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This wise woman’s words shot through me like a bolt of lightning. I knew instinctively that what she was telling me was true. My ability to love so completely was indeed a blessing. Over the years, I’ve had to continually remind myself that putting love first is not a “problem” I have, or an unhealthy habit I need to get rid of – it is the way I am as a woman. When I am putting love first, I am surrendering to my most essential and joyous nature.
I believe that when we as women learn to celebrate our ability to love deeply, and to honor ourselves for our beautiful, abundant hearts, we will make it easier for the men in our lives to do the same.
Perhaps you’re a woman reading this chapter and having a different experience from that of my friend. Perhaps you’re thinking that the information doesn’t completely apply to you, because your heart doesn’t feel as loving as you think it should. Sometimes life’s painful experiences can cause a woman to shut down her heart, to vow never to put love first again.
If you grew up in an emotionally cold family, for instance, you may have made an unconscious decision as a young girl that it wasn’t safe to share your love and open yourself to intimacy. A painful childhood can put a damper on a woman’s inherent tendency to love deeply. The love is there, but you just don’t allow yourself to let it flow.
Sometimes it’s what happens to us as an adult that drives us to turn away from loving. An emotionally damaging relationship with a man can leave a woman feeling wounded and closed off. Often women who’ve been hurt will consciously take their focus off of love, and put it exclusively on work and career, hoping to avoid more pain. Their Love Pie may look more like a traditional male’s, with very little conscious focus on relationships. This “love reversal” is a form of protection. It’s as if we unconsciously decide to become more cold and unfeeling – like the people who’ve hurt us.
Whenever I work with women who have wounded hearts, I discover that deep inside, their longing for intimacy and connection is just as powerful as ever – its the willingness to seek it out that has changed. So perhaps you might say that for these women, their outer Love Pie looks more like a man’s, but their “inner” Love Pie is still more traditionally female.
Perhaps you’ve had times in your life when you’ve been that wounded woman. Perhaps you’re still there and are struggling to break free of those emotional chains and love again. I hope that the information I’ve presented will help you begin to heal your judgments about yourself, to love and accept yourself the way you are, and cherish the gift of your beautiful heart.
If you are a man who has loved or does love a wounded woman, know that what you’ll learn from this book will help you to help her learn to trust her own love again. The more you let her know what a gift her love is to you, the more she will begin to value herself as a woman.
I couldn’t resist the last example!
2 WOMEN ARE CREATORS (#ulink_2549f817-764b-58ec-b404-f67444d0a263)
Why do women always want to make things better?Why do we feel compelled to talk about the problemsin our relationship with our partner?Why do we feel the need to help when we see theman we love going through a hard time?Why do we so enjoy making plans?Why do we work so hard to ensure harmonywith our lover?
In this chapter, I’m going to share with you a second secret about who women are that’s the motivation for so much of how we behave in relationships. It is one of the most beautiful qualities women possess, one that is such an integral part of our psyche that we don’t even think about it. And it’s the answer to all of the above questions.
WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:
Women are creators.
It is a woman’s nature to create. Women are life-givers. This is our mystery and our magic – we have the power to bring forth something out of nothing.
This ability to give birth to life is most obvious when we become mothers and bring a child into the world. But whether or not we have children, as women we are always giving birth: always creating something where nothing existed before, if not with our bodies, then with our words, our actions, our love. We do this when we give birth to a delicious meal for our family, or a party for a friend, or a bedtime story for our child, or a more effective way to market our company’s product, or an intimate conversation with our partner, or a display of flowers in a vase.
As creators, women are also alchemists; we change the form of things. We transmute the ordinary into the beautiful, the empty into the meaningful, that which was struggling into that which suddenly flourishes. We rarely encounter things that we do not feel inspired or at least tempted to improve upon, whether it’s the way a room is decorated or the way a friend is handling a problem in her relationship, the way we are wearing our hair or the way we have organized our jewelry in a drawer, the way our partner set the table for dinner or the way the two of us are communicating.
Women reading these words will feel a throb of recognition in their hearts. “Yes,” a voice within you says, “I know this to be true.” And for most women, it is. Yet our nature to create is so much a part of us, we rarely think about it or acknowledge it for what it is. We just do it. For instance:
When you first moved in, your empty house or apartment looked like nothing. But as you walked through the rooms, you thought, “I know just what to do to make it beautiful. I’m going to paint the walls a very pale peach; I’ll put my couch over here and my chairs over here; I’ll get a rug that will brighten up the floor; I’ll arrange my plants in these two corners.” And before long, it looked fantastic. Where there was nothing, you created a warm and inviting home. And it was the most natural thing in the world for you to do.
Your little girl comes to you and says, “Mommy, I need a costume for school tomorrow.” You have nothing ready-made, but you go through the house and gather up some colorful scarves, fabric leftovers, ribbons, old costume jewelry, and other odds and ends, and within a few hours, you’ve created a fabulous gypsy costume for your delighted daughter. Out of nothing, you gave birth to something.
It’s Saturday morning, and your husband is sleeping late, exhausted from a difficult week of work. He seemed depressed last night, and it frustrates you to see him so down. You sit at the kitchen table drinking your coffee, and suddenly, a plan emerges in your mind. Quickly, you begin to put it into action. You prepare his favorite breakfast; you look through the paper and find an ad for the Electronics Expo that’s in town for the weekend; you make a reservation at a restaurant he loves for dinner that evening, and call his best friend and his wife, inviting them to join you. By the time he wakes up, you greet him with delicious pancakes, plans to go to the Expo, and dinner reservations with people he really enjoys. He is thrilled. You transformed what probably would have been a depressing day into a string of fun-filled events that will cheer him up and give him a chance to unwind.
All of the above scenarios sound lovely, and harmless enough, don’t they? How, then, could a woman’s creative expression be a problem in her relationship with a man? Read on to learn how women create, yet why it’s easy for a man to misinterpret and misunderstand a woman’s creative instincts.
HOW WOMEN CREATE, AND WHAT MEN NEED TO KNOW
1. Manifesting
Manifesting means creating what wasn’t there before. Women love to manifest. The very act of starting with nothing and ending up with something thrills us in a deep pan of our being.
WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:
Women like to manifest beauty, celebration, connection, and love that did not exist before. When we do this, we feel a deep sense of fulfillment and purpose.
This joy we experience in manifesting expresses itself in big and small ways every day:
We hear that a friend is coming to town and quickly create an impromptu party around her visit.
We find ourselves with a weekend free of obligations and plan a last-minute excursion to the country for ourselves and the man we love.
We share some of our deep feelings with our partner while walking in the park, and all at once what was just a stroll transforms into a sweet experience of intimacy.
We buy a little table, place some pictures on it, and turn what was an empty corner of a room into an attractive area.
We receive a necklace as a gift, and build our whole outfit around it when we get dressed for work the next day.
We overhear our husband mention to a friend a computer game he’s interested in, and when he’s at work that day, we search the Internet until we find the product and order it for him as a surprise.
When women manifest, they can create a special moment, an experience for others to share, an improvement in the environment, something beautiful to look at, or something that brings another person joy.
Another way women manifest is in creating and re-creating ourselves. All you need to do for proof of this is to walk into any major department store and look around at the cosmetics department. There before you are dozens upon dozens of counters, each displaying hundreds of shades of eye shadow and lipstick, powder and blush, along with innumerable bottles of perfume, body lotion, and every other potion you could imagine. In front of those counters are hundreds of women trying on makeup, testing new scents, and enjoying themselves immensely. Men imagine this scene and roll their eyes, perhaps concluding that women are vain or superficial. But what’s happening in this store isn’t vanity – it’s creativity. It is women creating a look, an image, using their own face as a canvas as they become the artist.
It is the same with clothing, or jewelry, or any of the other ways women adorn our bodies – these female pastimes are all means for the female creative urge to express itself. This is why so many women love to shop, even when we don’t buy anything – we are doing research for our next creative undertaking!
These are things we and other women understand, but have a difficult time explaining to men. Why, for instance, do we need new makeup when we already own a drawerful of it? And must we really have so many different shades of lipstick? I mean, how many kinds of red are there? Women know the answers to these questions, of course: There are many kinds of red, and yes, they are all different, and yes, we need new makeup once in a while, just as an artist needs new paints and brushes.
Last week I decided to treat myself to a manicure and pedicure in a little beauty salon down the street from my house. I sat there in a chair watching all the other female customers and concluded that this salon was a hotbed of female creativity, a perfect example of what I’ve written about in this section of the book. Each woman who came in took time to carefully look over the hundreds of bottles of polish, seriously examining this one and that one before she chose the color that would be applied to her fingernails or toenails. Not just any red would do this week – it had to be a blue-red, as opposed to a fire engine red, or a coral red. Or maybe since last week it was red, this week it would be a dark chocolate color. Or for fun, icy blue! The nails had to be shaped just so, perhaps square or oval or round – each woman definitely had her preference. Any man who ever thought women were wishy-washy or indecisive should come to a beauty salon, where after witnessing the precision with which women choose their nail polish color and shape, he would change his mind forever!
What is it that a woman is actually doing in the beauty salon? She is turning her hands and feet into a work of art, decorating them for the enjoyment of herself and the man who might happen to have the good fortune to gaze upon her shimmering toenails. She is taking a few moments out of her busy day to express her creativity by choosing that hot pink polish. She is manifesting: Where there once were dull, boring toes, now there are exciting, sexy toes!
WHY WOMEN LOVE TO FILL A SPACE AND MAKE PLANS
One morning while Kim and her husband are having breakfast, she decides to discuss the schedule for a weekend coming up the following month.
“Listen, Eric, I wanted to remind you that Aimee is going to be on a trip with her school on the weekend after Easter, and since we have those days all to ourselves, I thought we should plan something special.”
“That’s weeks away” Eric responds casually, going back to reading his paper. “Let’s talk about it later.”
“But darling,” she replies, trying again, “it’s so rare that we have time together alone, and I just felt the sooner we discussed it, the more options we would have for doing something really terrific.”
“Why do we have to talk about it now? I don’t even know what I’ll be in the mood to do tomorrow, let alone next month. Besides, I don’t see what the rush is.”
“Well, I just don’t like not knowing what we’re going to do that weekend,” Kim explains. “Can’t you just focus on it for five minutes with me?”
Eric grabs his paper and gets up from the table. “I can’t do this now, Kim,” he says in a tense voice. “I really can’t.” And he leaves the room.
Kim sits staring at her calendar, feeling hurt and disappointed. The empty squares marking that weekend stare back at her.
Men and women have very different reactions to this story when I share it with them at my seminars. The men make comments like:
“Boy, can I relate to this. My wife tries to get me to plan every second of my free time, and I hate it I think she gets a kick out of locking me into a schedule.”
“The woman is trying to control her husband’s time, to pin him down so she can be in charge.”
“Kim is obviously insecure and high strung. Why else would she need to have every little detail of her life figured out in advance?”
The women, on the other hand, make these kinds of comments:
“I could scream, hearing this story. I go through this with my boyfriend all the time. He refuses to make plans, so I never have anything to look forward to.”
“Eric is a typical man. What is their problem with planning ahead? It just sets up his wife to look like a nag when she brings it up the next time.”
“This is one of my biggest complains about men – that they just seem oblivious to what’s happening around them. Doesn’t he realize that it takes time to plan special experiences? Kim’s just trying to be a good wife, and he isn’t respecting her at all.”
What do the women see in this scenario that the men are missing? They understand what Kim is doing, because it is something all women do. They know she is doing much more than trying to make plans, or get her schedule sorted out – Kim is filing the space.
Filling the space is what women do when we see an empty table, and think about what we could put on it to make it look better; it’s what we do when there is an awkward silence in a conversation and we invent something clever to say to help break the ice; it’s what we do when we see a vacation is coming up, and we start fantasizing about where we could go with our lover.
This term describes one of the ways women express their desire to create – we like to fill up what is empty. Women’s creative force is stimulated by emptiness. It is as if when we see something that is empty or blank, we feel the need to fill it, to manifest something in that space so that it becomes occupied with life, with beauty, with love.
What is it about emptiness, whether in a space or a conversation or a calendar, that urges a woman’s creativity into action? Is it because in the sexual act, we feel the primal urge to fill the physical space inside ourselves with a man? Or is it something in our genetic makeup as life-givers that makes an empty space too tempting? Whatever the cause, one thing is certain – women like filling space with our energy.
One of the most common ways women fill the space is by making plans. We love to plan. We love to take what was a blank space in the future and turn it into something exciting and meaningful. We don’t do this, as some men conclude, out of insecurity or a need to control our partner’s time. We plan because it is a way for us to honor time, as we will see in Chapter 3, and because when we plan, we give our creative power a wonderful outlet in which to express itself.
WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:
Women love making plans because it allows us to fill up an empty space in time with our love, our passion, and our creativity.
I don’t think men realize the joy women take in planning, especially when it involves their intimate relationship. That’s because for most men, planning is not an emotional activity as it is for most women. When a man plans, he is doing a task, figuring out the details. He is getting something off his to-do list, and then he moves on to the next thing. When women plan, however, it is an act of love. Whether it’s a party, an evening out, a vacation, or a special dinner, the process of planning becomes a channel through which a woman’s devotion can flow. It is as creative an act for her as painting a picture or composing a song. She is giving birth to an event, a happening, an opportunity for relaxation or romance or recreation. And this makes her very happy.
2. Improving
Improving is the second way a woman’s creative nature expresses itself. What’s the difference between manifesting and improving? Manifesting is creating from scratch: birthing something out of nothing. Improving, on the other hand, is taking something that already exists and making it better. It is rebirthing.
The urge to improve is so much a part of most women’s character that we’re not even aware of its almost omnipresent existence in our speech, behavior, and attitude toward others. We accept it in ourselves, just as we accept it in other women. It is just the way we are.
WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:
Women see the potential in everything, and we want to help that potential grow. That is why we like to improve things.
The desire to improve what is within us and around us is really the act of seeing the potential in things, the possibility hidden beneath the surface, and doing what we can to help that potential manifest. Women seem to possess this kind of vision that sees the flower waiting to erupt from the seed, and also the tendency to nurture that seed until it blossoms. Perhaps this vision of potentiality is so strong in us because we are genetically designed to be mothers, to nurture what is small so that it can grow. We exercise this part of ourselves in big and small ways every day:
A coworker in your office shows you the new scarf her boyfriend just bought her. “Isn’t this lovely?” she says. “Tom gave it to me.”
“It’s gorgeous,” you reply. “What a great color for you.” Then, without even thinking, you add, “Here, let me just pull this part a bit tighter and tuck in these ends. Now it looks perfect. What do you think?”
Your friend looks in the mirror, and replies, “You’re right – it does look better. Thanks!” It was totally natural for you to want to improve upon the way she had tied the scarf. You saw a way it could be better. And she intuitively understood this, and welcomed your input.
Your sister invites you over to see her new couch and love seat. “What do you think?” she asks as you enter the living room. You stand back and assess the room, noticing how the furniture looks where it is, and then visualizing how it might look if it were rearranged.
“Have you thought about trying to switch the two pieces?” you suggest. “That way, you’ll have more space between the couch and the bookshelf.”
Your sister doesn’t hesitate for a moment. “Let’s try it and see how it looks,” she replies. The two of you slide the furniture around until it is arranged in a different configuration.
“What do you think?” you ask her, trying to catch your breath.
“You know, I like it better!” she says enthusiastically. “It isn’t so cluttered. I knew I needed your opinion. I’d lost perspective since I live here all the time.”
When you looked at your sister’s living room, your eye naturally noticed a way the furniture could look better. You didn’t try to scrutinize it – you just spontaneously saw how it could be improved.
You and a close friend who owns her own business are having lunch, and for the third time that week she’s complaining about one of her employees who’s not managing his department well. “I just don’t know what to do with Louis,” your friend says, shaking her head. “He’s a dedicated guy, but lately he’s gotten so sloppy. It’s starting to affect the morale in his division.”
“Have you talked to him?” you ask.
“I’ve tried,” your friend replies with frustration, “but I just don’t seem to be getting through to him, because I’ve seen no visible improvement.”
You ask your friend to replay her conversations with Louis for you, and as you listen, you get a sense of what the problem might be.
“You know, it sounds to me like you’ve been telling Louis what you’re unhappy with, but perhaps not asking enough questions about what’s going on with him. I mean, maybe he’s getting a divorce; maybe he has some family problem, or health concern that you don’t know about. What if you asked him what he thinks the problem might be?”
“That’s something I hadn’t thought of,” your friend admits. “I guess I was just hoping the problem would go away after my first warning to him, but obviously it hasn’t. Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to talk to him as soon as I get back to the office.”
As you heard your friend lament over her office problem, your mind instantly began searching for a solution. You weren’t trying to tell her what to do – you simply saw a way she might handle things differently and you wanted to help.
Ladies, I’ll bet most of you can relate to all three of these examples. They illustrate how this tendency to improve is such an integral part of our consciousness. Notice that in the three stories, each of the women were grateful for the input they received. Why? Other women understand and accept this quality, the desire to improve, for it is who they are as well.
Now for a contrast, imagine the first two scenarios enacted by two men instead of two women:
The new item of clothing: First of all, a guy wouldn’t show off the new tie his girlfriend bought him to his male coworker. Second, the coworker wouldn’t comment that the tie needed to be straightened, let alone just reach out and do it. And third, if he did, the guy with the tie would feel like his boundaries had been violated, not to mention probably make assumptions, correct or not, about his coworker’s sexual preference.
The furniture: A man wouldn’t ask the opinion of his friend or relative about how his furniture was arranged, let alone care that much one way or the other himself. If he was asked, the brother would probably just look at the couch and love seat and say, “Nice,” and that would be that. Finally, if he did offer to rearrange things just to see how they looked, his brother who owned the house would probably say, “I don’t want to deal with it right now. Let’s go watch the game on TV.”
What’s my point? It’s that men don’t have this nonstop creative urge to improve things. Not only that, they actually interpret offers of help or advice as unnecessary, unwelcome, and intrusive.
Take the last story, for instance, and this time, imagine that instead of two friends having lunch, it’s a husband with the employee problem having a meal with his wife. Let’s replay the conversation as it would probably unfold:
“I just don’t know what to do with Louis,” your husband says, shaking his head. “He’s a dedicated guy, but lately, he’s gotten so sloppy. It’s starting to affect the morale in his division.”
“Have you talked to him?” you ask.
“I’ve tried,” your husband replies with frustration. “But I just don’t seem to be making any headway, because I’ve seen no visible improvement.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your conversations with Louis, and maybe I can help figure out a better way to get through to him,” you suggest.
“It’s no big deal. I’ll figure something out,” your husband answers.
“But I have some ideas about what might be happening,” you explain, “and I really think we could come up with a solution if we discussed it. After all, honey, it’s been bothering you all week.”
“Look, I can handle it myself, okay? I don’t want to get into a big discussion about it right now,” he says in a tense voice. “I’m sorry you don’t approve of the way I’m dealing with it. Let’s just change the subject.” Ouch. This conversation certainly had a different ending than the one between the two girlfriends. What happened? The woman’s husband misinterpreted her desire to help him improve a situation he was dealing with as criticism and control, rather than seeing it as an expression of her love and concern for him.
