The woman grieves: “He left me, but I could have made him happy!” But in fact, she has no idea what male happiness is. I’ll explain now.
I asked this question to different women. And I understood from their surprised faces: it doesn’t even occur to them that men can have some other kind of happiness than women.
Meanwhile, for ten centuries of the existence of literature, not a single work about male happiness has been created! So the item probably doesn’t exist. A man is looking for the meaning of existence, not happiness, his goal is to overcome mortality. A woman does not have such a task, because for her it is not a task. She can give birth, prolong herself biologically, and usually sees no need for physical immortality.
A man finds himself in an existential trap and tries to overcome this impasse in activity, creativity or in a feat. The man is a vector creature. He is interested in action with an unpredictable result, an attempt to go beyond his own limits — perhaps even by self-destruction!
You can object to me. Point to merchants or European Protestants with their strict family lifestyle, family values. But this is self-denial, not the pursuit of happiness.
It has been repeatedly described that a smart man, which, however, is rare, is not able to take refuge in a quiet backwater of love. “I still love her, I’m ready to give my life for her, but I’m bored with her” — this is Pechorin’s formula of sacrificial love. Isn’t it true that she is very different from the female?
We will never be able to reproduce in ourselves the emotional world of the other sex, so the happiness of two is an illusion.
We have all seen this scene: a school friend calls a woman and they talk for two hours about something of their own, despite the fact that they have not seen each other for twenty years. This is because a woman is programmed to maintain connections. This is its function — to support, to preserve. A man destroys and creates anew. A woman runs away from loneliness, and a man affirms it. For a man, the gap between the proper and the existent is insurmountable, but it gives the opportunity for development, and the woman is looking for «balance».
We will never be able to reproduce in ourselves the emotional world of the other sex, so the happiness of two is an illusion. And what is left for a man, if not happiness? Minutes of owning oneself and the world, a feeling of the fullness of existence in its momentary temporality and longing for the impossibility of prolonging the moment.
“There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and freedom,” says one poet. “As if there is peace in the storm,” the other responds, and yet both know for sure that there is neither peace nor will. And in a private letter to a woman in French, Pushkin writes that happiness, perhaps, lies in the “maybe” that Rabelais said on his deathbed. It is that “maybe” that is already beyond physical existence. «Where are we going to sail?»