Why do men in Russia choose war over love?

When I tell the Russian-speaking audience how Russian men and Europeans behave in relationships, the reaction of the audience is clearly divided by gender. The men tense up and start arguing, and the women come up and thank you: “I thought I was crazy, but you confirm my feelings, which I didn’t even know how to voice.”

I have interviewed almost a thousand women who have accidentally or deliberately chosen European partners after unsuccessful attempts to build happiness in their homeland. And I noticed one thing: everyone was equally unhappy with their compatriots, but so differently happy with their Johns, Pedras, Andreass and Peters.

The easiest way to say that «it’s all about the money, she just wanted to live beautifully.» But it’s not that. Europeans can live in abundance, but they do not show off, they try to save money. And a husband who supports his wife is a rare occurrence. No, money is not the main thing here.

Do you know what the women themselves say? “In my relationship with my husband, I lacked … a husband.” He seems to be near, but you can’t reach him.

And if only before him. Mothers, grandmothers, and even older friends answer their complaints: everyone lives like that. Do not drink — and rejoice. It’s your own fault, you don’t inspire well, you want too much, you care wrong…

What is left for a woman? Decide that she feels something is wrong and seek solace in womanhood training? As if you can influence someone who does not want to.

And our men generally have little interest in building relationships. They are not up to it. They live in a constant struggle with a debilitating fear — to be «not a man enough», to find themselves weak, dependent.

What and to whom are they really trying to prove? Who put these thoughts into their heads? To whom are they trying to justify themselves? Spoiler alert: it’s not their fault either.

Echoes of collective trauma

Feeling weak, helpless is actually very difficult. Yes, it’s just unbearable. So much so that we try our best to throw these feelings out of consciousness. But they don’t disappear.

Like any unpleasant experience, disapproved behavior in the family languishes in our inner prison — the unconscious. And from there, he can gradually control us. But that is not all. Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung believed that each of us, in addition to the personal, also has a collective unconscious. The attitudes and habits of our ancestors seem to germinate in each of us, are bizarrely refracted through the personal unconscious and are sometimes brought to consciousness in a very strange way.

And if the historical experience of our ancestors was difficult, we inherit the spiritual «scars» that he left. And we have more than enough injuries: the nationwide psychosis of revolutions, “polished” from above by the trauma of war…

Everyone was hit, but to varying degrees. On a collective level, an entire generation lost their fathers. The collective father left and did not return. He is an unattainable hero, perfect, like everything dead. He doesn’t go to work, he doesn’t cultivate the land, he doesn’t build a house, he doesn’t plant a tree. His son was raised by a «same-sex couple» — a mother and grandmother, crushed by grief, loneliness and lack of fulfillment. To be mature, we need to learn to separate the personal from the collective.

Analytical psychologists will call patterns of behavior similar to the whole society archetypal dynamics that prevent us from being ourselves, because we seem to become parts of a pre-planned performance, where all roles are prescribed and distributed in advance. And it’s time to figure out what heroes of a fairy tale we all unwittingly became.

Russian mother, senseless and merciless

A woman suffers without someone with whom she could feel safe, warm, accepting and calm. She has to shoulder the burden of the strong. She works hard, solves problems … but completely stops feeling.

An explosive emotional cocktail of humiliation, use, hopelessness, grief, anger and helplessness, she passed down the generational ladder. It is unbearable for her to live with these experiences, and she tries to hide from herself behind a mask.

Remember our favorite fairy tales. “Cinderella”, “Frost”, “Sleeping Beauty” — everywhere we see such a vile stepmother who is trying to be not who she really is, looks comical and gets angry at it beyond measure. And the more the spirit of this “stepmother” is felt in the whole generation, the more difficult it is for everyone and everyone.

This collective mother has favorites and hateful children.

Through immensely spoiled pets, she tries to live a different, ideal, well-fed and contented life. She calls it love, although it is power. She «fattens» the child like a Christmas goose in order to swallow it and finally satisfy her sensual hunger.

Hateful children also take on an important function — you can project your weak, denied and rejected sides onto them. As a result, they resignedly win back «redneck» and «insignificance», or try their best to prove to their mother that they are really good and worthy.

That’s just the awareness and independence of the child of such a mother in any case is disadvantageous. What if he sees that she really is not who she claims to be? She will get hurt. Let it be better to be helpless, weak, dependent.

Therefore, a man who grew up under the rule of a tyrannical mother does not know how to take care of himself, but is actively looking for a surrogate for these relationships — for example, in the form of a mother-wife or an ideal state that will take care of its fellow citizens.

The boy is used to fighting for love, but does not know what to do with it. He does not even imagine that you can love just like that. And myself, and a woman, and work, and the state. The war is long over, you can relax and learn not to survive, but to live. And to see in the eyes of a woman not a reflection of her mother, but her herself — a woman.

A chicken is a bird, a woman is a man

There is such a joke that there are three types of men: macho, schmuck and «mom, cho?».

Many Russian men either live in one of these roles all their lives, or run from one to another. At the same time, they can be pleasant people, wonderful friends, good employees. But in a relationship with a woman, there will always be a kind of “mother of the brain”.

She may no longer be physically around, but her messages are deeply ingrained in the very essence of his personality. This inner voice constantly sounds envy for his well-being or anger for his inability to become perfect. At work and at home, he constantly struggles with his mother’s curses. And after all, you can’t give up slack, raise your visor and admit to yourself how important her kind word was, in fact, never heard.

Captured by this complex, a man is more busy sorting out a phantom relationship with his mother than establishing contact with a real partner.

It is not surprising that our women lose their heads with delight when they understand how “the Danes and various other Swedes” treat them (remember Mayakovsky).

There she is the same person, the same personality, and not the vague embodiment of a childhood nightmare. In Europe, things are better with paternal and maternal images. In this sense, its inhabitants are lucky: they have already dealt with the struggle for survival and moved on to a quiet life. They had less trials than we did. There are models of woman and man, mother and father.

Of course, not angels live there either — with what fear some people divide bills and give gifts … For local women, such behavior is bad manners and a sign of infantilism. Yet there are fewer examples of such «defensive» courtship. A healthy European will both pay and give, but not fashionable and expensive, but sweet and personalized. But first, make sure that the woman does not use it, but is serious in her intentions. However, a healthy Russian knows how to do it no worse.

Enough of this fight for love

And this is good news: our men are not savages at all, not some kind of insensitive and chaotic creatures by nature. Nobody just told them that you can enjoy emotionality, that you can be gentle and even (oh, horror!) sometimes cry.

But it is impossible to feel only the pleasant without dealing with the unpleasant: pain, addiction, confusion and inconsistency. But the exit is always the same as the entrance. By acknowledging our weakness, we open access to strength.

Surviving a collective trauma is possible only on an individual level, getting out of the power of the archetype and living a personal relationship with your past.

You can study your family history and learn more about what relatives went through to give us life. To see how the tragedies of the country have touched us and our environment, and to come up with our own rituals of mourning.

We can find the remains of those who died in the war with search parties and bury them. On the day of remembrance of the victims of political repressions, we can go to the Solovetsky stone and return the names of the innocent victims. We can learn to take care of ourselves, if not about all, but at least about some of our needs, and help those who are having a hard time in excess.

By doing small good deeds, we thereby heal ourselves and create a new collective history. She’s already better. The younger generation of boys has a father, albeit such a suffering one. This means that liberation from the negative mother complex is not far off.