Adam's Silence

I have one frustration with men. No, it's not their insatiable sex drive or how they act like pigs sometimes (although those two are very close contenders), rather it's their inclination towards passivity -their silence- right when you need them to be anything but that.

I don't know if it's an isolated thing with men I like, which when I look at it badly reflects on my taste, or if it's a shared trait among men in general, so i'd better stick to the few representatives of that grand fraternity of the male species who i've come across in life at one point or another. 

To start things let me establish that there's nothing passive about these men upon first meeting. They do the asking, they initiate conversation, encounters, and all other things a typical male will do. Something common also is their propensity for small talk, bearable during the first few meetings, but dragging and uncomfortable once you've gone out for let's say a month, no, actually a night into small talk and it gets awkward. But by some design that's how normal conversations get started nowadays in the age of greater connectivity thanks to technology, so I could only hope that "how are you?" and "what are you doing?" eventually turn into something more intellectually stimulating or emotionally appealing whichever I need the most at that moment. Luckily though steering into the intellectual jungle isn't a problem for these men, they can actually hold up pretty well their end of the conversation making one think they took their science, history, and literature classes very seriously. Not silent at all there, I hear their minds loud and clear. 

But too bad, the heart can't be schooled. 

As great as these men are in small talk, intellectual banter and the usual sleazy asides, once you hit issues that hit too close to home (which is the part I really want to get to eventually in the first place), they shut off. Works both ways actually, I try to tell them something personal, something that makes me come alive or brings out the worst in me and the most I get is the shifting of the eyes or the flinching of the arms or the legs, all indications that my man is so ready to bolt. It's disconcerting how issues concerning the heart can immediately reduce a very capable man into a boy with puppy dog eyes, makes you feel for them, but definitely not what I need in a man. 

And what makes it worse is that it extends far beyond the usual sharing of experiences. The silence is also present during make or break problems in the relationship, during issues where trust is on the line and I need them to come up with the truth, and the hardest of all, during moments when I need them to stand up for me or with me. All of them bailed, what's a girl to do?

Explaining Adam's silence is something women can only shoot at only to fall short of actually understanding the issue and instead end up rationalizing or worse making excuses for this behavior. So to make life easier for me I chose to get it straight from the horse's mouth, from one of the few enlightened men who has recognized and dealt with his own passivity, John Eldredge, author of Wild at Heart.

"Now, a part of a man's fundamental reluctance to truly dive into the world of woman comes from a man's deepest fear, failure. Oh, he may joke about the "differences of men and women,"Mars and Venus and all that. But the truth is, he is afraid. He fears that having delved into his woman's world, he won't have what it takes to help her there. That is his sin. That is his cowardice. And because of a woman's shame, most of the time a man gets away with it.... The effect is that most women feel alone. Some of this is simply selfishness on the part of men. When Eve was first assaulted, Adam didn't do jack squat. Men sin through violence and passivity. It's that plain and simple..... and ugly."

Hear women, hear.