This will be the last instalment of ‘The Great Man’ series. A look at how we as women can take responsibility for how we show up in relationship and also understand men a little better. If you missed the first one, you can find it here and make your way through my personal journey of discovery.
In this last article I wanted to explore, why is it that we let great men go? Why do we push them away? Why do we say we want something, have it presented to us and then decide we want something else? We say we want a loving man, who is supportive, who looks after us, who loves us, who treats us like queens. Why is it that we emasculate them? Push them away? Fall hard for the ‘bad boys’ and get the ‘ick’ from the ‘nice’ ones? What’s going on that what we say we want, we don’t seem to have. Or if we do have it, we push it away?
Nice guys finish last - treat them mean to keep them keen
We often hear that ‘nice guys finish last’. That women go for ‘bad men’ - even though we have a long list of how we want to be treated, we fall for the ones that don’t match that. The old ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’ so often works for us. That ‘bad boy’ feels so… masculine.
In my practice I often hear women complain about their male partners, about them not being ‘masculine enough’. That they don’t take charge.
So what’s at play here? I’m going to share with you some personal realisations and also what I have supported my female clients through too. With this knowledge I am also finding the tools to be able to support men in this - to be more ‘masculine’ (now that I know what this means for women). I now support men to stand up for themselves, to speak their truth with kindness and to direct the relationship, for them to feel empowered enough to guide and lead in relationship. To teach them to soothe their inner-little boy so that their partner doesn’t need to feel the consequences of his anger or emotional outbursts. I now show men that ‘happy wife, happy life’ does not mean self-abandoning and doing everything to make her happy.
Because what I have learnt is, women don’t want that either. Women want a strong man, a protector. A man that can protect a woman from his own shadow. Protect her from his own wounding. A man that lovingly stands his ground and doesn’t let her get her own way. A man with a backbone. A man who isn’t afraid to say he thinks or wants to do differently. All with grounded presence and love (whereas the ‘bad boy’ is doing it from their wounded inner-boy).
So why do we ruin the good relationships and chase the bad?
To put it into a nutshell - we learn what love is from what we have experienced in childhood and growing up. It’s what our nervous system has got used to as ‘normal’ and so we unconsciously go chasing that. Throw in some conditioning we have from society as a whole and it’s a huge soup of a mess we are trying to navigate.
Let me start with my own experience. When I was with Will there would be some very deep intimate moments as we explored Tantra together. These deep intimate moments, although they felt good in the moment and would be amazing experiences, my nervous system was so sure that it wouldn’t last and that I would be abandoned, I would look for signs that he would leave me, such as looking for ways not to trust him. In the early days of the relationship this insecurity would manifest as me finding something to complain about which was actually an unconscious way of trying to get his attention or reassurance. We had a long distance relationship and so the times we would be leaving each other and not being seeing each other for a week or so, on the hours up to my departure I would feel anxious, not realise it was a fear of separation and then criticise him about something. Overtime I figured this out and learnt to ask for reassurance from physical affection, until the anxiety upon leaving no longer became a thing.
The fear here is not trusting when things are good. Not having a nervous system with a full capacity for pleasure. A nervous system that does’t give permission for fun and pleasure and also doesn’t trust that it can stay.
I recently saw a sexological bodyworker to explore this more intimately. My original goal was to show up and speak up for what I wanted and state what I didn’t in an environment that was supportive to that. I had got into a pattern with a previous partner whereby asking for my needs to be met was greeted without compassion and I had began to notice a lot of guilt in asking for what I wanted. That I didn’t feel I had the ‘right’ to ask for my sexual needs to be met. What I came to understand that when the practitioner did dearmouring processes throughout my body, including my vulva and vagina, which in essence is releasing trauma the body is holding onto, I was able to be quite present in that discomfort. Curiously, when his touch was pleasurable, my mind took over and began thinking of a myriad of other things, and not able to be present with the pleasure.
Taking this to my attachment coach, my body had become so used to in a previous relationship of not having permission to be in pleasure, and not feeling my pleasure was a priority or importance, I had started to check out - my nervous system felt it was unsafe. Asking for my pleasure to be a priority had led to arguments and disagreements in the past. How clever our bodies can be, how they can find ways to protect us when we don’t do it for ourselves. Going to see a professional who holds the space to explore this in a consensual way really allowed me to slow down and see what patterns I was holding onto sexually.
Which leads me onto the next thing I have noticed in myself and with women I work with.
Safety.
Inner-safety vs external safety and building trust
Safety can be split into two very different components. Inner safety and external safety.
External safety comes from having people around us that we can talk to, feel seen and validated by, with emotional maturity to be a space for us to share ourselves. We can choose people in our lives that cultivate this sense of safety. We can also let go of those people who are not able to create that container of safety.
And here’s the thing - our ability to be able to let people go who DON’T give us safety can actually determine our own internal sense of safety and trust we have in ourselves. Let me explain…
When we can speak up for ourselves and ask for what we want, when we can have boundaries and take action to maintain them, we create an inner sense of safety. We create self-trust. We trust ourselves, our decisions and our intuition. When we don’t show up for ourselves, we don’t trust ourselves.
When we don’t trust ourselves, we try and control our external environment to feel safe. This means, we can then end up controlling our partners, what they do, how they do it. If we have expectations that we might feel rejection from them if we ask for our needs to be met and we don’t want to feel that rejection, we don’t speak up for ourselves. Consequentially we don’t trust ourselves and need to control what they do to avoid the discomfort of the potential rejection. The rejection is not guaranteed, it is assumed. And what do we make that ‘rejection’ mean? Is it really rejection? Or is it them holding a boundary?
To keep a sense of safety and trust we try controlling what they do and how they do it. Eventually grinding men down and out of their ‘masculine’ energy. What the women I have coached mean when they use this term, is that these men no longer take the lead or use their initiative. The men have learnt that doing so only results in criticism or nitpicking and them feeling not good enough. It’s better not to try than to get it wrong. Let me tell you now - a great man WANTS to hear your ‘yes’ and your ‘no’.
When we don’t feel safe we want to feel powerful. Controlling our environment gives us the illusion of having control. A way we maintain that sense of control is by deciding what happens in any given moment. Asking other people to change so that we feel comfortable. We do this because we feel helpless and powerless not just in our relationship but in life generally. There’s a part of us that fears that by surrendering and trusting what happens next we may end up feeling an emotion that we are trying to avoid - one that is uncomfortable. I see this often in women who grab and hold on for a fear of missing out. Of not getting a need met. They grasp and demand. Afraid to relax and let go because they worry that not doing so they will lose something. What emotions do you try and avoid? How are you controlling life around you to avoid feeling it? What are you afraid of losing?
Disempowering men
Another issue for not speaking up for ourselves is that our men risk violating us or harming us without their awareness. If we are not clear on what we do and don’t want, if we don’t voice it and we choose to say ‘yes’ to things from a place of self-abandonment, then as a consequence of that the man learns he has transgressed our boundaries unknowingly. Over time he trusts himself less. He fears making moves because he doesn’t know if it will harm. He shuts down his own power. By not being empowered ourselves, we have taught him to be disempowered. Men end up using all their energy trying to figure out what you might want in a bid to protect you from themselves. So he becomes less ‘masculine’ less ‘manly’. He stops taking the lead and using his initiative.
We fear speaking up for ourselves because we fear their reaction - maybe anger, disappointment, sadness. We are trying to control their emotions by abandoning ourselves. Now there are different ways that he can react to you which can influence your ability to continue speaking up for yourself.
He could respond to your requests for needs to be met or you placing a boundary with an intense response of blame, a projection of his shame, withdrawing or some other type of behaviour which can feel like punishment. This is a sign of emotional immaturity and the invitation here is, if you continue not to be seen in your desires and boundaries, where can this go? Will you learn eventually to shut down or can you continue to meet his storm? I’ve written an article here with more information about emotional immaturity.
Secondly he could respond with grounded calmness unaffected by your shares. He acknowledges and accepts your boundaries and requests, he is able to stay present and/or invite you to discuss them further - active listening to enable him to fully understand you and what it is that you are sharing. I write about How to Listen here.
Thirdly it may be a case that he may initially respond with an emotion that is uncomfortable for you to both be with but the difference to emotional immaturity is he takes responsibility for what it brings up for him - feelings of rejection, feelings of jealousy, fear of abandonment, etc he is aware of his own core wounds and speaks to that rather than projects the discomfort of his own emotions onto you.
As long as there is an element that most of the time there can be a place for discussion and repair if needed, then safety can be created. However we can never really ‘test’ the safety of another person until we share with kindness and from a place of empowerment our own residing truth.
We lose our connection to play and sensuality
We push men away when we are no longer playful and connected to our sensuality. So often as women we take on all the roles. We make decisions on everything, we lead the relationship in where we want it to go. Decide which hose to buy, where and what the wedding will be like, how we’ll parent the children, how the house will be looked after, etc, etc and it’s exhausting. Women in my 1-1 coaching containers complain that they are left to do the mental and physical work load in the home and the first thing I ask is if they have actually had a conversation about this. How do they know they are not doing enough if we don’t tell them? Passive aggressive comments about him being lazy and not taking the bins out doesn’t count as communication.
We take all the roles on and don’t give ourselves time for play. By play I mean activities that light us up, that have us feel good. That when we return home we have a huge smile on our face. Instead, what we do is we feel resentment to our partners for prioritising their play which might look like evening football with their friends or going to do a hobby. What is really going on for a lot of women here is that they aren’t taking care of themselves by incorporating play. They are tired, miserable and instead of picking themselves up are bringing their partners down to their level instead. We no longer have fun with our partners, or look for opportunities to get silly and have a giggle or to play jokes on each other. If our partner tries to engage us in this way we shut him down for being childish and he retreats. We end up abandoning our lives to fit round theirs and resent them for it.
We don’t know how to receive
Men are natural providers. In today’s modern world I’m not necessarily meaning monetarily speaking, but men do like to open doors, help out physically, find solutions to our problems… the problem is we stop appreciating their efforts - a sure fire way to stop any support. We think we need to do it all ourselves because of feminism. And, let me say I do absolutely want more equal opportunities and respect as a woman. And, I have also learnt we need to appreciate men for when they do things for us out of care or kindness we need to welcome their help. Yes, I could do it by myself, but great men want to be needed - you know that as it was one of my earlier articles in this series.
Also, when it comes to receiving, often we are wanting things to be really specific and look a particular way. We have an idea of ‘should’. I’ll give you an example. My relationship with my own father was strained a few months ago impacted by a relationship elsewhere in my life. I was holding onto anger and resentment towards him instead of just accepting him for who he is and how he shows up. I invited him for a walk to apologise for my behaviour. During the walk it was raining, when I got home after our walk he sent me a message ‘Hope you enjoyed the walk x’.
My reply was ‘Yes. It was interesting to hear what brings you joy and what your current challenges are. I also want to leave hurt feelings in the past and have a better relationship with you. How did you find the walk?’
So at this point I was hoping for my dad to say something along the lines of:
‘Thanks Carla for inviting me out, it meant a lot’
‘I appreciate the time together, I would like a better relationship with you too.’ ….
Or something to that affect. Instead his reply was…
‘Wet xx’
He was referencing the rain. Immediately my initial reaction that I didn’t send to him was one of disappointment. How could he not see the effort I’ve made? I’m the child in this relationship and here I am finding myself as the adult. Why can’t he just say nice things to me? Why can’t he voice how much he cares?
And then when I took a moment to pause, I could see he already had done all of those things - in his own way… ‘Hope you enjoyed the walk x’ was his way of saying to me that his hopes for the walk is that I got what I wanted. He reached out to me afterwards - he made the first move - in the way he knows how.
So I gave him the reply he was looking for…
‘😂’
So my invitation to you is to see - how are the men around you already showing you they love and care for you - and how are you not receiving it? Can you let go of the idea of how it needs to look and hold your own inner-little girl as she holds disappointment for how it ‘should have been’ and come to acceptance and gratitude for how it actually is.
Creating unrealistic visions - pedestalisation
Right at the beginning of a relationship when everything is new and shiny we can create an idea in our own head of who someone is - or what we want them to be. I have noticed this in myself - in a recent relationship I created an idea of the man who was in front of me, and because I ignored signs of lack of awareness or self-responsibility because I wanted to meet someone who ticked other boxes, I let the those boxes go - the ones for emotional safety. Consumed with the idea I had created in my head of who he could be and how I saw him, rather than acknowledging the reality.
Another example for me is I was recently contacted by a date from 3 years ago. He reconnected and during our message exchanges acknowledged his reactivity on our first date was inappropriate and because we didn’t live in the same city had never chosen to come find me and tell me. He said that being accountable and growth were important to him. I immediately noticed myself jump to this idea of ‘he could be the guy’, as he seemed to be ticking the boxes of relationships I haven’t had recently. I slowed myself down and removed the idea that ‘this could be it’. He needed to do more and I needed to see more of him before I started putting too much of my energy into any possibilities. And also knowing that I am not ready for a relationship yet. If he was interested he would need to wait.
The problem when we get into our head of who someone is (or who we want them to be), we then face disappointment when they are not this image of what we created. Another mistake we make is looking at their potential. How can we see the person in front of us and fully accept who they are and how they are showing up in this moment? I saw a quote recently about potential that really resonated for me…
’When we look at someone else’s potential we’re looking at what we would do in their situation.’
I know I have definitely been guilty of this. Looking at how someone is living their own life and causing themselves their own pain and taking my own experience and applying it to their situation. I also know that people will also be taking a look at my ‘potential’ and seeing how I could do differently based on their own experience - I likely don’t have the self-awareness or capacity to do that yet. So we end up pushing men away because they are now the versions of them that we had created in our own mind. We build up disappointment or resentment for them not meeting our own expectations and unrealistic vision. They are human. As are we.
Perfectionism
Women, how we scrutinise ourselves! We look in the mirror and pick ourselves apart. Areas that could be bigger, smaller, flatter, more rounded, smoother, more textured… We look at what others have - the car, the house, how the kids dress, the cute pet, the holiday, the wedding, the birthday party, the gifts… and we want it for ourselves. We look at our friends’ relationships, dating, partners, and take the bits that we like about their lives and want to make them ours. We are constantly looking for and striving for our idea of perfection. Now, don’t get me wrong, vision and ambition are important. Not settling is important. However, many of us are putting unrealistic expectations on the men in our lives and the relationships we have.
I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting you stay with a man who speaks unkindly to you, who doesn’t TRY to meet you. I’m saying that he will have his quibbles and quirks and things that might irritate you - those smaller and less important ones, can you let them go? Where can you move into gratitude and appreciation? Where can you learn to accept him for who he is? Because he is most likely experiences the same amount of ‘curiosity’ around your less desirable traits and chooses to let them go. Relationships take work but we want them easy. And we want men to change to make it easy. Let go of perfection and meet your man in gratitude.
Lack of awareness around men and masculinity
Many of us women are simply, misinformed. We have an idea of who men are and how they should be from social expectations and also projecting our own female lens on to a situation that a man would do. For example, many women believe that men aren’t emotional and can’t share how they feel. The thing is men can very much do this when they are given the space, the invitation and the space holding to do this. There requires a certain level of trust and patience for a man to share how he feels. Many of us talk too quickly before waiting for a response or if they don’t have the response we want we project onto them which shuts them down, instead of being open and curious.
We make assumptions about why men do things. We believe that behaviour we don’t understand is just ‘bad behaviour’. My invitation is next time you are puzzled by a man’s actions, ask him why he chose to do something in a particular way (important here that it’s done from a place of curiosity and not criticism) - I’m sure the answer you get will give a greater insight into how he thinks and operates, allowing you to understand him at an even deeper level.
Many women speak to and treat their partners with disrespect and disdain. In a way they would never speak to their friends. It’s almost as if they don’t see the humanity of the person in front of them. They have objectified him. He has become a ‘thing' - not a human. Something they can speak to how they like because he doesn’t feel it anyway. It these ideas amongst many others that we have about men and masculinity that prevent us from building deeper connections - leaving them feeling disrespected and us unloved.
Victim consciousness
I have written before about being a victim and will cover it here briefly as I plan to do a full article on this. However, what we can do as women is when we aren’t getting certain needs met, instead of approaching from a place of empowerment and asking for them, we drop into our little inner-girl consciousness. We become graspy and demanding, only able to see where we lack and not able to tap into appreciation. We get comfortable telling our friends and family how our partner isn’t showing up and how we have tried everything to engage them in change - positioning ourselves as the victim of a situation. We do this often because taking responsibility for our role and also being accountable for our own choices and actions is hard. It’s so much easier to point the finger and blame others. It also gives us a sense of ‘permission’ to then continue with our partner criticising them and telling them all the places they are wrong - in effect emasculating him.
Unhealed parts from past relationships
What we don’t process and feel during a previous relationship or in the break up period and the ensuing grief that comes up from a relationship ending, will follow us to our next one. This is whether it’s inner-child work and your relationship with your own father or from past boyfriends and husbands… what we didn’t feel then, we will end up feeling now. What happens in future relationships is that we take the way our father or ex didn’t show up for us in the past, see that as ‘truth’ to how we get treated in relationships and begin looking for it in the new one until there is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We treat them with that pattern or idea we have of them and with that fear in mind - they respond in kind - in the way we most feared.
Self-sacrifice for the relationship
Many of us can become over focused and fixated on a relationship, whether that’s making it work, trying to get our needs met or something else. I have definitely done this. In one relationship I was so focused on wanting to make it work and building him up and concentrated on his growth, that I lost myself in the process. He left our relationship with a side hustle, new business goals and ideas that he was putting into practice, better relationships with his family and had taken some important life choices for his health. I was distracted from my business, my children, my friends, my professional development - everything around me began to crumble. I had abandoned my own life, and needs for his. Some part of me thinking that if he could see how well I had supported him maybe he would finally choose me. What I know is that for a relationship to be healthy, two whole people need to come together and support each other, it can’t be one-sided. We end up exhausted and again feeling resentful of everything we are doing for them and not doing for ourselves.
Knight in shining armour
We get told so often in the fairy tales that as long as we are pretty enough and special enough a knight or prince will come along and rescue us. As we get older these ideas mature and we hope that the knight is going to ‘complete’ us in some way. That he is going to make us whole. He will meet those needs that the men before him didn’t. Some of the modern ‘polarity’ teachers are saying similar things - that if we are ‘feminine’ enough we will be chosen and in essence, be rescued. So we wait. And hope. We twist and turn and contort ourselves in all ways to be more likeable.
And then when we meet a great guy - if he doesn’t rescue us and do everything that we want or expect of him, it must be him at wrong - instead of looking within. What I have noticed in the last few months of my own journey is three group healing containers I have accessed deep grief - grief which has been there such a long time wanting to be released. In the third container it surfaced again to be witnessed and fully experienced. The grief of a past boyfriend not being able to hold me in my sadness and my anger. During the process I began thinking of the men I knew that I could reach out to who would be able to hold those emotions. There was such a deep desire in me to be witnessed in that way by a man. Until, during the end of the container there was this realisation that the deep desire I had was an inner-child need. That for me to heal that, I would need to meet it and hold myself in it first. That I would need to be there to support MYSELF and love MYSELF through those processes, instead of outsourcing it to others.
So my invitation to you is where are you asking for needs to be met that are much deeper that what they first appear to be? That could be an inner-child need that wasn’t met that is now being projected onto your partner? Something that he can’t meet you in because no matter what he does it would never be enough? A yearning? A longing? An external ‘you fix it’? You first need to learn to hold it for yourself. Because once you have held it for yourself - you can then, from an empowered place, invite them to meet it too. Because you will be a whole person meeting another in their wholeness.
Carla Crivaro is a trauma-informed and certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach, she works with men and women internationally to reach their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla helps men and women understand themselves and each other, sexually and relationally, in and out of the bedroom. You can reach her at hello@carlacrivaro.com.
Other resources which are supportive around this topic are:
This is a personal blog in which I sometimes write about personal experiences. Some of these experiences may be recent. Some are from as far back as my childhood and teenage years. Activities, locations and other details may be changed.
To the best of my ability, I have re-created events, locales, people, and organisations from my memories and perceptions of them only. In order to maintain the anonymity of others, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, and the details of events. I have also changed some identifying characteristics, such as physical descriptions, occupations, and places of residence.
Timelines on the post may not be representative of actual timelines to protect the identities of those involved.
I relied on journals, interviews, and conversations I had with many people who appear in these pages, as well as my own memory. In some cases I have edited conversations for brevity or describe personal experiences others have disclosed to me. To protect the anonymity of certain individuals, I have modified their identifying details and/or their names.
The end result is a work for entertainment and educational purposes only. Any similarity to any person, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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