The Pursuit Of Androgyny

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A football player doesn’t bang a cheerleader just because she’s hot. Underlying the clichéd relationship is a bridge joining two interdependent opposites; they are grout to each other’s cracks. Dominant masculinity finding submissive femininity as its counterpart.

Relationship compatibility is, at times, a search for what we lack. Covering the blank spaces of our canvas. It is common to see alpha males with girly girls; yet, in the periphery of society, there are androgynous men and women straddling the gender median like a geostrophic current, dynamic and hungering for wholeness, searching for each other.

Androgyny, as I intend for this piece, is not concerned with sexuality. Rather, it is androgyny defined as the spiritually developed person in the Jungian fashion of recognizing the anima (for guys) and the animus (for girls). There is a girl inside every boy and a boy inside every girl, to put it simply. Individual development relies on confronting the opposite gender attributes inside of you rather than drowning them in the still waters of repression. It is about becoming personally whole so relationships don’t become a quick fix for your unconscious compulsions.

I want my anima close at all time. She is me.

My anima is a necessary and unwieldy component of my personality. She inspires me to dance with my entire body, not just jump up and down amongst the frat boys. She encourages me to speak with benevolence, rather than smack talk. She scoops up my lingering emotions and casts them in front of me so that I can’t eclipse them into a bunker with no entry. She slaps me with her steel hand when I condemn and deny. She opens me up when I’m too logical, when my thinking is too concrete, static. She carries bandages when my ego is shredded into a thousand pieces spread out into an impossible puzzle.

I have given up parts of my alpha male for the sake of her. A difficult loss in a culture mired by linear thinking. My acknowledgment of her and my embrace of her voice has led me to a place of androgyny. That is, a place of confusion and, often, contempt from people who are imperceptive to the amorphous expanse waiting outside the established lines we’ve drawn.

It is not a coincidence that I’m attracted to girls who are similarly androgynous. Girls who hold their animus close and let him breathe within her. Girls who aren’t afraid to dominate and harness their feelings in an elegiac and structured way and express themselves as such.

Androgyny is carefully balancing thousands of feet in the air; it’s a long way down on either side. Androgyny is the struggle of mounting an equilibrium and hanging on while your exterior vacillates radically to the tune of your social life. Androgyny is opening up to all that is projected while you dream, what you abnegate and how you draw your own life.

Even though I’ve fantasized too many times about a roster of cheerleaders lining up at my door to engage in naughty exploitation, it’s not really what I’m looking for. My alpha male wants half-naked sorority girls while my anima wants to engage on an emotional level with a girl that can level me with her perspective and her sensibilities. It is the amalgam of the two that I really desire.

I never want to be entirely alpha male. That’s too simplistic. It’s too easy to be the jock that is the safe haven for girls who don’t recognize their own masculinity, their own power and architecture. It’s too effortless to pick a side and stay there, to be safe in homogeneity.

In relationships, I don’t want to shoddily repair what I lack as a person by patching it up with someone who makes me feel outwardly complete. I want to find someone who has fought for balance in their life, someone who is seeking the higher values of personal androgyny, who has understood the civil war that rages inside our body and who continually seeks resolve. The best relationships are not built on dependence, but on two developed psychologies, which perpetually struggle to be whole independently of each other.

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