It's a Guy Thing (21 page)

So often during the so-called mid-life crisis, men get divorced, leave their family and start something new. If there was a structure in our society where, for several months, a man could release his vocational obligations and household focus, he might not have to leave his family permanently
because he could confront his deepest fears and engage his edge in temporary solitude. But in our culture such a vision quest is not supported.

Until men receive their vision and understand their fears, they may always feel self-suppressed and stuck. Life seems like hell to them because they can’t do what they really want to do. However, after penetrating through the barriers of their fear, men can incarnate fully. They are no longer fearful. They are finally able to share love without reservation.

Why Does It Seem to Make Things Worse When I Try to Help Him?

If your man is not living his vision, if he is wobbly in his life, then you won’t be able to trust him. Since you don’t trust him, your own masculine energy comes up to try and save the day.

If he isn’t living his vision there is only so much you can do about it. You could help him. You could support him. But basically, it’s up to him. And if he is not living it, you can’t trust him. You won’t trust him. In relation to him, your masculine will come up in order to take care of business and protect yourself. Then, there will be depolarization, defensiveness and lack of trust.

You need to be able to maintain your own wholeness, but part of maintaining your wholeness is participating in the exchange of love in relationship. You can’t experience the exchange of love with him unless he is living his vision.

The best way for you to support your man’s vision is to let him know how you are feeling. If you see your man not living
his vision, if he’s just hanging out and not getting it together, you might be tempted to tell him to get off his ass and get it going. But if you do that, you will be bringing him masculine energy and he will resent it.

Instead, try to feel deep down and uncover the primary feeling underlying your anxiety. Maybe you feel like he isn’t taking care of you. Perhaps there is a feeling of insecurity, or just an anxiety or inability to relax. Tell him that. Instead of telling him what to
do
, tell him how you
feel
. That way, instead of bringing him masculine energy and making that the issue, you will be bringing him the gift of your feminine sensitivity. This will reflect to him how his irresponsibility affects others.

Whether or not he becomes more responsible is up to him. It is completely out of your hands. If you try to change him, the relationship will only become more depolarized. Gift him with your love, gift him with your happy and radiant feminine energy, and if he doesn’t get responsible soon, leave him. There is no reason for you to be a victim of his irresponsibility.

What Can I Expect If My Man Is Just Beginning to Grow Strong?

As your man becomes stronger in his masculine energy, he will become more directed in his life, and you may experience this as a loss of playfulness or sensitivity.

To grow in confidence and strength in the world, a man has to go out there and bust ass. He needs to eliminate distractions from his life, discipline himself with daily goals to meet and not play and engage in conversations which distract from his work.

If you look at men who are very successful at business, art, sports or spiritual practice, you will see that for periods of their lives they have applied themselves totally to the accomplishment of their vision. They have focused their lives and have known what they wanted. They have very firm goals and they eliminate distractions. Men like this are often a pain in the ass in intimate relationships.

For instance, it’s great when a man becomes financially or creatively successful, but such men are often very unsuccessful at softness, at feeling, at sensing and responding to your love. If you reject your man’s quality of self-centered or project-oriented focus, then he will feel your rejection of his masculine essence.

If you want a man who is very confident and successful but also feeling and sensitive, then find a man who is already strong in his masculine and gift him with the feminine by inviting him into sensitivity. The other way doesn’t work. You can’t find a sensitive man and then teach him how to be strong in his confidence and success. To do this you would have to animate your masculine energy, which would depolarize the relationship.

Choose a man who is already confident and successful. Or, allow your man to develop his own masculine energy, by himself or in the company of other men.

He is responsible for his own growth, but you can play a part in it. You can find the strength in yourself to support his one-pointedness, including his disregard of those around him, but only for clearly defined periods of time. After this period of total focus he should, of course, be able to embrace you in total love. His presence with you should be full and undivided.

How Can I Teach Him to Receive My Feminine Gifts?

There is a fine line between unhealthy “co-dependence” and serving one another with your gifts. A key to relational healthiness is to give your gifts because you love to give them, not because you are hoping to get something in return. Then, if your man can’t receive your gifts, you are still living exactly how you want to live, giving your gifts. Your happiness is not dependent on his ability to receive you. In your happiness, however, you may choose to share your gifts with another man.

What can you do if your man doesn’t seem to respond to your feminine gifts? Maybe he just doesn’t know how to receive them. In our anti-feminine society, many women don’t know how to give their feminine gifts and many men don’t know how to receive them. Your man might have some learning to do. Before you decide he is the wrong partner, allow for some learning. Eventually, if he proves incapable of receiving your gift, then you may be inappropriate for each other at this time.

One of the best ways to teach a man how to receive your feminine has nothing to do with any discussion between you. Rather, it involves inviting your man into his body, not verbally inviting him, but inviting him through touch, through sensual communion, through emotions, through sexuality. It involves teaching him the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of the feminine force, the wisdom of subtle, natural energies. The best way to teach him about the feminine is by attracting him into it, not necessarily by talking about it.

This is one unique way that the feminine energy teaches the masculine energy to relinquish its heady one-sidedness
and to flow with the energy of love. This is how he learns to receive you.

11
The Ups and Downs of Masculine Sexuality

What Does My Man Feel When He Stares at Other Women?

When a man sees a woman who fits what he considers attractive, he has an instant bodily response of sexual polarization. It is not an emotional response. It’s just like smelling a freshly brewed cup of coffee, seeing a glorious rainbow or smelling the intoxicating fragrance of a flower. It’s a moment of thrill, a wave of desire and appreciation.

This kind of attraction has no influence on a man’s love for his chosen partner. When your man sees an attractive woman, it does not cause him to remove his love from you. It has nothing to do with love. It is a physical response to the universal force of sexual attraction between masculine and feminine energies.

Why Is My Man So Mechanical During Sex?

As a woman, making love is something that takes place inside of you, close to your heart. Sexual loving involves a feeling of deep emotion. For a woman, the heart, the body, the emotions and sexuality are all intertwined. To participate fully, you must open your heart and body; you must become vulnerable. You are letting somebody inside of you, inviting someone inside of you and opening your essence to that person. It is a very intimate, loving, emotional, sacred and heartfelt event.

By contrast, from a biological perspective, a man’s sex organs hang outside his body. They are probably the most superficial sense organ he has, farthest from his heart. For
him, sex takes place outside of his body, inside you. He need not open himself nor become particularly vulnerable.

At the physiological level, there is a big difference between men and women relative to sex. For many men, having sex is something like eating chocolate, at least at the physiological level. If you put chocolate against your tongue, it tastes good. It doesn’t matter what mood you are in. In fact, sometimes the worse the mood, the better the taste. It doesn’t really matter who gives you the chocolate. It’s the chocolate you taste. For many men, the pleasure of sex is similar to this.

Sex
could
be as sacred for a man as it is for a woman. But in general, for a woman, it is hard to dissociate sex from emotion. Her feelings about her partner as well as her feelings about herself play a huge part in what sexual intercourse feels like to her.

This isn’t true for many men, for whom sex can simply be a very pleasurable bodily activity, like participating in a sport or eating ice cream.

It is not always this way. Men certainly express their deep loving through sex. But at the lowest level of sexuality, men get enjoyment out of genital stimulation and nothing else. In fact, sometimes men just want this kind of sex and are happy to pay a prostitute for it; love has very little to do with it.

Sex to a man could be equivalent to masturbation. It
could
be. It doesn’t have to be. But it’s sometimes difficult for women to understand where their man is coming from, what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. How could he enjoy sex as sport, sex as ice cream, sex divorced from love and emotion?

Likewise, it is difficult for men to understand where a woman is coming from, what she is thinking and feeling. To him, simple sex is a very pleasurable event. He can’t understand why she doesn’t enjoy emotionless sex, too. He might
think, “We’re both getting enjoyment.” He projects his way of enjoying sex onto his woman and imagines she enjoys sex the same way. It is not necessarily an emotional or spiritual matter. It is simply a pleasurable physical experience. It is joyous even, but physically joyous, like getting a massage, motorcycle driving, sitting in the sun or eating a sweet papaya. They all give bodily pleasure.