Attractive opposites

Reading through a book called Dynamic Duos, by Keith Swain. He uses evolutionary psychology and a survey to make the case that gay men mate most successfully when there is an Alpha & Beta coupling: the alpha being the more traditionally masculine and the beta with a higher dose of the feminine. His advice is to conform to this pattern rather than to try to resist it. Not finished yet --it is strangely and, to me, poorly laid out-- but it covers territory from a social science point of view that I have seen elsewhere from archetypal and a psychoanalytical ones. He uses the figures of the Hero and the Sidekick to illustrate the point.

Heroes and Sidekicks, from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Holmes and Watson, to Batman and Robin, are a fascinating study in male love, even where the pairing is not sexual. Jesus had his Peter, Buddha his Ananda. It is a natural and necessary part of the larger male soul for some to serve others. How else could an army be maintained? Alphas and Betas need each other, precisely as men.

The Canadian Jungian analyst Graham Jackson wrote two books in the early 90's in which he makes the case for two basic kinds of male coupling which somewhat echo the masculine/feminine polarity. Whether the dyad is on the brother-brother model or the father-son model, Jackson saw in both fiction and his cases an attraction between sun-identified thinking types and earth-focussed feeling types, on the one hand, and dominant fact-oriented hierarchical men of duty and submissive intuitive artistic men of passion. The Yellow Man with the Green Man, the Blue Man with the Red Man.

Jackson had himself been inspired by the little known psychoanalyst Paul Rosenfels, who investigated the psychological mating between assertive and yielding males. Roselfels puts this in stark terms:

True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex, it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization. What this book says in effect is that character specialization is dominant over biological identity, and that therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development.

The complex ebb and flow of "masculine" and "feminine" energies in a same-sex couple is fascinating. My own experience suggests that it can alter both with time and with the character of the partner. And it can express itself surprisingly in both integrated and unintegrated ways and with varying degrees of intensity.

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