The feeling of safety and security matters a lot to people. And people employ all kinds of strategies to try to feel safe and secure. This is even more true of women because women feel chronically far more unsafe in this world and in this human society than men do. But not all of these ways people try to find security, actually guarantee security. Today, we are going to talk about one of the most prevalent ways that women in today’s world feel a sense of security, but that is actually a false sense of security.
First, I’m going to tell you what this false security is and then I’m going to un-pack it for you. Women believe (and have been led to believe) that a man being in love with her and/or being sexually attracted to her, means that he is going to act in her best interests. That he has motive to take ownership of her wellbeing and lend himself to her wellbeing. This means protecting her from harm and ensuring that her needs are met. This is far more than an association that women have formed. It is an assumed given. And this, creates a sense of security.
For many, many women, the minute that she can tell a man is “into her”, she feels more secure because even on a subconscious, visceral level, it is a given for her that because he is into her, she now is an advocate and defender of her wellbeing, should she need it.
This belief is engrained into the fabric of our species at this point. If you look back through time, when men took over the world and women were made into property, there was no way for a woman to secure her wellbeing without a man. If she was lucky, that security was guaranteed by her father and or brothers. But ultimately, her wellbeing was only secured by a man taking ownership of her. And for a huge portion of human cultures, a man taking ownership of a woman was down to whether he was in love with her and was sexually attracted to her. We like to think that this is part of our pasts. But I’ve got to break it to you that women being able to secure their wellbeing in society in any other way than through a man, is so recent, it would make your head spin. For example, let’s just look at America. It was in my parent’s generation 1974 that the equal credit opportunity passed, which meant that for the first time in history, a woman could sign by herself on any credit application without a man having to co-sign with her. And just two years ago, in 2022, the supreme court ruled that the constitution does not confer any right to abortion. Overruling both Roe Vs. Wade of 1973 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey of 1992. And it doesn’t matter what your stance on abortion is, the reality is, it created huge issues with a woman having rights related to her own body and therefore, a woman’s ability to secure her own wellbeing. And guess what? You can’t just undo that in a generation or two or three. So, we are in a transition right now. And it’s one hell of a painful one. If you look around the world, you will see that we do not live in a world where it is easy for women to secure their wellbeing in other ways than through the venue of a man. We do not live in a society where equality is a reality. And yet, women have more opportunities than they did. And society is aggressively pushing towards gender equality. Well, most of society. At the current rate, gender equality (not to be confused with gender sameness is in fact still centuries away. Need meeting in relationships in a society that is now completely focused on equality between genders means that energy exchanges are not about gender anymore. So they are no longer straightforward. It’s simply about need meeting in general. But because of this, no one knows where to actually get their needs met, because the old ‘gender roles’ way of getting the needs met, doesn’t work anymore.
And despite the reality that women should never be considered objects or property, there was a tiny little unforeseen downside to women not being seen as property anymore. And that is that to generalize, both the negative and positive elements of ownership have been dropped by men. Most people have a negative relationship with the concept of ownership. But there is such a thing as positive and negative ownership. And when people take positive ownership of things (and thus take responsibility for them) they caretake the wellbeing of whatever they are taking ownership of and responsibility for. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Own People! How To Take Ownership Of your Relationships. This drop of ownership left women to fend for themselves, when fending for themselves was never what women were asking for.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the idea that a man being in love with a woman and/or sexually attracted to her, means that he is going to act in her best interests and keep her safe and secure is reinforced by all forms of entertainment. Think back to Disney. There were no good Samaritan princes. They rescued the damsel in distress and protected the princess because they were in love with them. This idea echoes through books, verbal stories, movies, TV Shows, commercials, newspapers, magazines, advertisements and religious doctrine. Society has been very clear… if you want to be safe and secure, a man must want you. He must be in love with you. He must be attracted to you.
What does all this boil down to? Men being seen as the venue through which a woman can ensure her wellbeing. Men being the venue through which she can trust she will be safe and secure in this world. And therefore, women being desperate to gain security by doing whatever it takes for a man to be sexually attracted to them and fall in love with them. Keep in mind that when a woman does her best to look and act in a way that would make her attractive to men and thus make a man fall in love with her, so that she can have security, it is a form of manipulation. Manipulation is all about not feeling like you can go for your needs directly, so you have to go about getting them in a roundabout way.
The security that women feel when a man is sexually attracted to them and in love with them is actually a false security. If it were not a false security, women would not have a million stories of being harmed in their relationships with men. Here is why it is a false security…
Whether a man will or will not act in a woman’s best interests and take responsibility for her wellbeing, has nothing to do with whether he is in love with her or attracted to her or not.
Firstly, we need to talk about what it means to be in-love. To be in love with someone is not the same as to love someone. The issue with the English language is that we have one word, love, to represent a myriad of different states of being. To be in love is a feeling state of wanting someone. It is positive appreciation of them. It is attraction to them. Sometimes it is attachment to them. It compels you into a relationship with someone. It feels good to you to be near them, so you want to do it again and again. When we are in love, the reward centers of our brain are completely activated. Our senses are stimulated and they drive us towards closeness with the person. But there are so many whys behind falling in love that you don’t see. From pheromones to suppressed parts of the personality to needs a person thinks the other will meet for them to getting caught up in the biology of our reward centers to esoteric influences. To be in love is in fact a self-focused state. It can go away. Love on the other hand, is true caring about the other. It is a conscious choice to include someone as a part of you. And by doing so, you cannot go against their best interests without harming yourself. It is a choice to act in the best interests of not just yourself, but also them.
To generalize, there are two pillars to a relationship. Both pillars may be present in a relationship. Or, there may be only one. One of those pillars is love. True caring about the other. The conscious choice to include the other person as a part of you and to be an active advocate to their wellbeing. To act in their best interests. Love is a very hard practice for people. People have egos and thus, tend to spend their time stuck in their own best interests. The other pillar is energy exchange. This is really about mutual need meeting in a relationship. What I get out of being in a relationship with you, and what you get out of being in a relationship with me. You see energy exchange in all forms of symbiosis. Some people may also call this a transaction. Energy exchange is an element of every relationship. But, for the vast majority of people, this energy exchange is totally unconscious. Most of the time the energy exchanges in a relationship are hidden and assumed. And, people only tend to act in each other’s best interests when the energy exchange or transaction is carried out and maintained. The relationships that are harmonious, have an underlying energy exchange that is working for both people. Now a days, living a life in human society is SO complex and so many of the old structures for energy exchange between men and women are gone. So, there are LOTS of reasons that an energy exchange in a relationship might fall apart.
To simplify this, relationships are mostly about mutual need meeting. This means that when a woman has a man that is in love with her, she assumes that she meets a need for him that will guarantee he will act in her best interests. But all this meaning that a woman ads to the experience of a man being in love with her and being sexually attracted to her, may not reflect the actual meaning of it.
The most common thing it means if a man is in love with a woman and is sexually attracted to a woman is this: He thinks she will meet a specific need or desire he has, or that he will get that need or desire met through her somehow. It would be easy to assume that because he sees her as the venue through which a certain need, or multiple needs will be met, that he will look out for her wellbeing. After all, one wants to preserve the fountain from which they drink. But let’s say for example that a man is looking for status through a relationship with a woman, the minute that he secures the relationship, his need for status has already been met. So, why does he need to caretake her best interests any more than is necessary to keep her around? Very important to know that if a man is in love with a woman because of a need or desire he thinks he can get through her somehow, lots of what he is doing for her is not something he likes to do. It is a so that. They are SO THAT he can get those things he wants and needs. And this is a recipe for disaster. Because once the “so that” aim is achieved, the intrinsic motive to do those things for her starts to dwindle. And if the “so that” aim isn’t achieved, the motivation to do those things also dwindles.
In addition to this, many men provide security for a woman at a price. This is a price that most women are unaware of, because people in general are rarely consciously aware of their subconscious transactions and even if they are, people are unlikely to overtly share them. If women knew what this cost was going to be, they would not feel as secure.
So that you can understand this better, here is an example. Juliet had a mother that was always focused on work and a disengaged father. As a result, she was super emotionally neglected. And, she was molested by a teacher for several years. She could find no way to get anyone to really caretake her wellbeing. But when she turned into a teen, she became hyper aware that the other girls and women who were being obsessed over and who were being taken care of and who were being protected, were girls and women who had boys and men that were in love with them. So, she studied what made those girls desirable and modeled herself after that. She became obsessed with her looks. She started dressing in sexy clothes. She learned how to flirt. She put on an air of confidence. She became demonstratively affectionate to the boys. Sure enough, she ended up with her first boyfriend. And she felt so much more safe and secure. She finally had some of her needs met and she finally had someone who would rush to her side and to her defense if she got into problems or was facing threats. She had attention, engagement, belonging, protection, containment etc. The thing was, this first boyfriend did not keep it up. In fact, he abandoned her for another girl he fell in love with. So, she jumped into a new relationship with a boy who would keep her safe and secure. A boy who was full of rage towards the first boyfriend who had treated her so badly. The second one, an exchange student, was good for a while, until he left the country. And she jumped into another relationship. And so on and so forth this went all the way through her adulthood. Juliet’s belief that a man is the venue through which a woman can ensure her wellbeing and be safe and secure in this world, was reinforced by everything. TV shows, movies, books etc. As well as her own life observations and experiences. After all, she watched men be unwilling to lift a finger to help women succeed, unless they got to be with them sexually. And she watched men be totally uninterested in her talent, only fixated on wanting her to be theirs. And she watched the difference between women whose husbands bought them cars and put them in beautiful homes and women who were hard and stressed all the time, because they had no man in their life. And she got into lots of situations where she was unsafe, where the person who came to her rescue was the man in her life. After all, her father and mother would not bail her out of trouble. Well, Juliet was married four times. And one day, it dawned on her that every man she had ended up in a relationship with, had eventually gone directly against her best interests. They had abandoned her, stolen her money, cheated on her, become emotionally abusive and the list goes on.
It was then that she had an epiphany. Her method of getting security through a man, had not actually worked. Many of those men that were her partner, were still in love with her and were still sexually attracted to her. And admitted it openly. And this could only mean one thing. That a man being in love with you and being sexually attracted to you, is actually no guarantee that he will act in your best interests. Juliet was going to have to find different methods for feeling safe and secure in the world. She installed a security system and got one of her best friends to move in. She started looking into finances and learned how to make safe and smart financial decisions. And in the next relationship she got into, she directly told him that what she was looking for, is someone to protect her from emotional harm and someone to prioritize her. And it was understood that no matter how much she cared about them, if they made it a pattern to not do these two things, she would end the relationship. With the exception of three men she dated, every other man appreciated the straightforward expression of exactly what her expectations were, so they could decide whether that was something they could sign up for, or not.
Now that you understand this dynamic, there are also two big chinks in the chain of this ‘security through a man being in love with me dynamic’ that are worth mentioning. In male - female relationships, one of the biggest issues is that men tend to not perceive the threats that women perceive. Given that for so many women, the energy exchange they are looking for is safety and security (be it emotional, mental or physical) the man (the one offering that end of the energy exchange) had better perceive the threat and respond to it. Otherwise, he isn’t answering to the actual need and so, he isn’t actually keeping up his end of the assumed bargain, whether he agreed to it consciously or not.
A final thing to consider is that this whole dynamic we’ve been talking about, perpetuates separation within society. If the source of a woman’s security is a man being sexually attracted to her and being in love with her, this makes other women a threat to her. She thinks she has to insulate the relationship with him and exclude others. And this reinforces the binary relationship system as well as the nuclear family, neither of which is natural or healthy for a physical human. If we were living in groups, like what is natural for us and our needs, security and safety would be something that is provided by all members of the group to every other member of the group. This is a much more secure and safe system.
So, what’s the moral of the story? For the sake of this conversation, it doesn’t matter how things should or shouldn’t be. The reality is that a man being in love with and/or sexually attracted to a woman, does not mean that he is going to act in her best interests. It does not mean that he will caretake her wellbeing. His decision to do that, is separate from whether he is in love with and or sexually attracted to her.
On top of this, mastering the two pillars of relationship (consciously choosing to love each other as well as conscious and direct energy exchanges) is the future of human relationships. You can only successfully do that when you see that the current way that you are trying to secure an energy exchange, doesn’t guarantee that the need you have will be met. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Be Consciously Transactional. Why Every Relationship Is Transactional. If you are a woman and you recognize yourself getting sucked into this false security. Really consider the following: What threats are you afraid of and therefore what type of security are you looking for? What might be the best way to go directly for security relative to each unique threat and therefore each security need? Consider answers that involve a man, potentially even a male partner. And consider answers that don’t.
