Joseph Campbell wrote that he taught hundreds, perhaps thousands of young women, many of whom have gone into the arts. Many of the others, he said, had boyfriends or fathers or husbands who would not stand that that. Each of these women had to make a choice, he said, and if the woman chose to “knuckle down to what her husband wanted,” that ended her adventure.

It really did, just like that. Everything that followed became a substitute. The goal, believed Campbell, is to have your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is by no means an easy thing to do. Campbell said it was his intention to give all of his students the spiritual message of how to live one’s life, even if they had their families, and submitted to their men, and came to their adventure later in life. Many of them did.

I have been teaching for many years and have meet hundreds of those women, in and out of the classroom, who had men in their lives who would not permit them to follow their bliss and have their adventures. Maria is one of those women, I know many others. I am not a woman and can’t speak for them but I know by heart the arguments used against them: it isn’t safe, isn’t secure, isn’t predicable, doesn’t pay, is too hard, has too much rejection, or the most painful reason of all: they weren’t good enough.

I have seen a lot of people in my life – men too – who have listened to spouses, parents, friends, advisers talk them out of their lives, their calling, their adventure. Some people pursue their calling, some seek jobs. In our world, jobs are not callings, they ask the young to put themselves at the mercy of people who do not know what people are for, see them as disposable commodities, do not care what happens to them or how much they love their work and lives. When you give up  adventure for a job, it ends. Just like that. Your life becomes a substitute, the pursuit of someone else’s vision.

I do not understand a man who will not stand for his wife to follow her calling, and have her adventure, to live a substitute kind of life in the name of a kind of security that is false and fragile. I do not understand a parent who talks their child out of a calling and into a job, so they may live in a place they don’t like working in a job of no meaning,  for people who care nothing for them, and will throw them in the trash in the minute for a few dollars.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, it is a kind of death to give it up.

“The goal of the hero trip,” wrote Campbell, “down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of your Self…That’s the journey.”

What is love, if it is not holding out to someone you care about and helping them up the ladder so they can find their adventure and know their true selves? What does it mean to be a man? To be brave and nurturing, for us, for others. If nothing else, I can make certain that when I leave the earth, my wife will never say to anyone that she was asked to choose between my own fear and shallowness and her own adventure.

Or that she ever had to ask for my permission.