Feeling closer to Men - in a non-homosexual Way

When my Danish friend was visiting us at the Ashram in 2004, we had several nice talks with each other. I remember very well how I expressed to him, one of my male friends, my feelings towards my friendships with men and my friendships with women.

There were many people in my life whom I called friends and they were of both genders, male and female. I explained my friend however that I always felt that I could make a closer connection with the men around me than I could with the women. I was not talking about anything sexual and confirmed this to my friend with the words ‘I am 100% not homosexual’, which caused a laugh.

Seriously, though, I felt women got in touch with me, loved me, liked me but whenever I got more close, when the friendships became stable and we spent valuable time together as friends, I never got the feeling that they really understood me. I felt they did not really understand my inside feelings, the cause of my reactions, on which ways I was thinking. I liked to get in close friendship with women, too, but not only on a physical or mental level. Not even only on an emotional level. There is something above that, something that I call ‘the soul level’ where you have the feeling that the other one knows who you are. And this feeling was lacking in my friendships with women.

I had previously spoken and spoke in the years after, too, with both men and women about this topic and asked for their experience and opinion on this matter.

Once a woman said the reason could be that I did not show enough of my inner self to the other one. She practically said ‘If you don’t show the other one who you are, how should the other one know?’ I really had to dismiss this idea straight away. I don’t doubt my ability to express and I believe nobody who has really spent time with me could claim that I did not show myself enough!

Another woman, to whom I had expressed the same feeling answered that this was very normal as I was male myself. Females would understand females and males would understand males. I could not believe that. When I saw loving couples in my surroundings who had been married for years, I heard and saw that they really and truly understood each other and I thus believed that it was possible for man and woman to live in complete understanding of the other person, until his or her most inner thoughts and feelings.

I had several male friends with whom I felt close in this way. There were Indian friends, of course, but also Westerners like my Danish friend with whom I had this conversation, my friend, the German doctor and several more whom I had met on my journeys. They came from a completely different cultural background but we nevertheless had this understanding. How could it be that I could deeply understand a man from the other side of the world but not any woman, from my own country or another one. So this was an explanation I could not agree with.

I am writing this all not because my friend had any great wisdom to share with me about this which could make me suddenly understand it. I am writing because I thought of my friends and just felt nicely connected with everyone in friendship and love. Maybe there would someday be a woman with whom I had the feeling that we understood each other, completely and from the heart. Or maybe not, that was fine with me, too.