Loving a Woman Does Not Mean Protecting Her From Her Fears
Why this mentality strips us and our partners of our personal power and our gifts
I recently read an otherwise lovely piece by fellow Medium writer Renata Gomes about how to love a woman. This line from her story, Protect her from her fears, leapt out at me with all the delicacy of Mjölnir (Thor’s hammer).
The piece was otherwise a genuinely pleasant read. Except for that statement.
Look — the notion of “protect me, you big strong man” is as old as the hills. However, the problem with this is that not only do we women not need protection, asking for protection from our fears is an insult to our intelligence and to our enormous potential. The exception is protection against predatory men, which is another issue . Please see: Essential Understanding of How Women Can Support Each Other, by my fellow Medium peep Rosennab. In that article, Dr. Bakari explores important ideas around how rape created the need for protection of women from bad men.
Disney movies aside, we most certainly don’t need protection per se. If anything, ancient women warriors were something else again. However the title line above speaks to a completely different issue: asking for someone else to take responsibility for the monsters in the gardens of our bellies.
Our monsters are perfect for us, and only us. With respect. We put them there. They are ours to make peace with, evict or negotiate terms with. Nobody else’s. While you and I can and should seek assistance as necessary to help us build our strength, asking someone else to protect us from our fears is precisely what weakens us most. Without learning how to build our own strength we are forever weak, helpless, and dependent.
As such, we cannot give the world the gifts we were born to give, for we don’t trust ourselves and our own power. Worse, it doubles the burden men/partners have to carry. That limits them from reaching their potential. Double-edged sword.
It’s a sweet, rather romantic notion to be saved (kindly, religions have been very good at hooking us into this lie for millennia) but you and I are the only ones who can do that for ourselves. I am not in any way arguing for the kind of selfish, isolating individualism that has pockmarked my country now for the last few years. I’m discussing inter-dependency.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to make an individual. That community is there for the trust fall, to lift us up when we fail, and we will, and to applaud when we succeed, and we can. Learning how to link up and be there for each other is the whole point.
The best communities collaborate to heal ill health in the human ecosystem.
For a perfect example of how an interdependent community works when someone behaves badly, please see Sawubona: An African Tribe’s Beautiful Greeting. This piece discusses how an African tribe uses a meeting to collectively heal a community member from poor or hurtful choices.
From that article:
When someone from the Zulu community commits an inappropriate or offensive act, their presence is required in the center of the village. Their neighbors, friends, and family make a circle around them. For two days, they go to the person and greet them by saying “Sapubon”. They start reminding them of their good deeds, virtues, successes, and great qualities.
We don’t rise as a community or a species if we wholesale hand our feminine (or any other) agency over to someone else, in this case, say a male partner. Who, again, to be fair, has their own burden to bear. His own monsters in the basement. He quite frankly doesn’t need ours. Men — all partners — enter the world with plenty of their own parental and societal bloatware without being further hamstrung by ours.
Renata Gomes said that a woman wants to be “your safe harbor.” By all means. This goes for all of us, for we might wisely consider doing this for each other as needed. We have to take breaks, be rejuvenated, renewed. Those who love us, do that for us. They don’t filch our power by expecting to have their fears borne by us as well. The strongest among us invite others to build our strengths, rather than escape from their fears.
Let me hold this for you while you rest is very different from, here, I’ll carry that for you for the rest of your life. For as we’ve seen for millennia when a partner fails at the unfair job of having to bear a double burden (his problems AND ours), and the family’s and the business and anyone else who wants to pile on, he also then bears the full brunt when all that breaks his back. As it must. How incredibly unfair.
Let me hold this for you while you rest is very different from, here, I’ll carry that for you for the rest of your life.
Dr. Bakari writes, as a Black woman,
…I insist that Black women are entitled to a meaningful existence outside of the context of elevating Black men.
While this has particular meaning from a racial standpoint, which I most certainly acknowledge, I might expand this for the purposes of this article to say that not only are all women entitled to this, but all men are also entitled to the right to self-actualize without being burdened with protecting us from our own fears.
Which, to my mind, is a large part of what we came here to learn.
What is the cost of feeling “safe?”
The writer I first mentioned also wrote this:
She wants to feel safe in your presence and in your arms.
That sounds nice. Sort of. But at what price? For if I am supremely good at eviscerating myself about an extra pound on my middle, my too-large nose, my greying hair, my self-hate, what on earth can a man do about that?
Nothing, really. No more than you can “fix” the abuses he might have suffered at the hands of an angry father, or any emotional constipation he experiences.
It is a fantasy that anyone can fix or save anyone else. The only thing we really can do is provide the safe harbor while someone heals from the work they do to fix themselves. This is precisely what I mean when I say we can only bring a completed self to a relationship, or a self-in-progress.
The fantasy that someone else can fix us is as unfortunate a dishonesty as the religious pitch that some Invisible Man in the Sky is going to intercede for us for Sean’s SAT tests or whether you qualify for that condo in California. While I honor anyone’s choice to believe what they must, I lean hard into the notion that “God helps those who help themselves.” Hence, free will. Hence, you’re on your own, Sparky. See ya when it’s over. Good luck out there.
That’s why we have each other. The spark of the Divine is in all of us. Finding it, and understanding how that gives us agency to deal with our own demons are part of our journey. I believe that we find the sacred inside ourselves when we are in service. But being in service does not mean undermining our ability to self-actualize.
The heart of equality is in part based on learning to protect ourselves. From Dr. Bakari’s article:
“Equality happens when men hold men accountable to stop harming women so that women don’t need protection. Equality starts with teaching females to protect themselves rather than expecting the protection of men.”
Faith in something Higher for me means that I have faith that I’ve been given everything I need right here right now to evolve into my best self. Faith in each other means, for me, that while we most certainly support and love each other, we demonstrate our faith that our loved ones, partners, kids, and cousins have inside them all they need to evolve. We act as mirrors, as loving echo chambers and sounding boards.
No great boxer who ever stood in the ring ever asked his trainer to stand in for him for the final rounds. Nor should we. Each of us has his own private journey and the particular garden-variety monsters which hide behind trees along the way. We need supporters, not body doubles.
I ended my last relationship in part because the man was incapable of giving me what I needed: moral support, a hug when I was hurt, and the integrity to do as he promised. I didn’t need or want a savior. That’s my job.
I want a partner who loves himself enough to be the man he dreamed of being and would be honored to share with me. I wish to be the woman who loves herself enough to be the woman I’ve dreamed of being and would be honored to share with that partner. May not happen at this late date. But I am my own best date at this point, and that might well eventually make me pretty good company someday.
With heartfelt thanks to Jessica Lovejoy for her excellent editing assistance.