“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
—Albert Einstein
I can’t tell you how many beautiful women consult with me on the matter of how they actually can’t get any dates. More often than not, it is because the aura they give off is one that shows some of them are passive, some don’t smile easily, and others, carrying a history of being unlucky at love, continue to fulfill that prophesy through not being very friendly because they are understandably melancholic.
Of course, this is not to say that the success of courtship is only their responsibility. Of course it is the man’s as well. Their potential soulmate has an equal responsibility to keep things moving along between them.
Now that a woman has displayed her beauty at its best, it is his turn to win her over through his own Step One of courtship – being mysterious to her.
It is that state of him being a question mark in her life – a source of curiosity and speculation as to what he is really like, whether he is interested in her, whether he is dangerous or safe, masculine enough, or otherwise immature or weak or boyish. Is he compatible with her or not?
It is time to learn about the landmark in the lives of men and women that sets the precedent for all future relationships with the opposite sex: the Oedipal Period of around ages three to five.
In Sophocles’ story of Oedipus Rex, a young man unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. Sigmund Freud applied this tale to the first experience of competition by young males for the attention of a woman - that of his mother, and at this age, he faces competition with his father for her love and interest in a way that will have an impact on all of his future relations with women.
If successful at passing through this phase, he will find that he cannot compete with his father and instead decides to become like him, someday to find a woman of his own just like Mom. If he fails to grow through the Oedipal period, the boy will make an unhealthy durable connection to his mother that results in difficulty being truly intimate with mature women later in life. (More on this in the next chapter.)
Freud spent inordinate amounts of time detailing what happens to boys when they go through the Oedipal period to the relative neglect of the study of girls’ development. The early life of a woman is obviously no less important than a man’s but the nature of it is somewhat different. To get a glimpse into that, we need to turn to another story – the story of Bluebeard and how it explains women’s curiosity about men, and attraction to their mysterious ways.
A DANGEROUS MARRIAGE
Bluebeard was an older, wealthy man who was greatly desired in his home country of France. He had been married countless times – at one point, he was thought to have had nearly a hundred wives – and each wife “disappeared” at a young age. He had a huge palatial residence with hundreds of rooms. He permitted his wives to go anywhere in the palace while he was sailing abroad for business – with the exception of one room. It was his rule of marriage. He threatened them with untold dire consequences if they didn’t accede to this single rule.
You might immediately see the similarity in this narrative and that of Psyche and Eros, who forbade Psyche to ever look upon his face in the light, and maintaining his mysteriousness.
When Bluebeard left the palace, he gave his wife a ring of keys to every room in the house. The woman would explore the luxuries of various dining halls and libraries, but invariably temptation got the best of her. Though she knew of the risks, Bluebeard’s latest wife always opened the forbidden door.
Her sister had now joined her, and encouraged her too. There must, in her view, be nothing secret between a husband and wife. And there, in the dim light of pre-dawn, they both would discover the dead bodies of Bluebeard’s previous wives.
As Bluebeard’s very last wife did this, she heard her husband’s coach galloping home. He was early to return. She knew he would certainly kill them both. Still, she managed to maintain her wits and dispatch a messenger for her brothers.
When Bluebeard returned to greet his wife, he saw drops of blood on the key to the forbidden room and knew instantly that she betrayed him. He brandished his sword, and swore to cut off her head. At that moment, though, her two brothers arrived, with arms. They shot old Bluebeard to death and saved their sister.
This story has been used in psychoanalytic training to explain the psychology of the female Oedipus. As a surface view of the literal story, one couls see how it is a very good thing that the sister encouraged her to break her husband’s rule, and certainly a very ygood thing that the brothers arrived in time. But one can also see the very clear similarity to the story of Eros and Psyche as well: Bluebeard, a serial murderer and monster, and Eros, the god of love itself, yet both, men. That is where the similarity between the husbands ends, and it is a reminder to us that it is not the animal instincts of masculinity themselves which cause wrongful things, but the absence of the ethics, boundaries and gentlemanliness of a mature person, who happens to be a man.
“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
If we see the story at only the surface level, we might be led to believe that all men are Bluebeard, all men are serial murderers, and that all wives ought to, for safety’s sake, know every tiny detail of their husband’s activities and possessions, suffering none of his requests or demands in marriage.
Nothing could be further from the truth of a lasting marriage; for, the tales are both cautionary to women at a deeper level - in its time, the Bluebeard story was a warning to women to be chaste, and to fear marriage until one is ready, and one’s family have vetted a man. The Eros and Psyche story was a warning to women that at the time of marriage and entry to full feminine adulthood, it is time to start a new life, with a new family, and for a woman to think for herself, only under the advisement of her friends or sisters.
What is true about both, symbolically, in terms of the union of a man and a woman, is that the violation of the man’s privacy, rules and so forth - amounting to his own personal boundaries, as sacrosanct as those of the woman, results in “the end.” The end of both marriages, though one man is demonic, and the other, godly, there are both godly and devilish in all men and all women, fallible beings that we all are.
We will learn much more on boundaries once we enter the Third Phase of Courtship and partnership issues in marriage, much later in this work. Suffice it to say that in this very first step of attraction, the lesson for men is that - in the spirit of fun and discovery of what one finds appealing in others - the most attractive way to assert boundaries for men, early in dating, is to playfully set boundaries behind an air of mysteriousness.
The most primitive experience a girl has of her father is one of mystery about him. He is a giant towering over her. He goes to an office where he does things that she knows nothing of, and brings home gifts to her, feeds her, and disappears into a room with mommy until morning. He is powerful to her, even magical, but she doesn’t understand the source of his power.
Every healthy girl has at least a brief time when she idolizes her father and professes that she would like to marry him one day. Yet in the Oedipal period, she is frustrated in her desires because of the special nature of her mother’s attachment and exclusive favor with her father.
On some basic level, a girl has an intuition that her father has some mysterious control over the heart, mind, and body of her mother. She might even sense that his greatest secret lies somewhere that she will never see, in his loins. Yet this bodily example still doesn’t go far enough to explain merely symbolically all that she doesn’t understand about her father’s personal experiences, activities, private thoughts, all of which are central to his power, she suspects. Only on a symbolic level, the “secret door” of Bluebeard’s mansion represents her father’s “fly,” which is obviously to remain private, secret, and left alone. The girl who successfully gets through the Oedipal period, eventually gives up her exclusive adoration of her father. Someday she will solve the most central mystery of her life – male sexuality and masculinity. She will let her father be her father, but will return to solve this central mystery with another man more suited to her age and societal norms.
This sense of “mystery” in Bluebeard, Eros, and the Oedipus has special resonance for us today. Romantic suspense novels – stories that combine love and mystery – have a seemingly permanent place on bestseller lists. Every popular women’s magazine seems to promise “the secrets” of this or that (usually something related to men). Men think that women are at times strange or peculiar in their love of gossip sessions with each other, the special activity in their lives with girlfriends where they can enjoy the sharing of secrets and mysteries. It is not silly at all, but the most primal need in the reptilian brain of a woman to crave secrets to discover and mysteries to solve. It is at her sexual core to follow the mystery of what lies deep in a man’s heart, and the first man in her life was her father.
Obviously, then, women bring this need for mystery into their adult romantic lives. The man who is boyish and wears his heart on his sleeve, professing his undying love for a woman soon becomes boring and uninteresting sexually, which is to say that it does not impassion her, does not excite her, literally. No matter how much women have wished for men to share more, be more sensitive, and truly connect with them heart and soul, that is their mammalian brain or higher brain talking perhaps, but their sexual core, their reptilian brain, doesn’t really want that at all.
What a woman really wants in her true love is for him to hold on to a few secrets that he will never tell her. He should not be cruel or dastardly in so doing, like Bluebeard. He should be gentle, but firm, and reward her in thanks and admiration in the way of Eros.
A woman wants a man to have an air of mystery surrounding him. She desires access to all the rooms of the mansion of his psyche, but needs him to forbid that one, last forbidden room. It is his job to set the limits, not hers. He vaguely reminds her of her own father as long as he keeps her guessing about his intentions and nature. If he gives her the key to open his “secret room,” his most unconfident experiences, his personal shames, and his insecurities, the woman enjoys a feeling of connected friendship but lose all sexual attraction for him. Opening that room of Bluebeard’s house, a woman finds the dead bodies: the shames of his past, and symbolically, the death of their mutual sexual attraction.
After a woman displays a dangerous beauty that captures his attention, the very first thing a man must give her back to be worthy of her is a sense of mystery that is likely to endure. He has things about him that cause her to ponder, question, struggle to understand, persist, ask, and overall try to decode the nature of this man she fancies. Women should keep their Observing Ego turned on and aware of this. If a woman can “figure him out” too quickly, he is disqualified from courtship with her. He is a little boy looking for a mother, a suffering soul looking for a therapist, or a psychological pauper clad in threadbare clothes looking for a financial or emotional handout. A secure, mature man is comfortable keeping some sense of privacy, boundaries, individualism, and mystique.
Bluebeard is not literally about women finding a man who is truly bad, wrong, unethical or murderous – who literally has “skeletons in the closet” – but rather, the man who knows how to keep a secret, including his own, as all people have. He gives her the chance to discover him bit by bit, and not give too many of his secrets away as easily as Bluebeard gave up his key to the secret room. The death involved is not literal here, but the death of the potential relationship. Romantic Dynamics has revealed the budding couple’s incompatibility in courtship, and caused the death of a potential relationship, and Psyche will have now married Death, not Eros.
The things a man does to be mysterious to a woman in Step One go far beyond simply “not wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve,” and into all manners of keeping her curiosity and attention on secrets about himself.
Oftentimes when men ask me, “How can I be mysterious?” I say, “That’s for me to know and you to find out” - the demonstration of a mysterious statement in and of its self. Personality plays in here, as we will see in Phase Two of Romantic Dynamics.
In personality, some men are natural conversationalists, while others are action-takers. Some have humorous personalities and others are ironic, or witty, or charming.
A man’s way of being mysterious are as unique as they are as individuals, and women love to discover the mysteries and nuances of a man’s unique personality. Yet something all men have in common - regardless of specific personality traits - is the ability to recognize a woman’s response when they are not being mysterious anymore: the woman stops paying attention, stops smiling, stops being curious, stops asking questions, and a very sensitive indicator – she stops trying to label him. She stops.
Think of how fond women are of categorizing things – labeling them and putting them in containers. Why do women seem to have such a natural gift for this neat, organization ability? Could it be that that which can be labeled is also rendered harmless and safe? For example, if you had never seen, heard of, or understood what an elephant was before you could call it its proper name? it might seem frightening, noisy and deadly. But what if you learned that its name is “an elephant” and understood that “elephants are not meat eaters, but docile, slow and friendly vegetarians?” Yes, it is true. The label and understanding make the elephant safe to you, and to women, make men safe. You know what to expect.
However, as soon as something is labeled, it is predictable and safe, and what is expectable is no longer mysterious. What is safe is no longer arousing. What is it that men are once they are safe and expectable? Boring and comfortable, which is fit for a friend to spend idle time with. They are not arousing, masculine, or sexually attractive anymore.
Which is why women label men often with nicknames.
The thing for men to immediately take note of in sexual attraction is that when they are labeled by a woman, they should welcome that, not explain away what they label themselves. She is trying to render them safe, only because her fantasy is that they might be dangerous, and very, very arousing for so holding that possibility, with the likely probability that they are certainly not.
Men need to resist being easily labeled, so that the sexual tension between what is possibly true about them, but probably not, can thrive - and sexual attraction can stay alive.