Principle: The Masculine In Relationship
By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson, and Geoff Laughton
Many years ago, when one of our clients was in college, he was a textbook doormat. Maybe you can see the patterns in his relationship with his then-girlfriend:
- He was scared to stand up for himself. It was always "whatever you want, honey."
- Because his biological mother was verbally abusive, he was terrified of his girlfriend's anger. Any time she expressed even the slightest irritation, he folded like a piece of paper.
- He felt a lot of resentment owing to the fact that he never stood up for himself and instead let her walk all over him.
- Because he didn't stand up for himself, he tried to get his needs met in covert or sneaky ways. When he was feeling lonely, he tried to guilt her into hanging out with him. When he was feeling horny, he tried to guilt her into sex.
- His resentment burst out in eruptions that he didn't feel like he could control. They fought constantly.
- He was generally miserable and pissed-off that she wasn't doing what he wanted, even though he had never asked her to.
- He tried to buy her love with flowers and nice dinners. When that didn't work, he would get pissed-off and hurt and scared that she would leave him.
Unsurprisingly, his behavior made them both miserable. She snapped at him and lashed out at him. She pulled back from him and closed herself off emotionally and physically. They were in college, but while all of his friends were copulating like rabbits, he could barely entice her to make out with him. Eventually they went through a messy break-up that left them both scarred.
Fast forward ten years, and our client's relationship with women has utterly transformed. In his relationship with his fiancé, he:
- Takes the lead in planning all of their dates.
- Is generally bulletproof towards her changing moods. If she's pissed, he'll try to help because he cares about her; but he doesn't take it personally or let it affect him.
- Speaks up if something in the relationship is bothering him.
- Asks for what he wants in a clear and direct way. No guilt trips, covert contracts, or passive aggressive bullshit.
- Takes his role as her Protector seriously.
- Buys her flowers and nice dinners just to see her smile, without any expectation of anything in return.
Partially as a result, their relationship is fantastic. They've been together for almost 3 years, and they can still barely keep their hands off of each other. She tells him every day how safe and in love he makes her feel, and how excited she is to marry him. Their sex life is explosive.
What changed? In the intervening years, our client cultivated a strong core of Masculine energy. If your relationship is stranded on Suffering Island, the path back to a healthy relationship is to develop and/or strengthen your masculine leadership in the relationship.
Why is it important for most men to cultivate a masculine core in their relationship? As GS Youngblood, author of The Masculine In Relationship, puts it, "Most women I know, both meek and strong, have expressed to me their desire to be LOVED and LED by their man." Both loving and leading come from a place of strong, grounded Masculine energy.
Dr. Robert Glover, author of No More Mr Nice Guy, lays out a powerful call to action for why men should stop pussyfooting around and take the lead:
"It is often the strongest and most liberated women who are craving a mindful man who’s got a spine and balls. These women are in charge of so many things throughout the day, they typically don’t want to come home and have to be in charge of their relationship and sex life as well. They want a man who can match their passion and strength – and who can lead."
In the context of a relationship, Youngblood suggests that there are three core components to cultivating masculine energy:
- Respond vs React
- Provide Structure
- Create Safety
Each of these components can help your woman to feel loved and led by you, which helps her to relax and open up into her Feminine. Let's go through each of these in more depth:
Respond vs React
One core component of masculine energy is cultivating the ability to respond to difficult or stressful situations rather than react. As Youngblood puts it, "'Respond vs. React' refers simply to that quality of interacting with the world from a place of choice rather than from unconscious reaction."
Or as Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychotherapist who survived Auschwitz internment camp and went on to write Man's Search For Meaning puts it:
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Reacting to a situation means letting it knock you off-kilter. It means seeing the situation as a threat, which triggers your anxiety and causes you to make rash decisions. A common example is when your woman is expressing anger or frustration at you. The reactive man perceives her words as a threat, typically that she will leave him or hurt him. His anxiety kicks in, and he starts reacting from an ungrounded place in a desperate desire to end the threat.
This can look like:
- Throwing his own integrity overboard and just agreeing with everything she says, even when he thinks that she's wrong. He refuses to stand up for himself, hoping that meek acceptance will make the storm pass.
- Lashing out at her in return. This is where a lot of yelling matches start.
- Getting defensive.
- Shutting down or giving her the cold shoulder.
With each reaction, the man communicates to his woman that her emotions are too much for him. This makes her feel profoundly unsafe. After all, if her mere words can induce him into a state of fight or flight, the odds that he'll be able to protect her in a truly dangerous situation are roughly zero.
By contrast, the responsive man is able to weather his woman's storms and remain in a place of grounded calm. He chooses to hear the pain in her words, not the blame. As such, he can stay present and consciously help her move back to a place of love and joy–not because he's scared of her storms, but because he knows that this is what's best for her.
Being responsive can make your woman feel safe for two reasons:
1) When she's expressing anger or frustration, underneath those emotions is usually some form of pain. She's feeling hurt by your actions (or, often, inaction) and hoping that you'll step up as a truly Masculine leader. As much as it may not feel this way in the moment, she's trying to help you to be the best version of yourself rather than hurt you. She's trying to poke you into being a much stronger man and leader. When you respond from a place of calm, grounded Masculine energy, her desire to lash out may fade.
2) What the Feminine really wants is to feel an endless flow of love and connection. When she expresses intense emotions and you pull back, the message that she hears is that her emotions are too much for you. Here's how Youngblood explains it:
"As counterintuitive as it may seem, the times that a woman is most challenging to you is usually when she’s feeling the most unsafe. And it’s when she is most longing for a strong man who can “handle her”. Who can be with her emotional chaos and vulnerability, not run from it. Who can love and lead her in a way that settles her Feminine nervous system. Who will finally recognize her vulnerable side and take care of it. Can you be that man for her?"
When you choose to respond to her emotions rather than react, then you can choose to consciously create a safe container for them. You can listen to her, connect with her, and empathize with her pain. This is generally what she was looking for in the first place when the fight began. Lots of conflict is initiated over what may feel to you like small things, but your woman is feeling disconnected and yearning to feel your love and connection.
3) When you can handle your woman's emotions, she is much more confident that you can protect her from actual danger. A man who can stay calm in the face of intense emotion is far more likely to also stay calm and grounded in the face of an actual physical threat to her well-being.
Provide Structure
What does it mean to provide structure?
The feminine is chaos embodied. In his book The Way of the Superior Man, David Deida notes that the feminine is like the ocean. This is a beautiful and wonderful thing. Deida calls it "ever changing, beautiful, destructive, and the source of life." But like the ocean, the Feminine also lacks direction. According to Deida, "the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction."
While the Feminine flows in chaos, the Masculine embodies order and structure. Deida again: "The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B." This structure is a deeply enjoyable place in which the Feminine can reside, because it lets her relax and let someone else handle the details. As Deida puts it:
"One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do. She can be pure energy, pure motion, pure love, without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best. She can enjoy her man taking responsibility for the direction, so she can be what the feminine is: pure energy."
So what does it look like to provide structure?
One simple way that you can provide structure is to consistently have and share opinions. If your woman asks which dress you'd like her to wear to a party, don't just toss the ball back into her court with a, "whichever one you prefer, honey." She asked for your opinion, so assert what you want. If she asks where you'd like to go to dinner tonight, don't just make her pick a place. That's not leadership, and providing her with an endless banquet of options is not structure. Instead, pick a restaurant for the two of you.
If the decision is too complex for you to just unilaterally pick (for instance, you're deciding what to do with the back yard in the house you bought together), then you can provide structure by narrowing down the options. Pick two to three good options and present them to her. This is less stressful for her than having to navigate an endless sea of options, and the container that you provide can help her to relax and destress.
Relatedly, take the initiative and plan dates and fun outings. When it's her birthday, have a plan in place to sweep her off her feet and whisk her away, rather than asking her to pick what she wants to do.
Another way that you can provide structure is by creating and enforcing boundaries when the two of you are fighting. This can be especially powerful if she's a ball-buster or regularly flays the skin off of you. Youngblood recommends something like the following: “Darling, I’m interested in hearing your pain but have no interest in being insulted. Pause for a second, and let me know if you can come back to your heart. Otherwise, we need to talk later.'”
By creating the container in which the conflict happens, you're showing real leadership. You're not shutting her down or denying her needs. You're just helping her channel her emotions and needs in a way that's productive to the relationship.
When you take the lead, whether it's picking the restaurant for the night or setting boundaries, you're not being selfish. Your goal is not to just get yours, at the expense of her happiness. Instead, you are consciously leading her into the deepest place of joy and love that she can experience. She could get there herself, of course; but remember, the Feminine is all about connection. It is much more enjoyable for her if the two of you go there together.
Create Safety
The third way to embody Masculine energy in a relationship is to create safety.
A lot of men think that creating safety for their woman simply means Providing for her physical needs and Protecting her from external threats. Both of these are important, but there's more to making the feminine feel safe than this.
One component of making her feel safe is to care about the things that make her feel safe or unsafe (even if you think that they're irrational). For example, one of our clients let the oil in his car run low. He figured that it wasn't a big deal, because the Check Engine light wasn't on and the car ran smoothly. But his wife had almost died in an assassination attempt a few years back. Someone had tried to kill her pastor by leaking all the oil out of his car, so that the car lit on fire while they were in it and she had to dive out. As a result, whenever the oil in her husband's car was low, she felt unsafe.
Once our client figured this out, he proactively added more oil and kept a backup oil can in the trunk in case they ever needed it. The oil level in his car mattered to his wife, so he made it a conscious priority. She reported feeling much safer with him afterwards.
Another component of making her feel safe is connecting with her on an emotional level. You shouldn't vent or whine to her, but you should be able to feel your feelings and express them to your woman. Youngblood again:
"Your woman wants to feel you in your heart. It makes her feel safer, and therefore more open. She wants to feel you in your heart just like she wants you in your power."
When you can feel your own pain, then she can rest easier in the knowledge that you can also feel her pain. When you can feel both, she can be safe with you. But if you can't feel your own emotions, then she starts to doubt that you can feel hers. And if you can't feel hers, then you can't take care of her and address the underlying cause of her pain.
One of our clients embodies this with his partner. He brings his masculine leadership, and as part of that he brings his vulnerability in the best sense of the word. He doesn't lean on his wife or ask her to fix his problems. But he is open about his emotions and what he's feeling, which she appreciates because it lets her feel him. It makes her feel more connected to him.
As a result, they have a strong and deep connection. Even when a conflict arises, they slog it out until they both feel connected again. True masculine leadership promotes a greater level of mental, emotional, and physical connection between you and your woman.
One last element needed for her to feel safe is presence. When a man isn't fully present with his partner, kids, etc., there’s no way the woman is going to be able to feel as safe with him as she could be. So, it’s crucial that men develop themselves into becoming fully present…especially during conflict. For a great guide to help you develop that muscle, we highly recommend GS Youngblood’s book, The Art of Embodiment for Men.
Polarity
One reason that bringing your masculine essence to the relationship is so essential is that it creates Polarity. Polarity is the distance between the Masculine and the Feminine. These two energies are equal, but they are not the same; and in their difference lies the energetic pull that creates sexual and romantic tension. Here's how Deida puts it:
"Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles. All natural forces flow between two poles. The North and South Poles of the Earth create a force of magnetism. The positive and negative poles of your electrical outlet or car battery create an electrical flow. In the same way, masculine and feminine poles between people create the flow of sexual feeling. This is sexual polarity."
Without Polarity, you can still have a loving friendship with your spouse; but you're destined to end up as roommates. The love can remain, but the sexual spark will die. As Deida puts it: "If you want real passion, you need a ravisher and a ravishee; otherwise, you just have two buddies who decide to rub genitals in bed."
The more you step into your Masculine–and the more your woman steps into her Feminine, often as a natural consequence of your being more masculine–the more easily you can cultivate the relationship of romantic tension, ease, and playfulness that you both truly want.
So if cultivating masculine energy in a relationship is so powerful, why don't more men do it? There are three reasons.
1) They're Afraid of Conflict
A lot of men, just like our client in his early twenties, are scared of conflict. Maybe they had domineering mothers or pussyfooting fathers. Maybe their parents (one or both) were addicted to substances, or had mental illness; and so–as children–they never experienced the safety and security that are essential for a child to grow up confident and sure of himself. Or maybe they still have the scars from a former relationship that turned nasty and abusive.
These men refuse to stand up for themselves and refuse to set clear boundaries. Standing up for themselves might make their woman mad, and a woman in the throes of her feminine anger can be a scary thing. They think that if they just say "yes, dear" and "whatever you want" to every question, they'll avoid conflict.
Of course, this doesn't work. When your woman senses that you are scared of conflict, she can often turn more bitchy and chaotic in an attempt to push you into manning up and standing up for yourself. Unfortunately, many men respond to this by just slinking away or shutting down, reinforcing the unhealthy dynamic.
There's another reason that some men are afraid of conflict: they're terrified of hurting their woman. Maybe they watched their father knock their mother around night after night and swore that they would be the exact opposite of that. Maybe they know they have anger issues themselves, and they don't trust themselves to initiate conflict without losing control. Maybe they were knocked around themselves when they were children, and so their primary frame of reference for conflict is that someone has to get hurt–and they sure as hell don't want to hurt their woman.
One of our clients embodies this. He's in his early forties, and his female partner has had a lot of trauma. She's very strong, but as a result she's also fragile in certain ways. He recently confessed that some of her codependent behaviors are bothering him, but he's scared to stand up for himself. He doesn't want to hurt her, and he's scared that telling her "no" will cause her harm.
Unfortunately, while his intentions are good, his hiding out is doing the relationship no favors. She can sense him pulling away, which causes her pain. She can also likely sense him hiding something. Feminine intuition is very powerful. When your woman senses that you're hiding something and that you won't share it with her, even if you think it's for a noble reason, that causes her pain because it creates a rift in your connection.
If you're scared of conflict for whatever reason, then we politely suggest that you develop some testicular fortitude. Both you and your woman are likely stronger than you think you are. The relationship can survive a boundary or two. What it cannot survive is a man who hides out and refuses to stand up for himself. That sort of anti-masculine behavior breeds contempt and pain in his woman, and has led to the dissolution of more relationships than we can count.
2) No-One Modeled Healthy Masculine Energy For Them
The second reason that many men don't cultivate healthy masculine energy in their romantic relationships is that they don't know how. No-one ever showed them. Some of our clients report being raised by domineering mothers, who cowed their husbands and kept them in the shadows. They report fathers who meekly followed the woman's lead, let her wear the pants, and dealt with verbal abuse rather than ever stand up for themselves. Their fathers may have tried to teach these men how to be a man in a relationship, but we cannot teach what we do not know. When our primary male role model when we’re growing up doesn't embody masculine leadership, it's hard not to follow in his footsteps and recreate that same unhealthy dynamic with our own partners.
If this is you, then we have good news. There is a solution. You need to find healthy masculine men, who stand up for themselves in relationship and love and lead their woman, and associate with them. Learn from them, and ask them questions. As men, our fathers are our primary models when it comes to masculinity, but they do not have to be our only models.
If you would like help with this, we offer men's groups as well as one-on-one men's coaching. Reach out today.
3) Society Told Them Not To
Many men want to respect and love their woman, and society has told them that the way to do this is to have an egalitarian relationship. Neither partner leads; rather, both make all decisions together. As Youbglbood puts it:
"Many modern men play life with too much egalitarianism. They believe that intimate relationship is a partnership of equals in all things. Therefore, every decision is a joint decision preceded by a joint discussion of views. It doesn’t even occur to them that they can take the lead and initiate a direction."
These men think that showing leadership in a relationship is bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. Being domineering is bad. Being a control freak or a narcissist who wants to push your woman into meeting your own needs while ignoring hers is bad. Healthy masculine leadership is none of those things. Indeed, your woman probably craves your authentic, healthy masculine leadership.
Cultivating Healthy Masculine Energy In Your Relationship: Action Steps
If you would like to cultivate healthy masculine energy in your relationship, feel free to reach out today.
Geoff is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He has a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential. In over 28 years of counseling individuals and couples (and 41 years of being in his own marriage), he’s seen and helped couples from every walk of life and in every stage of their relationships.
Mark is a men’s coach, business and relationship coach, facilitator, and wilderness guide with more than 20 years of experience helping people and companies grow. He has been part of The Undaunted Man since 2014, and its CFO since 2016.
It’s so important to realize that, for the vast majority of men we’ve worked with over the last 22 years, NONE of them were ever taught about any of this. This is not to be used as an excuse for staying ignorant about all these kinds of dynamics. Instead, we invite anyone reading this to use this as a head start of sorts to help yourself grow into the kind of masculine leader you were born to be. Lastly, as with any number of things in life, this is a journey that’s MUCH harder when you’re trying to get there totally on your own steam. A community of men is one of the most valuable resources any man wanting to be on this kind of growth path can allow himself to have.
If this is speaking to you in such a way, we offer men's coaching groups (virtual and in-person in Colorado) as well as one-on-one men's coaching. If that's of interest, you can learn more about what we offer here or just get in touch here.
A note on authorship: Mark and Geoff are the relationship and men's coaches at The Undaunted Man, and all ideas in this piece are theirs. Julian is a professional author, and simply plays the Stephen Dubner to their Steven Levitt (i.e. writing their ideas down). When we refer to "our clients" in the piece, we are referring to clients of Mark and Geoff.