Monday, May 15, 2017

What Men Are Feeling: Why Women Refuse to Believe It's True by perri iezzoni: Preface

Preface
In order to understand a man’s feelings it is important to understand the situations in which these feelings occurred. For this book I use my mid-life crisis as the tool to provide you, the reader, an insight to why a man feels what he feels and why he keeps those feelings to himself.
A mid-life crisis is a tangent to your circle of life. I was an outdoorsman raising two daughters. I could see one day they would leave the nest and my life would seem empty if I didn’t find a way to fill it back up again once they were on their own. Honestly, I thought birding would be the activity that would consume me but I was wrong, it was dancing.
Learning to dance was a long and hard journey, the end of which I have not reached.  It is an education in balance, self-control, self-awareness and the opposite sex. I am a nervous person and I think most people are though some are better at hiding it than others. I got stage fright simply thinking about asking a woman to join me on the dance floor. If I didn’t overcome that fear I was destined to become a monk and might as well strap on my hiking boots, put on my backpack and crawl into a cave somewhere in the hills.
In an effort to understand my fear I began writing down what I was feeling.
“I can’t dance,” was the lie I kept telling myself but in writing about it I soon learned there was something else wrong with me. Determined not to become a hermit, I promised myself that I was going to learn how to dance even if I had to drive to New York City to take lessons.
It started with salsa lessons at a local restaurant, then swing dancing classes for adults at the high school. Soon I signed up for a year long membership at a bona fide dance studio. It took fifteen thousand dollars and two full years of instruction to understand the world of dancing when finances drove me into the arms of a dance called The Tango.
To become a tango dancer it is necessary to leave all your negativity behind or else you will not be able to connect to your partner. Tango is all about connection. Dancing tango is as simple as walking around a room to music with a partner as long as you are confident and calm, which I wasn’t, so it was the most difficult of exercises for me. I kept at it because it was the most affordable avenue available and the physical encounters with many different women was addicting. It is the most intimate of dances and I had been a single parent for seven years at this point; I was very lonely and desperately seeking some adult activity with women my own age. I fell for this dance hook, line and sinker.
Tango has been described as the three minute love affair. To get your partner to fall in love with you in such a short period of time is a trick that takes years to learn. To get there I needed to recognize that I was a complex individual but not nearly as complex as the woman I was holding close to me, her chest to my chest, her forehead resting upon my cheek.
When I say, “love,” I don’t mean real love or physical love. The love I am talking about is the comfort of being in a loving relationship; it is a deep trust between strangers; it is a love without fear of reprisal from your partner that allows two people to move together in harmony to the music. It is two people working as a team to navigate a crowded dance floor while simultaneously choreographing dance steps to the rhythms and melodies of tango music. It is a love that is unique to tango and lasts only as long as the music is playing.
I soon came to realize that a woman is a fantastic machine configured to reveal things about me that I never knew. This incredible creature is filled with thousands, maybe millions, of sensors that enable her to tune in to everything I am feeling when we embrace. Each woman reacted to my moods with one of her own that was equal or greater to mine. If I was afraid, so was she. If I was relaxed, so was she. When I lost my balance she would grab me for support.
Each time I returned from another unsuccessful night of attempting to dance the tango I would write down what I was feeling at the time and try to analyze what I saw on paper. It was something different on each outing for five years: anger, fear, jealousy, self-consciousness, doubt, arousal, etc. Arousal, that was the toughest to confront for a long time and I came to accept it with a promise to myself that I wouldn’t act on my urges, no matter how hard they got to ignore.
It often took several attempts to grapple with a particularly strong emotion and some of them I continue to struggle with to this day. What follows is a series of essays that show a man coming to terms with the demons inside him so he may connect more effortlessly to his partner on the dance floor and master the art of falling in love instantaneously.
Each one is a short story or a comment on what I was feeling at the time. The essays vary in voice and style because that was the only way I could get those feelings out of me and onto the paper.
The reason my tango experiences are such good laboratories to study feelings is that it the dance is full of paradoxes, just like our emotions. A moody person gets annoyed when someone tries to cheer them up; a person who has seen great horrors may have a great sense of humor, etc. In tango the man leads the movement but the woman leads the dance. Tango is an illusion; what is happening is the result of internal bodily mechanics, hidden from the observer. So it is with feelings, the cause of what we express in emotions is often the result of poor diet, stress, our thoughts, etc. and not any wound that is visible on the skin.
At fifty-some years of age I see that not every person has undertaken this kind of self-analysis and it is to their loss. I see now the meaning of the unexamined life is not worth living. Maybe that is my purpose for being on this Earth, to bring this message to the masses and to lead by example.
Each one is the result of a night of dancing, preceded and followed by a two hour ride each way. The final product, the essay, was composed during a time period often exceeding eight hours. Almost every result was an epiphany that made me aware of the magnificence of that creature we call woman and the stupidity of my initial assumptions about her as well as myself.  
I have invested a great deal of effort into the composition of my words so that they may flow effortlessly into your brain. I strive for the writer’s version of the tango connection with each reader who picks up my book. Let me tell you, “I love you,” and hope that you will believe it for the time you spend reading the words I have arranged so carefully, just for you.
What follows is not meant to be a tango lesson. If however, you learn something about this strange dance consider it a bonus.
Now, before we go any further I must beg your forgiveness for I am about to give away the ending, the reason why women find the feelings of men so unbelievable: we are shallow, incredibly shallow. Women have a hard time believing men can be so simplistic when we are the ones running the world and getting paid more to do the same jobs they are doing.
That we ever complete an act of courage or nobility adds to women’s confusion.
I’ve often seen the look of disbelief on a woman’s face when she learns this simple secret that is not so secret. Women are so complex that it is difficult for them to fathom a creature so superficial.
I’ll ask for your forgiveness one more time for I believe it is necessary to convey to you the degree to which the opposite sex is astounded by this mundane fact. It is a horrible story and I am certain more than a few will be appalled.
Once I watched a woman die. I was hiking on a trail in Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, near Reading, PA, in early December of 2011, when I came upon a couple in distress. The woman had been pinned by a large flat boulder against a tree, her face pushing against the bark. She didn’t seem to be in much pain but she was extremely annoyed that no one could move the rock off of her back.
She was in absolute disbelief.
Over the course of several hours we notified emergency personnel and assisted in the rescue attempt in every way possible. It was a tragic scene, it was the end of her life and she went through all the stages: denial, anger, acceptance.
I’ll never forget the look on her face: utter astonishment that this was happening to her. One minute she was walking along the trail, the next she was preparing to die as a helicopter hovered overhead and a crowd of people stood by helpless.
That is the degree of disbelief that women experience when they finally come to terms with the simplistic nature of men but we really are not that simple. Men are like math problems, we can be basic addition/subtraction  problems or we can be an enigma in quantum physics. As you read on I hope to educate you on the paradox of the male gender but it is an effort in futility. Like women, the more you learn about men leads to an increasing awareness of how little you know compared to what there is to learn.

Once again, I apologize for that dreadful analogy but it was necessary. Now, read on and enjoy for there are no more horror stories for the rest of the pages.


Available online at Amazon and Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/What-Men-Are-Feeling-Believe/dp/1546559302/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494861500&sr=1-1&keywords=what+men+are+feeling



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