I had a conversation with one of my male friends the other day about the difficulty that women have feeling safe in a relationship with a man: the fact that we are often shamed for expressing a need as being a “nag”; the fact that when asking a man to stop a harmful behaviour, we are often met with a ‘tit for tat’ response such as “well what about you changing as well?”; the fact that when disagreeing with something a man says we are automatically labelled as ‘high maintenance’. (To be clear I’m not talking about women who do this habitually with no self reflection or awareness. And I’m not talking about men who have done the work to undo the deep ancestral and societal programming that has resulted in these general patterns.)
My understanding of one of the key differences between men and women in an intimate relationship, is that at a core level, the driving force of contentment for a woman in a relationship, myself included, is the need to feel safe. And yet we struggle with automatically feeling safe, not just emotionally, but physically. Of course it’s also up to every woman as an individual to deal with any raging issues around ‘unsafety’, but women with these completely unaddressed issues are not the women I’m talking about.
I’m talking about women like myself who know who they are, are confident, genuinely want to connect with men positively, and have done huge amounts of inner work to try and resist and reset the patriarchal programming and toxic feminine we are all bombarded with, in order to just relax into our femininity and trust the masculine to hold the space for us to do that.
That kind of safety.
My understanding is that whilst men also want to feel “safe”, their need for safety is not the notion of ‘safety’ itself - and it certainly doesn’t comprise of actual physical safety - it’s more around a desire to be accepted and respected (which in turn leads to their own feeling of ‘safety’ with a woman).
But conversely, for a woman, without experiencing that initial sense of safety on so many levels, and in its purest form, she cannot respect or accept a man, she cannot truly lean into her feminine, because on a deep, unconscious, centuries-old level, a void of safety with a man represents an actual threat to her life.
The resurrection of the divine male; this dance of the polarity, must start with and be inaugurated by the man (as the initiatory, active energy) and then the woman will follow (the receptive, passive energy).
Behind all of this, I feel that the one thing that seems to be consistently forgotten or overlooked by men is that up until very, very recently, and for centuries before that, women were, as a norm, abused, raped, hated, hunted down/burnt for being ‘witches’, controlled, seen as a commodity, belittled, dismissed, used for sex, bought, sold, seen and treated as inferior etc etc, by men - across the globe.
Things have only started to significantly move away from that in the last 50 years or so. 50 years, comparative to 50 centuries gone before.
It is literally, biologically written into our DNA to fear men, to feel subservient to men. It takes more than a couple of generations to rewrite that innate programming and the fears and beliefs that come with it, and especially given the patriarchal narratives that still dominate in most societies across the world and are written into the foundations of those societies - from the medical system, to religious systems and more.
This does not just disappear. For either sex. Just as much as women have all these centuries of programming written into our DNA about what we have to tolerate, so do men; about what women SHOULD tolerate. It therefore takes a man to be extremely self aware and extremely conscious of that innate programming that can easily and automatically drive him to think unfavourably towards women, especially any women who try to assert themselves in some way, or ask for what they need - thereby directly countering the long-programmed-in “rights” that men have been given to not have listen to and validate women; to "not have to stand for” or expect any behaviour from any woman that they don’t like.
The majority of men might consciously understand or be able say that those beliefs are wrong or unfair, that to treat/see women in this way is harmful, but that doesn’t automatically stop the deeper unconscious beliefs and programs that still run the show, creating unconscious responses and reactions - whether internal or external.
For example, a deep belief that women are a problem, and have a right to be silenced (whether that’s, in the most extreme cases, through physical abuse, or more indirectly through ignoring them, mocking their expressed needs, seeing them as limiting in some way etc. etc). All of these tactics are still about unconsciously seeking domination which men have allowed themselves over women for thousands of years. And women have been forced to accept - until very recently.
Harmony and love are never found in domination or win-lose paradigms.
Unfortunately these approaches and mindsets from men are something that I have witnessed and experienced my whole life - both within the family system I grew up in, and within the society I grew up in… at school, then university and then workplaces. My observations and experiences of this are not just personal either… it’s in so many aspects of life, conversations witnessed as a 3rd party observer as well as personal experiences and interactions.
This is not about men having to “pay” for the actions of the men that have come before them, but it is about each man holding themselves personally accountable for whether or not they are, on an individual level (consciously or unconsciously), still holding onto those default narratives about women and behaving in ways that support those narratives, thereby allowing them to justify pushing women away, finding reasons to dislike women who are attempting to have boundaries, and criticising or mocking a woman’s insistence or need for a man to be the initiator in creating and maintaining that inherent sense of protection and safety within a relationship - both physically and emotionally.
If men can start to show up more consistently with the active understanding of what has gone before and the effect this is still having as we both try to find a new, fairer, kinder way to exist in relationship together; if men can use this understanding to make it their mission to create safety and partnership with women rather than seeing them as a newly empowered enemy to hate on; if men can truly attempt to build genuine compassion towards women through understanding of why we sometimes respond and behave in the ways we do and realise this comes from centuries of fear and danger experienced at the hands of men, that we are still working through and trying to recalibrate out of, then with this level of awareness, they will help initiate change and play an essential part that only they can play to helping women to be able to learn to innately trust rather than fear them. This will drastically and dramatically shift the balance.
But this will never happen when men continue to support and defend these types of anti-women mentalities, narratives and beliefs, both within themselves and within male groups 🙏✨
- Clairey Bright
@clairey_faerie (Insta)
Conscious Therapies and Moon Sprite Creations
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