I’ve been looking for real, lasting love all my life. I’ve also been on a mission to change the world. Recently those two desires have come together and I’d like to share the story. The impetus to write this article came from a recent post I read by the editors of The Good Men Project.
“We started The Good Men Project six years ago to have an ongoing worldwide conversation about the changing roles of men in the 21st century. We didn’t realize that conversation would be so difficult—nor did we realize the tremendous influence we could have on our culture by opening up that conversation. The conversation about men is the conversation about everything. And about co-creating the type of world we want to live in together. We at The Good Men Project want to connect with other individuals and groups who are out there creating positive change in the world. We want to hear the stories about what you are doing and what you see working.”
My story began in conflict following my birth. Both my father and mother believed that their first child would be a girl. I’m not sure to this day why they were so convinced, but they had multiple girls names picked out and no boys’ names. When I came along my father quickly chose the name Elliott Diamond, to honor his nephew who had recently died. The story is that my mother cried for two days until he agreed to change my name to John to honor my mother’s dead father.
It wasn’t until I went off to college that I decided I didn’t like either name and picked the name Jed. I thought it had a manly ring and seemed to balance the feminine upbringing I had starting with, having all the girls dolls and toys my parents had bought in anticipation of the birth of their “little girl.”
When my father tried to commit suicide when I was five years old and was sent to a mental hospital I came to believe there was something sinister, dark, and destructive about being male. I associated depression and later bipolar disorder, the labels my father was given, with the “craziness” I felt were part of the male experience. I gravitated even more strongly to my mother and more feminine pursuits like reading and playing house with the three little girls who lived next door.
When I grew up and married I saw the two of us as a closed unit. We used to feel it was “us against the world.” The marriage lasted ten years and produced two wonderful children, but I’ve since re-married. My present wife, Carlin, and I have been together now for thirty-six years and I have a new understanding of love. It’s not “us against the world,” but us as “part of the larger world.”
I’ve come to see that loving couples can not only enjoy the personal joy of real, lasting love, but can also come together to change in the world. In my forthcoming book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come, I have a chapter called, “You Two Can Change The World: If Not You, Who? If Not Now, When?” I describe the lives of six couples who not only have developed deep, loving relationships, but are also making a world of difference.
When I was in graduate school, the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow was popular. He described a hierarchy of basic needs from our survival needs for air, food, and shelter at the bottom to “self-actualization” at the top. I spent a lot of my life focusing on being the best self I could me and finding the next hero’s journey on my path to becoming an actualized man.
But in recent years I’ve come to see that the path to self-actualization can be quite lonely and often doesn’t recognize all the people who have helped us get where we are. The journey may not even be our own. “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people,” says Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner. “One is a fiction.”
“For centuries the myth of the lone genius has towered over us like a colossus,” says Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity. But Shenk suggests that the real genius of creation comes from the confluence of pairs. He points out that these creative pairs may be partners in love as I describe in The Enlightened Marriage, but they can be other types of creative pairings including such diverse pairs as:
- Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.
- Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
- Larry Bird and Magic Johnson
- Pierre and Marie Curie
- John Lennon and Paul McCartney
I can’t resist adding Steph Curry and Klay Thompson!
One of the things that attracted me to The Good Men Project was the relationship between the founder Tom Matlack and publisher Lisa Hickey and how they came together to create a powerful company that continues to make a huge difference in the world. It was the first of a number of creative pairings I experienced at The Good Men Project. I began to recognize the increased reach and power we had in combining articles I wrote for my own readers on my own blog and those I wrote for The Good Men Project. I also found the increased value that everyone got when I developed a creative relationship with a good editor. In recent years Wilhelm Cortez has helped combine my writing talents with the core values of GMP.
I’m convinced that the “Power of Two” can change the world. I encourage people to check out the Good Men Project as an example of a life-changing dialogue about the world through the lens of two simple questions:
- What does it mean to be a man in today’s world?
- What does it mean to be a good man?
I look forward to your comments. What creative pairings have you experienced in your life? What are the important issues that we need to address in the world?
