The Third Option Nobody's Talking About — In Politics, Relationships, and Your Own Mind
The topic of “tension between opposites” came up in a bunch of conversations these last couple of weeks. How everything feels so polarized, how hard it is to stay centered, why everything has to be so extreme, and how to avoid this all or nothing mindset.
I’ve thought about it in terms of US politics, the current dating landscape, and personal inner work. So today, I want to make the case for a third option, one that probably doesn't perform well online, but is the thing philosophers and psychologists have been arguing for, for ages.
Tl:dr: the third option is not a middle point between the two extreme poles, it is learning to live in the tension between them. Discovering that the longer you can do that without collapsing toward either end, the more range you have.
Oh, and it’s a skill you can practice.
"Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns." - Rainer Maria Rilke
When the binary breaks politics
Zooming out a little, the Obama years felt like genuine humanistic, spiritual progress to many people… and then came an enormous backlash. In term of collective unconscious, I think that backlash wasn't a revenge so much as the opposing mechanical, materialistic pole asserting itself. The further the aspiring edge expands, the more violently the trailing edge contracts (https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/11/14/loss-fear-and-rage-are-white-men-rebelling-against-democracy/).
The picture in politics right now is genuinely frightening. Governments across Europe, South America, and the United States are not just moving to the right, they are sprinting toward conservative territory that looked like fringe a mere decade ago. Reproductive rights continue to be dismantled, and people are talking about repealing the nineteenth amendment, aka women's right to vote (https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/).
This to me is as out there as looksmaxxing (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28z4zypkno btw, is Gen Z ok?? Holy moly.).
Here’s what’s also true: there’s more diverse funding going into consciousness research, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and the neuroscience of meaning than at any previous point in history (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2025.1546279/full). There’s also more women in parliament and executive leadership than ever before (https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-womens-leadership-and-political-participation).
What’s not immediately obvious in all the vitriol is that the extreme poles don't. represent. the majority. In the United States, the largest single bloc of eligible voters isn't Democrat or Republican, it's the roughly forty percent who don't vote at all (https://eu.heraldtribune.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/10/01/americas-largest-voting-bloc-consists-people-who-dont-even-vote/3585546001/).
This is obviously a bigger conversation; truthfully, one I don’t feel educated enough to hold. But the third option in politics probably isn't a third party, though it might eventually become that too. It's refusing to accept that the binary on offer is the only shape the question can take.
Start by staying genuinely curious about and trying to understand what is driving people around the other pole without being recruited by it. Expanding the space you can hold rather than resorting to name calling. (If you can stomach it, because I fully understand not wanting to engage with those who negate your right to exist. To me, conservative policies sound a lot like scared protectors, and while they don’t seem to respond to economic facts, I trust they would come around when doused with enough compassion and Self energy. Side note, really interesting piece on trad wives here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ-Hsh1B2TA)
When the binary breaks dating
A similar pattern of extreme opposites runs through the current conversation about men, masculinity, and dating.
In another moment of “seriously, is Gen Z ok???,” this video (https://youtu.be/pfEHQH1RSr0?si=KSNC_4FFDV_lX5-K) shows Leah Green of The Guardian talking to folks in their 20s about their beliefs around dating. Most young men share they are waiting to date until they feel they are settled, “stable,” with a good job, and enough money to be able to provide. Interestingly, the young women she interviewed lamented that guys seem to be getting their ideas about what women want from other guys, namely “podcast bros,” instead of talking to actual women. We are left with the questions of when did mixed-gender friend groups disappear to be replaced by podcasts, and where is the fun?
One of the panel conversations at Esther Perel's recent conference (https://sessionslive2026.estherperel.com) explored this even more poignantly. Dan Savage explained that he remembers his mother having to ask his dad for a signature so she could get a credit card. To participate in society, women needed a man. For most of recorded human history, the playing field tilted so dramatically in men's favor that even the worst kind of man could expect to be chosen. That field has levelled. Now, women have a choice that didn't fully exist a generation ago: a genuinely good man, a mediocre man, or no man at all. And many men are experiencing this shift not as the possibility for genuine mutual partnership, but as being cheated out of their birthright. And the manosphere has decided the answer to this dispossession is dominance.
As Dené Logan pointed out, the cultural critique of masculinity has offered men only two choices: apologize for yourself, or join the movement that says you don't need to apologize for anything. Most men can’t live in those extremes, which is part of why so many are quietly suffering. While women used to need a man to exist politically, economically, and socially, a man's entire sense of meaning was organized around protecting and providing for a woman. Now that women can provide for themselves, losing the role of “man of the house” means losing their self. Logan's observation that white cis heterosexual men represent the highest rates of death by suicide in the population is a strong signal that traditional ideas of masculinity are failing everyone, and we desperately need a third option.
Dan Savage referenced an article exploring heroic masculinity (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/heroic-toxic-masculinity-boys/675172/), and Logan described that something beyond the binary of dominance and apology, is the capacity to stay curious about your partner's experience without abandoning your own. Not to agree with their position or perform understanding you don't feel, but to genuinely ask: what is it like to be wrapped around that pole? What are they protecting? What would it cost them to move?
When the binary breaks your mental wellness
In Jungian typology, every psyche has a dominant function, the natural strength, the “hero,” the mode of engaging that feels effortless and becomes our identity (Sensing, Intuiting, Thinking, or Feeling, in either the extraverted or introverted attitude.) The heroic’s opposite is the inferior function: the unconscious part, the place we are most defended against and most vulnerable to.
One-sidedness is the trap: becoming so identified with your strengths that the inferior function goes underground, where it develops without supervision and erupts in the moments when you least expect it. The opposing cognitive pole we've disowned doesn't disappear, it just takes over and starts operating without our conscious involvement. The Thinking type who prides themselves on analytical precision becomes irrationally sentimental under stress. The Feeling type whose strength is empathy and attunement turns cold and cutting when they've been wounded.
Jung called the resolution when both functions are integrated the transcendent function: not a synthesis that smooths out any contradictions, but a third thing that arises from the tension being held consciously and for long enough. You don't have to become your opposite, but you can develop the capacity to meet your opposite without collapsing. Not by giving up your dominant preference, but by staying flexible enough to bend without breaking.
Bending without breaking
The extremes are not the problem. Opposing political visions, opposing ideas about gender and partnership, opposing functions of the psyche… these are not errors in the system, they are the system. Take the Fool in Tarot, who has to step off the cliff and incarnate into duality because there isn't much to learn when you're one with everything. The tension is where experience happens, like, that’s why we’re here.
What becomes destructive is the collapse toward the poles, when the binary forecloses the third option, and staying in the tension starts to feel not just difficult but naïve or hopeless. And the thing that makes collapse so tempting is that the poles offer something the middle ground doesn't: clarity, belonging, an enemy, a story about who you are.
The third option asks you to stay genuinely curious about what is driving the position you most want to dismiss, while keeping your own perspective intact, and not pretending all positions are equally valid. Especially if you have a J in your type code, tolerating this ambiguity is hard.
You can practice by being curious and trying to really understand. Starting with yourself, which takes courage and confidence, then profoundly engaging with your partner from a place of curiosity and compassion, and expanding through your community and society at large with calmness, clarity, and creativity. You will feel more connected as a result.
Calm, clear, curious, compassionate, confident, courageous, creative, and connecting - those are the IFS attributes of Self energy. Call it idealistic, but I believe that when we spend time developing our own inner Self leadership, we are changing our energetic impact on those around us toward a more comprehensive healing.
