It's a Guy Thing (4 page)

Why Can’t He Be with Me Emotionally?

Emotionality is not the same as love. Masculine love is often silent, discriminative, penetrating or unwavering. Feminine love is often tearful, excited, wild or joyous. Love is love; it can be expressed in many forms.

Many women experience strong emotions from day to day, often triggered by other people’s love or rejection of them.
They often assume that men must experience these same emotions. Some men do, but others don’t. Just as men must stop demanding that women always analyze their feelings, women must stop demanding that men always express themselves through emotionality.

The true obligation in relationship for both men and women is to transcend the changing flow of emotions and thoughts and directly give love. This is the key to the daily practice of intimacy.
No matter what you are feeling or thinking, practice giving and receiving love
. Feminine emotionality and masculine analysis are merely two styles of communication. One is not more loving than the other.

Whether you are willing to open and love is more important than the style by which you express yourself. Instead of obliging your partner to be more emotional, locate your true heart. Breathe from your true heart. Locate your true heart, the depth of your authentic being. Relax into your true heart. In your true heart there is no reactivity, no withdrawal, no need to punish others when they are not loving. Your true heart—the deepest core of your being—may be wounded, but even so, it still wants to give and receive love. Through the beauty of your open heart, your man may learn to relax more into his true heart, whether his style of loving is more emotional or not.

Why Is He Afraid to Commit?

The quest for freedom is most important to the masculine energy. That freedom can be financial, professional, artistic or spiritual. The most important priority for the feminine
energy is relationship and love. When your man turns away from you, you may instantly feel, “I must be doing something wrong. I must be doing something wrong or he would want to spend more time with me.”

Most men, if forced to make a choice between an intimate relationship or their art/profession/spiritual path, will choose the latter. When a woman is in her masculine energy she will make the same choice: freedom over love.

If you are in your feminine, love and an intimate relationship is at the core of your life. But at the core of your man’s life is his quest for freedom from constraints. He will do anything to continue on his quest. If he imagines your relationship is going to limit his quest, he will not want to commit. He’ll want to keep things open.

When men enter more deeply into a relationship, they feel their attention being more absorbed in love for you. This may scare them. They imagine that their freedom is decreasing, and they react by pulling out, or by refusing to make a commitment to the relationship, especially following an increased period of depth of intimacy.

Why Can’t He Be More Vulnerable?

You may feel that your man is not vulnerable. You may feel that he has built walls around himself. Indeed, he may not want you, or anyone else, to enter into his life. He may be very rigid and invulnerable. But there may also be something else happening.

It is possible that what you call vulnerability is the feminine form of vulnerability. Masculine vulnerability is quite
different. When a man is vulnerable he may not talk about his feelings as much. When a man is vulnerable, he usually talks about his vision, or his lack of it.

The most vulnerable place of a man’s life often has very little to do with the same emotions that are central to a woman’s life. A man’s vulnerability has more to do with considerations such as, “Am I living my life fully?” “Am I following my highest vision?” “Am I going in the right direction?” “Am I wasting my life?”

“I’m feeling bad in this relationship,” is rarely a central issue for a man. He may question his relationship, but more as a part of the overall scheme of his life rather than its central issue. A man’s most vulnerable place has to do with his direction in life. When he feels vulnerable, he may question whether he is living his truth.

Sometimes your man is truly not open to you. But perhaps what you call “open” is different for you and your man. Entertain the possibility that when he speaks of his direction in life he is being most vulnerable. If you do, then you’ll appreciate his openness as a man. When men talk about their direction in life, they are opening some of the most central parts of themselves to you.

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Thank God Women Are Not Men

Can Geographical Places Have Sexual Characteristics?

The Hawaiian island of Kauai is very feminine. If you take a walk on Kauai, no matter what you were previously doing, your whole body breathes fully and feels full of joy. There are double rainbows, beautiful bird songs and the fragrance of tropical fruit and beautiful flowers all around you. The surrounding ocean is healing and rejuvenating. Some of Kauai’s feminine qualities are its healing properties, its radiance, its fertility, and the feeling that life is abundant.

Life itself is feminine. Anything that has to do with life is feminine. The forces of nature are feminine. Even in our secular culture, we recognize nature to be feminine. And before it became politically correct to do otherwise, all hurricanes and typhoons were named after women.

The feminine has another side to it, too, as does Kauai. Kauai has monsoon-like rains, hurricanes and rip tides, as well as rainbows and flowers. These chaotic, wild qualities are also part of the feminine, just as much as the healing and life-giving qualities are.

New York, on the other hand, is a very masculine city. It is full of focused energy. Most people there are on a mission of some kind. They are intensely directed. Some of the masculine qualities are one-pointedness, goal-orientation and purposeful focus. The masculine eliminates obstructions to pursue and reach a goal. On the streets of New York, for instance, you walk with a purpose. You stay focused and don’t act too friendly with strangers. This narrow, directional quality is a masculine quality, whether it is in a man or a woman or a city.

In New York, everything moves upward. Skyscrapers go
up, elevators go up, and people go up the success ladder as well as up into their heads. The masculine quality points up and ahead. Men, or anyone in their masculine energy, tend to be in their heads more than their bodies.

In Hawaii, though, men and women can relax into their feminine and their bodies. They relax in the healing ocean. They play on the warm, soft sand. They smile at strangers and greet one another with a friendly, “Aloha.”

The masculine and feminine are universal energies. You find them not only in men and women, but also in places, animals and even objects. By understanding the universal energies of masculine and feminine, we can smile rather than argue about differences between ourselves and our intimate partners.

Why Do Men and Women Shop So Differently?

There is a real difference between the way men and women shop. Men usually know what they want, go into the store and get it.

Most women, rather than darting in and out, search through a store and check things out. If you are in your masculine, your partner’s feminine and flowing way of shopping drives you crazy. If you are in your feminine, this way of shopping is very enjoyable.

Why Do We Fight So Much?

Often, arguments arise because women want their partners to be more like them. Women typically want men to make more of a commitment to the relationship and to express their feelings about the intimacy. Women want men to pay more attention and spend more time with them in an intimate, romantic and loving way. That is, women want men to be more like women.

Men want women to be more sexually available, less moody and less talkative about their feelings and the details of their day. Men want women to “keep their word” and talk straight about what they want to do. That is, men want women to be more like men.

This desire to want your partner to be more like you results in conflicts. Unless you understand, honor and appreciate the differences in one another, you will be in conflict. It is inevitable because you, as a woman, will always crave more intimacy and communication. He will always crave your ability to get to the point and be less moody. Rather than compete, you can complement one another with your sexual differences. Then, when you fight, you won’t try to prove you’re right, but will enjoy the play of differences. In fact, in Chinese, the symbol for sex translates to “flowery combat.”

What Are the Essences of Masculine and Feminine?

Masculine strength is confidence of your direction in life. In order for a woman to trust a man fully, she must feel his self-confidence and direction. One reason men and women
should clarify their masculine energy is so they have a clear vision of their lives and where they want them to go.

If your man is always wishy-washy and never knows what he wants to do, it is difficult to trust him as a life partner. A good partner is a man who is strong in his vision and direction. He also embraces you. He appreciates and honors you not only as a person but as a unique woman, as his cherished connection to the feminine aspect of the universe.