If you filled a room with men and women and asked them, “Have you ever feared for your life?” What you’ll notice is that a few of the men’s hands will go up. Each one of these men has a story about an isolated incident.
Like, for example: the time they got into a fight when they were a kid, or the time they got into an accident, or the time they were traveling abroad. What happens is that every single hand of every woman in that audience will go up in the air.
And if you ask the question: “How many of you feared for your life in the last year?“
Most of the men’s hands will go down, unless the isolated incident they’re talking about occurred within the last year. And again, all the hands of the women stay up.
If you ask the question: “How many of you have feared for your safety in your life in the last month?“
Again, all of the women’s hands stay up.
And the same thing happens if you ask: “How many of you feared for your life in the last week?” All of the hands stay up.
There’s, like, this fight between courage and fear. And sometimes we choose fear because we want to protect ourselves. But we don’t realize that by choosing fear, we put ourselves in a situation that has a really bad impact on us.
Malala Yousafzai
And this exercise usually shocks the hell out of men. Because this is the one thing that men do not understand about women. And if they did understand this about women, their behavior around them would change dramatically.
1. The Fearful Women
Fear is something that absolutely everyone experiences. However, the experience of fear. Fear plays a role differently in the life 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.
When women have something in their life that they care about. For example: A partner or, to an even greater extend, children, this fear simply expands. It becomes even bigger.
The experience of simply crossing a parking lot is a completely different physiological experience for a female, than a male.
If you are interested some time in looking into this scientific studies about the fear response, or the relationship to fear between men and women, it is completely eye-opening.
E.g. high stress situations tent to make a man feel less afraid. The reason for this is because men don’t perceive themselves to be innately powerless. Especially in the world.
And so as a result, when they get into these types of situations, they tend to default into anger and into empowered action.
A woman on the other hand, in a high stress situation, will fall completely into fear. Why? Because most women perceive themselves to be powerless, actually, within the world.
People say to me all the time, ‘You have no fear.’ I tell them, ‘No, that’s not true. I’m scared all the time. You have to have fear in order to have courage. I’m a courageous person because I’m a scared person.’
Ronda Rousey
And so, as a result, they slip further and further and further into terror; and further and further and further into feeling like they can’t do anything about it.
Besides basic biology and thousands upon thousands of years of us being wired this way for the sake of survival. You’ve just gotta face it; The world is not a safe place for women. Just look at the statistics.
And the reality is, most men simple cannot relate to this perception of being constantly unsafe physically and emotionally. Because they cannot relate to this and don’t even know this is the perceptional experience for women, they do not understand how to behave around women. And by not seeing this, make tons of mistakes.
They don’t understand that this baseline experience of fear that women live with every single day is the biggest determining factor for what women really want in relationships.
2. TrustWorthiness of Man
The most important thing for women in a relationship, is trustworthiness. A capacity to trust somebody is a woman’s definition, subconscious or conscious, of safety.
Basically, trustworthiness is a woman’s insurance policy against this fear that she is constantly feeling. And this is actually the single biggest motivator for women to even enter into relationships to begin with. It is that feeling of safety.
I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy – a handshake means nothing to them.
James Cameron
A woman wants to be protected by a man. But she has to be protected first and foremost from HIM. To trust someone, is to be able to relay upon them to capitalise on your best interests. That is the simplest definition of trust.
So if someone is trustworthy, it means, they are the kind of person who you CAN relay upon to capitalize on your best interest.
But here’s the most important thing to realize about that; To be able to capitalize on someone’s best interest, you have to have a very firm grip on what those interest actually are.
3. The Development of Attunement
For this reason, the only way to develop trustworthiness is to develop 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 wanna 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 that you want to receive, in order to perceive that radio channel.
It’s no different with other things, including people. In order to be able to perceive other people, which is to attune to them, you have to be able see into them, feel into them, hear them and come to completely understand them.
4. The Process of Attuning
Basically you need to attune to them. You need to tune into them, as if you are them, so as to be able to imagine or feel 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 that person.
Unless you are attuned to a woman, you will have no idea what is actually in her best interests. You may think you do; this is a game a lot of men play. “Oh I know what’s best for her”; But you actually don’t.
This process of attuning, which develops emotional connection, so as to establish yourself as trustworthy, so as to signal to a woman that she is safe, is the single most important thing that you will ever learn how to do in a relationship.
The single most important thing that men need to understand, if they want to have a relationship with a woman, is that they have to learn attunement, and they have to learn how to develop trust, so that a woman sees him as trustworthy.
A man who is capable of doing that, literally has the key to any woman’s heart.
If a man was attuned enough to perceive this difference between the male perceptional experience of life, and the female perceptional experience of life, in that he was able attune enough to understand this baseline experience of fear that all women live with, he would obviously behave differently around her.
His priority would shift. His focus would shift dramatically to making her feel safe in any situation, particularly with him.
5. The Emotional Closeness
Now here is what men do, not having the same perceptional experience of fear that women have; Often, they minimize women’s emotions, dismiss them, distract her from them, invalidate them, and worse, make a woman feel that she is crazy, or that something’s wrong with her because she feels this way.
In other words, men behave as if women shouldn’t feel that way because they don’t feel this way. By behaving this way, you signal to a woman that you are unsafe.
You increase her fear by signalling 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 well being, that you will not take care of her, or protect her, and that you can be relayed upon to make her feel worse about herself.
6. Safety and Sex
This dynamic of men not making women’s need for safety the single biggest priority in their relationship, has vast implication. Because perhaps the single biggest complaint that men have when they enter into couples’ therapy is: “I don’t get enough sex”.
Now here is the thing; Women and men are a little reversed here. A woman, in order to ACTUALLY get aroused, has to feel safe. Now it’s tempting to think that if a man’s top complaint (in relationship therapy) is: “I don’t get enough sex”, that he is just a complete asshole who only cares about sex, but this isn’t actually the full truth.
The real truth is that men need emotional closeness in a relationship just as much as women do. However, for most men they experience needing sex in order to feel emotional connection. Whereas, women need emotional connection, in order to have sex.
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 and be vulnerable. And she needs to feel emotionally connected to you to do that.
Attuning to her, so is to act in a way that tells her that you are trustworthy, is what accomplishes that emotional connection.
Now some of you may be bulking at this, “Well, wait a minute, some women really like that fear.” No actually.
See women can bulldoze themselves, is what they can do. Women can act as if they are aroused. Women can fake orgasms. But they can’t actually get aroused unless they feel safe. It is biologically impossible.
Now you think you have me beat, right? Because some people who are turned on by bondage and sadomasochistic practices, right? No, actually.
7. The BDSM and Emotional Closeness
BDSM relationships are perhaps most interesting to study, when it comes to this difference between the perceptional reality of fear that women experience and men.
Now a BDSM relationship, if it’s a more in alignment version of that relationship, actually has to establish an even greater level safety and security in that relationship. It has to be so much of a security, in that type of a relationship, that a woman feels safe enough to be tied up by her partner and blindfolded, and things of this sort.
Like literally, in these relationships, a person has to provide even more positive ownership than in a normal relationship, in order to stretch the boundaries that far.
I want to touch the parts of you no one else has touched. I want to own the piece of you that has yet to be discovered. So stop resisting. Let go. Let it happen.
Patricia A. Knight
It’s very important to note that if you’re an emotionally unavailable man, and trust me, most likely if you are an emotionally unavailable man, you are not even to be able to admit it to yourself, but if you are an emotionally unavailable man, YOU CAN NOT create safety for the woman that you’re with. Why? You’re not there for her. So you’re not trustworthy. Also it will end in a woman feeling alone in her relationship. Remember?
Alone to a human, and even more so a woman, equals unsafe. You will be signaling to that woman (by being emotionally unavailable), that you are unsafe and it is an absolute guarantee that this relationship will end.
8. The Weak Women
Let’s just be honest. It is not in fashion, in a world that sees fear as weakness, and in a world that will shame you for feeling fear, for women to admit, that this is the actual baseline of their experience.
We are so acclimatized feeling fear that if you ask the average woman: “Are you feeling fear all the time?”, they will be like: “Mmm, no not really” Why? Because she doesn’t even notice that her baseline is fear.
It’s difficult for women to even acknowledge or admit to the fact that she lives in a state of fear for her physical safety and well-being; as well as emotional safety and well-being nearly constantly.
A woman is like a tea bag — you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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 don’t need a man. A strong woman is seen to be a woman that does not exhibit fear.
But as a result, men have no idea what is going on with us. They don’t get what a woman needs because it isn’t societally acceptable, since the women fought to get rights and be considered equal to men, for women, to tell them what is going on with them. Which is fear.
But perhaps this will shift a little bit of your thinking around this fear automatically equating to weakness, right?
9. The Brave Women
Bravery is not weakness, is it? Bravery implies fear. It can’t be bravery unless there is fear present. And bravery is something that all women are. Why? Because we are living in a constant state of fear, and living despite of that fear.
As a man, you have got to accept this reality of fear as a baseline of a woman’s experience. Even if a woman does not act demonstratively afraid, she will respond to you behaving in a way that insures her that you will dedicate yourself to her feeling safe, especially with you.
If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher
Ask yourself this question: If I one hundred percent accepted and knew that fear is what this woman was experiencing in this situation, and genuine fear, not fear that she shouldn’t be feeling, “How would I speak and act differently?”
There is nothing that is sexier or more desirable in this world to a woman, than a man who is always looking for ways to ensure her safety and well-being. And looking for ways to enhance it.
Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
Margaret Thatcher
Have a Great Day.
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