XI. The Battlefield and the Wishing Well, or Where Important Things Happen

The adventures of men and women tend to take place in entirely different realms. Men focus on events/objects/tasks—concrete data; women focus on emotional responses to concrete data, and on responses to prior responses. Men believe they must successfully do things, and that the external world is the arena in which they must prove themselves against others; women believe that the source of possibility and danger is within their own Hidden and Unknown Depths—that they must learn more and more about who they are and what they need, and then incorporate these discoveries into their values and sense of identity.

Men typically experience life as a series of discrete challenges; what we can call the Male Mythic Pattern is something like this:

targetingàconfrontingàstrugglingàmastering

Satisfaction comes from mastering one challenge, then proceeding to the next. Successfully meeting a challenge often leads to a tangible reward. Women tend to view their adventures as connected—in fact, they tend to see all of their challenges as different steps in a single continuous journey, one which leads to a deeper understanding of themselves. Each step produces not a tangible reward but an emotional realization. This journey is an inward one, because women feel that they have limitless depths and potential which neither they nor anyone else fully understands. Their life’s purpose is to discover ever more of what is hidden within these depths. For a woman, every sensory or emotional experience is an opportunity for discovering more about herself. What we can call the Female Mythic Pattern, or the Realization Cycle, is something like this:

realizingàacceptingàopeningàconnectingàincorporating

Recall this example from the last chapter:

                                     connection with real selfà

                                excitementà

                           anxietyà

                     stressà

Example:    tensionàpacking up house, preparing to moveà

Each single emotion in the “packing up a house” example above is processed through the Realization Cycle of realizationàincorporation.

Men overcome, and master the environment; women realize, and connect with themselves.

How is this information useful?

When you describe an emotion or experience in terms of the Realization Cycle—that is, as if everything implies the existence of a more powerful emotion which is waiting to be realized—a woman will tend to relate to it very easily, feel the emotion you’re describing, and feel more emotionally connected to you. Obviously, the greater the number of descriptions that you supply in this format, the stronger her connection to you will become. Example:

“When you REALIZE this sense of serenity blah blah blah; ACCEPT blah blah blah serenity blah blah blah; OPEN blah blah serenity; CONNECT…serenity; INCORPORATE blah blah blah serenity.” Serenity in this example is an arbitrarily chosen emotion; you could substitute peace, excitement, love, destiny, passion, curiosity, or what have you. The descriptions in the cycle (realize/accept/open/connect/incorporate) are also quite flexible—the general idea is one of recognition, gradually leading to taking an emotion “inside”, and you need only choose words to reflect these processes—you needn’t stick to the words given. Female satisfaction comes from experiencing progressively greater “heights”/ “depths” / “intensity” of emotion—that is, making finer and more elaborate emotional distinctions in regard to some stimulus from the physical world. These distinctions can be drawn by, and manipulated with, language. Feeling “passion” and “awareness” and “wholeness” is better than simply experiencing “passion” and “wholeness”. Feeling “true passion” is better than experiencing “passion”. Because these verbal distinctions are meaningful to women, you can add or subtract a word and change her emotional response.

Remember, while these verbal descriptions of emotions seem laughably empty to a man, they are deeply meaningful to women. Women and men genuinely are deeply different. Put another way, women tend to feel that physical events and objects are trivial, next to the emotional responses that they generate. Everything physical is experienced as emotionally symbolic; and whatever emotion she’s feeling can be diminished, intensified, or transformed by whatever you say.

Emotions are subjective, and not bounded by sensory limits; they are therefore infinite and malleable. You help a woman “grow” (i.e., you create rapport and deepen her emotional response) by describing the next, “deeper” emotion to which any given emotion can lead. You can talk of “learning” leading to “appreciating” leading to “enjoying” leading to “feeling passion”.

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