If you fill a room with men and women, and you ask the group “have you ever feared for your life?” What happens is that a few men raise their hands. Each man that raises his hand has a story about a single incident such as an accident as a child or a fight they were in or a dangerous situation when they were traveling in college. What also happens is that every single woman raises their hand. If you ask “how many of you feared for your life in the last year?” every male hand goes down. But every one of the women will keep their hands raised. If you ask how many of you feared for your life in the last month, again, the women keep their hands up. If you ask how many of you feared for your life in the last week, again the women keep their hands up. And this usually shocks the men to see. The fact that men are shocked to see this lays the stage for what men fundamentally do not get about women and what would change if they did.
Fear is something that everyone experiences. But fear plays a different role in the lives of men and women. For a woman, fear is woven into her biology. It is the baseline experience of her life whether she is consciously aware of it or not. It is something she lives with, like a prey animal, day in and day out. And when women have people that they care about (like a partner and like children) this fear simply grows. The experience of simply crossing a parking lot is an entirely different physiological experience for women. If you ever feel like it, studying the scientific differences in fear response between men and woman is very, very telling. For example, high stress situations cause men to feel less afraid. They do not perceive themselves to be powerless and thus tend to default to anger or proactive action. High stress situations tend to cause women to feel more afraid. They tend to perceive themselves to be powerless and thus feel intense fear and to not be able to do anything about it.
Besides basic biology and thousands of years of experience going into that biology, this world is not safe for women. All you have to do to get this is to look at is the statistics. Most men simply cannot relate to this perception of unsafety. Because they cannot relate to this and do not even know this is the perceptual experience for women, they do not understand how to behave around women and by not seeing this, make lots of mistakes. They do not understand that this baseline experience of fear that women live with every day is the single biggest determining factor for what women really want in relationships.
The most important thing to a woman in a relationship is trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is their ultimate definition of safety. It is their insurance policy against fear. Women want to be protected by a man. Safety is the single biggest motivator for women to be in a relationship with a man. But to be safe in a relationship and protected by a man, means first and foremost that he, himself is safe. To trust someone is to feel as if you can rely on them to capitalize on your best interests. When someone is trust worthy, it means they are a person who will capitalize on your best interests. But to do that, a person needs to know what is actually in your best interests. For this reason, the single most important thing for a man to develop is attunement.
Attunement is being or bringing into harmony. A feeling of being “at one” with something. The best way to imagine attunement is to imagine sitting in your car and reaching out for the radio dial. If you want to hear the music being played at a specific frequency, like 98.2 FM, you need to tune your radio dial to 98.2 FM. And then you will hear the music. Your own radio dial needs to be brought into harmony with or become one with the radio channel you want to receive in order to perceive that radio channel.
It’s no different with other beings, including people. To be able to perceive other people and to feel and see and hear them and understand them and communicate with them, you need to attune to them. You need to tune into them as if you are them, so as to be able to feel or imagine the other person’s emotional experience and to understand what they are feeling. This is what allows you to know what to say to someone and do in any given situation with someone.
Unless you are attuned to a woman, you will have no idea what her best interests actually are. You may think you do, but you don’t. You have to see, hear, feel and understand her. This is what makes you safe to a woman. For this reason, if you really want to have a relationship with a woman, the single most important thing you will ever learn how to do is the art of attunement and to commit yourself completely to being trustworthy. For this reason, I suggest that you watch two of my videos. The first is: Trust (What Is Trust And How To Build Trust In Relationships). The Second is: Attunement (The Key To a Good Relationship).
If a man was attuned enough to know that a woman lives in a state of fear both emotionally and physically, a man would behave differently around her. His priority would shift to helping her feel safe, including helping her to feel safe with him.
Men, not having this same experience of fear that women have, often minimize women’s emotions, dismiss them, distract her from them, invalidate them and worse, make women feel that they are crazy or that something is wrong with them. In other words men behave as if women shouldn’t feel that way, because they don’t feel that way. By behaving this way, you signal to a woman that you are unsafe. You increase her fear by signaling to her that you do not see, hear, feel and understand her. That you will not be there for her, that you do not value her wellbeing, that you will not take care of her or protect her, and that you can be relied upon to make her feel worse about herself.
This dynamic of men not making the woman’s feeling of safety the most important focus has profound implication because one of the most common complaints that men have in relationship counseling is not enough sex. This isn’t because men are assholes that only care about sex. This is primarily because men tend to experience the need for sex in order to feel emotionally connected to a woman. Nothing prevents a woman from being able to be sexually aroused like fear. For a woman to be aroused she must feel safe enough with you to be vulnerable and she needs to feel emotionally connected to you to do that. In this way, woman and men are reversed. Attuning to her so as to act in a way that tells her that you are trustworthy is what accomplishes that emotional connection.
Women can bulldoze themselves. They can act sexually aroused and have sex with you and fake orgasms, but they cannot be truly sexually aroused unless they feel safe. Even the couples that are into BDSM relationships must create a feeling of safety for the woman in order for her to be genuinely aroused. In fact that feeling of positive ownership inherent in an in alignment BDSM relationship must provide so much safety that the woman can feel safe with the man, even when he is tying her up or blind folding her for example. For this reason, I suggest you watch my video titled: Own People! (How To Take Ownership of Your Relationships).
It is important to note that if you are not emotionally available for a woman, not only does this make you not trustworthy; it means she will feel alone in the relationship. Remember that alone = unsafe and in pain. It is inevitable when this is the case that the relationship will end.
It is not in fashion in a world that sees fear as weakness and that shames you for feeling fear, for a woman to admit that she lives in a state of fear for her physical safety and wellbeing as well as emotional safety and wellbeing nearly constantly. We are praised if we play the tough girl. We are praised if we say we don’t feel fear. We are praised if we say we don’t need a man. A strong woman is seen to be a woman who does not exhibit fear. But as a result, men have no idea what is going on with us. They don’t get what women needs because it isn’t societally acceptable since the women fought to get rights and to be considered equal to men for women to tell men what is going on with them, which is fear. Women need to see that they are brave, they are brave because bravery implies fear and that is something women live with as a baseline of their life experience.
As a man, you must really accept this reality of fear in a woman’s life experience. Even if a woman does not act demonstratively afraid, she will respond to you behaving in a way that ensures her that you will dedicate yourself to her feeling safe, especially with you. Ask yourself this question: If I knew that this woman was truly afraid in this situation, what would I say and do differently? There is nothing sexier and more desired in the world to a woman than a man who is always looking for little ways to ensure her of her safety and wellbeing and to enhance it.
