When I talk about the old relationship forms breaking down, and old gender roles crumbling, I think it’s good to remember that a very definite catalyst for these changes has been the profound changes in the consciousness of women. And there’s no way we can talk about the nature of relationships today without trying to understand those changes.
If I wasn’t a woman, I could never say some of the things I do, because if they came out of a man’s mouth he’d be run out of town. But being a strong and independent-minded woman, I’ve given a lot of thought to women’s issues, and I’m not shy about saying what I think.
Before we can talk meaningfully about relationships, there are a few things we need to understand and agree upon. In other words, “Let’s face it, these are the ground rules.” And if we’re going to make the relationships game work, we have to play by the rules. We cannot simply wish that the rules were different, or that we can change them.
The rules weren’t created willy-nilly by someone with an axe to grind. They’ve come into existence as a result of cosmic forces operating outside our influence, in the context of these particular times. And one of the changes today is that gender roles have become more flexible.
Our gender identities have gotten more blended and mixed-up, and women have helped shift that dynamic, but they haven’t quite figured out how to turn back around and relate to men.
The men, meanwhile, are being challenged to reconsider their traditional roles, while at the same time they can’t figure out where they’re supposed to land in the new scheme of things.
When we talk about women and men, what we’re really talking about is feminine and masculine energy. And it’s only partly about men and women considered as separate entities. Because these energies exist in a spectrum, and every man and woman has the potential to experience a unique balance of male and female qualities within their own nature.
So when I say “women,” I’ll mostly be talking about feminine energy. And because it’s an uncontroversial way to think about it, I’ll bring in the symbol of yin and yang, where impersonal cosmic nature is always trying to balance the opposite qualities that make up the whole.
It’s a convenient way to talk about relationships in an age of energy, because no one feels offended when you talk about pure energy, without hinting at a battle between polar opposites, or an argument about which one is better.
Yin energy is feminine, yang is masculine. And it’s generally the yin energy, the feminine energy, that’s sensitive to the nuances of relationships. And it’s yang energy that can go out and look at the big picture and drive forward to accomplish things in the world.
Lots of women today are very yang, and lots of men are somewhat more yin, partly because the fixed points on the gender spectrum have been set loose and gotten mixed up as a result of the more fluid general energy-awareness that has entered our consciousness today. And men are getting beaten up for being too yang, to the point where they’re trying to be more yin. But then the yang women are complaining that the men are too yin. So there’s less of a balance in the energy of our relationships that can satisfy everyone.
In fact, what we’re looking for in our interactions with the other sex is a balance. After living with my second husband for several years, I began to understand that it makes no difference who puts out one kind of energy or the other, so long as there’s a balance. Because it isn’t just standing up for one side that will satisfy and fulfill us, but the feeling that we’re balanced within ourselves.
Some of the relationships I’ve observed over the years have been completely reversed from the traditional idea about the gender roles. The man was yin and the woman was yang, and they worked fine together because the net result was a lovely balance, and everybody was happy. But regardless of the shift in gender energies, you cannot have an intimate relationship without a balance.
Women are determined to get into yang energy nowadays, in part because the modern world demands it, and we can no longer expect to be comfortably married and taken care of.
To be married and taken care of means that you don’t have to think about conquering the world. You can draw a circle around your space and make it beautiful and warm, in all of the traditional yin ways that can be very satisfying. But because women have become more yang, it has taken the traditional schematic and tipped it over.
Also, there’s a great deal of false teaching about gender and relationships. And I call it false, because it doesn’t bring us happiness.
Women have failed to understand that they can’t be unrelentingly yang, and still expect to find the kind of inner balance that will give them a genuine sense of fulfillment. Women today are taught to stand up for themselves and speak their lines and not let men dominate them. I’ve heard a number of you say this, and I’m not suggesting that you take a subservient role, because that’s not a healthy path for anyone, either.
In my first marriage, I basically became my husband’s disciple. It was wonderful training for me, and he was a fine fellow, very intelligent and warm and wonderful. But it wasn’t a good marriage.
Swami Kriyananda said to me, “if you want to be with him next time, why don’t you have him be your brother? It would be fine. But you’re not a good married couple.”
Our problem was that we were so much alike that we were always playing the same note. And it wasn’t enough to make a life together, because it wasn’t a balance. So I literally disappeared. In an effort to try to create a balance, I became his disciple. And he wasn’t a guru, so it wasn’t a healthy situation for either of us.
People sometimes ask me, “How can I tell when a relationship is over?” And I say, “Ask your mother.”
Your mother will usually know. After my first marriage ended, my mother and sister confided that they could never figure out what was more remarkable, that I was willing to be subservient, or that he wanted me to be that way. I don’t think it was conscious on my part, it was just something I dove into, and I stayed there until the marriage ended.
At the same time, I’ve come to appreciate that feminine psychology has a certain reality of its own, and male psychology has its own very different reality. And I think it’s completely unrealistic for most people to assume that they can find a perfect balance in their own selves without learning to relate to the other sex.
People who’ve chosen to incarnate in a male body have a certain dynamic that they’ve decided to work with, and people who’ve chosen to incarnate in a female body have another dynamic that they’re working out. And not to take that into consideration, but to imagine that we can simply dismiss it with a wave of the hand or by a bit of intellectual word-juggling, or by adopting an aggressive strut, will result in what we very commonly see today, which is a great inability to hold our lives together and feel inwardly whole.
I’ve observed that people are often attracted on a spectrum, with a super-yin energy at one end and super-yang at the other. And if you’re attracted in a healthy way, where the relationship creates a good balance, you tend to be attracted about equally, and the balance fulfills you.
An extreme example would be a big, macho guy who likes a dumb, sexy, very girly girl. It’s an extreme example, but if you find that you’re nicely balanced, even in such an extreme way, it can help you find an inner balance that might open doors to have an expansive and satisfying relationship.
But then it sometimes happens that one partner starts scooting toward the center. And that’s what’s happening for many women and men today. They start out nicely balanced with each other, and then very often the woman will start scooting toward the yang position. Or just as often, he’ll start scooting toward a yin position, and then she suddenly finds her inner sense of security weakening, because instead of playing the big, strong, protective male, he’s starting to think about how he feels.
One man wrote very convincingly: “If men actually thought about how they feel, do you think that they could do the kind of work they have to do? Do you think they could go off to those jobs every day and do that work?”
He said, “they have to suppress how they feel. And when you start pressing them to be more open about their feelings, maybe they’ll start getting into it, and it might not be what you wanted.”
So much is written about the female side that it helps to get the male end of the story once in a while.
Men have learned, as this man wrote, not to be too sensitive. He said, “we were trained not to be sensitive. We were trained not to cry. We were trained to play football. We were trained to go into the Army. We had to train ourselves in these professions, and go to work every day and do these jobs, and work overtime and not ask questions about it. And it was all fine. But now we come home and the woman wants us to be sensitive and vulnerable, and all these things. So we start doing it, and then we don’t want to do the other part anymore.”
He said, “And it makes it very hard on both ends.”
The risk is that you’ll lose respect on the job, and you’ll create resistance at home, if you’re a man and you suddenly start to become more yin than the woman in the relationship had bargained for.
The reason we have these blended-gender relationships today is that it’s our nature. Our nature is to crave a balance, because we instinctively know that it will bring us a sense of wholeness and fulfillment.
We’re longing, as Paramhansa Yogananda said, to expand our awareness, because we intuitively know that it’s how our happiness will increase. And one way to do that is to open up to the qualities that we’ve been suppressing in ourselves.
The longing for a balance of yin and yang is part of our nature. We’re born on the yin or yang side, as determined by our physical bodies. And maybe your temperament from past lives also plays a role. But generally speaking, there’s at least some temperamental connection to the male or female body that we’re born in. And it’s a place to start learning to access the opposite energy and find the balance that will fulfill us.
The key is freedom. You need to be free to become whatever your life is asking of you. And if you suddenly find yourself divorced, and you have to start making money, you’ll need to become somewhat more yang. And if you have a tremendous drive for a career, maybe you’ll need to be more yang.
But if you get too far off center, you’ll find that it isn’t working, and it’s not sustaining you in the long term.
If a man becomes little more than a money-making machine, entirely yang and lacking any yin feeling, he’ll wither inside. You see those men at the end of their lives, and there’s nothing sweet about their nature. So they’ve lost, and everybody in their lives loses.
We’re tremendously attracted to the qualities that complement us, and we want to experience them close‑up and firsthand – so we can expand our consciousness to include it, to become sympathetic, and to understand what moves our opposite.
Women want to be understood by men, and men want to be understood by women in a different way. And they express that inner need in different ways.
When I was able to truly understand where my second husband was coming from, and why he did what he did, I found that to a much greater extent I had absorbed into myself a balance of yang consciousness.
But when I was simply insisting that he was wrong because he wasn’t like me, and he, because he was strong in himself, would insist that he wasn’t about to become like me, then we would have an impasse, and something would have to change before we could find a healthy balance that served us both. Because, let’s face it, he wasn’t born to be a woman.
In the next articles, I’ll say more about the longing for happiness and freedom in our relationships, and how can satisfy that longing by expanding our awareness to include the qualities that will balance us in ourselves.