Which woman would say men these days can't handle them

 

The real reason women believe that men can’t handle their greatness? Does it gives women an excuse not to handle their own stuff?

When I first saw a  headline, I balked like a dog a bit. Okay, a lot. Especially after clicking through and reading these ’10 reasons most men can’t handle a deep woman’. Because ‘deep women’ are honest! And know what they want! And are looking for a deep, intimate, real relationship!

I don't need a man

In other words, the reasons are: because they believe men are shallow, dishonest, distant, closed off, and incapable of real love. That’s what this post  is really saying. And it’s not unique. It’s proliferated around the web, being republished over and over, in the few days since I first saw it, and there are thousands of others like it, with similar ideas about just how useless, unreliable, inherently disappointing, and frankly inferior men really are. The idea that most men can’t handle women, that men are letting us down, is everywhere these days.

 

Here’s the thing. These articles and ideas? They’re wrong. And they damage all of us in profoundly deep ways. In particular, these beliefs cause women to have terrible, unsatisfying and heartbreaking relationships with men.

 

This isn’t about men. It’s about women. It’s about unhealed pain. And these beliefs don’t just prevent healing that pain – they create even more of it.

 

Imagine an article titled ‘Most people can’t handle deep people.’ What would that really mean? It would mean that most people have difficulty meeting deep people where they are. Fully showing up, in the way that ‘deep’ people do, and want others to do, in the way that’s needed for true, satisfying intimacy.

 

If you can't be here for my needs I don't need you!

In our culture, we have this story that men never show up for women's needs. From the absent father and mid-life-crisis abandoner to the ‘best friend’ who secretly just wanted to get laid, the ghosting tinder date and the guy women lost their virginity to who didn’t know what a clitoris was, women's very identity as women are shaped by stories of men letting them down.

 

Over, and over, and over.

I want a man who will do what I want!

 

Almost all of women have experienced that sense of abandonment, rejection and deep shame at some point in women's lives. And in the context of a culture that tells the story that ‘good men are as rare as unicorns’, and that men are so unreliable, so unable to meet women's needs that women must pretend they don’t need men, or need them ‘as much as a fish needs a bicycle’, that pain feels even more powerless, because it is tinged with fear.

 

The fear that no man will ever show up for these women. That no man will ever provide women with what they need.

 

Now imagine an article titled ‘Most women can’t handle deep men.’ I don’t know about you, but I can already hear the outcry – that it’s misogyny, the hatred of women; that it’s just men who are angry they’ve lost a bit of power and privilege; that it’s sexist.

 

Those things are all correct. And it’s vital to understanding what happens when  women believe that men will always let them down; to understanding why articles like the one mentioned go viral:

 

Because when women feel powerless, they believe they  have a choice. Women can either look within, take their power back by taking responsibility for themselves and their own actions, and heal… or they can blame someone else, and get angry.

 

The author of the original article wasn’t trying to be sexist against men. No, this belief doesn’t have hatred as it’s motivation – quite the opposite. It comes from powerlessness, which is based on fear that men will always let women down… And pain, from times that they have. It’s written from a place of woundedness, fear, and scarcity.

 

Not from a place of writing about reality.

 

Spoiler alert: men CAN handle deep, or strong, or smart, or otherwise powerful women just as well as women can handle powerful men.

 

But articles like that one, they act to confirm the belief, presented all around WOMEN, that men will never fully love them, for who women are, never give women what they need, never truly meet them.

 

And because women learn to believe that they can’t, their actions towards men change. Women close their hearts, find what they expect, and end up in relationships where their deepness isn’t met, accepted and celebrated. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, and a heartbreaking one: women learn to sabotage their relationships with men.

The truth is that, to the extent that individual men are able, based on maturity and experience, nine out of ten men are dying to share women's real, deep emotional selves, to witness them, to be truly intimate. To be the one women choose, the one man given the chance to step up and be a great man, for the world, and for the women he chooses.

 

Nine out of ten are so, so eager to do that. To love women. Truly and deeply. They won’t do it perfectly – no one can. But they will do it, they will give it their all, they will love honestly.

 

If women would let them.