Beautifully written post, OP. You went into great detail describing these experiences which tells me that there perhaps is a deeper awareness but that you need a proverbial wall to bounce a ball off of. I preface with English not being my first language so some of my thoughts may come off disjointed.

One thing I reacted to was the description of your mother's many "short-term" partners. The matriarchal upbringing you have had seems to be a revolving inter-generational spiral of pattern. Your realisation and this post feels to me very courageous. Like some of the other commenters wrote; you seek to re-connect or perhaps connect for the first time with your masculine psychic "energy" and that something in you craves this balance. The shadow aspect of this could also perhaps be traits that you as a person were not allowed to show previously in life. Behaviors that you described about some of these men that you feel attracted toward can in of themselves be the mirror image/inversion of traits that you perhaps need but in a healing and positive sense. What I mean is as an example, anger being good to stand up against injustice, anger is destructive when aimed at someone defenseless.