Desire Is Empty Without Respect

Your relationship with others can only be as healthy as your relationship with yourself.

If you are a woman and use any social media app, particularly the dating apps, you likely receive your fair share of messages from guys expressing their desires to you in a multitude of couth and not-so-couth ways.

Well men, guess what?

If a woman is attractive, she most likely did not “just wake up like this.” For me personally, I believe my appearance and how I carry myself is the culmination of not only years but decades worth of cultivation. So why should I as a woman give a man my energy with nothing in return? Men really expect (or hope?) that a woman might be so desperate or thirsty that she’ll agree to his bottom-of-the barrel offers. Well, sorry-not-sorry, but men who message any self-respecting woman maybe need to try a little harder — ok, a lot harder.

I’m not just talking about chasing that woman you’re lusting after.

And notice how I am careful to say “woman” here; yes, I do believe it is a micro-aggression that we tend to call women “girls,” particularly in my case when I support not only myself but am also the sole care provider for my daughter. I’m not condoning relentlessly chasing a woman you desire; while I get that the “thrill of the chase” may be a primal desire and build up anticipation and lust for the “conquest,” such relentless behavior is also predatory. So when I say to try harder, I mean to do more than just to continue in your pursuits for her attention.

Oh, you know what else is predatory?

Offering women what could at best be called the bare minimum and then feeling entitled to her attention as well as her time, energy, and intimacy. Attention and access need to be earned. When men virtually approach me these days in less than tasteful ways, I’ve started sending them links to my articles, such as my article:

“Why Is It So Hard For Men to Do the Bare Minimum?” and the latest one, “Why Do I Trigger Men When I Demand Respect as a Woman?”

The tricky thing is that the way that this patriarchal culture works is so insidious that men think they are being reasonable when they make replies such as this:

Here’s the thing.

We’re living in 2022. It would be either naive or obtuse to say that any sexual relationship needs to be predicated on trust, respect, and admiration. I agree with the trust part, and, ideally, there should be at least some basic level of respect and at least superficial admiration. But the author who commented above is disingenuous in a way, as although he ostensibly disagrees with the idea that “men must earn sex,” he also agrees that through earning a woman’s trust, respect, and admiration, sex may be earned accordingly.

Yes, a man must trust a woman as well, but again, my reply guy overlooks my arguments as to why women have more at stake for not just a prospective physical encounter, but for any prospective date, period.

He also entirely overlooks the reality of us living in a patriarchal culture where women’s labor, bodies, and time, are systematically devalued. I didn’t say that a woman was “giving up” anything in having sex, but sex does always entail an energetic exchange, and women have more to risk in every encounter.

And what it boils down to is that whatever happens consensually between two adults, happens consensually. However a woman chooses to harness a man’s desire, and/or her own desire, I say go for it — again, as long as it’s consensual.

I am simply arguing that, for me personally, all of the flirtations and forward advances I’ve been receiving lately have been off-putting because they lack a certain basic level of respect.

These interactions keep me returning to the phrase, Your relationship with others can only be as healthy as your relationship with yourself. *This,* I believe, is a fundamental part of the hollowness that I am feeling in the dating world these days. So many men keep pursuing women and dating without having healed from their own childhood wounds.

Now that I have been on a more self-aware journey to heal from my childhood traumas, and now that I have re-birthed myself both through motherhood and through journeys with sacred earth medicines, I am becoming much more purposeful and selective of who I allow into my energy field.

When men pursue women only superficially, they are degrading not only their relationships with these women, but also their relationships with themselves.

As a spiritual person, I need to feel safe and respected by a man. I need my time and energy to be valued. I do believe feminine and masculine energies complement each other, but our culture has caused us to bury and forget our divine relationship to ourselves and each other.

So, to the men:

Please, appreciate women for the divinely earthly creatures we are.

Women, with our monthly cycles and our bodies made for child-bearing, are more connected to the earth.

Men, let us women help raise your vibration. Let us help support each other and help raise each other’s vibrations.

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