Female feelings

Being an INTP, I am certainly not without feelings, but they are pretty raw and inarticulate. No matter how I am feeling --until pressed beyond endurance-- I will default to my brain to try to work conflicts through.

Feeling types --most women, and a fair number of men I have known (and lived with)-- swim in the sea of emotion and are at home there, no matter how turbulent and tsunami-like those waters may be.

Via a reference in a  Götterdämmerung  essay about America-as-Weimar, sent me by Mr Trevor Blake, I came across this piece by a happily married male blogger. He points out the wifely feelings control-and-threat game. Even I know it well. And it never ceases to exhaust, disappoint and drive me away.

"I feel disrespected and humiliated when you do that, and I don’t know why you want to do something which makes me feel disrespected and humiliated. When you do that, I feel sad. I feel ugly. I feel like you don’t care about me and don’t really love me."

Placate me or I'll keep pouting and it's your fault. The background threat is making him sleep on the couch, or withholding sex, or even taking the kids and leaving. The rule: if the woman feels unloved, she is commanded by God to punish her man.

I watch how women use this all the time to control men. Makes me glad to be gay, as they say. (But many gay men, whose inner feminine is either teenaged or pathological, play a similar game.)

One of the many things I am glad about in my relationship with Mr B is that we are both Ts, thinking types. In fact, compared to him, I'm the emotional one in the dyad. We are otherwise quite opposite: me INTP, him ESTJ.  The oppositions make for interest, but the common T saves us.

Woe to the man yoked to a feminine power (be it in a female body or a male one) where her feelings rule.

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