Men enjoy the pleasures of womanly chaos, the adventure, passion and zest she can bring - but these things are mere indulgences, not necessities. Men can live without them. Women depend on men to bring them stability through order to stop their own chaos swallowing them whole.

Her demand's greater, because her need's greater. In man it is not so much a need as it is a desire, he doesn't need her, he wants her. For her it's when she realises she needs him that she wants him, thereby igniting her obsession as she reorients herself to make him her centre.

This is why women who try to play it cool always invariably fail to do so, for if they do not fail, they are not really in love, for women in love are obsessed to the point he becomes her everything. His existence consumes her essence entirely, her directive becomes pleasing him.

Love supplants both the will and ego in woman. She sees herself as an extension of him, rather than as sovereign. This only changes when she has a baby. Once she is a mother, she reorients herself again to make the baby her new centre and love dulls as the mutual goal is achieved

The only equality between the sexes is that each requires the other to reproduce. Insofar as a man needs a woman, it is for this and this only. Beyond that, all needs are wants. Men are metaphysically independent. Women are dependents. Both are reproductively codependent.

It's common for women to neglect their men once they've had a child. The reorientation of her centre is akin to the replacement of one God (him) with another (her newfound obsession with her child).

"For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child." - Nietzsche

That is to say, a woman's love of child is greater than her love for her man, which is why when she has a child and falls in love with it, that love supplants the love for her man as the dominant force in her life, often at the expense of ameliorating the love she felt for him.

He is no longer her priority, the child is. He is no longer the thing always on her mind, the child is. She is not thinking about pleasing him anymore, she is thinking about meeting the child's needs. He is but a deposed God who has served his function in ushering in her true joy

And I don't use God in the literal sense, as of course no man is God, but I mean it in the sense that "he is no longer the reason for being, and the centre of all things" - the child has replaced that role in her psyche. He is now relegated to his utility more coldly than before.

In case you think I am being melodramatic, observe couples with very young children. The men despite becoming fathers do not change much in attitude or behaviour towards the woman. He does not relegate her in importance because he has become a father. But she does this to him.

This of course can cause a lot of resentment in men, and between that and the stressful demands placed on the relationship by the needs of the young child, intimacy and relational quality invariably falls. This is more often true than not. The haze of romance dissipates into duty

This is why if a wise man were to instruct his daughter, it would be to warn her against this instinct of hers to replace the father with the child as her central reason for being. But to always keep him there and in turn the romance alive so they may flourish rather than exist.

This is the difference between a middle aged couple plodding along tolerating one another until they've "done their time" raising the kids and divorce, and the elderly couple with adult kids that left home who still laugh together and flirt with one another.

The latter is rare.

You see if you presented these two options to any woman, she would of course say she wants to stay in love with her man until old age.

Yet the price she pays for that is resisting the instinct to become obsessed with her children at the expense of all else.

Nothing is for free.

A woman has not fully matured until she has become a mother. For obsession with child preoccupies her enough that it dulls her chaos, and promotes higher virtues in service of care towards the child. For the very first time, she is loving downwards rather than upwards.

I mention this, because I'm reinforcing the point that women are not metaphysically independent, and thus for a time, when children need them most, they can supplant their dependence on men with their child's dependence on them. Both dull her chaos.

The man does so by grounding her behaviour through discipline, care and guidance. The child does so by requiring her to transcend her constraints to meet new, higher limits. Both stress her, but the child more so, as she is ultimately responsible for it in a way she is not a man.

That responsibility can either destroy her, or finalise her growth as a woman.

For whilst woman is man's final test, the child is woman's.

That which we care for most, tests us most

And so in much the way children trigger growth through burden in women, women do so too in men.

When a woman loves a child, she loves like a man, for she does so sacrificially - putting something smaller and weaker before herself, and being ultimately responsible for it. Poetically then, motherhood is the closest women come to loving like men. https://twitter.com/TellYourSonThis/status/1385270813885095941

It would seem then that women can love like men can love, but that they just can't love men that way

This is both sadness and joy, depending on how you look at it.

Joy because love from below is still beautiful.

Sad because we never recapture our mother's love in our partners.

Perhaps one of the grossest inequalities of all that thinking men must make peace with, is that women enjoy the privilege of recapturing their father's love in him, but that he may never recapture his mother's love in her

A true testament to the image of Godliness in man's love.

This is a small tragedy in and of itself, muted only by the appreciation for the beauty of the love of reverence. In a sense, that is what it really is to cast off the boy. To not long to be loved in fragility for simply being, but to be loved in reverence for being instrumental.