Connecting with the male soul...

Any regular reader of "The Baltimore Chronicles" knows about my tortured feelings for the artiste also known by his actual name, Gordon. You know that I am doing a long-running imitation of teflon when it comes to men in general; they just do not stick to me in any way on any level.

I have female companionship in spades, sometimes I have had more than I wanted, and I thought to myself... "I swear, if I meet another woman..." I like my girlfriends, but bonding with the female spirit is not a challenge for me. I have sisters. I have a mother. I have my women's poetry group. I have a handful of ex-roommates with whom I still keep in touch. Almost every member of my team at work is a woman. Women outnumber men in my grad school program by at least 5 to 1.

To say that there is a dearth of maleness in my landscape would be an understatement. As a woman, I'll be the first to say that I need and want the male perspective, the male heart, the male rationale, and the male spirit represented in my life in myriad ways.

No, this is not another post about how my father and stepfather are shiftless losers. I have written that post before, and as much as possible, I am moving on from the stigma, nay, the legacy of being another woman whose father wasn't there for her. But now, coming out on the other side of the pain of that particular abandonment, I don't find much to redeem it in my current relationships with male peers.

I know I need to examine my role in this. I do believe that I have arm's lengthed some men because they were not the ideal of what I wanted, even as friends. Certainly I have a standard for a potential lover, and the men who have expressed romantic or at least sexual interest in me in the past have not fit the construct that I have in place. It's not that the men I've coveted have been perfect. I just wanted them. I was attracted to them. And the long-standing pattern is this: What I am attracted to is not attracted to me. What is attracted to me, I am not attracted to.

The disconnect is disheartening. The maleness that I require to make my experiences and my perspective less lopsided is not a covert way of saying that I want a boyfriend. I do. But this is not about that. I really also want close male friends with whom there is no sexual tension, attraction, or innuendo. I need that even more than I need a lover. I still hold to the belief that if I had more men in my life in general, when I am "interested" in a particular man, it wouldn't be so high stakes for me. There wouldn't be such a great burden on this guy to be the friend, brother, lover, and father I've always wanted.

Basically, I miss men. So, I am going to try to avail myself to more opportunities to meet them, talk to them, be near them, and establish intellectual and personal kinships with them. I need to connect with the male soul not so much to complete my self-perception as much as to inform it more deeply. Sometimes you become the best version of yourself when your "other" is in place to show you your own intrigue.