Women Were Never Supposed to Make Men Feel Safe

There is a modern relationship idea that sounds fair, compassionate, and completely reasonable:

The problem is that our nervous systems don’t care about what’s fair, they respond to the way we were designed over thousands and thousands of generations - the last one being the only one where this idea began.

For most of human history, a woman was never standing at the edge of the village reassuring her man that he was going to come back successful from the hunt or safe from the battle.

The hunt was dangerous.

War was deadly.

Exploration was dangerous.

Protecting territory was life threatening.

Standing between your family and another group of armed men was going to leave at least some of your men dead or injured.

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Male life repeatedly required stepping toward things that were frightening, painful, violent, uncertain, and sometimes fatal.

The female role in that system was different.

Women needed men capable of going into danger and coming back with something.

Food, resources, protection, territory and security.

The ancient promise running underneath the pair bond was much closer to:

And in return:

Each role had a purpose in support of the other.

Boys Were Expected to Lose Their Safety

A boy begins life differently.

His mother is safety.

She feeds him. Holds him. Soothes him. Protects him. Helps regulate his terror when the world overwhelms him.

Then, across countless cultures, something happened as boys approached manhood, the men took them for initiation.

The form varied wildly across cultures, but the psychological movement was remarkably recognizable: the boy left the protection of women and entered the world of men.

Initiation for boys was frightening, painful, isolating - not designed for cruelty’s sake, but to prove to them they could face it and reach the other side.

Pain.

Isolation.

A physical ordeal, hunting, combat training, exposure to the elements, tests of endurance, courage, pain and the possibility of injury or death - the lesson was simple and brutal:

YOU are one of the tribe members responsible to keep what is unsafe on the other side of the wall - that is the expectation of you, but it is also the thing you were designed to do.

That is an enormous psychological transition.

The boy discovers:

That is one of the foundations of masculine confidence.

Fear disappears as the requirement.

The ability to move while afraid becomes the requirement.

Modernity Removed the Pressure, It Didn’t Change What Draws A Woman To A Man

Modern Western life changed the developmental environment dramatically.

A boy will likely reach adulthood having encountered few situations where life forces him to discover what he is made of.

There is no initiation.

No tribe of older men taking responsibility for his transition.

No meaningful ordeal.

No unavoidable responsibility.

No moment where childhood ends because reality demands that it end.

And what’s made it even harder for boys to become men is that mothers instinctively protect their boys from everything that can make them feel uncomfortable.

When the boy becomes frightened his mother removes the frightening thing.

He struggles and she intervenes.

He becomes uncomfortable and someone explains that what he experienced wasn’t fair and he shouldn’t have to exist in a world where things are scary or unfair.

His rough play gets treated as a behavioural problem.

His aggression gets treated as something requiring suppression.

His desire to compete gets channeled into collaboration.

Risk, danger, conflict and failure get removed.

And his female peers join the process of shaming qualities of masculinity.

The qualities he is biologically compelled to experiment with — strength, dominance, aggression, competition, sexual boldness, risk, status, toughness — quickly acquire socially radioactive labels.

So the boy receives a bizarre developmental message:

Then women meet him fifteen years later and wonder where all the capable men went.

Women Are Complaining About Men They Helped Prevent

Women routinely say they want a man who feels grounded, decisive, strong, steady, protective, capable under pressure, consistent, responsible and able to handle hard situations.

But culture spent twenty years trying to remove the experiences that create those capacities.

You cannot raise a male as though fear, discomfort, aggression, danger, competition, and failure are inherently harmful and then expect him to magically become a man who stands calmly inside them.

Masculinity requires pressure.

Strength requires resistance.

Courage requires fear.

Confidence requires surviving situations where the outcome was uncertain.

Self-trust requires discovering that you can handle things nobody can handle for you.

It used to be that a man incapable of functioning around danger had a serious survival problem.

What A Man With A Healthy Nervous System Wants

A mature man certainly wants a woman he can be emotionally open with.

He wants warmth, affection, respect, understanding, tenderness, loyalty and openness.

He wants somewhere he can put the armour down.

A man with a healthy nervous system can tolerate uncertainty, he can handle disapproval, he can hear that she’s frustrated with him, he can deal with rejection and bounce back from abandonment.

It’s only a man who can survive losing a woman who is capable of choosing a woman instead of settling for one he feels he will be safe with.

The Safety A Man Needs

She can be upset with him without humiliating him.

She can disagree without contempt.

She can be scared without turning him into the villain.

She can tell him where he failed without attacking his identity.

She can be furious and still remain fundamentally on his team.

She can experience abandonment fear without using punishment to force reassurance from him.

She can have a nervous system reaction without making him the emotional whipping boy responsible for absorbing it.

That is a woman a man will choose every day and never leave because she occupies one of the only places in his life where he does not have to prepare for attack.

He Needs To Step Up or Step Back

For the men who complain that their wives or girlfriends are emotionally unsafe.

She mocks him, shames him, she explodes, weaponizes his vulnerability, she threatens the relationship and makes him feel like he’s permanently on trial.

Okay. Is she right? Then you’re going to need to step up, regardless of her tone and approach.

But if she genuinely treats you in a way you wouldn’t tolerate from any other human being, then why are you still there?

The most obvious sign of a man with dignity and a healthy nervous system is that he can set boundaries while maintaining that energy of dignity with the woman he loves.

Because once you have clearly told a woman what you will participate in, your remaining presence becomes your responsibility.

A man with a healthy nervous system does not spend five years begging an unsafe woman to become safe.

He establishes the conditions under which he will remain.

He makes the standard unmistakable.

The Man Complaining About Safety Usually Has a Bigger Problem

The man who frames his presence with someone who shows only disapproval, disgust and disrespect doesn’t stay with her because he’s so full of commitment and love, he stays because he fears life without her even more.

And whether she’s conscious of it or not, a woman in a relationship with a man who tolerates treatment that she herself wouldn’t accept from a coworker, is filled with loathing and disgust that he would let her treat him this way.

This relationship is sexless for that exact reason.

But he still stays.

He complains.

He explains.

He negotiates.

He tries to make her understand.

He gets angry behind her back.

He researches everything he can to prove that she’s wrong for being toxic.

He tells the internet how emotionally unsafe his wife is.

And every day he wakes up and chooses the exact same arrangement.

At some point, the complaint stops being about her behaviour and starts revealing his dependence.

You have handed her responsibility for something that belongs to you.

Your ability to face life without her.

A Man Needs to Know He Can Lose Her

This may be one of the least romantic truths about healthy masculine love.

A man becomes capable of deeply choosing a woman when he knows he can survive her absence.

That gives his choice meaning.

He stays because he wants her.

He stays because he respects her.

He stays because even though he can create a good life, life with her is remarkable in a way it couldn’t be if he’d chosen anyone else.

He stays because she has earned access to parts of him the rest of the world rarely sees.

He stays because she feels like home.

And she understands something too:

There is no theatrical threat behind that.

There is no manipulation.

There is simply a man who knows where his responsibility begins.

The outside world will sometimes be brutal.

He has already accepted that.

Women Have Created This Just As Much As Men

A woman cannot spend years attacking a man and then complain that he has become passive, guarded, sexually flat, indecisive, checked out, or emotionally absent.

A man living beside contempt learns to protect himself.

A man whose vulnerability gets weaponized learns to hide vulnerability.

A man whose mistakes produce hours of humiliation learns to conceal mistakes.

A man whose honesty reliably creates punishment learns strategic dishonesty.

Then she looks at the resulting man and says:

He adapted to the environment inside his own house.

Women have extraordinary influence over the emotional climate of intimate relationships.

That influence can produce a place where a capable man becomes even more open, playful, sexual, ambitious, affectionate, and alive.

It can also produce a place where he learns to armour himself before opening the front door.

The woman who understands the difference becomes extraordinarily valuable to a man who has actually grown up.

The Goal Was Never a Safe World

The modern obsession with emotional safety easily drifts toward an impossible fantasy:

A life where nobody frightens me.

Nobody overwhelms me.

Nobody rejects me.

Nobody wounds me.

Nobody triggers me.

Nobody says something I cannot comfortably absorb.

The masculine task was never to make danger and discomfort disappear.

When she starts soothing him. Reassuring him. Managing his reactions. Softening reality for him. Carefully delivering criticism so he can tolerate it. Convincing him he is enough. Helping him recover whenever he feels rejected, inadequate, frightened, or ashamed.

Because the part of femininity that wants to mother a vulnerable male and the part that wants to be taken, ravished, overwhelmed, surrendered, and sexually consumed by a formidable man occupy very different psychological positions.

He keeps asking:

Meanwhile his behaviour keeps telling her:

And then she gets the ick.

A deeply masculine man can tell his woman he is terrified.

He can cry.

He can admit that he failed.

He can tell her something broke his heart.

He can say, “I have no fucking clue what I’m going to do.”

And she can still feel enormous attraction toward him because underneath all of it she feels:

That is the difference.

A man who has a track record of being vulnerable yet who always comes through, never asks her to take on his responsibilities.

One creates intimacy.

The other creates motherhood.