The birthday presence

David Deida gives a great analogy about the core desires of men and women, in The Way of the Superior Man. In this book/chapter, he is addressing men.

"…Because what she really wants is a man who can figure it out for himself. She wants a man who loves her, and escorts her with his loving, without having to ask her what she wants all the time.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy is precisely not to have to figure it out for her man and guide him. She wants to be able to trust him in his direction. There are some times when she does want to figure it out for you, but far more often she feels your gift when you offer her a direction in your intimacy without her having to ask you for it or tell you what she wants.

Suppose it’s your woman’s birthday. If it were your birthday, you’d love it if your woman would do anything you wanted. So you think she’d like that, too. You say to her, “Happy Birthday! For your birthday, we can do anything you want. We can go anywhere and do anything. And I’ll do anything for you. What do you want to do?”

This is exactly the opposite of most women’s idea of an ideal birthday present. Most women would get far more excited if you were to say, “You’ve got 30 minutes to pack your bags for the weekend. Everything is taken care of. Just pack your bags, and leave the rest to me. I’m going to give you the best birthday you’ve ever had.”

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do. She can be pure energy, pure motion, pure love, without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best. She can enjoy her man taking responsibility for the direction, so she can be what the feminine is: pure energy.

A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart. When you ask her to analyze her heart’s emotions, it’s like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It’s safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening. Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of “fixing” them.

Women do not become free by analyzing themselves. They become free by surrendering into love. Not your love. Their love. They become free by surrendering to the immense flow of love that is native to their core and allowing their lives to be moved by this force in their heart. It may involve moments of analysis, but primarily it involves deep trust.

Be so full in your loving, so strong and stable in your presence, that she can just let go and surrender the limits she has put on her feelings. Let the emotions of her heart flow unguarded. Let her love be expressed with no limits. Let her go mad with love."