The Image of Female Perfection

I remember how beautiful she was, how exquisite (and yes, I am playing the pronoun game haha). Looking at her was like seeing a new universe explode into existence with my own eyes. From nothingness to pure perfection. It was golden. It was seraphic. It was a sight to behold. Unfortunately however, she was not the one for me.

Beauty...as perfect as a baby's first smile. In her presence I was a knight, a dragon slayer, kind but dangerous, basking in the radiance and image of this goddess, fighting for the right to claim what she had to offer. You know I always thought that true beauty was as bitter as it was sweet. Both good and evil. An equilibrium of opposing forces. It did not just come with an overabundance of peace and positive emotion. Inside of that beauty lived something else. There was this deep sense of pain and suffering on a scale hitherto undreamt of. It was terrible yes. But in some ways it was wonderful, and somehow it tied up the image of the ideal woman with a nice bow. It was true perfection. Eternal. Transcendent.

That is how we as men look at the women we fall in love with. And while we are aware on some level that it doesn't actually exist and it never would, it is still our primary motivator in our pursuit of women - the image of the eternal feminine. It is the image of female perfection, and it always will be. When we fall in love, the women transform before our very eyes into the goddesses of love, and what we see is immaculate and unparalleled divinity. That is what they are to us. What we see is a manifestation of a judgmental ideal.

But why does it make us afraid? Why are men terrified of pursuing women nowadays? Why do we make ourselves look like complete fools in front of the women we like? Is it because we feel as though we may not be worthy of what she has to offer? Or is it because we are afraid of outright rejection? I think it is the latter. The fear of rejection has us clinging to our seatbelts for dear life because pursuing women nowadays is tantamount to jumping out of an airplane without a parashoot. It's just not a good idea. So now, it seems that the more attracted a man is to a woman, the more afraid he becomes of pursuing her. To be honest I can't think of a worse paradox, and I love paradoxes. But this is a terrible one because this is not how men should be. I don't like it.

Rejection...I mean, there is literally nothing in the world that can make a man more self-conscious than some good old-fashioned rejection. It is after all a woman's job. IT IS NECESSARY! How else are we supposed to gain true awareness of the way we look, the way we smell, the way we act? What better way to separate the individual woman from the one that we dream about? And let me tell you, I did dream about her, but it was literally all I could do. Dream. While I got to see her almost every day, my interaction with her was extremely limited not because I was afraid, but because she was emotionally unavailable. It was like a DVD movie that kept getting stuck at the same place no matter how much you cleaned it and put it back in. There was just no moving forward. There was a time where I would have slayed a thousand demons just to be worthy of what she had to offer but alas, that time is long gone.

The image of female perfection as it were...more than just motivation. It was an antidote to skepticism. It allowed us to become knights in our own lives. Dangerous, but with the ability to regulate it. We know how to use our swords, but we also know how to keep them sheathed. It showed us our true selves. Similar to the story of the Greek goddess of love Hathor, once called "the Mistress of the West". Her job was to guide souls to the afterlife, but she was so beautiful that any man (alive or dead), animal and even god that laid eyes on her desired her. When she was trapped in the underworld, Horus, the Lord of the Air, slayed hundreds of demons to rescue her and he also crafted the Bracelet of Forty-Two Stars to keep the demons of the dark realm from capturing her. They soon fell in love with one another.

When we look at warriors like Horus, I believe that is how we as men should be. That is what we must be, because that is what women are attracted to. That is the kind of man that women fall in love with. A man with no capacity for evil or danger, a harmless man in other words, is all but useless in the arena of warfare. He would never win a woman's heart. Sadly, men are not being encouraged to become more like knights and it is worrying. We have become so terrified of rejection that we have resigned ourselves to the idea that maybe it is better to remain single than to pursue women. It is definitely not.

I've been asked many times, "how do you get over the fear of rejection?" And it's like, "get over"? What does that even mean? I always thought that it was the wrong question to ask. The right question would be:

"How do you become braver in the face of rejection?"

And the answer is that you expose yourself to it continuously and programmatically, and not just rejection itself, but the possibility of it. As you do it again and again, you would realize that you get braver rather than less afraid, and it is not the same thing, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Rejection hurts. Trust me, I know. But in the pursuit of the eternal image of the feminine, tell me, what's the worst that can happen?

Your thoughts?