Ladies, Are You Bossing Your Man Around?

Ok, so this is a LONG one. You may want to sit down with a cup of tea or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine or, my favorite, a shot of top-shelf tequila. Ready?

How often, ladies, do you end up looking at the man that you are in a relationship with or married to and thinking that you wish he could be a certain way, or that he would do something that you’ve always longed for him to do or the big one, things he used to do?

I was reflecting on something in a conversation I was having with a friend of mine about the reality that as women, in our current modern world, we have a tendency at the beginning of our relationship to try to lead the man that we are getting involved with and who we are attracted to in the direction that we want to go. It feels natural, because we all want what we want, especially in relationship, but this is our fatal mistake. Because you can lead a horse to water, but as the adage goes, you can’t make him drink.

Now when he is very thirsty, he will drink. Using that as a metaphor for early on in relationship where men are inclined to give us what we want in order for them to bed us. This is true, ladies, even of men who care about us or love us or who will love us. That’s BIG motivation for them to deliver all the goods we want.

So let me give you some examples of what I’m speaking to so that I can make what’s clear in my mind, clear to you as well.

Let’s say early on in a relationship, we want the man in our life to know that we love to be spoiled. Now that means different things to different women, but let’s just say for the sake of this piece( and for simplicity’s sake) that we want our guy to know that we love to be taken out to dinner three or four times a week, (ok, so it’s a shallow example but that’s the way it’s coming through!) and we want to be able to spend a certain amount of time together each week.

But when we start booking the reservations for the restaurant, or saying to him, “why don’t we go out to dinner tonight,” rather than allowing him to suggest what he would like to do, we just go ahead and take charge and make it happen. and this is leading the horse to water, or in this case to the restaurant table.

So in those early stages you end up thinking all this is so romantic and he takes me out to dinner. But the reality is you set it up.

For the sake of keeping this simple and illustrating the point, if you want someone who wants to go out to dinner three times a week and you are with the man who never suggests taking you out to dinner, and when I say never suggests, I’m speaking to that brand-new place in relationship where people really reveal who they are.

Let’s say he suggests hey, let’s go for a picnic out in the woods. Not your flavor? A lot of women would say yes anyway, because they like this guy and they want him to like her, so what we are basically doing is setting up our new relationship lies and facades. You’ll go for a picnic in the woods and hate every bit of it because you don’t like bugs or sitting on the ground, and he will go out to dinner with you even though restaurants aren’t his thing.

As time goes on, you will continue the farce, but most guys won’t. Sorry ladies, but this is one of those places where I have to give it to men for being more simple and honest. And it’s not that we are being dishonest consciously, it’s that there is a subtle form of manipulation going on when we keep trying to get him to do what we want.

I think in part it’s born of a fear that either we will never have what we want, or that we don’t deserve to have what we want, or a combination of these feelings. Or perhaps you just don’t want to end up alone, so you settle for what comes along.
What to do? In those early days, if you are clear about what is important to you in relationship, you must adopt the feminine principle of BEING and leave the masculine one of DOING to him. Witness how he shows up organically, because this is who he really is. Is he a guy that brings you flowers and takes you out to dinner and fancy places if that’s who you are? Or is he the kind of guy that wants to sit and talk for hours and know who you are from the inside out?

You won’t find this out if you continue to lead with your doing.

You’re trying to get what you want and need from a relationship which you are absolutely entitled to have, but you can’t get it by trying to change the man who is in front of you. When we do this, we dishonor ourselves and the man before us.
Are you following me on this?

Why do we do this? I believe because inherent in most women is a sense or belief that if we are just being who we are, that won’t be enough to be offered the things that we genuinely want to be offered by a man in a relationship, so we work at it. We set up our own romantic scenarios and all the other ones that are important to us.

But here’s the thing, is it because we’re afraid of being alone? If we just were truly who we were and allowed the man that is the object of our interest to just be who he is and we both were to witness how we each show up for the other we would very early on know the truth of whether we will be a good fit in relationship. Instead we create a habit of getting what we want by taking the masculine role and then one day we realize “he never does XYZ if I don’t initiate.”

You’re right, because it’s not in his nature and you probably should never have been with him if this is one of the things on your list of needs in a relationship. And then when you get angry, your guy is scratching his head because he genuinely, honestly doesn’t understand.

You see, ladies, the simplicity of man is the gift and the confounding confoundment that they bring to us, just as our innate complexity levies the same effect on them.

For men, often a duck is just a duck. To us, we see a potential Christmas dinner (sorry to my vegetarian readers) and a down pillow, and wonder why in the world they only see a duck.

I think part of the problem stems from the idea that most women, including myself for large portion of my life, never really examined what is truly important to me in a relationship. What do I want from a man mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, sexually, financially, and how do I want to feel in his presence?

So many of us just take what we are offered, afraid to have nothing offered at all. But for those of us who assumed a masculine role and do the doing, not only will you never have what you desire from a man, but you will also emasculate the man that you are in relationship with and he will never have what he wants from a woman, which in part is to be able to offer himself to her, not to be forced to give her what she wants.
There is a huge difference between being offered something by a man and asking for it from him.

In my book, I write about the difference between being a W.O.M.A.N. and feminism. I believe that feminism attempted to bring socioeconomic parity to women, which we certainly deserve, but somewhere along the way we stopped being in our feminine qualities. We stopped experiencing them in ourselves and we stopped offering them to the world, and of course the men we come in contact with.

Men are longing to experience a part of us that knows how to just be, how to subtly suggest what we need from them, without so much blah, blah, blah. And we desperately need to be able to rest into our more feminine parts that we have lost touch with. But can you give up feeling the need to control the man in your life?

If you want him to man up, you have to man down. Men don't want to be talked at, they want to be talked to.