In my relentless search to understand why men and women often clash at the deepest levels, I sought out experts. Psychiatrists, therapists, educated men and women with years of study behind them. Yet every explanation they offered felt incomplete, shallow, or conveniently sidestepped the brutal truth.
Then I began meeting weekly with a minister to discuss the nature of relationships between men and women. Week after week, we explored the tension between the sexes, the repeated failures, the cycles of attraction and disappointment. One day, as our session ended, he looked me in the eye and said, “The first commandment is the hardest to follow.”
The first commandment, Exodus 20:3:“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
I left puzzled. I had never bowed to Zeus, Apollo, Thor, or Aphrodite. I did not worship idols. Why would this matter to my question?
It took time, weeks of reflection, before the truth hit me: we make gods out of each other.
The old saying, Never meet your heroes, explains it. When you meet them, they rarely match the perfect image in your mind. The higher you elevate them, the further they fall when reality sets in.
Parents who idolize their children, treating them as incapable of wrongdoing, cripple them. They remove discipline, they erase boundaries, and they feed a delusion that only gods are flawless.
In relationships, men often turn women into goddesses. They worship beauty, charm, and allure, ignoring the warnings, the flaws, the evidence in front of them. They sacrifice their standards to keep her on a pedestal. When reality breaks through and the goddess bleeds like anyone else, the man feels betrayed, not by her actions, but by the collapse of the image he built.
Women do the same but with sharper judgment. They dream up a godlike man who is a provider, protector, redeemer, and savior all in one. He must be a fountain of happiness, love, attention, and security. The moment he falters, misses a beat, shows a flaw, has a bad day, he is stripped of divinity and cast aside. Boyfriends, fiancés, husbands, all replaced because no mortal man can meet divine expectations.
We are not built to worship each other, yet we do it constantly. And when the gods we invent fail to perform miracles, we do not forgive them, we crucify them.