Head, Heart and Balls

The dynamic between men and women

So. You're in a relationship, and you want it to be loving and passionate - and meet your needs, and last a long time. What's going to make all these things happen? Especially as far as the passion is concerned?

Well, first of all, you need to be together - you need to be in close proximity. It's no use trying to make a relationship work if you're on the other side of the country. Sure, you'll have heard of men and women for whom this seems to be OK, but having once tried it myself, I'd simply say that either the two people concerned are playing a game (see this website for a good explanation of what that means) or they are each wearing a mask that helps them to avoid real contact and connection.

Second, you need to have the right chemistry. And what, you may say, does that mean? I think it means that you have the excitement of a polarity between the masculine and the feminine in the relationship - hopefully with the man being the more masculine component. (I say "hopefully" because I believe that greater fulfillment comes when we are each settled comfortably in our own gender, though I recognize many relationships are not like that. In a gay relationship, for example, the polarity will come from one man being more masculine than the other.)

Maybe at this point it's important to remind you that being masculine isn't limited to those human beings who have a penis and balls! Women who are successful in business, or raising children in a single parent family, may have to display their masculine side a great deal. And men can express a more feminine set of values and behaviors when they organize the house or nurture a sick relative; none of this takes away from the essential character of the individual as a man or a woman. It just means that we all have masculine and feminine traits and abilities, though one direction will be prominent in each of us.

I once had a relationship with a woman who had very powerful male energy. She had developed a way of being that most of us would see as very masculine. Yet when she brought this energy to our sexual union, her delicately feminine body powered out her sexuality with such male force and energy that it turned lovemaking into a fantastic experience for both of us! There was no sense in her of the female passivity that sometimes characterizes women's sexual expectations and behavior. Passivity was not a feature of her lovemaking style: as soon as my penis entered her vagina, she went into a kind of ecstatic sexual state which reminds me now, as I write, of the urgent sense of desire and power that a man can bring to sex when his most basic instincts are aroused.

So where, you may ask, was the polarity in this relationship? How come it was so passionate if she was so masculine? Was I being feminine? I'd certainly claim not, and what I think was happening was that the passionate lovemaking was bringing out her feminine side with a strong male energy behind it. Maybe, if our relationship had continued, our passion would have diminished fairly quickly after the intense excitement of that initial period of mutual sexual discovery and high sexual desire. Or maybe not.

Having said all of that, I also remember a relationship I had with a woman who was extremely feminine, and very comfortable with it. She had given birth to her children with little pain, she had never experienced much menstrual discomfort or vaginal infections, and she'd sailed though her menopause without any troubles at all. I interpret all this to mean that she was extremely comfortable in her own body, and very happy with her identity as a woman. And when we made love, the archetypal sexual Goddess that dwells in every woman emerged from her arousal and passion. When this happened, my own primal sexual God emerged to meet her Goddess, and our mutual arousal climbed to astonishingly high levels.

So in both cases it would seem that masculine - feminine polarity lay behind the passion. In fact, I think it was the cause of the passion. It certainly seems true to me that a masculine male responds to female energy. I'll come back to this in a moment.

What else makes a relationship work?

Meeting someone's needs helps because it makes them feel wanted, loved and appreciated. You can read about emotional needs and relationships here and here. Most of all, though, I think authenticity is the foundation of a good relationship. For example, if you feel angry with someone and you don't show it, is that a good thing? (I'm talking about healthy anger, not manipulative or unjustified anger.) No, because you're not being real with them. When you're angry with someone, expressing it cleanly is an authentic way to stay in emotional contact with them.

It's also important to select the right person. This can be difficult, for you may only discover what they are truly like after some period of time - for example, when you stop meeting their needs! The best way to avoid this is to establish what your needs are before you get into a long term commitment, and make sure that they are broadly similar.

How does the concept of polarity influence sexual contact? To start with, someone who has male sexual energy will trust his partner if his partner opens up to him sexually. So that delicious sense of surrender that a woman may experience when she allows her partner to penetrate her most valued and secret place - her vagina - with his most valuable asset - his penis - is matched by an opening in the man's heart that allows him to feel his emotions, and, most particularly, to feel love. In other words, she opens to him sexually because she loves him and trusts him; he opens to her emotionally because she trusts him enough to have sex with him.

But how does a woman know if a man can be trusted? More than anything else, there's something about the way a man looks at a woman that gives her the clues about how trustworthy, masculine and male he is. He conveys a message about himself and his masculinity by the expression in his eyes; later, of course, his actions tend to bear out his trustworthiness, but initially, for a woman, a man's eyes provide the most powerful clues she has about him. Even though she doesn't know how she decides, a man's eyes offer the clues that enable her to decide pretty quickly after meeting him whether or not she will ever sleep with him.

But women never stop testing men. This is what lies behind what we see as nagging, bitching and complaining: the man is being tested in his self-assuredness, his masculinity, his male strength. And the reason for the testing is that a woman needs a strong, centered man to bash her emotions against; she needs to know that her self-expression will not knock him off course, and when she does find him to be consistently firm, when he does indeed do what he says he will do, and when he proves to be a reliable mate, her emotional storms will diminish and become less - but she never stops testing him. This testing makes a man use his male energy and be a man! Or, rather, that's what it is intended to do. Unfortunately, many men in our society do not learn how to be masculine. We have the penis, but we have forgotten how to access the software that makes being a penis-owner a deeply fulfilling experience. This software is what we men colloquially refer to as our "balls" when we talk about having the balls to do something or other! (If you want to learn how to be a real man, start here.)

So how can you assess how masculine or feminine you are? You can take this test. Or, more simply, you can think of how much you want to be taken (or ravished or penetrated or whatever term you choose to use) during sex; and compare it to how much you want to be the taker, the penetrator, the ravisher. Male energy is associated with the penetration of the penis into the vagina, and that penetrative theme is a good metaphor for how a man is designed to work generally: his system is designed to seek obstacles and find challenges, then power through them to reach his goals. A woman respects a man who knows what he wants and then goes for it with single-minded purpose, powering through any resistance to get what he wants. (This is not an apologia for aggressive non-consensual sex, by the way.) If, as a man, you occasionally fantasize about being penetrated, either by your partner wearing a dildo, or by another man, then you can assume you have some feminine sexual energy washing around inside you. This isn't a bad thing, by the way, because it is the overall polarity between two people which determines the level of passion in their sexual life, not the fluctuations that happen in odd moments of fantasy.

A man needs to attend to a woman all the time to see her fully move into her feminine energy. She needs constant attention and appreciation from masculine energy - which is evolutionarily designed to attend to female energy all the time. What this means in practice is that women need reassurance and appreciation on an ongoing basis - what you said to her last week will not count this week, and big gestures may count no more than small ones. As a man, it's your job to respond to the feminine in this way. You may be thinking this is a load of balls, and it's too tedious to contemplate, but there are good reasons for doing it. First: it fulfills you because it's the way you are designed to operate. Second: you get a loving and appreciative woman eager to display her feminine side - and that leads - of course! - to passionate sex. And sex is at its best when both partners are meeting the opposite polarity to their own masculinity or femininity.