Christian Community Networking

 Dr. Pamela Thompson

www.drpamthompson.com

At one of my recent community forums in Atlanta known as Blue Lights in the Basement where we pick apart a certain topic of the month, the female audience members were stunned to hear outright confirmation of our suspicions that men don’t really WANT to be KNOWN by their spouses or intimate others. Females, of course, are just the opposite (generally speaking). We want our significant others to KNOW US—our fears, hopes, wounds of the past, where we get our hair fixed, our favorite color or restaurant, what we’re dreading about our day today, what we dreamed last night, what is the current favorite cologne. The list is endless. We feel that when we are KNOWN like that, including the mundane details of our lives, that we are loved, thought of, and cared about.

My male co-facilitator at the Blue Lights in the Basement, sexologist and professor at Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Chris Bass, clued us in on the fact that men don’t want to be known because if we women knew all of their disappointments, fears, wounds, and failures, and if all of the details and vulnerabilities of their lives were on display for us--it would render them unable to care for US. We scratched our heads and probed that concept with much greater understanding of the male psyche—I think. The idea of men not wanting to be known struck me in a way that my mind felt compelled to keep exploring well into the night and the next day. I thought about how any one who is in a position of headship or responsibility (a boss over an employee, a teacher over his/her students, an army commander over his men, a president over his country, a parent over a child), CANNOT really be completely KNOWN by his/her subordinates because it compromises authority and potentially puts the subordinate in a position of having to care for the superior—which isn’t the way things are supposed to go. So it is with men (not that one gender is superior to another), but it helped me to understand how sometimes the most loving and helpful acts of women toward their men in crisis are not received well, and in fact sometimes seem to make the situation worse. Women may think they’re helping men by taking charge of certain things in their men’s lives when the need is apparent—finances, job searches, training opportunities, business ideas—and yet it may not be received as the support it was intended to communicate. It may somehow communicate to men that we don’t have confidence in them to figure out things on their own. I have observed and concluded over the years that when we females do too much for the men in our lives, including our sons and brothers, we make SORRY men out of them.

On a closing Biblical note to all of this knowing business, isn’t it interesting that the Bible, in referring to sexual unions, always says “HE knew HER…” It never says “SHE knew HIM…” Hmmm. What say you on this topic? Let’s talk about it.

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