Cultivating Endearment — The Gentle Flavor of Love
Endearment deepens the heart and helps men find their authentic masculinity.
Men need to know the inner geography of their own emotions, and this knowledge requires language. Without language, a man can’t express himself. But even more, without language, he cannot name his experience, and therefore, he doesn’t know what he is experiencing. That is, he cannot know what he feels.
To know ourselves better, men need a language of emotion or what I call an eloquence of the heart.
Men’s Emotions and Flavors of Love
This series of essays on the Flavors of Love begins to build such a language. Most men experience six categories of emotion: love, grief, pain, anger, fear, shame. I know this from hundreds of hours in men’s groups, many of them recently discussing #MeToo. Each category has many flavors, and a knowledge of those flavors creates eloquence.
Endearment, the topic of this essay, is one of nine flavors I want to address. The nine flavors are shown here:
1) Captivation: the experience of being arrested by beauty, intensely attracted, lost in wonderment
2) Endearment: Amorousness, affection, fondness, tenderness, endearment — qualities…
