I got asked what women really need from men these days, and it's a question that hits at something real. The rules have changed from what most of us were taught growing up, and a lot of guys are walking around confused about what it even means to be a man anymore.
We dug into how structural shifts are pulling the ground out from under men. More women getting educated at higher rates, automation taking over manual labor, the economy shifting toward relational service work, which most of us men are pretty underdeveloped in. And then on top of that, we're being asked to show up with more complexity and fluidity in our relationships. Not easier for anyone, but definitely asking more of us in some pretty specific ways.
What I kept coming back to was emotional capacity. Most of us learned to freeze, disappear, or come out swinging when tension shows up. Neither works. The real skill is learning to stay present with intense energy, with your partner's emotions, without collapsing into them or pushing them away. That steadiness used to be about providing shelter and food. Now it's about being able to hold a nervous system state when she's dysregulated, to be a lifeline instead of making things more complex.
And yeah, we talked about sexual polarity too. How more women are holding their masculine energy all day and want to not have to in intimate relationship. How that requires us to actually feel our desire without shame, to get into our bodies and learn to attune. Safety and turn on don't happen separately. They're connected.
This stuff takes real work. Getting into your body, healing shame, building the capacity to hold discomfort. It's not a weekend fix, but the growth can happen faster than you think when you're in the right container with the right support.
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Melanie Curtin: Providing emotional safety means doing personal growth work. It's an inside job. Providing emotional safety to me, your woman partner involves you doing therapy, coaching work, personal growth retreats, medicine, journeys. You know, all of the work that it takes to actually integrate trauma and become more steady, safe and secure in yourself and with life, right? With the greater web, with the greater whole feeling part of that. Hi everyone, A few quick announcements before this episode. First, I noticed that a few of you have gotten my streaming course, Please her in Bed, which is the course that I teach about sex and it is based on my sex research. If you are someone who has taken that course in the past, I would love to get a little bit of feedback about how it was for you if you experienced any results as a as a results as a result of taking it. So you can get [email protected] I'd love to hear from a few of you. Or if you're going through the course now, I just want to get some feedback on that. So if you have any, please send it along to me. And then I wanted to mention that as I've said before, our live retreat is coming up at the end of August, which is three months away. And I know that people are making summer plans and figuring out their situation and travel and all of that. So I just wanted to update you all that. That retreat is over half full already. It will sell out. It has sold the past few years and it will again. If you are interested in that, you can go to Evolutionary Men Retreat to find out more. Pricing depends on where you stay. It's a beautiful location. I strongly recommend it. If you've been wanting to do some in person work, I could not recommend that more highly. And then if you are interested in contributing to the community and joining the community, you can always become a patron of the podcast. If you do that at a $10 a month level or more, then you will get access to our free live Q&As. And I'm thinking of adding some goodies to that. Stay tuned for more announcements about Patreon and other things that are gonna be coming up in that vein. And then if you are interested in coaching, you can always get us at Evolutionary Men Apply. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a Jason Lange episode. Always love those. This is a fun topic because I think it's one of the things in the collective consciousness right now and has been for a while. And it is that yes, we women still need men just in a different way than we have in the past. And I think some of you heard me reference the book of Boys and Men by Reeves. His first name is something I'm forgetting. He also has some TED Talks. But one of the things that's been increasingly apparent over the last, I would say at least 10 to 20 years, maybe 20 to 30, but really in the last 10 to 20 years is how much boys and men are struggling emotionally, financially. And I'm talking about mostly middle and lower classes, not the 1%, but the rest of us.
Jason Lange: And.
Melanie Curtin: And it's more than just the outer trappings, I think. It's the interior experience, the inner experience. What is my value? What is my purpose? What am I here for? What am I good for? There's a kind of a malaise or there's been some confusion or doubt or just. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe you have better words than I do. And then alongside that, there is the loneliness epidemic, which is that men in particular are more socially isolated than ever. And that includes, honestly, men that are in partnership. Right. Not just men that are not partnered, although they, you know, arguably have it the worst. But also partnered people, not just men, but all of us, live in such an isolated way that it's exacerbating everything else that's going on. So we're going to be talking today about how women still need men. We still need you. We really need you, just in a different way than we have in the past. And we're going to get into the two primary needs that we have from men and how men can provide those. Any comments on that sort of section, especially about boys and men?
Jason Lange: Yeah, it's definitely a real thing. And I think where a lot of guys you and I work with, part of what's bringing them towards us is I. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. Right. Like, the rules are a little different than what I was taught growing up, and I don't even know what a man is. Right. And we get a lot of conflicting signals these days about what that's supposed to be as men. And then there's structural changes in society that are kind of simultaneously pulling the ground out out of a lot of men. Right. More and more women are getting educated at a higher rate, at least in Western nations than men. My kind of theory is that as automation and AI comes in, like they actually don't have anything to do with each other in terms of etymology, but right, right there in the word manual labor is man. And turned out a lot of physical labor, a lot of highly repetitive kind of industry tended to be men's bodies. A lot of that's going away to automation. And we are definitely seeing a shift into more of a relational service economy, right, where it's about people relating to each other, whether that's at a coffee shop or coaching, you know, whatever that might be. And that's an area where us men tend to be pretty underdeveloped, right, because we're not taught how to engage and relate and connect with someone or manage, you know, each other. In a sense, a lot of us men just kind of have a fuck it, I'm out. You know, when conflict or tension comes in, in relationships, and that's left a lot of guys a little lost and I would say a little confused as to, okay, how do I, you know, how do I win? How do I win in this? And then that just gets accentuated in terms of the actual interpersonal dynamics that are changing very much between men and women and that we'll talk about many of the shifts there and the very real reality. And I want to be super clear here, it's not easier for either side, men or women, right? There's challenges on both sides, but we're mostly going to speak to the part for men about how men. We are being asked to show up more, with more complexity, more fluidity in some pretty important ways we're going to get into.
Melanie Curtin: I really like that phrase complexity and fluidity, and I think that's something that I think about a lot, is that it used to be in the past, in many places around the world, not just in Western culture, that a man's primary role was breadwinner, that that man provided financial security and actual food on the table. Some people were farming around the world, but just that was a primary function of a man. And it was simple. When I say the word simple, I do not mean easy, right? I'm thinking about Russia in particular. Life was hard, really hard in a lot of ways. So I don't mean easy when I say the word simple, but what I mean is it's very clear. Am I providing financially for my family, yes or no? You know, and that was easy to answer. The reason we're doing this episode is that what a lot of women want now and what we need, what we really need from our men is not necessarily financial security. There are lots of couples where both couple, both members of the couple are earning or they're trading back and forth, right? I'm earning while you go through grad school. You're earning while I go through nursing school. We're we're trading that. And in some couples, the woman makes significantly more money. There's a lot more complexity around who is earning the money for the family. So that is not a primary need in a lot of modern relationships. It's not. It is still in some relationships sometimes, but for a lot of women, that is not the primary need. What we're going to talk about today are the two needs that I've identified and kind of. We've worked with a lot, and what we're kind of seeing as the larger pattern of what women really need from men. And the first one is emotional attunement. First one is emotional attunement. The second one is generating polarity. And we're going to do these in order. So we're going to do the first one, then the second one. And I'm going to reference a few other episodes that we've already done. And if you did resonate, for example, with that question about loneliness, I did an episode called are you lonely? I strongly recommend that. And we also did one called how to handle her big feelings, which we're going to get into shortly. So one of the primary needs, I would say, for a lot of women, and I'm using the word women, but this is really. It doesn't necessarily matter which bodies you're in. It's more who's holding the masculine pole. Right? Who's holding the alpha pole or the omega pole. Some of you have heard me talk about those words before. In polarity, we tend to use the words alpha and omega instead of masculine, feminine, because those words come loaded up with a lot of crap, to be honest. But whoever's holding an alpha pole, and then whoever's holding a more Omega pole. Omega is more flow and radiance, and alpha is more structure and containment. Right, Containment. So when it. When we're talking about emotional resonance or emotional safety, emotional attunement, all of these are similar. One of the things that I've found that I really need from a man in order to feel safe with him is to know that I can bring my emotional intensity. And when I say the word intensity, I don't just mean negative. It could be, you know, I'm annoyed or I'm upset, but it could also be my joy or my sexual expression or my bigness. My bigness, my fullness, my. My vast Omega self. I need to be able to bring that and feel like I can be met. I can be met. So another way of saying this is I'm not going to blow him out, right that he can handle me. When I say I need a man who can handle me, sometimes women will say that part of what we mean is I need to know that there's a sturdy container over there that he is grounded and secure in himself so that he can hold me. And for a lot of men, that robust container is not set. You know, they are easily overwhelmed. They are easily, you know, blown out by a woman's upset or radiance or whatever you want to call it. It. And I would love to hear from you a little bit about, you know, your journey, because in your 20s you were probably not able to handle a woman's fullness, and then you did a bunch of work and now you're much more able to hold that and contain that. Can you speak as a man to your experience of going from that state, from one state to the other?
Jason Lange: Absolutely, yeah. You know, in my 20s, I just avoided discomfort or conflict. I would just freeze, go quiet, or disappear were my main strategies for dealing with that. Or. And then eventually kind of deny and deflect and defend. As Dr. Glover says, the shift to being more comfortable was honestly just getting more into my body and learning much healthier expressions of boundaries and being able to just hold intense energy, intention. Right. And as I've said before, to, you know, not be afraid of my partner's emotions, in a sense, in, in also not necessarily believe they're 100% real for the rest of ever, you know. Right. The guy says, oh my gosh, it's this way, it's going to be that way forever. It's like, no, if you're just present with the energy, it often shifts. And that capacity is one a lot of us guys are really under trained in, because the first place we learn to be present with emotions is often with ourselves. And so if we don't have a capacity to attune and be present to ourselves, as we often talk about, it's really hard to do that with a partner. So any kind of emotional tension we avoid internally, we're going to avoid externally with the feminine as well. And so when we don't have the tools to support ourselves, lo and behold, we don't have the tools to support our feminine partner. And that causes, you know, usually the two primary reactions of men, which are the collapse, freeze, disappear, like I tended to do, or the posturing, the aggression that, well, I'm going to come at you harder. Neither of which are really productive or conducive to deeper connection. And, you know, another way to maybe relate this to how we came in is, in some sense, culturally, we're. We're kind of moving up a little bit here in the West. Those of us that are, you know, not in the lower classes, we're moving up the hierarchy of needs. And so to provide, as a man used to just be literally, I'm providing you shelter and food. And in a sense, steadiness in the external world, as we've moved up, that steadiness, which is part of what we're going to kind of talk about, is often a desirable attribute here. That rock solidness you talk about that moves up to the emotional realm. Can you provide me steadiness in a very turbulent world? In a sense, it's not that life wasn't incredibly stressful before, but you could say our horizon of stress is much larger now because there's both what's happening acutely around us and then just because of information, we're holding the stress of the unknown, of really the entire globe in people in a way that wasn't done before. And that uncertainty then, obviously has huge impact on our nervous systems. And then you tie it back to how we're going to live. And there's a lot more, you know, room, at least in the places we walk, for dealing with this emotional stuff, which in some sense makes it even more important for us men to have the capacity to work with it, both in ourselves and in feminine partners. And it's not something most of us will just stumble across on our own. Because unless we got really lucky and had it modeled in a family system that this is stuff we have to explicitly seek out and train in, because it's not part of our school system, it's not part of most of our families, it's not part of most mainstream religions. This is kind of a new emergent skill set and technique for, yeah, how do I stay present? To be able to create emotional safety for my spouse, for my kids if they have them, and obviously for myself.
Melanie Curtin: Yeah. I want to ground this in the reality of relationships. So I'm gonna give a personal example. I had a partner who was pretty sharp, and not all the time, but if I was annoyed or upset or made some kind of comment, he would respond in kind or worse. So he was. He would lawyer up, right? He said he would lawyer up and get a little bit mean. Like, a little bit mean, a little bit harsh. And to make a long story short, that did not provide emotional safety. And one of the main things I was tracking throughout our relationship was, are you working on that? Are you getting support around that. Are you doing your trauma work? Because it was pretty obvious that, you know, a lot of the origins of his stuff were from childhood. Big surprise there. And. And unprocessed grief. Unprocessed grief that had calcified into resentment. Resentment at the world for not taking better care of him. And anger and sort of a generalized anger and resentment that would sometimes get directed at me. And one of the points that I want to make here is that he was a really good partner in a lot of ways. And he was very able to generate polarity, which is the other side of this scale that we're going to get to. But he was not able to provide emotional safety and he was not willing to do the work needed to provide that. So I left him. And he didn't want that. He didn't want me to leave him. That was not his choice. And the reason I bring that up is because I think that there are ways that a lot of men will perceive emotional safety as, oh, I can provide that. Like, I've got you, you know, like whatever you want, or I'm just gonna. I'll always be there for you. I'll do anything for you. I'm gonna provide, provide, provide. But in most instances, right, we can.
Jason Lange: Just find each other. We can come back to the ventral vagal in the poly vagal sense, which is a huge skill and capacity. We're not withdrawing and collapsing into that blown out parasympathetic, and we're not going into the fight attack mode of sympathetic as well. I'm still here and I'm holding our difference and I'm staying in connection with you. I don't need you to be different right now. I don't need to be different right now. And that is a real skill set where I developed that confrontational tolerance. As we've talked about before, something we work with our guys on retreat of like holding that energy of, whoa, you're over there and I'm over here and we're not aligned, or you're feeling something and I'm not feeling something doesn't mean I have to collapse into your feeling either. Right? That's another thing I've talked about on here. If when I said boundary work, I was in years past not creating emotional safety for my partner when I would let her nervous system dictate the state of my nervous system. Because then if she was dysregulated and I got dysregulated about her dysregulation, lo and behold, I'm not useful to anyone. I'VE just actually made the situation more complex and painful for both of us. Because then if I'm dysregulated, she's dysregulated. Connection goes down. If I can see her, you know, she's not in a great state. Doesn't mean I have to take that on. I can still be present and stay connected with her. That actually supports her way more because, in a sense, it gives her, like a lifeline out of. Okay, there's some steady energy here, so I can really feel what I need to feel in my depth. I don't even need you to change it oftentimes. And then, boom, we can reconnect.
Melanie Curtin: I'm thinking about a success story from one of our clients who. It was interesting when he came to us, he had been married for a while, you know, a couple decades, to two different women. And one of the things that he was working on in his relationship was polarity. And interestingly, part of what our work together involved was embodiment, which we talk about all the time. But the reason I'm mentioning it here is that this man was. Came from the world of the 12 step programs. So he had done a lot of personal growth work with respect to that. And there's a lot of value in that world, and there's not a lot of talk about embodiment. And when he started working with us, he noticed tremendous shifts in his own consciousness and in his relationship with his woman. And this was one of the places that he grew the most, was learning how to stay steady when she was not. And in the past, there was a lot of please and appease. You know, he was like, I'll do anything. What, you know, what do you need for, you know, what do you need to feel better? I'll do whatever it is that you need to feel better. And there was a lot of kind of, I would say, catering to her and sort of going her side of the street and trying to sweep up her side of the street, right? And then after the work that we. That we did, there was a lot more of him staying in his body and breathing deeply and providing emotional safety in a totally different way. That was very grounding and healing for their relationship. And what he found was that that led to hotter sex, that there's a connection between providing emotional safety and providing sexual fire, which we're going to get to in the next section. We're going to talk about polarity explicitly. But I want to kind of emphasize here that these aren't separate. They're linked. They're related. And emotional safety is the foundation of healthy sex and, and hot sex, to be honest, like a lot of really hot sex in, especially in the, you know, more tantric sense of merging, is laid on a foundation of emotional safety. And I loved what you said about emotional safety does not mean please and appease. And I think that's what I was trying to. To say more explicitly was that this doesn't equal that. And I'm going to give another personal example. I had a partner where he was trying really hard to provide emotional safety. But one of the things that would happen when he got triggered and we were in conflict was that he would dissociate. So there were times when he. We would talk about it later and he wouldn't even remember what he said or what I said or, you know, things that had happened because he was dissociated. And in a similar way, I was tracking, like, are you working on this? Are you doing your growth work around this? Yes, we. We are. We are going to couples therapy. We are. We are working on it together. And are you working on it, too? And. And when I say working on it, part of what I really want to emphasize here is, you know, in your journey, Jason, you worked with a number of different mentors, male and female. You worked with massage therapists, you worked with somatic therapists, you worked with, you know, workshop leaders. You went on personal growth retreats. You invested thousands of dollars in your growth, in your. In your capacity to hold intensity and your nervous system. And you've done that over the course of years. And I just want to say that's what it takes. That's what it actually takes to provide emotional safety. Unless you grew up in a home with secure attachment, which most people did not, you gotta do something about this stuff. It doesn't just work itself out. And that is. That is again, why I left the relationship. Because I was like, I don't. This isn't gonna change unless you do some work around it on your own. And with other men in particular. The safety around. Yeah, the secure. The security of being around men that you deeply trust that are holding you, that have got your back. You know, we just did an episode about, do you trust men? All of that is relevant because what I need from you as a woman is I need your steadiness, I need your groundedness. I need your presence. I need your rootedness. I need that in order to feel like I can be my full self and that it doesn't accidentally happen. It doesn't just happen one day. Right. You kind of got to work for it. Can you speak to that briefly before we start to shift to polarity?
Jason Lange: Yeah, it's, you know, it's training. It's. It's an actual capacity we have to build that just like to go lift a heavier weight. You have to practice and stress your system, in a sense, and actually practice going towards friction and discomfort is really the root of the work, both sometimes physical and particularly what we're talking about, emotional learning to actually stay present with emotional and even spiritual discomfort, in that you can get the tools for that just kind of like with polarity in a weekend. But it takes time to actually build that capacity inside ourselves, and it often takes healing as well. Right. So if I'm triggered by my shame every time I give you feedback, there's not a lot we can do to change that. Until I learn to work with my shame so it doesn't take me down. And when you look at me in the eye and say, hey, this thing you did really hurt me, I don't just collapse like something I would do previously into. Into my shamanator, as some guys know. Instead, I can stay present and, okay, yeah, I. I hear you. Doesn't feel good to me. Doesn't feel good to you. Now let's work with that. You know, we can stay relational in a sense, and that does take work. It takes being around professionals who have skills and capacities to take us deeper, takes being in community with other men who also can take us deeper. And in a lot of ways, as Luke and I talk about, in the heart of Shadow Light the way for us and show us some of the different ways of being. It's like, oh, okay, I get it now because I could see it in you. Sometimes it's hard to take it in, but when I see it in you, I'm like, okay, that gives me something to work with. So it's. It's an interesting thing because it's both a long journey and it's one. Once you get situated in the right place, it doesn't have to take forever to change. It's a lifetime process. But the growth can actually happen pretty fast. And in a sense, what you're going to do is grow yourself into a new set of problems, which is often what guys in our program experience, right? Like, hey, I have this new stressful problem. It's like, oh, hey, well, what a great new problem to have. Because doesn't that feel totally different than what you were struggling with before? And so they still have to grow and get uncomfortable and get training. But what you're doing it for starts to change.
Melanie Curtin: Yes. And I just want to say, you know, as a woman, that I really do need this. You know, I really need that emotional safety to. To blossom and to flourish and to feel radiant and lit up and excited and like, that deep trust, that deep sense of trust and capacity to let go and to really be in my fullness. And I think that's one of the things that has been the most gratifying about our work, is actually hearing from the spouses, like, hearing from the women or hearing from women that have interacted with these men or sometimes have gotten married to them. Right. We worked with men who've been in a relationship and they've ended up getting married and, you know, a whole bunch of other things in between. But, yeah, that sense of, wow, I've never experienced this level of depth and love before in my life. This is totally new. And that is what you can provide when you do. When you do the work, when you show up and you do the work and you actually become the most. What is the word? The most powerful version of yourself. I guess that's the way that I would put it is I just. I think we witness over and over men stepping into their authentic power. And when I say that, I don't just mean, you know, the sort of, I don't know, superhero or something wielding a sword. That's not what I mean. Authentic power can be. This thing hurt my feelings. You know, we were on this date last night, and this thing hurt my feelings. And for him to share that in a straightforward way without collapsing and, you know, sharing his heart with her, that is trustable as fuck. And there are a lot of women that, you know, their respect for their partner goes up, their trust in their partner goes up, their emotional safety goes up. And that has endless ramifications, not just on that couple, but also on anyone else in the family system, especially including the children. This is a big deal because more than one man has said, wow, this is really providing a lot in my dating or relationship life. But also it's completely changed my relationship with my children because I am able to hold and ground intensity in a totally new way. And it feels really masculine. It feels really good. It feels like I'm doing it. I'm really providing and providing something essential. And it's true, you are. That's real. So I want to keep us moving on our track. So the other side of the coin is one thing that we really need as women from our men, particularly our mates. Really is. Is sexual heat, sexual polarity. And, you know, a lot of the guys that we work with, they can provide a measure of emotional safety depending on their level of. Of. Of growth. And for them, polarity is their challenge. So these are, let's say, guys who maybe don't have a lot of sexual experience, or they, you know, they're getting a lot of first dates, they're not getting a lot of second dates, things like that. And I would say that one of the roots of this pattern is often sexual shame. And we've done a few episodes specifically about sexual shame. I will drop those in the show notes. If you are a man listening and you think that might apply to you, I strongly recommend listening to those. But in order to generate polarity, you as a man must be able to bring your attraction forward. Right. You have to be able to show up with your desire and bring it to her to actually show it to her. And what we find is that a lot of men are afraid of coming off as creepy, being humiliated, being called a pervert, some variation on that. And so, and. Or they don't want to make a woman feel unsafe or uncomfortable, so they tuck that part of themselves away, and then they're totally safe, quote, unquote. But they're not getting any action whether they're partnered or not. They're not. They don't. They're not bringing the polarity. And this is something that we really, really need and crave and desire for from men. And there's a certain amount of complexity to it. Right. There's a lot of. There's a lot of complexity to it. So can you speak a little bit to what you've witnessed in terms of this need from women?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think it's. Women, I would say, more than ever actually desire to be polarized. Right. I think because the complexity we spoke about, you know, we're able to cultivate our inner omega, our feminine as men. Women are able to cultivate their alpha, their. Their masculine out in the world. And we often have to do a lot of those all day long. But when it comes to romanticism, there tends to be a place. It doesn't matter if you were born in a man's body or a woman's body that you find home base. Right. We tend to work with heterosexual pairs in the sense that the. The man holds the masculine, the alpha, the. The woman feels most nourished by the feminine. And so what we're talking about here is as more and more women can hold more of their masculine in Their day to day, it becomes a stronger desire, paradoxically, to not have to in intimate relationship. Meaning I want to feel the man come in with agency, direction, drive, to take the reins and guide me so I don't have to. Because I've been busy raising the kids all day. I've been busy dealing with work, I've been managing my creative output, you name it. And so a lot of women want to know their man has that capacity. Doesn't mean he has to do it all day long. Right. It's not like the old style thing, but you have to have that capacity and you have to be able to bring it forward, and particularly sexually to generate polarity. You have to kind of be in touch with what you want and in a sense reveal and guide your partner towards that. And if we're not comfortable with what we want, lo and behold, that becomes pretty hard. So that's where the big thing we do a lot of work with men on is just rewiring that connection to our sexuality and the shame that a lot of men these days are raised with. Because, you know, they, they were raised in a context of, look what happens when guys only emphasize sex and objectivity. Okay? Right. It's the phrase we hear all the time. And I don't want to be that guy, don't want to be that guy. I don't want to make a woman feel unsafe. So the challenge for a lot of guys is they associate unsafe with me being in my sexual desire. And that's part of what we're starting to react to rewire with guys that, no, it's not your sexual desire that's unsafe, it's what you do with it. And in fact, it's when you have desire and you lack the capacity to attune to a woman and ignore what she's saying or can't even pick up the signals, that's what feels unsafe. So the whole first part we were talking about of being able to create emotional safety and presence, part of what that comes from is being in a body that feels and can attune to, to the woman I'm with to see, okay, I can tell she's closing herself down and looking away. Probably not the time for me to kind of push forward. I'm getting a signal. I might not like that signal. I like her, but I'm going to attune to that signal. And I'm not going to keep pressuring her, coming at her harder, so to speak. And so the sexual shame piece is a big part for a lot of Us nice guys in particular to heal. Because, uh, you know, as I say, I, I don't really know man or woman. I mean, there's some out there with certain interests, but most people want to know their partner wants to fuck them, right? Like this just has that desire in their body. Doesn't mean they're like crass and showing it all the time. But that, wow, you turn me on. And that feels good, right? When we feel that if we're not willing to feel that as men, our partner can't feel that and she's not going to feel often magnetized. And you know, we've talked before about, you know, for a lot of women, their desire is more responsive, right? So it's our heat as the man that kind of ignites and helps them connect to it. If we're not bringing any heat, it's like flatline. It's like, oh, this guy's really nice. But you know, I'm just not feeling it. It's a really, really nice guy though, right? That kind of friend zone thing. So building the capacity for polarity is a lot. Just getting into your body, feeling your lower body in particular, learning how to stand, how to breathe, how to calm the fuck down, get out of your ruminating mind, relax your physical body, even let your emotional content flow when appropriate. And then a lot more becomes possible. And particularly then when we're holding that, we have that capacity to be present and hold safety, a lot more energy and desire can come through for both men and women. If we're not feeling safe, it's very hard to feel turned on. Just those two things are not very complementary. And so whether it's old school style providing a certain amount of external stability and structure, or the newer emotional style we've been talking about, that safety and steadiness that can come from our presence, that's what allows a lot of women to feel their turn on, to relax. If she can't relax in her body, she's not going to be very turned on most of the time, right? And so it's not just as, you know, simple as learn some pickup lines as some guys want. It's what's the state of my nervous system and how's it relating to her nervous system. If those two things are pretty relaxed, there's going to be a lot more desire, there's going to be a lot more fire in a sense, a lot more of that sexual energy and heat and chemistry. We got to heal our sexual shame to do that as men. We got to get into our Bodies to do that as men. And then, yes, there are some tools we can learn about polarity, but truth be told, those are the easy part, as we say. Like, that's the stuff, you know, we can teach you pretty fast and you can go out and you can play with it. It's the other things creating that emotional safety, unwinding, sexual shame, getting more into our bodies, that takes commitment. As men, you can move the ball forward, but it does take saying, okay, I am going to change this and get support in doing so.
Melanie Curtin: Yes, I have several comments about this. One is a fun success story from one of our clients. So we have an episode we did on overcoming religious trauma, which I strongly recommend. I'll drop that in the show notes as well. And this man came in and he was single when he arrived, and he had a lot of religious trauma, Christian background, and worked on it. Did a lot of really good work in the program. And then it was either during the program or just after. He had. He had worked on everything we're talking about of getting into his body. Holding presence, breathing, and being willing to be with sexual heat, by the way, is another form of being able to hold intensity in your system because that's an intense feeling and being willing to breathe, stay in connection. In this case, this was eye contact. We had talked to him about eye contact and holding presence and not necessarily filling the space with words on a date, but just holding eye contact and breathing and feeling his attraction. That was one of the things we were training him on. Well, long story short, he ended up going out with this woman that he was really excited about. And she noticed, I mean, very much like they were looking at each other across the table. And he. He came back. I think he must have been still in the program. And he was like, that was a much different date than I've ever been on. And they ended up making out on the street after the date. But he was like, wow, you were right. This. This experience of just generating polarity in this way of me noticing her breathing into my balls and staying in connection, staying in eye contact with her, not looking away, looking down, being ashamed of my desire, but actually being present with my desire with her was super effective. He was really excited. They're still together, they're really happy. It's just a really beautiful story. But that what you mentioned about, you know, a lot of women really want to be polarized. I can't emphasize that enough. It's like. It's like mana. It's like nourishment to the soul. When I feel my man wanting me and. And being direct about that, it is so nourishing. And there are lots of. There are lots of nuances here. There are some women that are going to be more open to that than others. We. We're not saying that this is a, you know, surefire way. Just generate polarity and every woman's gonna fall at your feet. That's not what we're saying. But what we are saying is that this is a need that women have. It is a need and it is a way that a man can provide. That is not the way that we used to need men to provide, but it is a. It is a thirst that we have that we women have, that we. We need you for. We can't generate that on our own. We can't just feel desired without you. You know, you. You are the sun and we are the flower. You are the you. You provide the gaze of attention, and we dance before that gaze of attention. We need you in order to feel fully alive in that way. There's no other way to get there for us. So we're going to start to wrap here. And the other thing I wanted to say was that if you are looking, if you are a man listening to this and you are thinking to yourself, I want this, I want to grow in this way, then consider our program, because we designed it specifically to take you through the things that you need to know and grow and ways you need to develop. And we did that within the container of a safe, healthy community of men. So you get coaching, but you also get the community. And we did that on purpose because one of the things a lot of men lack is conscious male community. Places and spaces where they can be fully themselves. They can bring all of this kind of thing forward that we're talking about and get support and be held and train up right to get all this training. So if you're feeling a little overwhelmed, like, oh, they talked about a lot of stuff. I'm not really sure how to do that. Consider the program. Consider our program. You can do other things too. It doesn't have to be our program, but if you are interested in that, you can go to evolutionary men apply. Anything else you want to add before we wrap?
Jason Lange: Developing and deepening both of these capacities is part of what's needed and they're very related and just, you know, it is more fun doing it with other people as well, so you don't have to learn it alone.
Melanie Curtin: Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.
