What WomenHave Told Me

My dear men.

Women are angry with us. And they have every right to be.

Women are afraid of us. Millennia of being treated as second-class human beings — suppressed, commoditized, sold, indentured, objectified in ways too numerous and too brutal to summarize — have left deep marks. Men have imprinted so much violence upon women that many women have come to despise their own being as a result. The recognition of women as men’s equal is relatively recent in the long arc of human history. We are still catching up to what that actually requires of us.

We owe women reparations. Not a legal category — a relational one. Reparations of patience, presence, steady love, care, and the willingness to actually listen.

The Wiring We Carry

Wired deep into the male nervous system is an archaic belief: that if we provide for women their basic necessities, they are to bend to our will, needs, and desires. Most men today would reject this consciously. But when push comes to shove — when a woman asks for more than provision, when she names what is missing, when she refuses to be satisfied with what we’ve offered — the old hardwiring can kick in. Entitlement surfaces. “If you don’t like it, find someone else.”

In the age of internet dating, trading out a relationship has been made as easy as a swipe. These apps do nothing to heal the deep wound between men and women. They entrench it — training us to treat each other as interchangeable rather than irreplaceable.

A woman not long ago confided in me that as long as she gave her husband what he wanted physically twice a week, he wouldn’t threaten to end the relationship — and with it, her financial security. I talk with many women who are afraid to take a stand for what they need from their men because they cannot fathom starting over financially. They endure dynamics where neither person actually experiences what they long for. The man gets compliance. The woman gets security. Both get loneliness.

What Women Actually Crave

More women I work with now prefer to be alone than to be in relationship with men. Or they prefer the company of other women — not necessarily as lovers but as companions who hold space, listen, and understand what it is to move through the world as a woman. And yet, deep down, most women still want more. They want what only the masculine can offer.

What women crave is not to be listened to, exactly. It is deeper than that. Women want to feel the fullest possible presence from men.

When a man provides but is not present — and this describes most men — a woman does not only feel incomplete. She feels unsafe. And in that absence of safety, she cannot fully open. Her creative power, her wildness, her love — all of it stays behind the wall.

“A protected, provided-for woman who is not truly met cannot express her full power. The alchemical force released when masculine Presence meets feminine Love is one of the most powerful forces in human experience. Most relationships never get close to it.”

Men are equally hungry. Not for the love of a caretaker — for the vitalization of a woman’s fully expressed power. Men have been battered by a culture that insists they be impermeable. Take your pain, put it in a box, lock it away. Be a man of steel. The cost of that thick skin is an underdeveloped heart. Men lack the deep emotional resilience to feel — let alone feel deeply. And if a man cannot feel through his heart, he cannot be present. And without his presence, she will not open. And so here we are.

So Close, Yet So Far

Men and women long for one another’s deepest gifts and are kept from them by centuries of conditioning and unresolved pain. Like two magnets held at the same pole — drawn toward each other, repelled at the moment of contact. The closer they get, the more the invisible force pushes back.

Repelled by what? Pain. So much unresolved pain on both sides.

I see this in couples work constantly, and it is heartbreaking. Two people with genuine love for each other, longing to connect, generating instead a narrative that justifies the distance. They vilify each other. And all the while, buried beneath the story, an ember flickers — waiting for someone to lean down and breathe life into it.

To the men

It is not women’s job to heal this rift. Women are exhausted from trying. They cannot mother us into wholeness. They cannot tiptoe more eloquently around our fragile egos. They are done being dragged to therapy as the ones who “want to do the work” while we sit skeptical in the waiting room.

Many women are done. And their hearts ache for us to arrive.

Men have to lead this. Not because we are stronger — we are not stronger emotionally, only more unpracticed at feeling. We have to lead because leadership is presence. To lead is to step forward vulnerably, without a formula, navigating entirely by feel. The first move is to bring your full presence — sexual energy set aside for now — and stay.

Yes, women are angry. When you bring your presence to a woman who has been waiting for it, you open the door for a backlog of hurt and rage to release. Let it. Feminine fire must flow. Women — and men too — need to mourn all the love and life lost at the hands of patriarchal values. Men need to witness that grief, including the grief within themselves. Coming together is not about feeling good. It is about feeling alive, which means feeling whatever has been waiting behind the dam.

“Men are quick learners. We can develop the emotional resilience to feel. When women feel us feeling them — especially when we allow ourselves to feel their anger, hurt, and grief — a woman cannot help but release her love, adoration, and passion toward us.”

Be steady. Breathe. When you are in full presence and a woman shares her pain with you, breathe it in. Resist the old pattern of becoming defensive, or the equally old pattern of going stoic and thick-skinned. And do not try to fix her. We are not meant to diagnose women like a broken engine. Our task is to broaden our chest, fill our lungs, feel our guts — and be with not so much her words but what is behind them, until she registers: my man is here.

When we connect in that place, the magic of relationship begins.

One more thing: do not allow her to shame you or put you down. This does not bring her heart forward — it turns her into the very thing that has been done to her. You do not serve her by absorbing contempt. You serve her by being present and having a spine. Both at once. That is what she is actually asking for.

To the women

Be done making excuses for male emotional impotence. Not expecting emotional resilience from men keeps the relational dynamic diseased. Expect more. Demand it — not with contempt but with the clarity of someone who knows what is possible.

And when your man shows up — when he finally brings his presence, bares something real, steps forward vulnerably — do not be surprised if what you feel first is anger. Or rage. Or the exhausted exasperation of someone who has been waiting a very long time for something that is finally, finally arriving. That fire is real. Let it out.

But be mindful not to crush him back into his shell in that moment. You have every right to your fire. And you also have an opportunity — one worth seizing — to let that fire mix with the oxygen of what is actually happening: that he is here. That it is possible. That the thing you have always wanted is standing in front of you asking to be let in.

Do not reject it. Even if he is overdue. The alchemy of love and presence meeting — what the traditions call Grace — is the great healer of shared pain. It is available to you right now. Go toward it.

The Nice Guy Problem

Men younger than fifty-five may have been raised more deliberately — with attention to emotional wellbeing, with parents who worked to counteract the worst of what macho culture produces. These men are gentle, respectful, attuned. They would never be deliberately cruel. They have real and valuable gifts.

But in the refusal to become toxic, many of these men stunted something else: healthy anger. Healthy desire. A clear sense of their own preferences, vision, and needs.

His friends know him as the nice guy. And the core wild feminine — in any woman worth being with — will eventually push this man to find his edge. When a man consistently defers his vision and desire to a woman, she may at first feel honored by it. After a while, she feels the limpness. The vessel of the relationship stops moving. She becomes both the wind and the sail — the structure and the life force. It is exhausting. It is not attractive. And it does not produce the alchemy that both people are longing for.

The work for the nice guy and the macho man is the same: develop clean, healthy anger. Anger that knows where it comes from, that does not punish or withdraw, but that draws a clear line about how love can flow. A boundary lit by genuine love and respect. Not a wall — a doorway with a threshold.

How to Actually Bring Your Presence

Here is the truth: you cannot bring your presence by willing it. You have to earn it — by beginning the work of healing your core wound.

The masculine core wound, in its most distilled form, is this: I am unlovable if I have emotional needs. Men carry this belief at a visceral level, often without knowing it. It is the dread that lives beneath the stoicism, beneath the fixing, beneath the retreat into work and screens and the thousand other ways men avoid being fully felt.

You do not have to heal this wound completely before presence can flow. The healing only needs to begin. But you cannot do it alone. You need to have presence modeled for you — to see what it looks like in another man, to feel it in a room, to be held by it. A men’s group with a skilled guide is not optional. It is essential.

Men: be with your woman. Insist — gently, consistently — on her sharing what is really bothering her. Look past the surface complaint to the deeper pain beneath it. And share your own broken heart with her. Your authentic longing to be loved, and to love. She will meet you there — more fully than you expect — when she feels you genuinely reaching for her depth.

Your love will grow roots. And roots allow for less perfection and more nuance, more play, more of the full wild range of what two people can be together.

In life, we lose everything we love — including ourselves. So love anyway. With everything you have. And when it hurts and your heart is broken, take time to heal. And then get up and love again.

That is what it is to be a man.

— Dr. Luke Adler
Author, Born to Heal