So often someone who is masculine believes he wants the love of someone who has reserved herself, who has held herself away from life or intimacy with others. He wants to earn the love of someone who can practice restraint. But when she can practice restraint at the level he thinks he wants, she has nothing to give. No life, no love, no passion.
What she is advertising is not that upon winning her love he will receive a bounty that has been reserved for only him, but that he will receive someone who has been shaped by withholding, restraint, and resistance. To conquer and be the winner of a desolate dry land is no great feat.
She who can maintain an appearance of coyness has all her attention focused on subduing her power. Masculine power will necessarily frighten her. Those who exhibit masculine power will find himself having to express this power away from her, or blanketing it with a thick layer of false chivalry, caretaking, and powerless kindness.
He will be reduced to the point where his only option is dominance or people-pleasing. There is no intimacy to be had in this place. His ego may feel gratified, he may consider himself manly and strong, but his body, heart, and soul will weep for the lack of life and lack of fecundity she transmits because that is what she has had to exist inside of.
While he may get the ego hit of the dependent adoration of childlike attachment and singular devotion, he will always feel like he is living on a fault line, knowing that at any point her power and desire could erupt, and that when it does, there will necessarily be a rage on top of it because she will know he had been colluding with her in order to keep her power down.
It is his choice. He can pay on the front end with someone who expresses her power and as a result, demands he become who he would want to be in order to meet her. Or he pays on the back end, with someone he wears the masculine archetype for, knowing that for as much love and devotion as she expresses, there is that much hatred and anger beneath the surface that will have to be paid off at some point.
What the true masculine wants is the true feminine, who loves indiscriminately, who feeds, fills, and exchanges love with the world with such abandon that she lives off the interest only. He wants someone with a principle sufficient to support herself, him, and our communal dreams. He wants enough love in her to build worlds together.
He wants enough love in her that he can afford to make mistakes, and for her to have enough love to understand and respond rather than react or pretend love as she seethes beneath the surface.
What he wants is not to be a man who is able to compete with other men at the most base level of masculine, but to be fully expressed in his masculine such that he is thrown into the sphere of someone with such fully expressed feminine power that people gravitate toward her. He wants to be in the presence of her love and to be so inspired for the rest of his life to rise into the greatest he can be, so when she looks out at all she loves, she sees him above others, because of who he has become in greatness, in contribution, in resourcefulness, in his ability to pay attention, and in developing his presence.
And most importantly, in his capacity to sense precisely where the spot is and how to stroke it open so that the connection between them is one that always opens into more greatness. The option is his: endlessly slay dragons for someone who will likely never descend, or become that which he knows exists inside of him in the name of someone who overflows with true feminine love.