It's a Guy Thing (16 page)

Your masculine force may be a key to your financial success in our culture, but your feminine force is a key to fulfilling reciprocation in the emotional dance of sexually polarized intimates.

What If I Am Better at Handling Our Finances Than He Is?

Is it more important to do things your way rather than his way, or is it more important to magnify sexually transmitted love in your relationship? This is a moment-by-moment decision. It might take your man an extra 10 minutes to figure something out without your help, but in exchange for those 10 minutes you may enhance emotional and sexual polarity by empowering his masculine energy. It is up to you to decide if the trade-off is worth it.

For many couples, the woman is better at financial matters than her man. She is better at making financial decisions, budgeting and investing their money.

Arranging the finances involves masculine energy: organizing, planning, projecting, disciplining spending behavior and setting and reaching goals. If the woman takes financial responsibility for the couple, it will tend to depolarize the relationship—unless it is done very artfully.

One way to handle the finances with minimum conflict is to set aside a certain time and place in which you function as business partners rather than as intimate partners. You might say, “For the next hour, let’s go to the kitchen table and do finances.” For this hour, your man isn’t going to experience you as his woman, in particular. He will experience you as a financial planner. He may argue with you or be bored with you. This switch needs to be all right with you. For this hour, he isn’t going to treat you as his woman, as his wife or as his lover, but as a financial consultant.

Then, after an hour, clearly switch out of your role as financial consultant. Perhaps you take a shower and change clothes to help you shift the energy. When you come back together as intimate partners don’t bring up the finances again until your next meeting, if at all possible. Handle the finances completely during the appointed hour, or however long it takes. This is one way for you to handle the finances without unintentionally depolarizing the relationship.

Another way is to arrange the finances without projecting masculine energy toward your man. Just sit down with the books and take care of business. Don’t involve him. Because you do it yourself, he doesn’t experience your masculine energy. He knows you are taking care of it. He appreciates that you are better at it than he is. But he doesn’t experience
your masculine energy face to face. Whoever handles the finances, and how they are handled, are crucial factors in the presence or lack of sexual polarity in intimacy.

Why Are Men Often Hostile Toward Professional Women?

In our day-to-day lives, especially in our “modern” culture, both men and women must be highly developed in their masculine energy in order to survive economically. Unfortunately, a woman in her masculine energy at the workplace should expect men to treat her somewhat like a man, which might mean swearing or verbally pushing her around, as men do with each other as friends. Men make blunt comments with each other fairly frequently. A man might be with his best friend and say, “Don’t be an idiot. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

One aspect of the masculine form of communication is the assumption of mutual warriorship, involving the challenge of self and other. If you don’t mind being treated this way, like one of his male counterparts, then it’s fine to project masculine energy. You will be treated like a fellow warrior—although some men may become confused by a woman warrior.

It’s difficult for some men to deal with you if, at your core, you are very feminine, yet you are being very masculine to get a job done. These men feel your naturally attractive feminine energy and also feel the sword of the masculine from you. A man must shut off his sensitivity to your feminine energy if he is to relate to you as a business associate rather
than as a source of feminine energy.

It is only recently that women have been expected to act like men do. Before this period of history, for both good and bad reasons, men and women often had separate domains of work. This division eventually became a role that each sex was put into and then was expected to perform in accordance with rigid stereotypes. This role typing is entirely negative; men and women should have equal access to everything. They are free to be any way they want.

In the last 30 or so years women have excelled in high-paying professions that were previously the domain of men. But this kind of work does have its consequences on intimate relationships: It’s hard to let go of your accumulated masculine energy at the end of a workday.

Imagine that all day you are in the fast world of business. You make quick decisions and tell people what to do. Come six o’clock it’s hard to flip a switch and be a radiant goddess, a deeply relaxed woman. It’s not so easy to let go of a day’s worth of masculine energy. This is one major cause of the deadening of sexual polarity between intimate partners who both work at jobs that require masculine energy.

Does Working with Women Ruin My Man?

Imagine a man who spends the whole day at work treating women as sexually neutral associates. At the end of the day he comes home to his woman. He has just spent eight hours closing off his sexuality and the flow of his emotional-sexual feelings. When he comes home to you he is not very sensitive. He is rather closed and weary.

At work, most men are sexually attracted to many women every day. The way a man often responds to feminine energy is with sexual interest. It is not a mental choice so much as an innate, bodily polarization. Women experience this polarization too, but it is not necessarily so directional or sexual.

Imagine you are sitting and talking with a group of women friends and a really handsome, powerful man walks into the room. Your energy, as a woman, shifts. The way you hold yourself shifts. Your breath may even shift in response to the masculine energy.

Men have a similar response to the feminine, but their response often includes sexual attraction. When men are together with other men, a lot of what they talk about is women—their bodies, their sexiness and their attractiveness. Most men don’t act on their frequent sexual desires. Instead, most men confine their sexual activity to their chosen partner. However, a large percentage of a man’s sexual life is spent fantasizing about having sex with other women.

As a woman, you probably don’t experience a struggle within yourself because you want to go to bed with dozens of men you see every day. Some women would, but not most. However, most men are. It might be difficult for you to find this out, because very few men will admit it to a woman. However, most men are rather polygamous, at least in their secret desires.

Most men spend part of their day at the workplace suppressing their sexuality, suppressing their feelings of attraction, and suppressing their native masculine response to the feminine energy of the women they work with. When your man comes home to you it’s hard for him to sweep you off your feet and tell you how much he loves you. He has spent his whole day shutting down his response to the
feminine. He has turned himself off to the feminine.

So, even though it’s positive socially, politically and economically for men and women to have equal access to all positions, it has served to undermine our intimate emotional and sexual lives. How much of your workday involves subtle flirtation or innuendo? Sexual energy is almost constantly being transmitted between men and women at a subtle level. All of this was avoided in more traditional settings where men and women had their own separate cultures. But today is a different time and we are learning a new way to live.

When Discussing Business, Why Do Men Like to Exclude Women?

Men are actually not as good at being businessmen when women are around them. For one thing, when men are in their masculine energy and are with a woman, they often feel sexual energy toward her. Their masculine and feminine energies create a natural arc of polarity.

So, if men don’t want to be sexually distracted by their women co-workers, they have to cut back their masculine energy. But when they cut back their masculine energy, they also cut back on their decision-making capacity, their aggressiveness and their ability to focus.

There is another aspect to it. When several men are around a woman, they compete for her. It happens automatically at the biological level. Not only are the men in the room working on a deal, they are trying to look good in front of the woman.

For these reasons and more, many men don’t like women around when they are doing business. Men may not fully
understand the dynamic of sexual polarity, yet they feel it. They don’t admit, “Well, I compete with other men when she’s around so I’d rather she be out of the room.” Instead, men say to one another in exasperation, “Women!” They can’t admit the sexual dynamic, yet it is obvious to most men.

Polarity is a real force. It is something to be honored. The presence of feminine energy changes masculine energy. Men and women must respect the force of sexual polarity and find creative means to work together. They need to understand each other’s natural sexual response without being judgmental about their differences. Sexual polarity is a big factor in the workplace, whether we like it or not.