Challenges to the Inner Marriage Include Learning how to Express Masculine and Feminine Energies in a Relaxed Way
Let’s consider that an important goal along the spiritual path is finding, assessing and working on your masculine and feminine sides. Whether you’re man or a woman isn’t the issue. Your healthy positive expressions of masculinity and femininity and the relationship between the two will hugely affect how your life goes. The first and most important ingredient in this relationship is love which means your thinking side must love your feelings and your feeling side must love how you think.
For those who have been active in trying to apply these teachings, the day to day effort can seem like a lot. It is because we have had nonexistent, weak or misguided role models. We have formed opinions about genders based on romantic relationships, siblings, parents and world figures. We may be striving to be a certain way because our egos observed something and decided that was a good model to follow.
Many of these examples are negative expressions of masculinity or femininity. The classics are defined as being too far to one side. The manly man doesn’t bother with feelings because he doesn’t want to be weak. He’s here to fix problems and make all the decisions. The girly girl is all about making herself beautiful and is entitled to have emotional fits when she doesn’t get her way. I doubt these sound like healthy role models but in our world, they are considered appropriate.
There are a few interim stages when you make the effort to find and live from both. This is where we are trying to have healthy expressions of positive male and female energies and we haven’t quite settled into the groove, sort of an awkward teenage phase if you will. We call these expressions mock masculine and mock feminine.
The expression ‘mock’ comes from the notion that we are trying to mimic something we have witnessed or something that has been told to us but we don’t yet know it intrinsically. Let’s look at each and how they come off.
Mock feminine is an expression that acts in touch with feelings but is only so at an intellectual level. Sometimes this can be called ‘nicey nice’ which is a syrupy sweet, super positive, ‘happy all the time kind’ of disposition. In essence, it’s fake. The person might want to feel very positive and happy and thus is trying to project such a thing but it’s not genuine. Most people will be able to feel that something isn’t right.
This can happen to men or women but is typical in people who have been shut down in their feeling side usually because their feelings were not honored or valued. What happens is an exaggeration of the feminine. It can manifest as an enthusiasm that is felt as too much. It actually creates a pressure because it’s not giving but taking. The mock feminine expression is trying too hard to be the real feelings but doesn’t know fully how to feel so it exaggerates and looks to the expressions of those around them to validate the feeling. This is why we say it’s taking and not giving.
Other ways that mock feminine comes across is when someone is so enamored and cares so incredibly much that it’s almost painful. “Oh my God! I’m so happy for you! That is so wonderful!” It’s a person trying to be supportive and nurturing to another person but is way over the top. It’s not that the person doesn’t care or doesn’t want to connect. It’s that they can’t feel their real feelings yet and they are acting in a way they think you should in those moments. Their smile is too huge, their tone is too much and the whole presentation can feel like a sales pitch. This isn’t real feminine in a balanced way. It’s someone trying to act feminine but not knowing how.
Mock feminine is different than negative feminine. Negative feminine is where the person gets into negative emotional states and refuses to allow their masculine thinking function to move them out of it with reasonable solutions. It puts us in a whiny self-centered entitled mode of being that wants to pollute the atmosphere with our unhappiness. In this case, the feelings are real but we have shut out the masculine that wants to resolve the difficulty. This is a person refusing to honor and take on their masculine. They want someone else to fix things for them. It’s the helpless damsel who seeks a man to be her prince and if he doesn’t do it right, she throws a fit.
Let’s talk about mock masculine next. Mock masculine is where a person is trying to carry their decisive authority but the energy is not truly confident. This comes across when a person doesn’t know what they are doing but is acting like they do. A version of this is someone acting tough or cold because they think that is what a strong man is supposed to do. They order people about and do so without a consideration for other’s feelings (including their own) because they are faking what a man should do.
A good leader who has positive masculine energy is someone who is relaxed and able to make decisions relatively promptly once they know the information that affects the decision. They recognize that decisions involve risk and that no decision is 100% right. A good leader has the confidence to hear the input of those his decision will affect and consider them but in the end, makes the decision that he deems will be best. He has compassion for those his decision affects but doesn’t waiver from it.
The mock masculine energy doesn’t feel confident in its leadership ability because it hasn’t learned how to consider his feelings and promptly reason through the options available. He is essentially guessing and yet trying to appear very sure. They add forcefulness in how they express, thinking that force is a positive aspect to authority.
True authority relaxes people who then want to follow and want to perform at their highest level. Mock masculine authority leaves people feeling like their leader is hypocritical. Positive masculine does the work to explore the options before them and carefully assess the risks associated with each. It considers your feelings and your wisdom (aspects of the feminine) before presenting the best course of action. Authority comes from knowing and knowing comes from doing and experiencing.
Mock masculine is trying to appear as an expert but hasn’t done the work nor had a lot of experience. Its act will be very apparent to those who carry positive masculine. It’s as though they want to say, “You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?”
Remember that our positive masculine not only decides what to do but then ignites the will and gets it done. It is the action component to the feminine reflective. The masculine acts and the feminine supports, offering the love element to offset the sheer accomplishment mentality. Positive masculine leaves room for the positive feminine to interject all the time but once the decision is made, positive masculine follows through unless some distinct, new information comes to light.
The mind and ego can get in the way of both our masculine and feminine expressions. Our ego wants us to be good at this stuff without having done the work to learn how. Learning how to have feelings and care about things is hard work initially. Gaining experiences by having the courage to get involved in life and take risks is also work. Applying oneself as in accumulating knowledge and improving in a particular field will increase your authority. The word originates from the ‘author’. An author can write about a topic because they are an expert on it. They become an expert after doing it for a while and getting really good at it.
Positive masculine has skill and ability from experience. This leads to confidence and relaxation. As long as our thinking side includes our feeling side in its decisions and actions, we are likely to succeed. This is in contrast to negative masculine. Negative masculine can be an authority because it has a lot of experience and is in fact an expert. The negative aspect is in its lack of care for the feelings. It has a bullying quality, doing what it wants and not considering his own feelings or the feelings of others.
When a person with this tendency has feelings, they don’t have a process to manage them. They get moody and often withdraw wanting to solve the problem without including others. This is hard for one’s partner who wants to help. But the negative masculine wants to do it on their own without any help. Their ego is trying to preserve an image because it believes true masculine doesn’t need help just because of some tough feelings. It is afraid of being weak.
If you have tendency to do either of these, stop immediately. It’s going to turn a lot of people off. If you know you do this and keep doing it, it’s lazy. If you are truly striving to be more balanced and realize that you are faking it, pull back and try making a dramatic shift in how you express. Be a lot more subtle.
You can see that these issues are very common in marriages between men and women. That’s because people have these imbalances within themselves and the inner always expresses and manifests to the outer. Put the time in to learn how to be a man and a woman both. A man will generally express his femininity in a way that is attractive to women if he avoids mock feminine and really knows how he feels. There is no way to get there but by caring about how you feel and processing feelings on a day to day basis.
Women acting with positive masculine are very attractive to men. They initiate things and act with confidence. They have authority in the things they know well and a man will always respect authority that is based in love. In fact the whole thing is based in love. It’s doing the work because you care. Once you have these parts in balance within yourself, you’ll feel loved. You’ll be loving yourself and your need for your partner to solve all your problems or validate all your feelings will greatly diminish.