The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible (7 page)

Men are generally not attracted to women because of how well they emulate male qualities.  Men are attracted to your
femininity
.  Think of it this way: how attractive would you find a man with a lot of feminine energy?  Men are likely to react the same way towards a woman with a lot of masculine energy.  And embracing your femininity is not an abdication of your power; rather, it is the ultimate
acceptance
of your power.

So if you express your masculine energies at home in the same way you do at work, you are likely to be respected and admired (and perhaps a little feared), but perhaps not cherished.  In
A Woman's Worth
, Williamson calls this the
Amazon neurosis, "the woman who achieves at the expense of her tender places." 

              There is another way, of course.  If you wish to be cherished, celebrated
and
incredibly attractive to men, you may wish to relinquish some of the yang when you're at home and embrace the full power of the feminine.  As Williamson put it, "In intimate relationships with men, I want to major in feminine and minor in masculine."

Yin and yang in a relationship

              I have noticed that many women in relationships feel that it is their job to steer its course and provide most of the fuel to propel it.  She will be the one to initiate serious talks about where the relationship is headed and to give of her time and energy to keep the relationship going.  However, from a yin-yang perspective, leading and giving are
masculine
functions.  Even though there is a tendency to think that giving is a feminine function, at its essence it’s a masculine one.  The feminine is the
receptive
. 

              Of course, in any true partnership, both parties are engaged in giving
and
taking, which in its highest form manifests as sharing.  However, it's important to keep in mind that if you take over the masculine function of giving, then it leaves no room for the man to do that. 

              Therefore one way to think about relationships is in terms of depth and direction.  The depth is a function of yin; the direction is a function of yang.  And so, roughly speaking, the masculine will be in charge of the direction of the relationship, while the feminine will be responsible for its depth.

              Although we will talk more about what to do once you are in a relationship, keep in mind that this book is mostly about dating, not relationships.  Once you've successfully navigated the waters of dating to arrive at a relationship, you may wish to seek out some of the resources featured at the end of the book (e.g. the works of professor of psychology John Gottman).

Chapter 4. What You Really Want

              What do you want from your dating life?  Most people don’t have a concrete answer to this question.  And the people who
think
they know what they want sometimes end up getting it, only to realize it’s not quite what they expected (affective forecasting again).

              As we discussed early in the book, what we want from a relationship (and almost everything else in life) are fulfilling feelings.  Once you think of it that way, you realize that you’re not looking for a particular kind of person, of a certain height or hair color or socioeconomic status, but rather the feelings that person evokes in you. 

              You also realize that fulfillment is more of an internal phenomenon than an external one, depending on yourself more than anything.  It’s not about what your parents or friends think.  It’s not about how strangers look at the two of you together.  It’s about how your values are fulfilled on the inside.  

              At any point in life, what you think you want may vary.  And often what we think we want doesn’t really fulfill us when we get it.  As stated earlier, we’re quite bad at affective forecasting, always overestimating how much things will make us happy (or unhappy) in the long term.  However, your values tend to remain constant.  That’s because values are deep, unconscious motivators that give the general sense of purpose and direction to your life.  Although values are the strongest drivers of our overall behavior, we often don’t know about them until they are violated, much like how we notice the stomach only when we have a stomach ache. 

              There are two more ways of figuring out what your values are besides having them violated.  One is by noticing events that fulfill them, and the other is through conscious inner exploration.  The next exercise will get you started on that exploration.  For further resources on figuring out your values, I recommend the book
NLP: The New Technology of Achievement
, which has a series of drills in the chapter entitled ‘Discovering Your Mission,’ from which the following list of values was adapted.

Exercise 5. Empower yourself by figuring out your core values

What are your values in life?  From the list below, pick ten values that you feel are most important to you.  If there’s a value that is important to you that you do not see on the list, add it on. 

             
Write down your ten values.  Now, if you could have one and only one of these, which one would it be?  Mark it “1.”  Now, from the remaining nine values, if you could have one and just one, which one would it be?  Mark it “2.”  Continue this process until you have your top 5 values
. 

              Let’s revisit the question from the beginning of the chapter.  What do you want from your dating life?  The answer is you want from your dating life the same things you want from your life in general.  Values affect all areas of your life, so your overall values for life tend to be the same ones as your values for relationships.  Once you know what your values are, you can decide how you’d like to fulfill them. 

              It’s best to fulfill your values in a way that creates the least amount of conflict amongst your top values.  Let’s say one of your values is adventure.  You can experience that in the context of having one adventure with several men, or several adventures with one man.  If another one of your values is variety, then you will probably choose the former option.  If one of your values is stability, then perhaps you will choose the latter option. 

              You now have an internal compass for knowing when a given relationship is aligned with your values.  If your values are being matched, the relationship will naturally flourish.  If not, the relationship will falter and you will want to move on.

What you have to offer

              Would you date yourself?  I'm not asking a frivolous question.  For a moment, take the perspective of a man who is actually interested in you.  Perhaps you have even been on a couple of dates together.  Now, ask yourself these questions: “What draws me to this woman?  Why do I want to see her again?”  Take a look at the inventory of values that you came up with in the previous exercise (and if you didn’t do the exercise, go back and do it – the rest of the book hinges upon that information).  How many of those would you be able to fulfill in a relationship with a man? 

Exercise 6. Walking the walk

Determine how many of the values you came up with in Exercise 5 are ones you can actually provide in a relationship.

              It’s very important to be honest with yourself in this exercise.  No one is looking over your shoulder, and all of this information is for your benefit alone, so it is to your great advantage to provide the most accurate information possible.

Now look at that list of values again.  If you feel that you can provide many of those values in a relationship, great.  You need not possess
all
of them, since yin-yang dynamics is about complementarity, too.  For example, you can appreciate humor in your man without being a stand-up comic yourself.  But if you’re missing most of the values that you demand in a partner, perhaps you have some work to do in those departments. 

              For example, let’s say
spontaneity
and
honesty
are two values that you cherish in a relationship, yet you tend to shy away from new activities, or be very secretive about your thoughts and feelings.  Since this is clearly not compatible with your stated values of spontaneity and honesty, you must either change your behavior to become consistent with your values, or change your values to become consistent with your behavior.  To demand certain standards from your partners, it’s a good idea to meet them yourself first.

Exercise 7. Take stock of your relationship assets

Write down everything about you that is interesting and attractive.  What reasons would a man have to see you again, or to stay with you in a relationship?

              This exercise is an assessment of what you offer in a  relationship.  Are you funny?  Exceptionally generous and kind?  A great cook?  Do you provide witty conversation?  Can you stimulate his mind?  His body?  Do you have exceptional sexual expertise?  Do you have an infectious sense of adventure and wonder?  Write down every reason that a man would want to spend time with you, from the most trivial to the most important. 

Having done that, let’s take a brutally honest look at this list to find out which of the items would actually
matter
to a man.  For example, you may have exceptionally good taste in upholstery, or have shoes to fit any and every occasion.  But will he necessarily care about that?  You want to assess what
he
(not your girlfriends) will see as an asset. 

              But how do you make this assessment?  What do men really want?  The broad answer to that is that men (and women) seek things that makes them feel good.  Your mastery of the subtleties of women's shoes is probably not one of those things.  Your massage skill, on the other hand, is a much better bet. 

Yin, yang and three stages of relationship

              As we discussed in Chapter 3, the principle of polarity governs attraction in the universe. Positive charge is attracted to negative charge, whereas like charges repel one another.  The north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole.  And so it is with masculine and feminine.  For there to be a spark, a flow of energy between two entities, there needs to be polarity.  This seems to be particularly true in relationships between men and women. 

              And so masculine and feminine are two manifestations of the universal life principle.  Everyone possesses elements of both masculine and feminine energy.  Men tend to have more masculine energy, or
yang
according to Taoist tradition, and women tend to have more feminine energy, or
yin
.  What's important to remember is that for there to be a flow of energy and vitality within a relationship, there needs to be polarity, regardless of which party has more masculine or feminine energy. 

              Let's examine this in the context of male-female relationships.  I find David Deida’s simple but powerful way of describing relationships through three stages useful as a general framework.

              The first stage relationship is between a macho jerk and a dependent, submissive woman.  The man is strong but not terribly considerate and carries a lot of masculine energy.  He has a lot of spine, but no heart.  The woman, on the other hand, will do anything to get even a little bit of love.  She has a lot of feminine energy.  She has a lot of heart, but not much spine.  Sure, there is plenty of polarity in this relationship, but there's much left to be desired. We call this the codependence stage, and room for growth within this kind of relationship is limited at best. 

              The second stage relationship is between the sensitive man and the independent woman.  This is a man who realizes that women want a guy who listens, who is in touch with his feelings, who has an open heart.  So he has taken it upon himself to bring more feminine yin energy into his life.  The woman in this kind of relationship is strong and independent.  Typically, she has a job with a lot of responsibility.  She can take care of herself financially and doesn't really need a man.  As such, she has brought a fair amount of masculine yang energy on board.