The battle of the sexes isn’t just happening externally — it’s happening inside your mind as well.
If you have ever encountered self-help books, they commonly espouse the idea that the outer world functions as a projection of your inner landscape. For instance, if you have a lot of chaos in your life — drama and volatility in your relationships, clutter and mess in your living space, financial instability, etc. — all of this is a mirror to the turmoil within.
In The Path to Love, Deepak Chopra articulates a similar idea specifically regarding our romantic relationships. Chopra describes how the people we choose as partners and the nature of our interactions with them reveal the truth about our relationships with ourselves. Chopra writes:
“When you find your path, you will also find your love story. People today are consumed with doubts about their relationships. Have I found the right partner? Am I being true to myself? As a result, there is a restless kind of consumer shopping for partners. The path to love, however, is never about externals. The person you are with at the moment is the right person because he or she is a mirror of who you are inside. Every fault you see in them touches a denied weakness in yourself. The path to love clears up a monumental mistake: that someone out there is going to give or take something that is not already yours. When you truly find love, you find yourself.”
Chopra goes on to illuminate a dynamic in the inner world, to which I had been blind: that completeness will come from balancing the male and female energies within, metaphorically marrying the two polarities in a kind of internal partnering. I think most of us already know instinctively that fulfillment cannot be achieved through an external relationship alone. Jerry Maguire’s “You complete me” is pure fantasy. However, it never occurred to me that I should look for the qualities I want in a boyfriend, in myself — that, in fact, those are precisely the qualities I should foster and hone.
In other words, the battle of the sexes is not just a cultural phenomenon, but one that is intra-psychically divisive in each person as well. Many of us have disowned the “opposite” sex traits and thus are at odds with them, so instead we seek out partners with our orphaned characteristics in an effort to achieve a kind of externalized balance. So for example, I personally embrace my femininity through striving to be kind, nurturing, and open, while partnering with someone with a strong, assertive personality.
Together, we tenuously approximate a kind of balance, but individually, we are each tipped too far in one direction, which can be literally polarizing. According to Chopra, prior to a successful union with another person, we must merge the masculine and feminine energies within our own psyches. In my case, my quest for balance will involve bringing to the fore my own strength and assertiveness, in balance with my kind and nurturing side.
(Just as an aside, though Chopra discusses generalized qualities he attributes to “maleness” or “femaleness” and speaks of marriages both literal and metaphoric between males and females, I don’t feel we can fairly charge him with heterocentrism or sexism. The very goal he is directing readers toward is an inclusivity that dislodges our identification with these binaries. Moreover, masculine and feminine energies are present in every relationship regardless of the sexes of the two people involved.)
In addition to avoiding living out your life as a gender stereotype, Chopra also advocates embracing an ambiguity in self-definition that will allow you an expansive freedom and prevent you from illusory attachment to external sources of identity. He clarifies that “the point is to bring home feelings that need reclaiming instead of displacing them onto others.” In so doing, you neutralize the way you look at your own traits.
For instance, if you feel one of your flaws is selfishness, there may also be many instances where you are considerate. No one is fully one way or the other. You can be both selfish and considerate; rather than cancel each other out, they provide the shades that make up your whole character. And for Chopra, “A person who exhibits both strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete” — perfect, in his or her uncleaved duality.
Photo Credit
“Untitled” griff le riff @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
Did you enjoy this article?
Please let the author know by leaving them a comment below!
And, subscribe to our free weekly digest!
Simply add your email below. A confirmation email will be sent to you.
Recent Katie Paterson Articles:
- The Intrapsychic Battle of the Sexes
- TED Talk: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty
- Daylight Savings and Darwin
- A Good Will Announcement for All of You Ladies with Waves, Curls, or Frizz...
- Questioning the Future of Nostalgia: Technology’s Paradoxical Effect on Photographic Record Keeping
Hi Katie,
I enjoyed reading your article, but I think you veered off the rails with one of your comments:
“So for example, I personally embrace my femininity through striving to be kind, nurturing, and open, while partnering with someone with a strong, assertive personality.”
Women are nurtring and men are assertive? This Mars and Venus hooey really has got to go. It is so last century.
If you asked my wife, she would describe me as a kind, nurturing and open person. And, by the way, those qualities are part of my MASCULINE side.
John Ptacek
Sorry for the delayed response. I just saw your comment now. Thank you. The reason I qualified my remark with “personally” was precisely because of the immensity of the subject matter. I was speaking only for myself. We all have our own definitions of what constitutes femininity and masculinity (which also exist in concentric circles of our cultural and political backgrounds, upbringing, education, etc.) and to try to capture any kind of objective set of gender traits, to me, would be futile. Gender is a hugely complex topic with many facets — sociological, anthropological, psychological, cultural, historical, literary, etc.– certainly, such analyses are far beyond the scope of this little article!
Nonetheless, please forgive any reductive statements or over-simplifications. In part, I was trying to maintain a level of fidelity to Chopra’s ideas and language as well as avoid esoteric or politicized jargon. (However, perhaps it’s impossible to address the topic apolitically!)
The point I wished to stress in writing this piece was Chopra’s idea of internal balance–of not locking yourself into your gender stereotype and identifying too strongly or too exclusively with it (at the expense of failing to cultivate the complementary traits). However, balance isn’t restored if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, either. It is a delicate negotiation.
If you are someone who loves freely and openly and embraces his softness as much as his strength, then you are embodying the balanced psyche of which Chopra speaks (Good on you!)–and the issue is only semantics.