that I am most definitely on the theoretical side here, but I’m sure that I’d be much happier with a woman who is also inclined towards theoretical matters simply because we would both be motivated by the same love for it. Even if it were to turn out that we are both inherently bad at practical matters and just disliked them in general, then obviously that wouldn’t call for a breakup or a divorce, because if we needed someone to fill in for that then we’d have friends and family who would be glad to help out anyway.
What I’m saying here is, regardless of who one ends up with, two people obviously can’t complement each other in every single way one can think of, there will always be things that both will need help with. The whole theoretical/practical distinction is really just one of many things that can potentially serve as a complementary difference in a relationship, but I don’t see how it is unique in any regard. In fact the vast majority of things that we even need to live in order to actually have a relationship in the first place is in the responsibility of others, like food and proper infrastructure as a physical example, as well as friends, family, and other people’s perspectives in the spiritual sense. In short, I think common loves in general seem more crucial here than differences, even if those differences would have some kind of benefit in certain situations. This is not to say that a couple who’s parts like different things are bad, but I think the importance of those differences seems overstated.
It of course goes without saying that when it comes to how we organize a society, a business, or any kind of socioeconomic structure, we obviously need some people who specialize at one thing and some that specialize in others in order to maximize the efficiency of what we are trying to achieve. But the top priority of a romantic relationship, or any other kind of non-economic relationship like families or friendships, obviously isn’t to just efficiently make material ends meet, it’s based in mutual love of one kind or another, I’m sure we both agree on that. While it can certainly help if both partners specialize in different things depending on what their common goals as a couple are to meet spiritual needs, I think my point still stands, simply because two partners don’t live in a vacuum where all they can depend on are each other. That, and the fact that I don’t see any reason for why self-improvement in this regard is impossible.
I’ll move on from this distinction in particular into the more general differences you’ve mentioned now, though most of my previous points I think count here as well.
If men and women’s minds actually were fundamentally different to the point where one needed the other to make up for one’s weaknesses, then I could see why the supposedly inherent differences you have mentioned would be complementary here, but I do not see why this kind of state would be necessary in any way, and so I highly doubt that this is what God had intended for us if he wants what is best for us. Again, I’m not trying to say that everyone should be the same, I’ll elaborate more on this later.
To demonstrate my point, let’s imagine that we have a world where men have legs but no arms, and women have arms but no legs, or that they can’t use these body parts nearly as effectively as the other. It goes without saying that it would be a massive improvement for these people’s situation if they were to help each other out with what the other half lacks, especially if such things were to manifest as close pairs who love to help each other with what the other cannot handle. But the thing is, we know that these people would be better off having both functioning arms and legs, and I don’t think anyone would say that their relationship is less meaningful just because they are now able to do what the other partner can. In a spiritual sense, I think we have improved the situation for them remarkably, because they can now be of service to one another in countless more ways than before, and because it would also mean that they can now focus less on immediate needs from circumstances out of their control, and more on what they actually want on a higher level.
If one was convinced that men and women could not use both arms and legs effectively, and thus had to rely on each other for those tasks, I can see why one would think this is a good scenario, because it creates the conditions to form a relationship where one complements the other for the better. But I don’t think we live in that world, and if we do, then I don’t see anything to be happy about given that the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits. I don’t see how innate polarized differences in psychology between the sexes, ones that we need both of in one way or another, are that different from this scenario. I’m of course also not talking about physical reproductive biology here, I’m not trying to argue that humanity would be better off as hermaphrodites, rather I’m alluding to mental characteristics. Like I said earlier, you won’t ever find a person who can produce both sperm and egg cells, there are no exceptions in this regard like there are with the psychological traits we have talked about.
Don’t get me wrong, I would be more than happy to make up for whatever a partner lacks if need be. If I had a partner who was handicapped, for example, I would very much enjoy helping her with whatever she needed my help for, but it wouldn’t take anything away from the relationship if she were to overcome her condition, and I wouldn’t be any less happy to be with her because of it.
I of course don’t think that it would be better if everyone had the exact same level of inclination towards supposedly masculine or feminine matters, we do need different levels of skill and interest in these areas in different people as I’ve mentioned, just like how we need people who mainly focus on arm-related tasks and some on leg-related tasks, and everything that comes in-between. But that’s the whole point I’m trying to make, as I’ve talked about earlier that these differences being polarized actually seems more counterproductive than beneficial. However, if one was capable to have enough proficiency in either matters to be able to have this complementary aspect within ourselves, like how we use both our arms and our legs but in a mental sense, then I don’t see why that’s not something to be desired, and I don’t see why that is impossible. Going back to my analogy, if one wants to focus their life on arm-related activities, then they’re obviously going to be held back if their legs don’t work well enough for them to use them properly. Furthermore, if all of this is about what one desires, then what’s free about us being designed to innately prefer one way of doing things over another, rather than decide for ourselves what we care about, like we do with everything else?
This all likely depends on what determines the nature of one’s ruling love in the first place and how a partner would fit into that, I’m not saying that one size fits all, but if one truly desires to have what the opposite sex supposedly has in their lives, then I don’t see why it’s impossible for them to work on it in themselves, and why this wouldn’t be of benefit. I of course don’t doubt that many are happy in relationships where both have stark differences that compensate for the weaknesses in the other, but again, one size doesn’t fit all.
Overall, this is the crux of the problem I have with the complementarian ideal. If one takes a look at themselves, what evidence do they have that whatever beneficial mental qualities they desire in the opposite sex is off limits for them to cultivate in themselves, at least sufficiently to not have to rely on someone else for them? Apologies if I sound harsh, but I honestly find this whole attitude quite detrimental to personal development, because it hinders one from working on areas in oneself that would be of real benefit, despite the fact that there is no proof that one cannot work on these things in oneself. I don’t believe that we are all blank slates that are perfectible in our abilities and cognition, but I think most people take the weaknesses they have for granted, often out of a sense of laziness, or a flawed attachment to negative traits that they have internalized into their personal identity. If men think that they lack emotional perspective and practical inclination, and if women think that they lack logical perspective and theoretical inclination, and they can’t do anything about it, then that pretty obviously creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that just makes the whole gap even larger, and what is the benefit in that?
There is value in both perspectives, but I think we agree that people need both of them in one way or another, and I don’t see why it is impossible to have both perspectives within oneself without having to rely on a partner for the other, and certainly not why it needs to be separated between men and women specifically.
Moving on, I think it will be helpful to offer some of my own perspectives here, because I suspect that the crux of why we see so differently on this issue might very well be rooted in very different life experiences that have led us to very different intuitions about the world.
When it comes to the whole things/logic/systems vs people/emotions/empathy dichotomy that often gets talked about when gender differences are brought up, I really can’t say I relate to it when it comes to my own mind. I’ve always found both areas interesting, and I can’t say that I have had any difficulty with one over the other in the long term, at least to the extent that it is a fatal flaw that I have to eternally rely on a partner to make up for. So I don’t see how a woman’s mind as you have described it would be complementary to my own, on the basis of her mind having something innately feminine that I as a man cannot have without her, and vice versa. If she enjoys certain things that I don’t care much for but which still serve the same ruling love, then I don’t mind, but I don’t see why that would necessarily be thanks to her being a woman.
The ways that you describe how masculine and feminine behavior complement each other in regards to logic and emotion are also both ways that I behave in my own life, and I personally would be happier to use both alongside one another with a partner whenever the situation would call for it, rather than eternally rely on her for one over the other. I still present myself in a masculine way, and most of my interests that I enjoy partaking in and socializing around are what we’d call masculine, but in terms of general cognition as you have described it, I don’t really seem to belong to one end or the other in most cases.
But I think our different perspectives here really come to light in regards to how we view friendships between men and women, which I’ll focus on here. When you say that men and women can’t be friends like they are friends with those of the same sex, or even want to be in the first place, I think it really speaks volumes as to how different our experiences of the world have been. When I was younger, I was friends with several girls in the same way I was friends with other boys, and one of them was one of the best friends I could say I ever even had. Really, what drawback is there to close platonic relations between men and women, like the ones we commonly see among people within their own sex, bad enough to the point that God thought it was of no loss to design it in such a way as to make it impossible?
While it is somewhat uncommon, I do see friend groups every now and then consisting of both men and women, some of my friends are even in these and they don’t generally seem very different from the ones I am in. They do activities together regularly that they enjoy, albeit usually more gender-neutral ones like partying, though common gender-typical activities do intersect sometimes. One of my friends for instance usually talks a lot about relationships and emotional matters with the women he knows, but he also knows a few women that he likes to do more masculine things with like playing video games. In relation to some future points I will make, I’ve noticed that he in particular has taken after many “feminine” behaviors from his female friends, in that he often offers to talk about things like emotions or issues in life with me and our other friends, not from a theoretical or intellectual angle, but for its own sake, so this is clearly not a perspective that is cut off from him on the basis of him being a man, and I doubt it would just go away if he stopped being friends with women altogether.
Most guys I know also wouldn’t object to women being involved in the activities they do with their male friends on the basis that they are women, or even see it as anything but positive if they enjoy partaking in them as much as they themselves do. Some do have prejudices about behavior or fear of sexual tensions tearing the group apart, but I highly doubt even the ones I know who are like this would care if, for example, a lesbian or asexual woman similar in character to them were part of their groups. Obviously, there are a lot of men who really do want to keep women out of their activities on the sole basis of them being women, and I assume to a lesser extent that there are women who want to keep men out of their shared activities as well, but I think we can both call these kinds of people very immature at the least. On the same topic, you may be surprised as to how many men will just fall head over heels for a woman if they find out she likes the same activities and interests they and their friends share, especially if there is a lack of women involved in said activities from the start. I’m not sure if I can say the same for most women or for older generations, but this is absolutely a common thing in the men of my own generation that I see quite often.
I don’t know what my ruling love is, nobody but God does according to Swedenborg if I recall, but I would be surprised if there is a part of it that wants to be with someone who’s love leads them towards very different things from how I live my life, seeing as how I am generally not drawn towards femininity in a partner on a raw emotional level. I suppose whoever does share that ruling love would likely have similar interests and hobbies as me, and come to similar views as me regarding personal development and, by extent to that, human relationships, topics which have shaped the views that I have on this issue, but I can’t say for sure.
What you wrote here comes to mind:
Having said that, just as physical attraction to the opposite sex can bring two people together, so can having common interests. One of my suggestions for people who long to meet a partner in life is to pursue the things you love, ideally in the public sphere, and this will tend to bring you together with people who have a mindset similar to yours. Ruling loves commonly do direct people toward common interests in life.
I’m not sure if I misunderstood you, but the problem here should be obvious. We know that men and women generally have differing interests, you generally don’t find that many women who are, as you’ve said, passionate about things like cars (unless you happen to live where I live) or certain sports, and not too many men who are passionate about common parenting issues or fashion. But it’s not exactly uncommon for men and women to care about interests like these a lot, and if they are passionate about these subjects then they probably like to socialize around them as well. Even if a heterosexual person of the opposite sex does show up in circles where the opposite sex is overrepresented, you can bet that they won’t be available for very long, speaking from experience. So unless you are passionate about more gender-neutral interests, or better yet, interests more common with the opposite sex, then finding someone through this method will be very hard, if not borderline impossible.
I understand that not everyone is as passionate about their hobbies and interests as one might be about things like church work, like in your case. In those cases, shared interests and hobbies might not matter that much, so I think I see what you mean when it comes to whether or not interests are that important in a relationship. But as said, the thing is, one can be just as passionate about many different things on the same level, including things like sports or fashion. I’ve noticed that I have interests that I enjoy talking about a lot and socializing around, and ones that I don’t really care as much about, but still enjoy partaking in on the side. I love talking about things like technology, game development, big theoretical ideas, and socioeconomic issues to name a few, and I would hate to be separated from these interests, and I highly doubt that I would be happy with someone who I don’t share at least a few of those kinds of interests with. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t really care if a prospective partner wasn’t as into homesteading or the same music genres as I am, though I’d obviously consider it a bonus if she were, and it wouldn’t bother me much if I found other things to do in life. Of course, I can talk to people about things other than my interests and form connections with them, but in a lifelong partnership, I would definitely not be very happy if we didn’t share the interests and activities that we care about partaking in and talking about the most, because at its core, it has to do with how we wish to live our lives in the first place.
Imagine someone who is interested in something like, for example, engineering, who works with it and loves his work, and is devoting much of his life towards it. Now imagine what would happen if you take the means to pursue that interest away, or the means to socialize around it. If that person would be deeply troubled by this, then I don’t see how their interest in that is just an external thing that can just be discarded in the face of everything else. Whether or not this person will desire a partner who also shares the same love for engineering, that probably depends on, as you say, their ruling love, but I’d personally suspect that most such cases be happier with someone like that, not to say that they would necessarily be unhappy in any other case. Furthermore, imagine if barely anyone of the opposite sex cared about church work, or cared about it in ways that you don’t find appealing to engage in yourself or to talk about, if any. That’s kind of the situation I and many other men seem to find ourselves in, and in such a case, men and women’s differing interests are definitely a roadblock to forming romantic relationships, and most closer relationships on the whole.
When it comes to goals and core values, I agree that they absolutely matter the most, I’m not discounting them, but just because I share them with someone, that doesn’t mean I will necessarily enjoy her company to the point where I want to spend my life with her. The same is of course true for interests, hobbies, and other activities one enjoys. But even in terms of values, I’ve always had the impression that men and women seem to generally differ a lot on a group level. Having looked up some of the research into this topic, I’ve pretty much only found data that confirms this. Men also tend to be more likely to have values that line up with principles of competition, while women tend to be more likely to have values in line with principles of cooperation. The potential resulting conflicts from these differing values I find more than clear in everyday life, especially in today’s political climate, even if said conflict is not innate between men and women based on their psychology, which I don’t claim it is. As you have said, much of this conflict is because of people pitting one sex against the other, but I think most of it is because of the lack of understanding between them and a refusal to integrate the other’s perspective into one’s own, which I will talk about soon.
It’s been hard to even find women who do have similar goals as me. The clearest goal that I can identify in myself right now, though it’s of course not my only one, is to build some kind of theoretical system for reliably interpreting the world with, which is in large part for why I’m having this discussion. I’d love to be with someone who is the same as me in this regard, so if what you said about men and women in regards to that topic in particular is true, if I’ve interpreted it correctly, then things really aren’t looking good for me.
To clarify my point further, the fact that men and women grow up differently, live differently, and subsequently think differently, also makes them see the world differently in ways that affect their values, and if one does not internalize both views, hinders cooperation between them, as well as hindering one’s own psychological development. It’s good that people have a wide array of different views on things, but I think mainly because it provides perspective beyond one’s own, ones that one can integrate into one’s own view to get a more truthful picture that leads to personal development. That’s the point I’m trying to make, that one can have multiple different perspectives in their minds and take them into account with reason, but if we are more or less locked into one over another based on our sex, then I don’t see how it’s not counterproductive in a spiritual sense.
Men and women can obviously understand each other even in the situation we find ourselves in today, but it’s definitely not the norm. It’s not hard at all to find men who are clueless as to how women think and act, and vice versa, entire bestselling books have been published about it. I don’t think that this is because of any evil tendencies, and this divide obviously doesn’t have to lead to such evil tendencies, but it certainly seems to make spiritual growth, of both the individual and society as a whole, much harder. If men and women did listen to each other more and tried to understand each other’s differing views, then this would of course be less of a problem, but if we are so inherently different from each other to the point where we cannot have both views within us, that just becomes unnecessarily harder than it has to be.
This disconnect between men and women seems to much rather create misconceptions, misunderstanding, and prejudice between them far more than any potential benefit. I see this in my life all the time. Men in largely or even entirely male-oriented communities, like the ones I usually frequent, tend to have pretty questionable views on women, and the common denominator you can find here is that these men often lack interaction with women outside of their families, at least on a close friendly level. I highly suspect that this is because they generally struggle to find women that they can relate to in terms of both values and interests, so they see them as foreign and too different from them where, if it weren’t for things like sex, status, or at best just emotional support (which is a fair reason), to name a few, they don’t see a reason to be that close with them. For the same reason, it’s not uncommon to see men in some of these communities having serious problems with dating, largely because virtually all their peers are likely to be male, and quite often, their peers also have mostly male peers. Dating sites and apps tend to not be of much help either, but that’s whole other can of worms. It’s also not surprising why some women with bad experiences of men mistakenly think most if not all men are perverts, sexists, and rapists as well, because if they were to socialize regularly with men on a close level on a regular basis like they perhaps would with their female friends, they would know that this is not the case.
While evils such as greed, lust for power, and overall selfishness absolutely play a part in the overall divide between men and women, the social disconnect itself I think is largely enabled by the fact that men and women are much more likely to lack understanding of the behavior and thinking of the opposite sex, and these polarized differences in these matters only feed into that. If men and women had more close platonic relations, then such evil desires would obviously not go away by themselves, but it would certainly be an improvement of the overall situation. If we had, for example, a racist who bases their prejudice on generalized conceptions about people of other races, then we can probably expect such prejudice to weaken if they actually were to start meeting people of races other than their own and form close friendly relations with them, as has happened many times to many different people who used to harbor racist sentiment. This of course doesn’t just apply to hateful positions like racism or sexism, but everything else that is fueled by lack of common understanding between two groups.
On a related note, imagine if black and white people inherently thought and behaved in fundamentally different ways that the other could not, like how we supposedly see with men and women. In such a world, both of these groups of people would very likely have far more misconceptions and prejudices about the other as a result than we have now, and would probably self-segregate much more in certain matters based on race like we see in terms of gender. I think we’d both agree that this is not a good state of affairs, even if we could make arguments for why their differences can complement each other. You can make somewhat of a comparison with my own country after it’s terrible handling of the refugee crisis, where we have ended up with large portions of the population who have become culturally isolated enclaves with massive differences in values from the rest of the population, which has only served to fuel tensions.
Put shortly, what I meant in my previous post was that because men and women often struggle to relate to each other and even form friendships, that relationships on a deeper level can be expected to be much more difficult as a result, and mainly that these stark, polarized differences create useless, counterproductive rifts in society. Again, the point I’m trying to make has much less to do with oppression of one sex by another, as important of a topic as that is, but has mainly to do with social dissonance between them.
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I really don’t know the exact causes of all these differences for sure, and I won’t try and draw any hard conclusion here, because as I said earlier, there doesn’t really seem to be any consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists in this area from what I can gather, and I’d be foolish to think that I have all the answers for them. But by far the best evidence for the supposed innateness of gender-typical behavior appears to be the link to in-utero exposure to estrogens and androgens, not anything innate to the soul. This is pretty much what is always brought up as the source for virtually every supposedly innate gender difference in behavior, especially among those who wish to defend traditional gender roles. There is also a pretty clear link here with homosexuality.
One of the most robust pieces of evidence for this link appears to be studies on girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, who have due to several factors been exposed to a much more than typical amount of androgens in their prenatal environment, and reliably often exhibit, among other things, masculine behaviors like preferring boy’s toys and ways of play, preferring male peers, have masculine interests throughout life, and are more likely to be attracted to women, to name a few. On the other hand, they are also more likely to be subject to obviously non-biological behaviors such as wearing culturally masculine clothing and disliking makeup. This clearly indicates that social factors play a role in what we are seeing here. Another point I wish to make is, again, about CAIS. If there is a crucial difference between male and female psychology on the spiritual level that transcends biology, then we would clearly see whatever this difference is in males with CAIS, but as far as I know, that isn’t the case.
How exactly fetal hormones cause these changes in behavior, I really don’t know, though one hypothesis (as basically all explanations for this effect are at this stage) I’ve seen is that prenatal hormone exposure essentially causes one to be more inclined take after the behavior observed in one sex or another. I find this approach to make sense in most regards given that we often see clearly culturally ascribed (as in, clearly not innate) gender norms in populations that have been affected by abnormal levels of fetal hormones. CAH girls as mentioned being one example, males with CAIS being another, as well as the fact that we often observe breaking of gender norms in homosexual people. In the end, I can’t say much as to how exactly the link between fetal hormones and gender-stereotypical behavior is caused, as there is a surprising lack of research into how social factors, like gender labeling, contribute to this effect.
But even if this correlation were to be entirely direct with little to no regard for social influence, then the sex of the soul still has no observable effect to do with it, unless I guess we are to say that one’s prenatal environment is what determines the sex of the soul in the first place, which is obviously not true. Likewise, even if the correlation is direct and stereotypical behavior is determined in a biologically deterministic way, then I don’t see how these differences in behavior themselves aren’t external, like any other condition of the physical body is. To tie into the point I was making in my first comment, which I will soon get back to, this seems to point to sexual orientation being external as well, seeing as how it is also very tied to prenatal hormone exposure, though I doubt that the connection there is not more or less predominantly direct, as sexual orientation does not seem to have a socially influenced component to it. I’ll let you comment on that, however.
So the question remains, why do we tend to find these differences around most of the world? That is actually a good question, but I think one would be mistaken to immediately jump to the conclusion that it is because these differences are innate, especially to the soul. To start off, we have only relatively recently in history started going up against thousands of years of entrenched gender roles, ones that no longer serve the purpose which they did in the past. From this alone, I think it is too early to tell.
But consider this. There is probably nothing innate about the clothes that men and women wear, and we do in principle have the freedom to dress however we want just as much as we can pick whatever career we want, much more so in some countries than others. But the vast majority of men still dress in whatever clothes their society deems to be masculine, and women whatever is deemed to be feminine, but that obviously doesn’t mean that we are hard-wired to prefer one type of clothing to another based on our sex, regardless of social context. There is obviously nothing innate about a woman wearing a dress or a man wearing a suit, nor is there anything innate to preference of color of these clothes or any other items, or color preferences in general I might add which is another interesting topic. If our social environment can make us conform to gender stereotypes like these, despite the fact that there appears to be nothing innate about them, then I think that calls into question just how much else that we have talked about is influenced by the same factors.
This of course has more to do with what the clothes and colors themselves signify to people, like what clothes one has been told is masculine or feminine. If a dress were to give a man the same impression as it would with a suit, then he would probably wear that too. The question would remain however as to why exactly someone prefers what the clothes signify in the first place, and even if there was some kind of congenital and innate part in that, it still seems to have much more to do with one’s prenatal environment rather than spiritual factors, if they even play into it at all.
In regards to career choices, most gender-typical professions that I looked up tend to have a sex disparity of around 5-10% or so belonging to the other sex, depending on the country. Even 5% of either sex is a massive amount of people, and to assume that all these exceptions to the general rule are all in it either for mainly ideas or relationships, depending on their sex, sounds like a naive stretch to make. Some of these stereotypes do not even hold up in some countries either, in Japan for example roughly 40% of teachers in elementary school are male, and in Iceland (as well as other countries) similar numbers apply for women working and studying in STEM fields. As for why they choose to work in these fields, I obviously can’t say, but it’s a massive reach to say that they all have the same kind of motivation in mind depending on their sex, and if career choices are to be taken as an argument for an inherent psychological difference between men and women, then I don’t think it holds up.
Going back to what you said here:
“I doubt that many EPA girls are thinking that they might become auto mechanics, and that working on EPA tractors will be good practice for that trade.”
Leaving the Epa subculture aside to focus on the issue at a broader scale, when it comes to who is currently employed as auto mechanics in my country, one would think at first glance that you are right that women here aren’t interested in this kind of work, as statistics from 2022 show that 97% of those aged 16-64 (keep that in mind) in these professions are men. These are similar numbers to those who work in trucking and related professions as well, with men making up about 91% of those employed in that field. The relevant keywords in my source are “Motorfordonsmekaniker” and “Lastbilsförare”, quite a mouthful, I know. Another thing I want to point out is that in the US, the number of female car mechanics was actually 12% in 2022, an increase from just 1.4% in 1999.
But that’s where it gets interesting, because this gap is rapidly shrinking in younger generations here. In 2022, the share of girls in my country getting a high school education specializing in vehicles (mainly trucks for both sexes, not a very social line of work from what I can gather) had increased to roughly one third of second-year students, and in some parts of the country, this gap in education has largely even been closed. I think this should serve as a pretty major sign that some of these otherwise deeply rooted stereotypes can change, and I highly doubt that the vast majority of these girls have no prospects about working in areas like this if they are willing to spend years getting an education for it. So yes, I think there is definitely a growing desire among many young girls here to work in fields like this. I’ve noticed this trend of girls in my country taking interest in motor vehicles since long before I ever saw any statistics around it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if interest in this area were to become a largely gender-neutral topic here in a matter of decades. Seriously, if you were to look on dating services here, you’d probably be very surprised by the amount of young women who mention interest in cars and motor sports. My source is again in Swedish but use any machine translation service you prefer.
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To follow all of this up, I have some things to say in regards to your response when it comes to parenting.
What I meant with “gender-neutral parenting” was really just what you are also suggesting, that we let children choose freely, but also that we offer the opportunity to play with toys geared towards the opposite sex, or to act in ways that are more common of the opposite sex. If we want to maximize spiritual freedom, then I think we should at least offer our children the chance to do these things. I don’t think that what we consider either masculine or feminine should be the standard for raising children depending on their sex, rather I think we should recognize what characteristics make a good person, regardless if they are more common in men or women, and teach them to children regardless of sex. After all, why should one characteristic be valued in men, specifically because they are male, but not in women, and vice versa?
So I don’t mean that we should force children, or anyone else for that matter, into gender non-conforming behavior. If a child prefers acting in ways that are typical of their gender, that’s fine in my eyes so long as it doesn’t hold them back. In regards to how pointlessly gendered the society that children find themselves in is, I’m not surprised that children do generally fall into these different behaviors regardless of parental influence, however. We have to remember that even though many children raised by parents who try a gender-neutral approach directly go against this, the fact remains that outside the home, on TV, and online, to name a few, they will be showered with gender signifiers from all directions. How a child (and I assume adults as well) responds to this, again, is heavily tied to the influence of fetal hormones, whether their influence directly affects this kind of behavior or not, there is nothing about it that I can think of which seems to be spiritual in origin.
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In conclusion to this very long post, perhaps there is some kind of microscopic but crucial difference at play on the spiritual level, and perhaps this difference is the source of non-physical attraction between men and women, as well as potentially between same-sex relations. That is entirely possible and I’m willing to accept that, but as of now, I am not convinced. If anything, the spiritual influence seems to play an almost imperceptible part in the whole equation if we take biological and social factors into account.
Exceptions to the norm, like intersex conditions and gender non-conforming people, do of course not break a category in terms of general use, but when we have something who’s function is much more rigidly defined, like the Swedenborgian view of gender we are talking about, then I really do think that exceptions here need to be accounted for in order to arrive at a more refined and complete truth. If a model says that something is impossible, despite that clearly not being the case, then it really needs to be re-examined. We both already accept that there must be something wrong with the picture that Swedenborg gave us in terms of gender, namely because of the existence of non-heterosexual orientations, so I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that he was wrong about gender in general. Why that would be, I really don’t know. I find Swedenborg in general both hard to believe, but also hard *not* to believe, due to the overwhelming evidence that there was clearly something supernatural going on with his life, and that just makes it even more complicated. On a related topic, I’d very much like to discuss Earths in the Universe at a later point, because I have some questions related to the various explanations that have been written about it.
If behavior isn’t inherently divided by sex, then I don’t see what is to fear if that division were to largely disappear, because spiritually speaking, it seems nothing but beneficial if it were to. We wouldn’t get a colorless dystopia where everyone is the same and we all go around with shaved heads and jumpsuits, in fact we would very likely have much more diversity of character and spiritual freedom than we would otherwise if we aren’t actually cognitively limited by virtue of gender. I think it’s definitely possible that we could at least get close to there at some point, and that it would be better if we did. It’s not like masculine men and feminine women would go extinct if gender norms were to more or less disappear, but with that said, if one can see a positive attribute in what we would call masculinity or femininity that they want in their life, then I don’t see any reason for why someone shouldn’t at least try to embody them if they believe it would be beneficial for them. If a man is capable of the good qualities a woman might have, and vice versa, as we can clearly see in many people as opposed to reproductive functions, then I don’t see why this whole distinction of behavior into gender is necessary on a spiritual level.
With all the talk of gender going around today, a lot of people in my generation feel lost in that they can relate to both the masculine and the feminine traits we’ve talked about, though I think they have gone off in the wrong direction. I’m mainly here talking about the “non-binary” movement, which I think largely relies on this same principle that gender identity and behavior are fundamentally linked, which in turn have led them to wrongly conclude that they are actually neither men nor women because they can’t really pinpoint themselves to one end or the other if we are to say that men inherently behave one way and women in another way. The common sense way of looking at it is that behavior doesn’t correspond to one’s sex in an essential way, therefore they are still men and women, even if they don’t behave by the cultural expectations of either sex. I’m no fan of the bizarre gender ideology that many people today push, but that’s really for the same reason I have the views on gender that I’ve expressed to you in my posts.
I’ll end by saying this, I’m not looking to take down the worldview that Swedenborg has given to us, I largely want to prove it if anything because it contains the most valuable life lessons that I’ve ever heard, as well as explanations for things that I have wondered about for most of my whole life. But to do that, I think discussions like this need to be had in order to get to a more refined truth, and I do have a lot more questions on other topics as well for another time.
Hi NoName12345,
More later, but in response to this:
Neither one of these is quite what Swedenborg says. He doesn’t say that men are objectively ugly, but that they are less attractive than women. And he doesn’t say that women can learn only from their husbands, though he does say that women are dependent on men when it comes to matters of judgment and higher intellect.
On the first one, here is the key passage in Swedenborg’s writings:
He then goes on to talk about male and female behavior from an early age. You can read the rest if you wish by clicking on the link.
On the second, here are a couple of representative passages:
And:
Notice that he doesn’t say women are dependent on men for all learning. Only in highly abstract and intellectual things, and in matters of judgment. Whether or not Swedenborg is right about this is another question entirely. For now, the point is that Swedenborg didn’t say that women can learn only through their husbands.
In general, as with everyone who says things that may be deemed controversial, it is a good idea to pay attention to exactly what Swedenborg says, and not impose additional controversial and even repugnant ideas upon it, which may not be what he means at all. People today may or may not agree with him on this or that point, but it’s at least important to clearly see what he did and didn’t say.
Hi NoName12345,
It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to respond to everything in your two most recent comments. Instead, I’ll go through and pick out some issues that seem key to your questioning.
The core issue seems to be your hope for finding a female partner such as you are envisioning. Early on in this comment you talk about your own particular interests in a partner, starting with:
It is normal and natural to be attracted to someone like oneself, only of the opposite sex. (I am speaking of the vast majority of people, who are heterosexual.) Jocks are attracted to jocks, nerds are attracted to nerds, farm boys are attracted to farm girls, and on and on. There must be some similarities in culture and interests to draw the two together. No problem here.
Like men, women come in a wide range of personality and character types. From early childhood there are tomboys and girly girls. Some guys go for the tomboys. Others go for the girly girls. And everything in between.
However, I do think the fact that guys (and you specifically) are attracted to girls who have these characteristics is not something that can be brushed off. If it were merely masculinity that you were looking for, you would be bisexual with a leaning toward men. But in fact you are heterosexual, interested only in forming a relationship with a woman. Contrary to your concern, I do not believe this orientation is purely external and biological. I believe it is because you do seek a feminine counterpart to yourself.
And skipping a bit:
I may be going out on a limb here, but I very much suspect that your friendships with girls over the years have not been the same as your friendships with boys. It’s not that much of a limb for me to go out on, though, because I also had friendships with girls growing up, and they weren’t the same as my friendships with boys.
If you look over your friendships with girls and compare them with your friendships with boys, I suspect you’ll find that you didn’t talk about, and do, all the same things with your female friends that you did with your male friends. Of course, if it was a group activity the boys and girls would be engaging in the same things. But even then, I suspect that if you analyzed the conversations and activities, the girls engaged in them from a different angle than the boys, and focused on different aspects of the activity or the topic of conversation than the boys.
This can be subtle, especially if you don’t know what sort of differences you’re looking for. But the general idea of men being interested in things while women are interested in people is one place to start.
The very fact that you are having trouble finding a woman to relate to in the way that you relate to your male friends suggests to me that you instinctively recognize that this is true.
The problem isn’t with the idea of being friends with a woman. I also can’t imagine being married to someone I’m not best friends with. I agree (as does Swedenborg) that friendship is part of any good marriage. Speaking about marriage love, Swedenborg says:
The issue is thinking that this friendship is going to be just like your friendships with your male friends. I don’t think your past friendships with girls was like your friendship with boys. And now that you’re (I presume?) an adult, or nearly so, I don’t think you’re going to find a marriage-oriented friendship with a woman that is going to be just like your friendships with your male friends. If you get stuck on that criterion, it is going to make it much harder to find a female partner in marriage.
Yes, you can and should have a friendship with the woman you marry. A deep friendship. But it is not going to be like your friendships with your male friends. That’s so even if you marry a tomboy of a woman. Tomboys are still female. They still think and feel like girls/women, not like boys/men. (I’m talking here about heterosexual tomboys.) Tomboys may like to hang out with boys, but they still want you to know that they’re girls, not boys. That’s because they are girls, not boys—and not only physically, but mentally and emotionally, too.
There’s no problem with wanting to pair up with a woman who shares some of your male interests. But if you do find such a woman, she’s not going to approach those “male interests” in the same way you do. She’s going to approach them from a female perspective, not a male perspective. The difference may be subtle, but it is real.
To use the bicycling example I gave earlier, if you’re into biking, you may find a woman who’s also into biking, so that you can cycle together. I follow one such couple on a cycling app, and I always enjoy the photos of their rides together. But again to draw on my own experience, in every mixed-gender group ride I’ve ever been on, there are always women wearing pink or pink accents.
In the most recent mixed-gender group ride I went on, one of the women in the group kept having a problem with a creepy crawly in her sock. The other women in the group were commiserating, whereas the men were chuckling. Her male partner helped her get the creepy crawly out, because she didn’t want to touch it. This is a woman participating in and enjoying a predominantly male activity (cycling), but she still carries her female personality into the sport.
I am aware that there are also girls/women who aren’t creeped out by creepy-crawlies. This is just an example of a common pattern. For different girls and women it will be different. But if you pay attention, you will find that even in “masculine” heterosexual women, their feminine nature comes out in various ways.
This is a long way of saying that if you’re looking for a woman with whom you can have a friendship just like your friendships with your male friends, you are likely to be looking for a very long time without much success. You may indeed find a woman with whom you share some “male” interests. But your friendship with her still isn’t going to be like your friendships with you male friends.
What the exact differences will be I can’t say. Different women are different, just as different men are different. But in your search of a partner, I would suggest that you be open to the possibility that the woman you ultimately find will have quite a different interest than you do even in the same activities and subjects. If you doggedly try to replicate with a woman your friendships with males, you will most likely be embarking on a quixotic journey that will never reach its destination.
Again, I would suggest looking back on your friendships with girls in comparison to your friendships with boys, with an eye to subtle or obvious differences between them. If you allow yourself to consider the possibility that men and women actually are different psychologically as well as physically, I believe you will start to see those differences in your female vs. your male friendships. And I believe that as you notice those differences, they will be illuminating in your search for a female partner.
Hi NoName12345,
About this:
The abstract vs. practical polarity is not the one that Swedenborg places at the center of the difference between male and female. There are elements of it in what he says, but his definition has to do with intellect vs. will, or understanding vs. love, male being “a form of understanding” and woman being “a form of love.”
Even this doesn’t tell the whole story, however. When he’s being more detailed, he says that male is love clothed with wisdom, whereas female is that male wisdom clothed with love. (Yes, his defining woman in relation to man, but not the reverse, seems problematic to me. But this is what he says.)
The idea is not that men are exclusively intellect whereas women are exclusively will. Rather, each of these—intellect and will—plays a different role in the female than in the male. Men are “forms of understanding” because that is what shows in their outward form. Women are “forms of love” because that is what shows in their outward form. But each does have both intellect and will, both understanding and love.
In fact, outside the book Marriage Love, Swedenborg rarely makes any distinction between men and women at all. When talking about the human mind, regeneration, faith, life, and so on, he regularly uses the non-gender-specific term homo, “human being,” not the gender-specific term vir, “man, male.” Everything he says about humans applies to both men and women equally, even though in line with the culture of his times, his writing often assumes a male audience.
It is only in Marriage Love, and in a few other places in his writings where he talks specifically about the relationship between man and woman, that he makes any distinction between men and women at all. I’ll take this up later, in another reply.
For now, the main point is that these distinctions of abstract vs. concrete, of things vs. relationships, of ideas vs. practical application, are not the core of the distinction that Swedenborg makes between male and female. At most these are derivatives of that core distinction, which is the distinction between love and wisdom. Ultimately, Swedenborg derives the relationship between man and woman from the relationship between love and wisdom in God.
Back to your statement quoted above, my experience also is that most people are more focused on practical things and not on theoretical things. Another way of saying this is that most people are about action, not about ideas.
This is not a distinction between male and female. It is a distinction between what Swedenborg would call the earthly, spiritual, and heavenly levels of human life and focus. These relate to the basic “trinity” of love, wisdom, and action in Swedenborgian thought. In terms of human character types, it comes out as:
These also correspond to the three heavens that Swedenborg speaks of, from highest to lowest.
It is clear that on this earth, the vast bulk of the population is on the “earthly” level. They are focused on action, not on ideas, still less on universal love. They are focused on getting the job in front of them done, on making their daily living, and on providing for the practical needs (food, clothing, housing, and so on) for their family, and in their work, for their customers and clients.
The vast bulk of both men and women on this planet are on this earthly (“natural,” in traditional Swedenborgese) level. They are focused on practical matters and on action, not on ideas.
It is within this level that the derivative idea that men are interested in things, while women are interested in people, especially comes into play.
The mechanical trades are overwhelmingly male. Yes, there are some female plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and so on. But hardly any, even in this day and age of gender equality. Men like to build things and fix tings. This is the “earthly” level of intellect. Buildings, plumbing, wiring, factories, automobiles, airplanes, and so on are correspondences of ideas and paths of thinking. That is why men who are on the earthly level in character flock to these mechanical and structural things. In concrete, physical reality, all the things men build, fix, and work on represent spiritual ideas and pathways of thought, and express them on the physical level.
Women who are on the earthly level are much more likely to be in jobs that involve interacting with people. Many women, of course, are focused on raising children. This is a traditionally female role precisely because it’s all about raising and caring for new human beings. But even outside the family sphere, women tend to be in jobs that involve lots of interaction with people, such as running small businesses that sell products and services—food, beauty care, household goods, and so on. Women are heavily represented in the retail trades and in service industries. Wherever there is heavy interaction with other people, there will be many women, and fewer men.
You mentioned schools, and male teachers, but that is not on the earthly level. Teaching is on the spiritual level, because it involves ideas. Teachers don’t work with their hands. They work with their minds. Detailing the differences between men and women in that sphere would be another entire discussion. But in general, it would be the ideas that the men are primarily interested in, whereas women would be more interested in how those ideas relate to people and human endeavors.
In neither sphere are these hard distinctions between male and female. They are derivatives of the primary distinction that Swedenborg makes. That’s why there are some women who run heavy machinery, and some men who run hair salons. It’s not that men cannot do “women’s jobs,” and women cannot do “men’s jobs.” It’s that the underlying difference between men and women drives the vast majority of men toward men’s jobs, and the vast majority of women toward women’s jobs. The smaller number of exceptions to this only point to the complexity of human psychology and life—which is another subject I’ll take up in a future response.
For now, the point is that when analyzing the differences between male and female, it is necessary to do so within each level of human character type: earthly, spiritual, and heavenly in Swedenborg’s psychological usage of those terms. Even among the bulk of the population that is focused on practical matters, the difference between male and female asserts itself in the type of practical jobs men and women flock to, respectively.
My SpaceX example is on a different level. Both Musk and Shotwell are idea people, meaning they are in the spiritual character type. The distinction between them is that Musk is driven by a grand vision, whereas Shotwell is focused on exactly how to make that vision into a reality. Obviously, Shotwell also sees and buys into the grand vision, and Musk also works very hard to make his vision a reality. But in relation to each other, Musk provides the ideas and the direction for the entire company, whereas Shotwell’s job is to make those ideas work in the form of a specific company and its operations.
This leads to another key point, which is that on every level, men are men and women are women in relation to each other. That’s another idea I’ll take up in a future reply. For now, the key point is that on each level—the practical level, the level of ideas, and the level of universal love—there are both men and women, and each thinks, feels, lives, and acts as a male or a female on that level.
Hi NoName12345,
A brief response to this:
Given today’s knowledge of the genetic contribution of males and females, I would suggest that the biological distinction between male and female is not so much producing sperm cells vs. producing egg cells, which serve mostly parallel functions in being vehicles to carry DNA to the fertilization process, but rather providing the fertilizing element vs. gestating the fertilized egg until it becomes a human being capable of surviving outside the womb.
Hi NoName12345,
In response to this:
Yes, romantic relationships are based on mutual love. But is that their top priority?
In nature, the top priority of the relationship between male and female is to produce and raise young who will continue the species and the genetic lineage of the individuals who are mating, and of the clan, pack, or species to which they belong. This isn’t exactly “economic,” but it is a matter of productivity. The relationship does not exist solely for its own sake (for “love”), but for a purpose greater than itself.
Biologically, the differences between male and female all have to do with the function and purpose of producing offspring.
Outside the reproductive arena, as you have pointed out, men and women are generally capable of doing each other’s jobs. That’s so even if men generally, or on average, aren’t as good at doing women’s jobs as women are, and vice versa.
Men can raise children. Some do. But they tend not to have the level of natural compassion and insight into human psychology and relationships that women have, and are therefore generally not as good at handling the many human complexities of child-raising as women are.
Women can work on oil rigs. Some do. But when it comes to the parts of the job that require brute force, women aren’t as physically strong as men, and are therefore at a disadvantage. In more conceptual fields, despite the popular miniseries (and novel) “The Queen’s Gambit,” the world’s top female chess players still haven’t beaten the top male chess players and become world champions.
These roles and jobs, however, are not specifically reproductive. They are therefore characterized by overlapping male and female bell curves rather than by distinct, mutually exclusive functions as in reproduction itself.
Back to the point, biologically, male and female is all about producing offspring. As pleasurable as mating is, and as close as it brings male and female animals and people to one another, neither the pleasure nor even the love (in human relationships) is the main purpose of the relationship. The relationship exists for a specific purpose, which is producing new generations and perpetuating both the species and the genetic lineage of the parents.
This suggests that human romantic relationships also are not just, or even primarily, about mutual love and attraction. It suggests that they have a purpose greater than the relationship itself and the joy and pleasure it brings to two people who are in a good and loving relationship.
Swedenborg speaks of marriages in heaven producing “spiritual offspring,” which are new births of love and wisdom that grow out of those marriages. Without these “spiritual offspring,” marriages in heaven would be barren.
So . . . my view of marriage is a bit different from the “finding true love” or “finding your soulmate” that is popular today. It is common for relationships to be all about finding happiness for oneself in finding a partner to share one’s life with. And that’s not bad. It is commonly what drives people to form relationships and marriages in the first place. Still, it is rather self-absorbed. And it is certainly not a sufficient basis for a good and lasting spiritual relationship. For that, there must be a mutual dedication between the two partners to producing some sort of “offspring,” earthly or spiritual or both, that moves humanity forward on its path.
In other words, there must be a focus that goes beyond the relationship itself. Together, the two as a couple must be productive in some way that is beneficial to the world, and to heaven. Otherwise it is a self-centered relationship, which means it is not a spiritual relationship, and is therefore a merely temporary relationship.
A question for couples and prospective couples, then, is: “What can this relationship bring about that will be of benefit to others outside the relationship?”
Hi NoName12345,
In response to this:
I understand that you’re setting up a thought experiment. But it’s a pure hypothetical because that is specifically not the sort of difference that exists between men and women.
I said previously that in everything but the reproductive organs, men’s and women’s bodies are basically the same as one another, and function basically the same. They are also different, of course. Women’s bodies are entirely female, and have female proportions, arrangements, and so on. But overall, both men and women have head, torso, and limbs, and all of the same internal organs.
In short, both men and women are human, and have everything that makes a being human.
Physically, this means a human body, complete with upright walking, opposable thumbs, forward-facing binocular vision, a big brain, and so on.
Psychologically (or spiritually) as well, both men and women also have everything that makes a being human. Both have human loves and desires, intellect and thought, rational and moral capability, the ability to think about God, spirit, and the afterlife, the ability to transcend the needs of themselves, their family and clan, and even their race and species to have a universal concern for all life and the entire earth, and so on. These capabilities are unique to human beings.
Spiritually, then, the difference between men and women is specifically not that one has legs and the other has arms. It is not that one has the ability to go places mentally and emotionally (spiritual legs), and the other has the ability to accomplish things once there (spiritual arms). Both men and women have both of these capabilities mentally and spiritually.
If there were a community of only men, or of only women, it could provide for itself the necessities of life, and even engage in higher human pursuits relating to learning, arts and sciences, mutual friendship and support, and so on. None of these things are exclusively male or female.
What it couldn’t do is perpetuate itself. Once that generation died out, the community would be gone. This is the only absolute limitation on what men alone can do, and what women alone can do.
However, effectively, if there were only men or only women in existence, there would be neither male nor female. There would simply be humans, because there would be no counterpart that would provide a contrast and a distinction between male and female. Hypothetically, if these humans had male genitals, that would simply be what humans have, and the same if they had female genitals. But in reality, if there were only “one sex,” there wouldn’t be sexual organs at all because they would have no use. Reproduction would be asexual.
This leads to something I said earlier: that men are men only in relation to women, and women are women only in relation to men. Otherwise, we are all just human beings interacting with one another as humans.
This means that men and women are distinctly different only in relation to one another. In everything that men and women hold in common—analogous to all the body parts that are basically the same (which is almost all of them)—there is no hard distinction between male and female. It’s all a matter of degrees. Men on average are taller and stronger, women on average have greater health and longevity, and so on, but men and women greatly overlap one another on all these traits.
Just so, psychologically the most intellectual men might be more intellectual than the most intellectual women, but in general, both men and women are more or less intelligent, and greatly overlap one another on this metric. Similarly, women might be generally more relational than men, but men are also relational, and some men are better at relationships than some women. The sexes overlap on this metric as well, even though there is a general difference between male and female in these regards.
Biologically and physiologically, it is only when men and women are paired with one another for reproductive purposes that each fulfills a role that the other cannot fulfill at all. A woman cannot produce something that will fertilize her egg. A man cannot provide an environment in which conception, gestation, and birth can take place. Biologically, this is the only area in which there is an absolute difference between men and women.
(Even this difference is not as absolute as it may seem at first. Male and female reproductive organs grow out of the same structures in the embryo. And as you’ve pointed out, this process can go awry, resulting in, for example, an individual that has X and Y chromosomes, but looks physically female. I’ll take this up later under the rubric of the complexities of human life. For now, I’ll remain focused on the bulk of humanity that is psychologically, physically, and genetically either male or female.)
What, then, are the distinct psychological/spiritual differences between men and women?
They are not many of the things that have been proposed, such as men being more intellectual and women being more emotional, because men and women overlap on this. Ditto abstract vs. practical, things vs. people, structural vs. relational, and so on. All of these generalized gender differences flow from the distinct difference, but not in a way that makes an absolute distinction between men and women psychologically. These are, as I’ve said numerous times, overlapping bell curves.
This is mirrored physically in the fact that women’s bodies and men’s bodies are mostly the same, and yet women’s bodies are female even in the vast majority of parts that aren’t reproductive organs, and men’s bodies are male even in the majority of part that aren’t reproductive organs. Men have longer limbs, narrower hips, less subcutaneous fat, stronger and bulkier muscles, and so on. Women have wider hips, curvier and softer bodies, and so on. There are also differences in the other parts and organs, but talking intelligently about that would require more medical knowledge than I possess.
In other words, women are entirely female, and men are entirely male, but women and men also largely overlap one another in appearance, parts, functions, and capabilities. If there is any doubt that women are entirely female, and men entirely male, there is the simple fact that every cell of a woman’s body has two X chromosomes, and every cell of a man’s body has an X and a Y chromosome. Right down to the cellular level, a man is entirely male, and a woman is entirely female.
And yet, physiologically, the only completely distinct functionality of male and female bodies is in the reproductive organs. Yes, they develop from the same original structures in the embryo based on whether male or female hormones predominate in the gestation process. But by the time development is over, the structures are so different that their functionality is also almost entirely different.
About the only similarity is that eggs are produced in the ovaries through a process of meiosis, and sperm are produced in the testicles also through a process of meiosis. But even here, according to my limited knowledge of reproduction, girls are born with all the eggs they will ever produce already present, numbering in the single-digit millions, whereas men continually produce new sperm by the tens or hundreds of millions each time they ejaculate. Even in their production of gametes, men and women are distinctly different.
From there, the differences become even greater. Men have nothing like a uterus, and are completely incapable of becoming pregnant, Arnold Swarzenegger to the contrary not withstanding. Meanwhile, fluids such as semen and urine do not flow through a woman’s clitoris. It’s just not built for that. Only the penis is required to function as a delivery system for gametes. The woman’s role in the process in this regard is receptive, not active, which means she has no need or use for a penis.
And so, physically and physiologically, it is only in their respective reproductive systems that men and women are so differentiated that they have functions that the other does not have at all. In everything else, men and women mirror and overlap one another in bell curve fashion.
What does this mean for the distinct psychological/spiritual differences between men and women?
It means that only when it comes to producing “spiritual offspring” is there a completely distinct difference between men and women psychologically. In everything else, they overlap in bell curve fashion.
And yet, somehow, like physical reproduction, this distinct spiritual difference between men and women is essential to the continuation of the species spiritually. Swedenborg does say that marriages in heaven produce spiritual offspring, which are new births of love and wisdom. These new births of love and wisdom are essential to humanity continuing as humanity even spiritually. If we are not continually growing in new love and wisdom, our humanity withers and dies.
Honestly, I wish my spiritual vision were clear enough to provide a vivid account of exactly what are these differences between man and woman in spiritual form and function. Like human gender and sexuality itself, this is one of the deepest mysteries of human nature. I am only gradually groping my way toward some understanding of it, and this mostly in my own personal experience of relationships and marriage.
While I’m not convinced I can do anything like justice to describing these psychological and spiritual differences, I can tell you that my wife brings something to the relationship that I cannot bring, and I think I bring something to the relationship that she cannot bring. Here I’m talking, not physically, but mentally, meaning emotionally and intellectually.
Speaking more generally (because I’m not going to spill marital confidences), I think that men bring “seeds” of ideas and rationality to the relationship, while women bring “wombs” of ability to flesh those seeds out and bring them to birth.
Just to be clear, once again, I am not saying that women don’t have ideas and rationality. If they didn’t, they could not be receptive to those elements of a man’s psyche. But I do think (despite the slings and arrows I’m likely to take for saying it), that men are the originators of “seminal” ideas, whereas women make sure that those ideas don’t just swim around uselessly in the abstract—or in the semen—where they will eventually die, but make sure that at least some of them become flesh-and-blood reality, either physically or spiritually/interpersonally.
Returning to the Musk/Shotwell (non-sexual) relationship, Shotwell did not have the original grand vision and idea for SpaceX. She loved engineering and aerospace, but she was working in the legacy aerospace industry that was busily cranking out more and more and more of the same old, established types of airplanes and rockets. However, when she encountered Musk and was introduced to his grand vision for a multi-planetary species, she was perfectly capable of grasping and conceptualizing it in her own mind, and she was all in. She loved that vision, and she wanted to be part of making it a reality. To this day, she loves working for Musk, as she herself says.
Musk, for his part, has grand ideas, but he heavily depends upon many people, starting with Shotwell, to flesh those ideas out and make them a reality. It’s not that Musk doesn’t have some practical abilities. He certainly does. But Shotwell is much better at running the day-to-day business of the company, and making sure that all the people and parts of the company work together with one another and with clients and customers (such as NASA and the U.S. Space Force) to get things done, than Musk will ever be. And he knows it. That’s why he keeps her there running the company while he provides the vision and direction, right down to the nitty gritty of engineering specific parts of the rockets.
This, I think, provides some concept of how it works in marital relationships, specifically in the area of bringing new ideas, not to mention new levels of human love and understanding, into the realm of actual reality. Once these new “generations” of love and wisdom are birthed, the distinction between male and female becomes one of overlapping bell curves, not one of distinct differences. But the process of conceiving them and bringing them to birth requires both male and female input, each contributing something that the other cannot to the process.
That’s about as close as I can get at the moment to stating what the distinct differences are between men and women psychologically and spiritually. Once again, honestly, I doubt you will be able to gain a less theoretical grasp of it until you are actually in a long-term, committed, and mutual relationship with a woman.
Even then, it’s easy to miss what’s going on internally and interpersonally in the relationship because most people either aren’t paying attention to the internal dynamics of the relationship, or if they are, they have no structure of thought or analysis that would make it possible for them to have any real understanding of what’s going on.
This is where I lean on the physical correspondences in the process of reproduction. And it’s where I continually go back to the big spiritual idea that man, woman, and child reflect the “trinity” of love, wisdom, and action in God. What little understanding of man and woman I’ve gained in my decades of life so far have come mostly from keeping those two ideas in mind while paying attention to what actually goes on in my own marriage relationship, as well as to things heard and read about other relationships.
So . . . even though I can’t give you a slam-dunk answer on this very deep question, I hope this much at least offers you some avenues of approach as you work these things out in your own mind and heart. These are questions that require years, if not decades, of both thought and relationship experience to gain any real grasp and understanding of them.
Hi NoName12345,
In response to this:
There is nothing in Swedenborg saying that we can’t know our ruling love. God, of course, knows it far more fully and exactly than we do. But it is perfectly possible over time for us to gain a pretty good understanding of what our ruling love is. This, after all, is what drives us in everything we do.
It is true that many people are either self-deceived or simply aren’t interested in or paying attention to their own inner drives and motives. But for people who are contemplative and engage in self-examination, it is perfectly possible to know our own ruling love.
Further, it is possible for us to change our ruling love. In fact, this is what the process of regeneration is all about: changing our ruling love from a self-centered and greedy one to a thoughtful and loving one. If we couldn’t know our ruling love, it would be much harder to engage in the battle to change it.
Hi NoName12345,
About this:
This objection might be a game-ender if men and women lived in entirely different spheres. But in fact, men’s activities and women’s activities intersect with one another.
As an example, consider that man who is passionate about cars and becomes an auto mechanic. This is a quintessentially male interest. And yet, women do drive cars, and those cars do need to be fixed from time to time. Although the man my be interacting mostly with other men in the shop itself, he’s also going to be interacting with women who bring their cars in to get them fixed. One of those women might find him very sexy in his oily, working-man’s jumpsuit.
Also, though it is overwhelmingly men who work on the cars, it is very common in larger shops to have women handling much of the office work, covering the front desk, and so on. Presumably these women have some interest in cars, or they would not have applied for a job at an auto repair service. It is very common for romantic partners to meet at their place of work.
Further, neither men nor women are limited to a single interest. Yes, women are not likely to meet men in the nail salon if their greatest passion is doing nails. But those same women will most likely have other interests that are not so exclusively female. Ditto for men having some interests that are highly masculine, but others that are of more general interest.
This is why my words were, “pursue the things you love.” Not thing, singular, but things, plural. In the course of following various interests, one of them is likely to bring you into contact with women whose set of interests intersects with yours.
Hi NoName12345,
About this:
Keep in mind that just because you’re married, that doesn’t mean you can’t have male friends anymore. I agree that it would be hard to be happy with a woman who shares none of your interests at all. Hence my words about pursuing your interests, because that’s where you’re likely to meet a woman who shares some of your interests.
However, no woman is going to satisfy your need to talk and interact with others on all of your interests. Some things you’re into she’s just not going to be into. That’s what friendships are for, not to mention jobs, hobbies, and so on that are done with people other than one’s partner in marriage.
I presume you would not like it if your wife insisted on bringing you along every time she went shopping at the mall for a dress or a bra. This is an activity that she will likely enjoy, but will most likely not want you there for. Similarly, she’s probably not going to want to tag along every time you go hang out with your male friends who like to talk tech.
Hi NoName12345,
About this:
Perhaps this is the place to continue quoting a section in Swedenborg that I quoted from earlier in these replies:
Even if men’s “values” (I doubt that’s the right word) and women’s “values” may diverge in such areas as competition vs. cooperation, that won’t necessarily drive men and women apart. In fact, as suggested in the last line of the above quote, it is very common for women to be attracted to the very qualities in men that they themselves don’t have in such great measure, and vice versa.
Perhaps women are more cooperative than men by nature. That doesn’t necessarily mean that women as a group will be more attracted to cooperative men than they are to competitive men. In fact, highly competitive men, whether in sports, business and industry, or any other field, commonly have women flocking around them. It is precisely the highly competitive nature of the men that attracts these women. In such men, they see someone who has drive, and is likely to be a good provider and protector. (Sorry, feminists, but even in today’s day and age, women have not left behind hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary shaping.)
Vice versa, even very competitive men are commonly attracted to women who are more “cooperative” and nurturing. In such women they find respite and rest from the hyper-competitive nature of their pursuits in professional sports, the business world, law, academia, and so on. The psychological equivalent to wealthy, successful men going for physically attractive women is that men who are highly competitive in the drive for success in any field commonly want a feminine, supportive, nurturing woman to come home to.
Far from being a factor that drives men and women apart, these diverging male and female “values” are precisely what attract many men and women to each other, and bring them together.
I’m aware that not all men and women fit into this particular pattern of polarities being mutually attractive. But huge numbers of them still do. And for those who don’t, there are other polarities that attract men and women to each other, and many similarities as well.
Hi NoName12345,
And this, again, is where we get to the crux of the matter for you:
It’s all about finding someone you can share your life with, who also shares your goals.
Are you likely to find a woman who has as a goal “to build some kind of theoretical system for reliably interpreting the world with”? As you fear, that is highly unlikely.
Very few women are into engaging in this sort of pursuit, precisely because of the aforementioned, albeit debated, polarity of men being more theoretical and women being more practical. It will be an exceptionally rare woman who will devote her days to coming up with any kind of theoretical system, let alone a universal, world-comprehending one. This is the sort of thing that a certain class of men geek out on. Swedenborg was one of them. And he never did find a woman to marry during his lifetime on earth.
So far, it’s not looking good for you.
But as suggested in my previous reply, all is not necessarily lost. Though you are highly unlikely to meet a woman who is interested in developing a theoretical framework for understanding the world, you might very well meet a woman who is interested in a man who has that interest . . . provided that said man is also capable of descending from the stratosphere of his abstractions and relating that theoretical framework for understanding the world to the actual world in which we live, with all its struggles, confusion, and pain.
I just happen to be one of those heady, nerdy men who loves to study and build “theoretical systems for reliably understanding the world.” Hence my fascination with and love for Swedenborg and his system, which provides such a framework par excellence.
And yet, that framework was authored two and a half centuries ago, and needs to be adapted to today’s world. This is key to the work that I engage in every day, both professionally and avocationally. My long-time personal mission statement has been to make Swedenborg a household name in the English-speaking world.
But why am I interested in doing that? It’s not because I want to establish some brilliant theoretical framework that every intelligent mind will admire. It’s because I believe that Swedenborg’s “framework”—i.e., his teachings—will greatly improve the everyday lives of ordinary people who struggle with the daily challenges of this world. Hence the title of this blog, “Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.”
It is this willingness to descend from the abstract and theoretical, and bring those principles to bear on the everyday and ordinary, that will be attractive to any woman who may encounter you and be interested in a deeper understanding of the mysteries of this life and this world. She won’t have to be interested in building a theoretical interpretive system herself. But to meld her life with yours, she will have to be interested in how that theoretical interpretive system answers the sorts of hard questions that non-theoretical people face in their non-theoretical lives.
In fact, if my experience is any guide, she will insist that you don’t spend all your time up in the abstract clouds, but that you think about what all these theories and interpretive systems mean for regular people.
This is precisely the spiritual level of the distinct difference between men and women in the reproductive sphere. Men provide “seeds.” Women make sure that some of those seeds become a practical reality.
If you’re stuck on finding a woman who wants to partner with you in crafting theoretical theories, you’ll probably go through life as a bachelor. (That’s what colleagues are for.)
But that’s not what a female counterpart to your mind and character would do in the relationship. A woman is not about producing massive amounts of sperm and sending them out into the world. She’s about taking one or two of those sperm at a time, and carefully building them into a whole new embodied being.
Especially for highly theoretical men, I recommend finding a woman to provide what he himself cannot do anywhere near as well without her. And that is to take the theoretical system and make it practical in some way.
Such a woman can understand the theories that their husbands spin in their minds. Maybe not at the level of detail and abstraction that he does. But there are highly intelligent women out there who are perfectly capable of understanding complex systems. However, most likely she will be impatient of continual spinning of more and more theories. She’s going to want to see the results. If she sees only abstractions, and no results, she’s going to lose interest. Remaining in the abstract is not a woman’s inborn nature.
I recommend finding such a woman precisely because she will “value” these things differently than you do. If you are willing not only to affect her, but to be affected by her, she will make sure that you don’t go through life writing brilliant academic papers that no one will ever read. She will make sure that your intellectual legacy is one that accomplishes significant good for real people living in the real world.
Hi NoName12345,
I’ll be winding down on my responses at this point. Please don’t think that you have to respond to everything I have said. You are raising many issues and questions, and explicitly or implicitly asking for my take on or response to them. That is what I am endeavoring to provide. If you have further questions or issues—as you say you do—feel free to continue the conversation. But from my perspective, it is not necessary for you to respond to everything I have said.
My previous comment would have been a good place to stop, but I promised a response on the complexities of gender, so I’ll add one more before leaving space for you to read and then focus on any area where you still want more input from me.
You say, as part of a longer discussion of the issue:
The issue I’ll focus on is how, if the soul has gender and determines physical gender, can there be cases in which clearly in-utero conditions affect the physical, and perhaps psychological, gender of the fetus, and of the human being that the fetus grows into.
Here is where the complexities of the interaction of soul and body, or of spirit and matter, come into play.
According to Swedenborg, all “influx” (in the traditional language), or flow of power and influence, goes from higher levels to lower levels, and never the reverse. Overall, the flow is from God to the spiritual realm, and from the spiritual realm to the physical realm. Things never flow in reverse, from the physical to the spiritual, or from the spiritual to the divine.
This might suggest to someone who hasn’t delved into the details that everything on the lower levels would be entirely determined by the higher levels. The spiritual universe would be a perfect reflection of God’s nature. The physical realm would be a perfect reflection of the spiritual realm.
Clearly this is not the case. God, so the teaching goes, is perfectly good and loving. And yet, here on this earth we see much evil—some of it horrendously evil. Even in the world of nature, we see predators hunting down, killing, and eating prey, which certainly doesn’t seem to reflect anything good and loving in God. Atheists and skeptics are always going on about how nature is “red in tooth and claw,” seeing this as conclusive evidence that there is no God.
If there is a God, clearly God has not created spiritual or material reality such that it is a perfect reflection of God’s nature. Even in the spiritual world, if the Bible and the theologians are to be trusted at all, there is a hell consisting of evil people who do evil things. This does not reflect the perfectly good nature of God.
In the reality that we see, God has created a universe, both spiritual and material, in which evil can exist even though it doesn’t exist in God.
For a more in-depth discussion of this, as background to what I am about to cover here, I would recommend reading this article:
God: Puppetmaster or Manager of the Universe?
This article does delve into classical issues of divine omnipotence vs. human free will. It doesn’t delve into the related issue of the existence of evil vs. the loving and benevolent nature of God. For my most in-depth treatment of that classic issue (traditionally termed “theodicy”), see my four-part series starting with this article:
How can we have Faith when So Many Bad Things happen to So Many Good People? Part 1
I am linking these articles because they cover related topics that might be necessary for an understanding of what I want to cover here, but I do not want to spend the time laying out those topics here. There are other articles linked from the ends of these ones that are also relevant and may be helpful.
What I will focus on here is how nature has a tendency to resist and redirect what flows in from the spiritual world and from God, and how even though the flow is one way, the physical does have an effect upon the development and direction of our spiritual self.
First, Swedenborg’s belief (derived from Aristotle) was that our soul comes from our father, and our body from our mother. This, I believe, must be modified, since we now know that new human beings receive nearly equal genetic material from both parents—and according to Swedenborg’s system of correspondences, this must correspond to how new human beings are generated spiritually.
However, to keep things simple for the moment, let’s posit that the offshoot of the father’s soul is what determines spiritual gender, just as it is the DNA that comes from the father that determines physical gender. And let’s posit that the gender of this offshoot from the father’s soul is always either male or female. (This could be debated, but I don’t want to get that complex at this point.)
Wouldn’t this mean that the physical gender, both genetic and physical, must match the spiritual gender?
Conservative Swedenborgians insist that this is the case. They deny the possibility that there could be any mismatch between a person’s spiritual gender and his or her physical gender. Whatever the physical gender is, they say, that’s what the person’s spiritual gender is. On this basis, they reject the possibility that anyone could be legitimately transsexual.
But this idea begins to crumble when faced with precisely the genetic and developmental issues you bring up, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), in which even though the individual’s DNA has an X and a Y chromosome, the physical appearance of the body is female. Another case in point is Klinefelter syndrome, in which a male has one or more extra X chromosomes. Then there is the more general category of people born intersex, having some version of both male and female genitalia and/or reproductive organs.
If the soul were the sole determinant of physical sex and psychological gender, as the conservatives believe, none of these syndromes would be possible. Everyone would be born fully male or fully female genetically, physiologically, and psychologically.
And most people are born either fully male or fully female. But the existence of even a small percentage of people who are not makes it impossible for the initial gender of the soul, presuming it is always either male or female, to be the sole determinant of each new human being’s physical and psychological gender.
But how can it not be, if inflow is always from higher to lower?
The answer, I believe, is precisely that the physical has a tendency to resist and redirect inflow from the spiritual. In most cases it doesn’t, or doesn’t succeed. The overwhelming majority of people are born fully male or fully female. But in some cases, the physical does resist and redirect inflow from the spiritual. In these cases, even if the initial soul may have been clearly male or clearly female, the person’s physical and/or psychological gender is either mixed, or is the opposite of the initial gender of the soul.
What happens then? What happens when a spiritual influence flows into a physical vessel that doesn’t match it—in this case, specifically in sex or gender?
This is where the complexities come in.
Consider water flowing into a vessel of one sort or another. The water always flows into the vessel. The vessel never flows into the water. And yet, when the water flows into the vessel, it takes on the shape of the vessel. If the vessel is a bucket, the water takes on the shape of a bucket. If it is a vase, the water becomes vase-shaped. If it is a test tube, the water becomes test-tube-shaped. And so on. Even though the water always flows into the vessel, and never the reverse, the water takes on the shape of the vessel into which it flows.
Here is how Swedenborg illustrates this principle:
The key statement here is, “The sun and its heat do not alter the form of the plants. Instead the forms themselves alter the effects of the sun.”
The physical world operates according to its own laws on its own level. These laws are derived from spiritual laws, and correspond to them, but also, as I said, tend to resist and redirect them. Even if gender is pure in God, and may be pure in heaven, it is not pure on earth. Here in the material realm, gender can become scrambled around the edges, so that in some cases there is no clear male or female, or there is a mixture of male into female, or the reverse, in a particular individual.
What happens if a soul, even if it has a clear gender, flows into such a gender-mixed form, or into a form that has been redirected all the way to the opposite gender? In this case, there is a mismatch between the spiritual gender and the physical gender. And to repurpose Swedenborg’s statement, “The spiritual gender and its character do not alter the form of the physical gender. Instead the physical gender itself alters the effects of the spiritual gender.”
This would mean that it could be possible for there to be an individual who is spiritually male but physically female, or vice versa. This would be the situation for transsexuals.
There could also be an individual who is spiritually one gender or the other, but is physically a mix of genders. This would be the situation for people born intersex.
And then there are specific cases such as CAIS and Klinefelter Syndrome where genetic or hormonal issues block the usual normal development of physical and/or psychological gender, and push it in a different direction.
These cases, I believe, are not a flaw in the initial soul and its gender, but a flaw in the physical biology of the body that the soul inhabits. (Again, this could be debated, but I’ll not engage in that debate for now.)
However, it gets even more complicated than that. Just as the water is shaped by the vessel into which it flows, so the soul (or spirit) is shaped by the physical body and environment into which it flows. For example, the same soul will become a person of different character if the baby is born into poverty compared to if the baby is born into wealth. The underlying character of the soul may be the same, but that character will develop in different ways depending upon its environment.
What does this mean for the gender of a soul that is paired with a gender-mixed or gender-opposite body?
That is a very good question! I wouldn’t begin to claim that I know all the answers on this one. But in my mind, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a soul that was initially male might take on a female form instead if it were born into a female body. Or perhaps even a soul would become non-binary if that were the body, and mind, that it flowed into. I don’t know. But I think it’s best not to get too black-and-white and fundamentalist about these very complicated questions.
About as far as I’ve gotten on these questions so far is that I have come to believe that whatever psychological gender a person settles into, that will be the person’s gender in the spiritual world, even if it does not match the person’s physical gender.
Beyond that, these complex questions of gender are a bit beyond my pay grade. Mostly, I try to keep an open mind and accept the realities of experience rather than imposing a priori spiritual and philosophical doctrines upon reality whether or not they actually fit reality.
For most people’s own personal lives, these questions are largely academic because they are fully male or fully female—meaning they have the same gender psychologically, physically, and genetically. But for those whose gender is not so clear-cut, these are major issues that cut to the core of their being and identity. It is for this reason that I’m not inclined to lay down hard-and-fast rules as conservative types are wont to do. Such rules don’t have much effect upon the great majority of ordinary male and female people. But they have a disproportionately negative effect on the minority whose sex or gender is not so clear. And the experience of human life on this earth just doesn’t support such hard-and-fast rules.
This is also why I’m not inclined to go “cluck cluck” about your preference for masculine women. Different strokes for different folks. I’m more interested in offering greater light and understanding on these issues than I am in telling people how they should and shouldn’t live their lives—though I do sometimes dip into that territory when it seems to me that people’s beliefs and choices are causing a lot of damage to themselves and to others.
In your case, I don’t see any great damage from your preferences. Just some difficulty in seeking out a female partner given the current state of your thinking about what she must be like. In line with what I was just saying, my main suggestion would be to allow for a little more flexibility in what type of woman might be a partner suitable for you.
I believe God has someone in mind for you. But it’s perfectly possible that God will bring the two of you together one day, you’ll feel the spark, and then you’ll consult your checklist of required characteristics in a woman, she won’t quite make the cut, and you’ll say, “Nah, I’ll pass.”
With that, I’ll pause in my responses. As expected, I didn’t cover everything in your two most recent comments. But this is more than enough for now.
Just a heads-up, but I’ve decided to drop this conversation. I don’t think I have the energy to respond to all of this and anything you might further comment here in the future, and I’m not sure if it’s gonna go anywhere in the end regardless. I haven’t read all of what you have written so far, so I’m not sure how much of what I’ve said has been answered, but I’ll keep everything you have written in mind nonetheless. If you want to continue responding, feel free to, I appreciate and thank you for taking the time, but as of now, I’m out.
Hi NoName12345,
As I said in my most recent comment just above, I’m finished responding for now. I won’t be writing any more responses to you unless you decide to continue the conversation.
I’ll also reiterate that I don’t expect or need you to respond to everything I’ve said. My purpose on this blog is to develop and disseminate ideas and understanding. While my younger self loved a rollicking debate, I have long since tired of that exercise as mostly unfruitful and unproductive. I write what I write. It’s up to the reader to decide if any of it is sensible or useful for his or her thinking and life.
If at this point you’re out, then I am also out. If at any point you have further issues or questions that you want to run by me, you know where to find me.
Meanwhile, I hope that at least some of what I have written above has been helpful to you in developing your own thought and understanding.
A claim I have heard is that men are bad because historical conflicts were caused by men in power. I think the truth is that usually it is the corrupt and ambitious who rise to positions of power, and usually only males could be in positions of power, so you get the so-called bad apples in power making men look bad. Had women been able to get into positions of power in history, there would have been just as many corrupt women causing conflicts as well.
PS: where I said:
usually it is the corrupt and ambitious who rise to positions of power
I meant in history. Nowadays it seems that politicians are not as corrupt as they used to be, though there still is corruption.
Hi K,
This idea is based more on current ideology than on reality. There have been many powerful women throughout history. It’s just that they generally exercise their power differently than men. Rather than exercising power directly, they usually exercise their power through men, getting men to do their dirty work for them.
This doesn’t mean that men didn’t also have power—and usually more power than women. But women also exercised great power, sometimes wrapping men around their little finger and making them into their slaves, even while the man thought of himself as the powerful one.
There is much talk about men being in the positions of power. But every one of those men was surrounded by one or more women who enjoyed all the benefits of wealth and power without having to get their hands dirty to get it. When there were sumptuous banquets, women were there also, enjoying the luxuries of fine food and drink. When slaves were captured, some of them, including some male slaves, were given to the women of the wealthy and noble class to serve at their beck and call.
For the most part, power was not a gender issue. It was a class issue. The nobility and upper classes in any society, both men and their women, were wealthy and powerful. The common people, also both men and women, were not. This means that the vast majority of men in every society historically had very little power. And though they might have had power over their own wife and daughters, if a noblewoman came by, they had no power at all in relation to her. She could command them to do something, and they would have to do it.
Did men relatively speaking have more power than women? Yes. But not in such absolute terms as is often portrayed. It’s just that women generally exercised their power from behind the scenes, whereas men exercised their power directly and obviously. This has lulled sloppy thinkers of today into thinking that men had all the power, and women had none—which is a silly and superficial idea based on appearances and not on reality.
To use just one famous or infamous example from the Bible, in the story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21, Jezebel, the pagan wife of King Ahab of Israel, works behind Ahab’s back, impersonating him in letters, to bring about a nefarious result that Ahab himself was unwilling to bring about. And there are other stories of Jezebel exercising her power, such as in 1 Kings 19:1–8, where the prophet Elijah had to flee from Jezebel in fear for his life.
On the positive side, there are many examples in the Bible of women who exercised power for good purposes, carrying out the will of the Lord. For some of them, see:
Is the Bible a Book about Men? What about Women?
Throughout history women have had power. But they have generally exercised it in roundabout ways, often through men, rather than directly as men do. It is true that in some societies women have less power, and in others they have more. It is also true that in most societies men have had more power than women. But women as a class of people are not now and never have been powerless victims of men as portrayed in some modern ideologies. Women have always exercised power, only they have usually exercised it differently than men do, and not as obviously as men do.
So in other words, the anti-male notion that men in power are always bad and women in power are not so much is false then?
Hi K,
Yes. I think there are about equal numbers of men and women in hell.
It’s also rather insulting to women to treat them as if they don’t have the potential to be just as evil as men. Are women truly weaker creatures than men, so that they do not have as much potential for either good or evil as men? It smacks of the old decried practice of putting women on a pedestal, as if they are perfect, pure, innocent creatures.
To be plain, women have the same capability as men of being both very good and very bad, and everything in between. We are all human beings here.