For a few years, I was blessed to have the wonderful company of a pet. A small adorable and stubborn as hell bichon maltais dog. As a kid in Paris, I used to watch an animated show that I just adored called "Le manège enchanté", the enchanted merry-go-round; fabulous show. The dog in the show was named Pollux. I always wanted one.
At 22, I decided I was finally grown-up enough to have a dog and for months I searched for the dog. Eventually, sine perseverance always enables you to reach your goals, I found my own live pollux. And I instantly fell in love. A pure unconditional love, absolute for this little fur ball. He was so small, I didn't notice him at first until he came out of... a slipper. He was so insignificant in size, he would sit in the palm of my hand or I would carry him around in the front pocket of my jean jacket.
He grew, of course, and my love for him grew as well. I already had a cat, very intelligent and wise, that I had rescued when found in a barn at less than six weeks old. I called my cat puzzle since I used to do a lot of them then and he was not bigger than a couple of pieces when I got him. I had bought a miniature doll's baby bottle to feed him milk until, one day he jumped on my souvlaki and I realised he was big enough for real food. That cat brought lots of joy into my heart and still does even he has not been with me for 7 years.
The cat I had received by coincidence or maybe I love cats so much, I attracted him in my life. He was about two when I got the dog and I feared he might reject him. On the contrary, he totally adopted my dog.He became his mentor in a sort. He guided the white fur ball through early knowledge of basics. That means that puzzle made sure my dog regarded him as divine. And puzzle played abused that power on many occasions by playing many tricks on him.
Almost daily, the cat would get my dog to chase after him and jump on the sofa knowing very well that my dog would not be able to. And, every single time, the dog jumped and hit his forehead and the cat would just watch with a grin. Eventually the dog was able to jump higher and the cat found a new way to make fun of the dog.
Once, my cat fed a $10 bill to my dog. It was like a scene from a movie. My cat looked totally innocent. My dog wanted to look innocent as well but still had a piece of the bill stuck in his mouth and the rest torn up around him. He had been framed.
My friends used to come to my place just to watch the show. It was better than anything on TV. Not just for how the cat played tricks on the dog and the laughter their performance would create. More, because of the love they had for each other. During day time naps, they would sleep hugging. One would not eat if the other didn't. And even if my cat made fun of the dog, I saw him many times looking seriously worried for my dog (who would invent illnesses to get more attention). For those that have pets, you know we can tell their moods.
Looking back, and every single time I speak of bidule and puzzle, my two best friends then; I can't help but feel rejoiced, and full of love. I usually smile looking back at all we have lived together in such a little time.
Sometimes, they drove me crazy. Sometimes, I didn't have much money but fed them first. Sometimes, we just hugged all three in silence. Sometimes, when they felt that I needed to be cheered up, they did a comedy act, or were just really really good. And when they saw, I was in a good mood, they tried to get me to be more flexible with their behaviors.
No matter what they did, no matter how much I would have strangled them sometimes because they trashed a plant (cat), peed on the carpet(dog). I Loved them with all my heart. I cried for a long time after they were gone. I actually never got a dog again because the hurt was so deep in loosing my little bidule five years ago.
As a father of a boy and girl (now grown into early adulthood), I gave witness to both the subtle and blatant differences of the feminine and the masculine. Certainly, each gender has its own agenda in personality building and establishing their worldviews. There are reports, however, that suggest that the major differences between boy minds and girl minds are constructs of society and while there are certainly well defined cultural roles for both, it does not take a psychiatrist to grasp that nature has equipped males and females with their own directives and values.
In ancient times, Greek mythology tells us that once males and females were the same but Zeus, their supreme god, decided to split them apart and since then the two have desired to reunite. What is intriguing about this is that great thinkers such as the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1903) and the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) were pioneers in suggesting that men and women are united by both feminine and masculine elements. Jung called this the shadow self and named the male component in the female psyche, animus, and the female component in the male psyche, anima.
The image of the anima is what we, as male individuals, deem as the perfect woman. She is always a combination of best friend, mother, sister and lover while the image of the animus is more complex and connected to all the male myths of heroism; the dragon slayer, knight in shining armor and so forth, he nevertheless, is the perfect male in her inner-vision of true maleness. When people talk about romantic attraction between a man and a woman, the more each other correspond to the images within, the more attraction there is.
For clarity's sake, I will tell you a story about a young girl from a middle class family that I have told many times: Julie was described by her father as, "a saint of a girl". Julie was indeed a wonderful young woman. She was class president in her last year of High School and an honor student. She attended church regularly. She sang in the choir and served as the substitute Sunday school teacher. In all her nineteen years she had never-that's right never gave her parents a problem. Then one day during the summer a young man rode into the driveway on a motorcycle-he wore his hair half way down his back and was a display of tattoos. He walked onto the porch and rang the bell. Julie's mother answered the ring and was a little frightened by the stranger who was asking to see her daughter. Thinking fast Mom said that Julie was sick and she sent the young man away. What was such a ruffian doing in the neighborhood anyway?
When Julie came downstairs, her mother told her what happened and Julie openly admitted that she had been seeing the boy...for a few months. Mom forbade her to see him again and later that evening her father also put his foot down. They had never seen Julie respond so rebelliously, she left the room crying and screaming at them that she was in love.
Her parents said that they didn't care if she was in love or not, that she was not to see the young man again. Don't worry, they added when you go to college at the end of summer you will be meeting new people and you will forget all about this.
No one could believe that this young, sweet girl had done this or even that such a rough and rugged person would ever appeal to her. The truth is that she returned home after a couple of weeks in tears, the romance just wasn't how she thought it would be. And, she did go off to college and eventually met a man everyone approved of and, as Shakespeare would say, all's well that's end well.
The question is what had this delicate, lovely girl seen in such a ruthless young man to give her feelings to him? The answer is...her! Well, that is, beneath her own soft and feminine personality, her shadow self, her animus was a fearless, brute of a man, rebellious and daring. The young man with the long hair and tattooed arms came close to filling that inner-image and this is exactly what creates magnetism between males and females.
However, it also happens that when two people meet one may fulfill the other's image while the other does not. This is the reason why a woman or man might meet someone who is absolutely attracted to them but they are not attracted to the other at all. In this regard I specifically remember a young female who came crying telling me that she did not understand what was wrong with her; that she did everything she could for this fellow to make him happy, to fulfill all his needs and yet he obviously did not love her back. The truth was that there was nothing "wrong" with the young female. She simply did not fill the inner-image of her fellow's anima while he filled the image of her animus as much as any man might.
It is safe to say that all physical attraction begins with projecting one's own shadow self onto the other. More simply put, he is responding to this female outside himself because she represents what he believes that he would be, had he been born female and not male. When she finds herself physically attracted to some handsome male stranger, it is for some reason that he represents what she believes she would have been like if she had been born a male instead of a female. Sometimes these relationships work out and sometimes they do not. The future romance depends on how mutual the images match one another's other-gender projections.
Couples grow to love one another that do not necessarily fill one another's inner-images of the perfected other gender. But probably there is never a strong magnetism between them and they probably never experienced that in love feeling that people feel that have their shadow selves fulfilled by one another.
There is another side to this romantic coin, however. Carl Jung tells us that sometimes when we find that perfect image in another and marry him or her, it can end up that we are marrying our own worst enemy. This is precisely where the young girl I wrote about would have done had she married the rough and tumble motorcycle rider. Indeed, she fortunately realized the relationship would never work soon after moving in with him but some people end up living unhappily ever after when they happen to truly marry a person who fulfills their inner image of what they think a (real) man should be or a (perfect) woman should be. For only two examples, he might fulfill her animus image by appearing to be physically fearless and strong and yet in private life end up being cold and unfeeling or even weak. On the other hand, she might be charming and lovely as his shadow self is charming and lovely when the relationship starts but after marriage, she may reveal herself to be coercive and demanding. It is obviously impossible to list every possibility of how one's perfect mate turns out to be the imperfect mate after the relationship becomes committed.
Nevertheless this is also exactly why you will sometimes see a couple who obviously appear unmatched but have happy and wonderful relationships-you know, the beautiful, shapely woman wed to a Mr. Peepers type or the extremely handsome male in a most successful marriage with a mousy wife. In both these kinds of relationships the whispers are, what in the world does he (or she) see in their mate. The answer is that they see their inner-selves demonstrated in the world by their mates.
When we think about what has been said in the above, we can say that by the time we begin noticing the other gender, we unconsciously have begun our search for completeness-indeed, when we are males, females are a living, breathing expression of our other-gender selves. When we are female, males are a living, breathing expression of our other-gender selves.
As we mature and our anima selves and animus selves become more defined images we begin being more attracted to specific types and looks of the other gender. This is because we are more aware of our own other-gender natures and cannot express those natures in the outside world ourselves. Traditionally males are not supposed to have anything feminine about them and females are not supposed to have anything masculine about them. This however is a social myth as no boy or girl has ever been born without at least having some of each other's qualities.
However, there are males who are more masculine than other men are in that they have either buried their feminine side too deeply in their psyches to be influenced by them, or women so feminine that they simply do not have a very visible or knowable animus at all. Such men are typically brutish and overly aggressive while such women are typically frail and overly passive. (In their way, they are the stereotypes of our worst traits as separated genders).
While the human species is absolutely equipped to becoming polyandrous or monogamous or polygynous and especially promiscuous the age-old question is nesting with a single mate the strongest drive for our specie's call to fulfill nature's reproductive strategies, is asked. The biological answer is probably not since one male can theoretically impregnate hundreds of women within a short time span but it takes females the better part of a year to deliver offspring. The boundaries of marriage are no doubt a social establishment based on creating heirs and therefore keeping tight reins on female sexuality so that those heirs can be legitimized. For centuries, however, only female monogamy was (truly) made into a moral obligation while males, in many cultures, were even expected to have lovers. This seemingly was never the rule in America although the rule of lifelong commitment to a single mate has seldom been obeyed. And, there have been some groups to advocate polygamy along the way. Nevertheless, for our own culture monogamous relationships are clearly the most productive and certainly family unity itself was once called the cornerstone of the entire nation's stability.
There are, incidentally, around 4% or 5% of around 4000 mammals that maintain monogamous relationships such as wolves and beavers; among the primates gibbons mate for lifetimes and some birds do. People on the other hand, as already said, are capable of having any kind of relationship by choice alone. If for example, the United States supported polygamy as the mating standard we would not deem it immoral but righteous. We are simply capable to freely-willing our own mating habits or at least being receptive to whatever our cultures indoctrinate us to believe is right and moral.
There are other forces at work than religious-social engineering of course. Going back to the topic of the anima and animus there is that inner yearning to be made whole by connecting to an individual of the opposite sex. Indeed wives and husbands are often named, our better or other half...marriage itself symbolizes two halves being joined into a perfect oneness.
In regard to this, with some individuals there exists a terrible feeling of incompleteness until mating and having a member of the other gender give expression in the real world to their inner-world of other gender feelings and desires; to have the other give actualization to the anima or animus that has been consciously kept unrevealed through a persona of total maleness or femaleness. In this view wife relinquishes her maleness to her husband and husband relinquishes his femaleness to his wife. A result of this relinquishing is for husband to feel (all) man and for wife to feel (all) woman in their psyche lives. I suggest that this relinquishing of the female soul by men and the male soul by women is not necessary for males with more subtle animas and females with more subtle animus'; those that are molded more comfortably into their own gender images and do not have a strong attachment to their shadow selves.