Dear Lover by David Deida

shallow—your man has become shallow, and he can’t even feel it anymore, so thoroughly have his shells encased his heart.
WOMEN BECOME BODILY STRESSED AND HEART-CLOSED
    To protect your own heart from being inadvertently raped by your self-centered lover’s lack of feeling and awareness, you have put up your own walls. Your deep vagina is resistant to his mechanical thrusts. Your heart is shielded from his disconnected words of criticism and insult. Every time you try to open to your man, he diminishes your experience, as if your feelings were wrong, sick, or your problem.
    He asks you how you are feeling, but your feelings are too huge and complex to squeeze into a simple answer. So he abuses you with more questions, convincing you that you are too dependent on him, that you need to be more responsible for yourself, and that your “emotional problems” are your own and have nothing to do with him.
    Your experience is that his heart is yours; how he lives his life—even the nuances of where his attention goes, if he fidgets, or his subtle changes in tone of voice—affects your heart intensely. He seems to be able to live in a self-enclosed world where he can pursue his goals apart from whatever is happening with you. However, your heart is directly linked to his, as if threads of feeling were connecting the two of you, so your heart soars or sinks with his heart—and so does your trust.
    This is not a weakness on your part, although your man may try to convince you that it is. Your feminine heart is much more sensitive to the flow of energy and emotion than his masculine heart. In fact, your heart is much more responsive to the depth of his consciousness—how present or not he is with you and in his life—than he is. He is numb to his own lack of presence and blind to how he actively shallows his heart, wrapping up his attention in trivial but all-consuming projects and thoughts.
    Your heart-sensitivity can be a great gift to him. Your suffering, fully and responsively expressed, can teach him much about how his self-enclosed and unfeeling consciousness is paining the entire world. Your heart’s vulnerable strength can inspire his deepest gifts and evoke his commitment to openand give his love to you and the world without fear—which is the freedom he most deeply desires. But you can only help him if you are open.
    Chances are, after years of shallow men, you have closed to protect yourself from constant heart suffering. Otherwise, you would have gone insane. Every time your man drifts, scratches an itch unconsciously, wastes time in front of the TV, pretends to be intimate with you but actually is preoccupied in his own thoughts and sensations—every time your man is less than fully present with you or betraying his own depth, holding back his gifts in fear and numbness, your heart is crushed.
    So, you have probably trained yourself to feel less. You can lay beneath a man while he humps you and at least derive a bit of shallow clitoral pleasure—amidst the tragic heart-pain of not being ravished open to God by his feeling-force and deep presence. You can sit and listen to your man talk about his stupid projects without shouting and screaming, “Wake up! Open your heart! You are wasting your life and killing me with your mediocrity!”
    Your hurt and anger are hidden beneath shells of civilized stress: You pursue your own interests, spend time with your friends, and try not to complain too much to your man. If you let out what you really feel about how he treats you, you would either scare him away with your churning anguish or chop his head off with your rage.
    But at least he is willing to share a home with you, at least you share a decent life, so it’s not worth risking what you do share for the sake of what you most deeply desire. You are betraying your deepest heart as much as your man is. You are settling for shallow love just like your man is settling for shallow purpose. You both know there is a deeper