Which girl do you have a really fun flying with, and which girl do you take on as a girlfriend?
It's not hard... but many men make it hard.
Because they live in scarcity.
Because that hot girl they met at the club is the hottest girl they've met in months anywhere, and they figure they'll just mold and shape her into the way they want her.
Because they refuse to accept that people are the way they are, and there's not a damn thing you can do to change that.
You don't craft a girl into what you want. You find a girl who is already what you want.
Women Don’t Want To Be Saved
I’ll give the bad news first: women do not come with a manual.
Part of the mystery and wonder and awe of the feminine is precisely because there is no manual, and yet, this reality — our inherent unpredictability and the inherent confusion men experience as a direct result of it — tends to lead most men to want to give up entirely on understanding us before they have even begun.
It’s at this point that most men attempt to control as much of their circumstances as they can in order to feel even remotely sane around us. And without fully realizing why, this is precisely where we tend to turn up the volume on our unpredictability. Perhaps we secretly want to torture him. Or maybe we don’t feel heard. Depending on his own perspective, he may believe the former, but it’s more often than not the latter.
If a woman manual were to exist, it would be an intangible one, without the tools that so often leave us feeling confined and cornered into showing up in one specific way; a way that often conveniently protects a man’s ego and keeps him comfortable. The manual would have one page, wherein there would be a detailed description of how he, using the incontrovertible power of his attention, learns to play us better than we can play ourselves. How does he do this? By noticing, and then subsequently being inspired by, all of the brilliant ways a woman has learned to communicate with him and the world.
Fixing us means you think we are broken.
It may feel like a noble cause to save us from our torment and suffering, but what is actually being communicated when that happens is that he believes we are broken. Any time anyone attempts to fix someone, this is what is actually being communicated. It’s a standard example of the starting gate rescuer position on the drama triangle : rescuer saves victim in order to feel needed, and victim continues to feel broken, helpless, and in need of rescuing.
The good news is that we are not broken. None of us are. And the sooner we all are willing to acknowledge that, the sooner we all will free up a whole lot of energy that is better spent connecting with one another.
The caveat here is that many of us believe ourselves to be broken and in need of fixing from time to time. It’s one of the many ways we like to not take responsibility for ourselves and our power, and most of us are raised thinking it’s perfectly normal to let others take responsibility for it, for us, instead.
This is incidentally a surefire way to either get rescued or to find proof of our unworthiness of love, depending on the result. And herein lies the biggest conundrum that works a lot like the chicken or egg question. If I believe myself to be broken, then it only follows that a man will also believe I am broken and want to come and fix me (cause => effect). The result is that I am left feeling disempowered, and continue to feel broken (and by the way it’s almost a guarantee that I’ll use this as evidence of my lack of power later).
What’s a man to do? Well, he refers back to his intangible one-page woman manual: using the incontrovertible power of his attention, he learns to play us better than we can play ourselves. He doesn’t go on our ride and believe our story of hopelessness. He reminds us of our awe and wonder and mystery, and he let’s us save ourselves.
Men are being called upon, now more than ever, to expand their range.
It’s easy to blame women for being so confusing and hopeless. Like it or not, the feminist movement has happened and there are a lot of women running around with a lot of power, living out their story of needing to be saved from it.
Refusing to save the powerful damsel in distress from herself, while staying connected to her and loving her anyway while she figures out how to save herself, is likely to cause some disruption to the type of comfort many men yearn for, both in their professional and romantic relationships with women. It requires of him to be reconciled with his own unpredictability, as well as his own awe, wonder and mystery, so that he can consciously hold her there. It requires of him a willingness to not be needed, but to ask her instead what she needs.
And it requires of her to know.