Having a woman feel “safe” with you is the most important thing. The problem is, if it is critically important that you always make a woman feel safe, then you have committed yourself to controlling how she feels. This makes you into a control-freak. Consider:
If you are going to produce the outcome called “She always feels safe,” You must control her feelings. To control her feelings, you have to also control every aspect of your interaction, every aspect of your conversation, and every aspect of everything else. If you lose control, she might feel unsafe. Thus, having to make her feel safe means controlling everything. That is, in our minds, being a control-freak. Shy men become control freaks because they want to respect women and keep them safe, but being a control freak accomplishes neither; it actually restricts and even hurts women.
The truth is that shy men don’t bring safety to women. They bring the illusion of safety, or safety in a very small way–along with a really big sense of restriction. As a result, a woman will tell a shy man that she feels “safe” with him, but that “safety” lives in a very narrow range: She knows he won’t attack her, and that she is probably not in immanent physical danger when she is with him. Otherwise, she feels restrained and oppressed around him, and would never in a million years dream of dating him.
Shy men live their lives thinking that they are showing up to women as great guys. They are not. They seem unobtainable, controlling, and difficult. David, who used to be very shy with women, found this out years ago at a personal growth course. He got up and talk about how he felt shy with women, and always wanted to make them feel safe. The group leader asked the women in the group, “How do you feel about a guy like this, who won’t talk to you?” To David’s astonishment, the women were uniform in their response: they thought he was a jerk. “If he won’t talk to us and relax, how can we have relationships with him?,” and “How dare he decide how we should feel with him?” was the tone of their responses. It was a real eye-opener. Shy men seem difficult to women.
We once shared this story with a very shy student of ours, and he couldn’t–in fact, he stubbornly wouldn’t–believe us. He would not believe that he might seem difficult to women, though there was ample evidence, even in his own life, that women were trying to connect with him and he wouldn’t allow it. Until he was willing to accept that his shyness might have a different effect on women than he thought, he was unable to change it.
So what is there to do about it? It can help to consider what we have said here about being a control freak. Because your control-freak-ism is motivated by your desire to be a “good guy” with women, realizing that you aren’t doing women any favors will naturally motivate you to give that behavior up.
Here’s what you should consider replacing it with: Accepting your interest in women as a wholesome thing. If you accept yourself and can risk expressing yourself more-or-less fully, then women around you will feel like they can accept and express themselves, too. If you take appropriate risks with women, it opens the door for them to take risks with you.
Take some risks, and let go of controlling how women feel, and you’ll find that you have been experiences with women. You’ll feel freer, and she’ll feel freer, and your chances of success with each other will go up exponentially.
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Ron Louis and David Copeland are dating coaches and authors of the best selling “How to Succeed with Women” and the creators of Seduction Techniques |
