Women have been patient with men for a long time
The patience has been extraordinary. They've covered for men who weren't leading. They've kept households running while waiting for their man to find his footing. They've softened their needs, managed their disappointment, and told themselves it's fine when it wasn't.
And then one day they're sitting across from me, or across from a therapist, or across from their best friend, and they say some version of the same thing:
“I don't feel like a woman in this relationship.”
It means she's been doing your job because you weren't doing it, and she's exhausted, and somewhere underneath the exhaustion she's grieving the version of this relationship she thought she was signing up for.
She wanted to respond to you. That's what she came with. The capacity to receive, to soften, to give you something that doesn't come from effort but from feeling safe enough to let it out. That part of her didn't disappear. It went dormant. Because you have to create the conditions for it. That's the part nobody tells men clearly enough.
Reciprocation isn't a personality trait. It's a response. And a response needs something to respond to.
I've never met a cold woman who didn't have warmth buried somewhere underneath whatever she'd built to protect herself.
AND I've met plenty of men who gave her good reason to build it.
The man who understands that his woman reflects him more than she resists him, that man becomes a king. By being present. By going first. By deciding that his leadership is the precondition, not the reward.
She's waiting.
