Relationships

In this essay, I wish to establish that relationships are of the feminine domain.

From the graph: The Ideological Spectrum, it can be seen that masculinity is creative and femininity is not. In fact, we can say that God creates using materiality or the feminine as the medium of creation. So, it is proper to say that masculinity is creative while femininity is created upon. Because of its creativity, the masculine is dependent on fantasy, or mental modeling, as a method of producing a preliminary image of that which is to be created. Mental activity is, therefore, more natural to the masculine than to the feminine. Femininity relies on the material as its medium of expression and what it considers to be more real. For the masculine the reverse will be true. All of ideation, the entirety of metaphysics and physics are properly understood in the spiritual domain, where physics is understood to be essential science, towards which all other science tends. Mathematics is its primary and most precise language. Natural languages are also used as rough approximations preliminary to the stage of precise modeling. In fact all writing outside of the mathematical including novels and poetry can be seen as preliminary stages to the creation of the mathematical model. Metaphysics and physics are best understood as two ends of the spiritual spectrum, one end of which describes the material realm while the other describes the spiritual realm, or the medium in which models, including itself are constructed.

With this separation, it becomes clear why relationships are, essentially feminine. They are material or representative of materiality. The essential relationship is that between mother and child, in which the child is half of the mother and the closest thing to a new version of the mother. Other family relationships outside of the husband/wife relationship are lesser versions of the mother/child relationship. The husband/wife relationship is essentially sexual and therefore is also material. This is not to deny the accumulation of various mental constructs to describe the relationship, mainly created by the male, but the essence of it, without which there would be no relationship, is sexual.

Thus far we have discussed what Jung calls the cosmic family. There are other relationships that have no real materiality to them, but they are all modeled on one or another family relationship and so share in the materiality of it. That is to say, any relationship falls into one or another of the following models: spouse or creative partner, father or ordering principle, mother or nurturing principle, sister/brother or sharing principle, uncle/aunt or lesser parents, cousins or lesser siblings.

From this it will be seen that we have here identified another essential aspect of reality, in the common fourfold model, similar to Jung's characterization of the personality as the results of the action of sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. We can say that the activities of life fall into the four way pie, creating, ordering, nurturing, and sharing. As usual, half of the pie is more closely associated with the masculine, creating and ordering, while the other half is more closely associated with the feminine, nurturing and sharing. To further describe these entities, we should say that ordering is a preliminary necessity to creating, while nurturing is a subsequent necessity to the same act and in the case of creating multiple instances of the object, sharing becomes a necessity.

This is a graphical representation. This representation is chosen because, when talking about the personality, it is well to conform to symbols used by the unconscious. The circle represents the potential wholeness of the personality, and is called a mandala. It occurs frequently in mythology and religion, the most common occurance is the halo. Additionally, the number four represents wholeness or completeness.

This sheds light on the abortion struggle. Since relationships are of the feminine, and arguably the premier value, while rules are of the masculine and certainly the premier value, and since relationships are created by relating, that is communicating face to face, we can say that the relationship between mother and fetus is tenuous in the beginning and gains strength as time goes on, but is always weaker than that to a born child. Perhaps the relationship with the fetus is something like that with a stranger in one's life, in the beginning, and only picks up significance as its existence impinges on consciousness. In the abortion conflict, the woman is always having to choose between relationships, and those with independent humans are stronger than that with the unborn child.

For this to be an accurate model, it would be expected that all activities in all lives would be capable of assignment to one of these four generalizations. I believe this to be true. There are some odd cases, like masturbating for instance. But I would say that this amounts to a husband/wife relationship occurring in one individual. The person is having a sexual or creative relationship with him or her self.

For more on relationships, read this.