I believe women have the sacred right to punish the men who claim to love them when those men fail to read their minds. I am not joking or being ironic.*

A man who protests that he is not able to read minds, who demands clear, explicit communication does not deserve a life with a woman. (And he’ll probably be the first to agree: “I don’t deserve this.”) If he cannot read her that means he is not really with her, attuned to her. He still sees her as an object placed within his own environment, against his individual background, to be seen “whole against the sky” — and contrary to the opinion of some of the world’s foremost experts on love, that is not love, but, rather cheap, youthful infatuation.

*

Women, especially ones who lean toward second-wave feminism, tend to be a bit confused about masculine perception. Every man, from the basest semi-animal brute to the highest culture, always and invariably responds to his kind of woman as if to an object: the meaning of the woman flows in through the man’s eyes and senses. The issue is not whether the woman is experienced as a beautiful object to a man, it is whether he experiences her as poetry or as utility. If the former is the case, the woman is a poetic object and therefore a primordially intense object-mediated subjectivity, with whom the man will be preoccupied with and to whom he will be attuned. (And the woman will not only be beautiful, she will be beauty itself, its origin, its standard, and its terminus.) If the the woman is merely useful functionally or socially or emotionally… that’s when a woman is an object in the worst way.

The unforgivable sin in marriage is for a man to fail to become so deeply attuned to his wife that he is literally spiritually one with her, completely capable of reading her mind and responding to her and to the world as an extension of their shared will. This, and nothing else, is marriage. If a man can achieve such a thing with a dog or a toaster oven, I say join the two in holy matrimony. But if a man cannot love should not be permitted make a mockery of marriage simply by submitting to the whole legal and religious wedding rigmarole and bolting his name onto that of his unfortunate female counterpart.

One last moral point: if you’re not married before you have a child, you’d better make yourself married. It is never too late. It is not enough to just stick around. You have to figure out how to love your family for real, or you are a failure as a husband and father.

(* NOTE: Not that it’s not funny.)