The Severing

We were born from women and spent the rest of our lives trying to get back.

This is the secret beneath every masculine performance, every conquest, every desperate reach across the bed toward something we were never taught to understand. We emerged from the feminine and were immediately told to forget it. To sever. To pretend we came from nowhere, self-made, self-born, autonomous creatures who owe nothing to the body that made us and want nothing from the bodies that summon us now.

The man will always remember what the boy was trained to forget. The body remembers warmth. Enclosure. The first knowing, which was not words at all but heartbeat, rhythm, the ocean of another person surrounding us completely. We lived inside a woman. We were fed by her blood. We experienced the world first through the wall of her body, muffled and strange and safe. And then we were expelled. Born screaming into light and cold and separation. And every act of desire since has been an attempt to return from exile.

But men, proud and difficult, will never admit this. We will say we want sex. We will say we want pleasure, release, the easy transaction of bodies meeting and parting. We will say anything except the truth, which is that we are homesick for something we cannot identify, and the closest we come to finding it is inside the body of a woman who cannot understand why we are so desperate and so clumsy and so violent in our tenderness.

The world took the boy who cried and told him crying was a woman’s native tongue. Society took the boy who reached and told him reaching was need and need was feminine and feminine was the thing he must never be. They took every impulse toward softness and declared it betrayal. Surgery on the soul, cutting away the parts that felt too much, that wanted too openly, that moved toward connection without strategy or conquest. They left us with the hardness. Aggression. Ambition. The capacity to take without trembling.

And then they sent us toward women and told us to love them.

How? How do you love what you have been taught to remove from yourself? How do you reach for the feminine in another body when you have spent your entire life burning it out of your own? How do you touch a woman with hands that were trained to grip and control but never to receive? Never to open. Never to let something in without first weighing the threat.

We approach women the way we approach everything we were not allowed to become. With rehearsed confidence over real confusion. We learn what to say. We study what they respond to. We build a version of ourselves calibrated to their expectations and present it as though it were us. And beneath the calibration, beneath the studied ease, is a man standing in front of something he was told he could never be, pretending he only wants to touch it.

And beneath all of this, beneath the rehearsal and the pretending, is a longing so aching it makes us dangerous. We want to be let in. We want to stop performing the man who knows and become the man who doesn't and have that be enough. We want the feminine to recognize us as something other than what we were trained to be. But we were never given the language for entry. Only the language for force.

Or we worship from a distance that allows us to remain untouched by what we claim to adore.

Or we collect. Women as evidence. Women as trophies. Women as the answer to a question we cannot articulate because articulating it would require the very emotional depth that was removed from us before we could begin to understand.

The boys who grew up without mothers know this in a physical sense. The empty space where a woman should have been is home. It sits behind the sternum, to the left, a cavity that nothing fills. Not achievement. Not sex. Not the notched bedposts, evidence of women who stay just long enough to prove we are wanted before we push them away to prove we do not need them.

But the boys who grew up with mothers lived different yet equally devastating lives. Proximity without access. Living beside the feminine for eighteen years and being told at every turn that it is not yours. That her softness is not your softness. That her tears are allowed and yours are not. That her body is a mystery you will spend your life trying to solve and never will because the puzzle was rigged before you were born.

The mother is the first woman we cannot reach. She surrounds us. She feeds us. She is the entire world. And then, slowly, the world tells us to separate. To individuate. To stop needing her with the ferocity of an infant and start needing her with the distance of a man. And this journey, from total dependence to pretended independence, is the template for every relationship we will ever have.

We learned love as loss.

Every woman after the mother is a repetition and a revision. We are trying to get it right this time. Trying to be close without being consumed. Trying to need without drowning. Trying to touch the feminine without losing ourselves in it. And we fail. We fail because we were given no instruction for this. We were given instruction for building and breaking and defending. No one handed us the thing that would let us approach another human being with the full force of our wanting and the full confession of our fear.

So we confuse wanting as taking. And fear as indifference. And the woman across from us, who has her own exile, her own abandonment, her own impossible training, tries to decode what we mean by what we do. And she cannot. Because what we do and what we mean are separated by a distance that spans the entire history of what men were told they could not be.

And, as if it could not be thought worse, were exiled from our own bodies before we were exiled from theirs.

A boy is born. He lives the way an animal lives in the world, without separation, without commentary. He feels hunger and he eats. He feels joy and he runs. He feels sadness and he weeps. He feels pleasure and he follows it shamelessly. He feels the warmth of another body and he presses against it because that is what bodies do when they are not yet studied.

And then the lessons begin. Sit still. Toughen up. Stop touching. Stop feeling. Stop being so sensitive. What are you, a girl?

That last question. What are you, a girl?

It is the scalpel. It cuts the boy in half. Before that question, he was whole. He contained multitudes. He could be fierce and tender. He could be loud and quiet. He could fight and cry and dance and embrace another boy without anyone telling him it meant something dangerous. He was masculine and feminine and neither and both, the way all children are before we are quantified and qualified.

After the question, he is half a person. The feminine half is not killed. It is buried. Driven underground. It becomes the secret life of men, the emotional underworld where everything we were told we cannot be still lives, still breathes, still reaches for the surface every time we hear a piece of music that undoes us or watch our child sleep or stand before something that moves us to tears.

And this is what we bring to women. This halved self. This creature that has been told half its nature is poison. We bring our hunger without being able to voice it. We bring our need without our capacity to articulate it. We bring our bodies without the full right to inhabit them.

Is it any wonder we do not know how to touch them?

We touch women the way we were taught to touch the world. With intent. With direction. With the implicit assumption that touch is a means to an end rather than a conversation of its own. We touch to take, to claim, to prove. We touch to get somewhere. We touch toward orgasm the way we move toward goals, with efficiency and determination and a complete misunderstanding of what the moment is actually asking of us.

What the moment is asking is for us to be present. Not performing. Not pursuing. Not conquering or giving or proving. Just present. In the body. In the sensation. In the intimacy of skin meeting skin without ambition or agenda. And this is the one thing we cannot do. Because presence requires inhabiting the body, and we have been evicted from our own bodies for so long we have forgotten the address.

Women feel this. They feel the absence in our touch even when our touch is skilled. They feel the ghost in the machine. They feel the man having sex while the boy inside sits behind a locked door, desperate to feel something genuine. Women have told us this in a thousand ways and we have not heard them because hearing them would require admitting that our expertise is just hiding our exile.

We confuse intensity for intimacy. We think that if we want hard enough, long enough, desperately enough, it will substitute for the ability to be known. But intensity is the opposite of intimacy. Intensity burns. Intimacy warms. Intensity consumes. Intimacy stays. Intensity demands the other be the answer. Intimacy admits there may be no answer and that is enough.

We are men of intensity. We were trained for it. Trained to burn through obstacles, through resistance, through the other person’s hesitation. Trained to mistake fucking for passion. Trained to believe that what does not yield must be overcome, and what cannot be overcome must be abandoned, and what is abandoned was never worthy of us in the first place.

And the women we leave behind. They bear the scars of this. They bear the bruises of our education. They loved men who wanted them the way a drowning man wants air, not because they were seen as women but because they were needed as rescue. They loved men who could not tell the difference between a woman and their own duality. Between a lover and a mirror. Between a human being and the absent feminine they have been mourning since childhood and with never knowing what they lost.

Lust is at least honest.

When a man looks at a woman and something moves through him, something animal, something pre-verbal, something that bypasses every lesson of civilized man and speaks from the body, that is the closest he will come to his own truth. Not because lust is pure. It is not. It is tangled with power and projection and a thousand confusions about what women are and what men deserve. But beneath the tangle, beneath the projection, there is a genuine reaching. A genuine wanting. A genuine admission that he is not complete. That something in her body summons something in his that has not yet been silenced.

And the world, it gave us a prescription for this. Shame. To manage it. To tame desire until it is acceptable, which means until it is no longer desire at all but preference, selection, the consumer choosing from a catalog of options.

Desire is anything but preference. Desire is the self coming apart. Desire is the controlled man losing control, the certain man becoming uncertain, the autonomous man admitting he is at the mercy of something he did not choose and cannot regulate. Desire is the fracture in the facade. And through that fracture, if we are brave enough, if we have not been so thoroughly trained that the fracture seals itself before anything can enter, through that fracture comes the possibility of actually meeting another person.

Yet we are rarely brave enough. The fracture opens and we seal it with performance. We turn desire into conquest. We turn the vulnerability of wanting into the dominance of taking. We fuck toward the woman rather than with her, toward some destination that exists in our heads, a finish line that allows us to stop feeling the terrible openness that desire creates.

The women. Lying beneath us or beside us or on top of us, trying to find the man inside the machine. Trying to locate the person who wants them amid this charade of wanting. Trying to figure out if we see them or if we are looking through them toward something they will never be. And often the answer is yes. We are looking through them. We are looking toward the mother, the feminine, the lost half of ourselves, and the woman in front of us is just the screen upon which we project it.

That the cruelty is unintended is meaningless. This cruelty that lives in the gap between what we need and what we can say. We use women to solve a problem they did not create. We bring them our shattered selves and ask them to make us whole. We bring them the pieces of and we say fix this, without saying it, by the way we reach for them, by the way we grip them too tight or not tight enough, by the way we come and then retreat into the silence of men who have briefly touched something real and cannot bear it.

We were raised to be their opposite. And this is the second time we are betrayed.

Not their complement. Not their partner. Their opposite. As if masculinity and femininity were opposing forces rather than the two lungs of a single body. We were taught that to be masculine was to be everything the feminine was not. She feels, so you think. She is soft, so you are hard. She is receptive, so you are active. She curves, so you are straight. She is chaos, so you are order. She is body, so you are mind.

This opposition is a prison for everyone, but it is a brutal prison for men who desire women, because it means that the thing we want most is the thing we have been defined against. To move toward the feminine is to move away from the masculine. To understand her is to lose ourselves. To empathize with her experience is to abandon the post we were assigned.

So we desire from a distance. We want what we are not allowed to understand. We hunger for what we have been told is our negation. And we perform this impossible desire in the only ways we have been given. Possession. Conquest. The brutal reduction of a human mystery to a body we can enter, a surface we can understand, a problem we can solve.

Women are not problems. But we were trained as problem-solvers and so we approach everything, including love, including desire, including the irreducible otherness of another consciousness, as something to be figured out, mastered, resolved. We read articles about female pleasure the way we read manuals. We study technique the way we study strategy. We learn the mechanics without learning the meaning. We become skilled at producing orgasms and incompetent at producing anything else.

Safety is not a technique. Safety is a state of being. Safety is what a woman feels when the man beside her is not feigning certainty but admitting his confusion. Safety is what a woman feels when she is not the object of his desire but the subject of his attention. Safety is what a woman feels when his need for her does not require her to be anything other than what she is, including angry, complicated, contradictory, all the things the feminine was never supposed to be in the opposition that was built to contain it.

Men, however, are not built to provide this safety. Not because we are unwilling but because we have not been given safety ourselves. We were never safe in our own femininity, in our own tenderness, in our own confusion. We were never allowed to be uncertain about who we were without someone telling us confusion was failure. We were never allowed to try on different selves, different energies, different modes of being in the world without someone slotting us back into the rigid framework of what a man should be.

So we reproduce the same problem. We build the same cell for the women we love that was built for us. Be this. Be soft. Be open. Be available. Be the feminine I need you to be so I can remain the masculine I was told I must be. And when she resists, when she is angry or hard or unavailable, when she is a full human being and not the archetype we require, we punish her for it. With withdrawal, silence, with the cruelty of a man who has been told the world owes him a certain kind of woman and feels betrayed when the world fails to deliver.

The sins of our fathers are upon us.

Fathers that instructed with absence, and silence, and with the things they could not say and the tenderness they could not show and the women they could not reach. We watched our fathers stand in front of intimacy and retreat. We watched them attempt strength while their marriages collapsed. We watched them provide without being present. We watched them and we learned. Not what they taught but what they were. Men trapped in the same exile, performing the same impossibility, reaching for women across the same distance and failing in the same ways.

And their fathers before them. And their fathers before them. A lineage of men standing at the border of the feminine, turned back, trying to signal across a distance that grows with every generation. Each one swearing he will be different. Each one replicating the pattern because the pattern is not a choice. It is what we inherit. It is built into the words we speak, the stories we tell, the way we catalog desire and distribute allowance and decide who gets to feel what and when.

We are blamed for the destruction. And the destruction is real. What women endure, the scars of men who could not love without consuming, who could not desire without reducing, who could not be close without controlling. This destruction is real and it matters and no diagnosis of its origins excuses it. But the men who caused it were also products. They were manufactured by a system that dismembered them before they could walk and then sent them toward women with their hands full of pieces and their voices silenced.

This is what it looks like inside the man who reaches for her and finds his hands have been replaced with something that can hold but cannot feel. This is what it looks like inside the man who wants so desperately to be understood that he cannot bear to understand, because understanding requires vulnerability and vulnerability is the door he nailed shut when he was seven and someone used a word sissy, or fag, or girl and he decided he would rather die than be that again.

We are entangled with a sex we cannot decipher. Not because women are mysterious. Women are not mysterious. Women are human beings with different training, different allowances, different cages. The mystery is not in them. The mystery is in the distance between us, a distance that was manufactured and maintained and sold back to us as nature. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. This idiocy of exile being cosmic rather than constructed. As if we were born on different planets rather than raised in the same house with, only with different rules.

Women were told to feel. Men were told to think. Women were told to connect. Men were told to achieve. Women were told their bodies were their value. Men were told their bodies were their tools. Women were told desire was dangerous. Men were told desire was their birthright. Women were told to attract. Men were told to pursue. Both were told the other was fundamentally alien, and so when they come together, they come together across a gulf, reaching with hands trained by different imperatives toward a meeting that neither was prepared for.

In the bed where the distance should dissolve, where the bodies should override the training, where two people should be able to forget what they were told and simply be what they are. Even in the bed, the scripts persist. He performs. She evaluates. He takes. She gives. He is the actor. She is the audience. He is the question. She is supposed to be the answer.

And she can never be the answer. She never was the answer. She is another question, equally desperate, equally confused, equally formed by the same system that formed him, and when two questions meet in the dark and neither can admit they do not know what they are doing, what results is not love but collision. Not intimacy but impact. Not union but the violent joining of two solitudes that mistake friction for warmth.

Young men are instructed to master women. Study their psychology. Learn their triggers. Decode their signals. There is an industry built on the premise that women are a code to be broken, a system to be hacked, a market to be cornered. And the young men, who are so hungry for contact they would eat glass to get it, they buy in. They learn techniques. They practice approaches. They study body language like generals studying terrain before an invasion.

And they get women. They get laid. They get the physical proximity they were starving for. And then they find that the proximity changes nothing. The loneliness persists. That the woman beside them is as far away as ever because what they have achieved is access to her body without access to her being, and it is her being they wanted all along, her full complicated contradictory human being, and this is the one thing their training did not prepare them for.

Accessing her being would require offering their access to their own. And their own being is the thing they have hidden, buried, fortified against discovery. Their own being is the feminine half, the tender half, the half that wants to be embraced and does not know how to ask. To offer this to a woman would be to unmask. And unmasking is what they were told would destroy them.

So they stay masked. And the women beside them feel the mask and mistake it for the face. And the distance remains. And the hunger grows. And both of them, lying in the same bed, stare at the same ceiling and wonder why proximity has not solved the loneliness, why touch has not bridged the gulf, why the most intimate act two people can perform has left them more alone than before.

There is something we are not saying about desire. Something the culture cannot accommodate.

Desire is not masculine. Desire is not feminine. Desire is the place where the opposition collapses. Where the man who has been told he is all force and no feeling discovers he is being pulled, opened, undone. Where the woman who has been told she is all reception and no agency discovers she is the one with power, the one who chooses, the one who allows or denies, the one whose body is the territory and whose will is the border.

In the moment of authentic desire, the roles dissolve. The man becomes soft. The woman becomes fierce. The pursuer becomes the pursued. The walls fall. The opposition that was built to keep them separate collapses under the force of what the body knows that the training tried to suppress. That we are not opposites. That we are the same creature wearing different costumes. That the masculine and the feminine are not two things but one thing looking at itself from different angles.

This is what terrifies us. Not the woman. Not her body. Not her otherness. What terrifies us is the sameness. The recognition that inside her is everything we buried inside ourselves. That her tears are our tears. That her softness is ours. That her need is ours. The feminine we were told to kill is alive inside her, looking back at us, and if we let it in, if we let ourselves recognize it, we will have to grieve everything we lost.

Grief, to men, is unbearable. The grief of realizing we did not have to be this. That the exile was unnecessary. That the severing was a choice someone else made for us before we could consent. That we spent our lives being a half-self when the whole self was available, that it has always been available, and was waiting behind the door we nailed shut because someone told us what was behind it would make us weak.

And the tragedy of realizing that what was behind it would have made us human.

We watch women move through the world and something in us stirs. Not just desire. Recognition. We recognize in their bodies what was taken from our own. The ability to curve. The license to soften. The permission to be affected, to be moved, to respond to the world rather than remaining steeled against it.

Something we have reduced to simple attraction. It is not only attraction. It is mourning dressed as hunger. We want what they were allowed to keep. We want the softness that was beaten out of us. We want the emotional range that was narrowed to nothingness. We want the license to be in our bodies the way they are in theirs, as inhabitants rather than operators, as the lived thing rather than the machine running the thing.

And because we cannot say this, because the admission would collapse the idea of who we were told we must be, we reduce this stirring to sex. We physicalize it. We make it about penetration when it is about permeation. We make it about entering her body when it is about being entered by our own experience. We make it about her when it is about us, about the parts of us that are dying of thirst in the desert of the masculine, reaching toward the only water we have been allowed to acknowledge, which is the body of a woman.

And the women. The women who sense this. Who know, on some level they may never articulate, that the man reaching for them is not reaching for them at all but for something inside himself that he has projected onto her. The women who feel used by this and cannot say why, because on the surface he is attentive, he is generous, he is doing everything the manuals told him to do. But beneath the surface she can feel it. That she is a means to an end she did not agree to serve. That his desire, however genuine, is filtered through a desperation that has nothing to do with who she actually is.

This is what women inherit from men who cannot diagnose their own severance. This is the collateral damage. We bleed on them. We do not mean to. We think we are loving them. We are loving the idea of them. The archetype. The feminine principle. The mother. The goddess. The other half we were told we must never show in ourselves. We are loving an abstraction, and the real woman standing in the place where the abstraction should be feels the difference even when she say it.

What we can bear to feel. What we refuse to feel. This is the only question.

Can we bear to feel the weight of our conditioning without turning it into another performance? Can we sit with the fact that we were deformed without romanticizing it? Can we look at the distance between ourselves and the women we claim to love and admit that the distance is not the result of feminine mystery but masculine refusal? Can we stop blaming them for being unknowable and start admitting that we never learned how to know?

Can we feel our own femininity without disguising it as something else? Without marketing it as sensitivity? Without rebranding it as emotional intelligence? Without turning it into another tool for optimization? Can we let ourselves be soft without immediately cauterizing what bleeds?

Can we touch a woman and not be trying to get somewhere? Can we let our hands be dumb, purposeless, present? Can we let the touch itself be the destination rather than the vehicle? Can we stop fucking toward something and start being inside the moment that exists before direction takes over, the moment when two bodies are close and neither knows what will happen and the confusion is not anxiety but finally being alive?

We were never taught any of this. We were taught to know. To direct. To lead. To have a plan. To move from intention to execution without the wasteful business of uncertainty. We were taught that a man who does not know what he wants is not a man at all. And so we always know. We always have a direction. We always have a plan. And the plan prevents us from ever reaching anywhere we did not expect, which means we never get anywhere real, because reality is what happens when the plan collapses and we are left standing in the rubble of our certainty, naked, confused, capable for the first time of actually seeing the person in front of us.

Women know this about us. They know we cannot see them. They have always known this. They know that our gaze, even when it is adoring, is a kind of blindness. That we are looking at them through the filter of everything we were told they should be, and the actual woman, the irreducible human being standing in front of us, is invisible behind the projection.

And still they stay. This is the part that shatters me. They stay. They stay with men who cannot see them. They stay with men who confuse them with their mothers. They stay with men who reach for them from inside a cage and speak words of love. They stay because their training taught them to translate. To decode. To find the tenderness inside the silence and the need inside the dominance and the love inside the clumsiness of a man who wants to be close and can only manage proximity.

They should not have to translate us. We should learn to speak.

But we will not. Because speaking would mean saying things that have no masculine dialect.

I am lost.

I am afraid of you.

Not afraid you will hurt me but afraid you will see me. Afraid that what you see will not be the man I have told you I was for you but the boy who still does not understand why he was told to stop crying. Afraid that my desire for you is not something I can control and that lack of control makes me someone I do not recognize. Afraid that if I love you fully, with the whole self and not just the allowed half, I do not know what I will become. And I have spent my entire life constructing this self.

These words do not exist in the world we were given. There is no masculine word for this. There are only the old words. I want you. I need you. Come here. Stay. Words that sound like desire but are actually pleas for something we cannot identify because identifying it would mean admitting it lives inside us, the feminine, the soft, the dissolving, the self that melts rather than seizes, that receives rather than takes, that opens rather than enters.

Every man has a woman inside him. A suppressed register of being that includes everything the masculine training tried to eliminate. Receptivity. Emotional availability. The capacity to be changed by contact rather than to change what we contact. The willingness to not know. The willingness to wait. The willingness to let the other lead. The willingness to be led.

It is imperative that we recognize that this feminine is not weakness. She is a capacity. She is the part of us that could actually meet the woman in front of us if we allowed her to exist. She is the bridge between our exile and their presence. She is the translator we are too proud to employ. She speaks the dialect. She knows the customs. She could make the passage possible if we were not so terrified of admitting she is ours.

We kill her instead. Every day, in small ways and large. We kill her with silence. We kill her with control. We kill her with the reflex that happens every time something soft tries to surface. We kill her with porn that reduces the feminine to a function. We kill her with cynicism that reframes longing as weakness. We kill her with the machinery of a masculinity that insists it is complete in itself, needing nothing, containing everything, sovereign and sealed.

However, she will never be silenced. She cannot die. She is us. She lives in the words when we cannot speak. She lives in the lungs when we cannot breathe. She lives in the hands when we reach for a woman in the dark and the reaching is not strategic but desperate, not masculine but human, not performance but prayer.

The prayer is always the same. See me. Not the man I have made myself into. Not the performance. Not the muscle and the certainty and the mask. See the creature underneath who has been alone in the dark for thirty, forty, fifty years, eating his own need, swallowing his own voice, drowning in an isolation so complete he has convinced himself it is the very air he breathes.

The woman beside him, the real woman, the woman who is not the mother and not the archetype and not the lost feminine but a person, a sovereign complicated difficult beautiful contradictory person, she hears the prayer even when it is not spoken. She hears it in the way he holds her too tight. In the way he finishes too fast. In the way he rolls over afterward into a silence that is not peace but retreat. In the way he cannot look at her after being seen, even briefly, even through the fractures in the performance.

She hears it and she does not know what to do with it. Because she was not trained to save men. She was trained to need saving. She was trained to be the object of desire but not the witness to desperation. She was trained to receive the performance but not the performer. And when the performer breaks down, when the machinery stops and the man underneath is visible, she is as unprepared for his truth as he is for hers.

It is impasse. Two people conditioned to be each other’s opposite, discovering in the wreckage of their conditioning that they are the same. Both severed. Both performing. Both reaching across a distance that was never natural, never necessary, and the construction of a world that profits from keeping them apart.

The separation is nothing more than a market. Loneliness is the market. Sell men the performance and sell women the expectation. Sell men the fantasy of the woman they deserve and sell women the fantasy of the man who will complete them. Ensure neither can recognize the other as human. Ensure both remain hungry. Hunger is profitable.

Men do not deserve absolution. The things men have done to women through desire are real. The reduction is real. The centuries of treating the feminine as property, resource, and as the raw material for masculine selfhood, this history is real and we have blood on our hands every time we touch a woman, whether we know it or not.

But we also do not deserve to be told that we chose this. That we invented this. That we are the authors of an exile that was imposed on us before we had words, before we had choice, before we had anything except the need of a desperate animal looking for warmth.

We were taught to be the men who cannot reach women. We were taught by fathers who could not reach mothers. We were taught by a culture that profits from the distance, that sells solutions to a problem it created, that markets intimacy as a product rather than a practice, that tells us to optimize our way to connection as if connection were a metric that could be achieved rather than a risk that must be endured.

Women are tired. Tired of translating. Tired of decoding. Tired of doing the emotional labor of understanding men who refuse to understand themselves. They are right to be tired. They have been doing the heavy lifting of the bridge for generations while we stood on the other side insisting there was no gap.

There is a gap. And is vast. And it was not built by the men or the women standing on either side. It was built by the world that made them what they are and declared it nature.

Somewhere, right now, a man is lying beside a woman he loves and cannot reach. He is looking at the ceiling. She is turned away. Between them is the entire history of what men were taught to be and what women were taught to expect and neither of them has the words for what is happening, which is that two people who want the same thing, to be known, to be embraced, to be chosen for what they are rather than what they perform, are lying inches apart and cannot cross the distance.

He will not say I am afraid.

She will not say I am tired of being afraid for you.

He will not say I do not know how to love you without losing myself.

She will not say I do not know how to love you without becoming your mother.

He will not say my desire for you is the truest thing about me and it terrifies me.

She will not say I can feel your desire and it does not feel like it is for me.

They will lie there. In the dark. In the silence that is not peace but the exhausted aftermath of performances neither can sustain. And in the morning they will get up and do it again. The dance. The distance. The careful movements of two people who want each other and do not know how to bridge the abyss that was dug between them before they were born.

This is not a tragedy because it is hopeless. It is a tragedy because the hope is right there, in the bed, in the breath, in the hand that could reach across and find another hand and stay there without purpose, without strategy, without the masculine need to direct the moment toward an outcome.

Just stay there. Just be there. Just stop performing long enough to feel what you feel and let her see it.

We will not do this. Not because we are cowards. Because we are men. And men were built for the distance. Built for the exile. Built to stand at the border of the feminine and look in and want and never enter. Never cross. Never allow the crossing to undo the self that was constructed precisely to prevent it.

The body remembers what it was before the training. The body remembers when it was part of her body. The body remembers the first warmth, the first enclosure, the first communion that needed no words. And the body reaches. Even now. Even after everything. The body reaches toward her in the dark, reaches past the performance and the conditioning and the centuries of manufactured distance, reaches with the dumb animal hope that this time, this time, the reaching will complete them.

It won’t. It will never be enough. Not because the distance is real but because we insist on reaching with only half of ourselves. We reach with the masculine hand. The hand that grips. The hand that takes. The hand that knows what it wants and moves toward it with the certainty of a man who has been told certainty is strength.

The other hand. The feminine hand. The hand that opens. The hand that receives. The hand that does not know what it wants but waits for the wanting to teach it. That hand is bound. Tied behind our backs by the training, by the inheritance, by the voice that said this is not yours, this softness, this openness, this capacity to be changed by what you touch.

Unbind the hand.

Or keep performing the half-reach, the masculine reach, the reach that looks like strength and is actually amputation.

And the women will keep waiting. Not because they owe us their patience. But because they know, in the body, in the animal knowing that predates the training, that the man reaching for them contains everything they are looking for. That behind the performance is a person. That beneath the mask is a face. That inside the fortress is a prisoner who wants out as badly as they want in.

They can see us. They have always been able to see us. It is we who are blind.

We will die blind. Most of us. We will die having never crossed the distance. Having never used the full reach. Having never let the feminine hand unbind itself and open and receive what the woman we loved was offering, which was not her body, or not only her body, but her witness. Her willingness to see us whole. Her terrifying, generous, impossible willingness to look at the catastrophe of our conditioning and say yes.

I see it.

I see you.

Come here.

Come here.

We cannot.

We were never taught the way.