Member-only story
Guess What? American Masculinity Is Built On Narcissism.
Explaining the root of a much bigger problem.
By the time I was 21, I had a strict rule for myself that I never broke. It had nothing to do with college or my looks. It had nothing to do with friendships or even the boundaries I was setting with my family. It had to do with relationships. My one-to-one relationships with men. What was that rule?
International applications only. No American men need apply.
I didn’t care about their race or their nationality, as long as they weren’t from the U.S. I outright refused to consider a relationship with any man from America.
Seems like a strange rule to have, right? Why would someone draw the line like that with men from her own country? Did I have a fetish for accents? Was I looking for a green-card? Nope. The decision was much more complicated than that and based on 2 decades of experience.
Though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, I was building defenses against an actual reality that I had experienced repeatedly. I was desperate to protect myself from the repeating patterns of my mother and every woman I had ever known. What pattern? The pattern of narcissism that is present in every corner of the American patriarchy and American masculinity.
