Have The Relationship You Want

And, of course, we women have all been taught the exact OPPOSITE!

I was taught that if you dream big, if you laugh loud, if you want success in all areas of your life – and you’re a WOMAN – you’ll scare a man away.

And that playing “small” and “girly” would make him want you.

It would make him feel like a big man if we made sure we didn’t “show him up” with our confidence and power.

But men LOVE confidence. They love powerfulness in women. They’re excited and turned on by a woman who’s not afraid to be herself.

So - that’s the key – a woman who’s not afraid to be herself.

And, of course – that’s the thing we’re MOST afraid of – that he’ll see who we really are.

So – we’ve talked about what it’s like to feel and play “small.” Now, what does it feel and look like to be “weak”?

Let’s clarify an important point here – the way we FEEL and the way we ACT are completely different and separate things. We can either feel one way and act another, or we can act according to how we feel. Very often, we feel hurt, and so we act angry. Or we feel scared, so we act strong and take charge. Or we feel love, and so we pretend we don’t. The very smartest, best, and most fabulous thing we can do for ourselves is to find a way not to just ACT – because often that’s just a pattern we always tend to act out when we’re feeling strong feelings – but to EXPRESS how we feel.

That could look like: “I’m feeling really bad right now about the way my work is going, and so everything between us makes me feel angry” instead of what we usually do – take it out on him.

I know the whole idea of “saying what you feel” sounds wrong.

Men are supposed to HATE feelings, aren’t they?

A man gets really uncomfortable around “drama” and the kind of emotional intensity we’ve been talking about in this series of posts – where your energy is all bound up in a kind of “push-pull” tension inside you – but he LOVES “feelings.”

He loves to see you “uncovered.” As though you’re a transparent woman and he can see everything that’s going on inside you. Yes, even the “yucky” stuff.

What we’re talking about here is vulnerability, and vulnerability is a RARE thing.

“Fragility” is common, where a man feels you could easily break apart or fly into a rage or into tears at the drop of a hat. And he’s always on the lookout for that. But vulnerability requires inner strength, bravery, and a belief in yourself. In order to let someone see who you are inside – especially a man you love – you have to be “okay” with yourself. Liking yourself is even better. And loving yourself gets you the prize!

Because if what a man sees when he looks at you is that you love yourself – then he feels compelled to love you, too. He can’t help it.

So saying what you feel is a necessary part of being vulnerable. It doesn’t mean you have to say everything you feel ALL the time. (And most of the time we’re actually speaking about what we THINK, and what we think doesn’t count at all for vulnerability – we’ll talk more about that in future posts.) And it doesn’t mean you spew your feelings out in just any old way.

What being vulnerable and saying what you feel means - is that there’s a way to talk about what you feel that works, that’s soft and vulnerable, and there’s a way to talk about what you feel that’s dramatic, “intense” and makes him think you’re fragile and difficult.

In the next posts we’ll get to the exact ways to do it. If you’d like to quickly get my “Basics,” like Feeling Messages, down – try out my ebook, Have The Relationship You Want