The Myth of Masculine Leadership

There’s a dangerous idea floating around our world like poisonous spore that masculine leadership means simply: “man leads, woman follows.”

This ideal obviously runs deep in many patriarchal religions, but you’ll also run into it in the world of “conscious polarity” where often charismatic teachers insist relationships work best when a ”man is in his masculine energy” and a “woman is in her feminine energy.”

To be clear, I’m a huge fan of everyone learning to express mature masculine and mature feminine energy. It can be wildly enlivening, and profoundly healing, to connect with dormant aspects of our authentic selves that never fully came online because either we didn’t have good role models for them, or we had to exile those parts just to survive childhood.

Thing is … it’s so easy to take too far.

We humans are complex, messy. Imposing rigid ideals onto the complexities of relationship between messy humans often just creates more problems than it solves.

Over the years I’ve coached more than a few couples who’ve attempted to apply this rigid belief, and suffered unnecessarily for it.

This is what they essentially attempt to impose throughout their relationship: Man brings clarity and direction, making all the important decisions to ensure structure, order, and progress for their lives. Woman surrenders to his decisions while expressing embodied gratitude that his clarity and direction brings order and stability to her otherwise hopelessly chaotic existence.

Yeah. It’s a poorly considered and often harmful approach to relationship.

Where does a man even think he’s leading her? By what aim or measure is he making his ”masculine leader” decisions?

If he’s money driven, his leadership will predominantly reflect his desire for financial savings or gain. He’ll quickly orient towards his partner as an expense to be managed (resented) or a tool to be leveraged for more financial gain (he may push her to work in ways she doesn’t want to).

If he’s career driven, she’ll be forced to take a back seat to his endless pursuit of success. He’ll often see her as an impediment to his focus, her needy desire for connection an irritating distraction from time better spent at the office. Or, as often happens in career-driven communities like the military, she’ll be expected to play the dutiful wife serving her husband’s career at whatever cost to her own aims and ambitions.

If he’s status driven, he’ll see her as an object for his own elevation. He’ll expect her to impress others by behaving and looking a certain way – likely skinny, big-boobed, and ever-radiant, if that’s what the men around him prefer (having a woman other men envy is an essential status symbol for this man). He’ll embrace her only so long as she serves his desperate need to be admired, worshipped.

Even if he insists on making her happy above all else (“happy wife, happy life!”) – and many men play it this way – he can only succeed at that game for long by shutting down to his own experience, repressing his own needs. He’ll mask what’s really happening inside, and he’ll resist courageous action for fear of getting it wrong. Thus he eventually leads himself into a life of quiet depression, or one punctuated by occasional explosions of pent-up rage.

Intimate relationships unfold between adults. A true adult is a sovereign being who doesn’t need another adult making choices for them. Parents do that for children. Adult partners don’t need fathering (or mothering) from each other.*

*granted (1) role play can be fun, and (2) relationships may involve helping each other heal childhood wounds by showing up in mothering/fathering ways to a degree, but that’s about compassion and empathy, not leadership.

I’ve been with my wife, Silvy, for 10 years.

Sure, she may be sweet as summer lemonade and lovely as a poem, but God gave her as strong a character as he gave me, and she won’t be lead in any direction – by me or by anyone – that she doesn’t genuinely want to go.

We’ve faced a zillion choices along the way, most minor in consequence, many significant, and a handful with completely life-changing ramifications. We have at times been caught in painful power struggles, which at their heart are borne out of fear of being led astray by the other. Nonetheless, we have ultimately always found our way to collaborating in the direction of our lives together.

We co-lead our relationship. We share power.

Some decisions we make together: where to vacation, where to live, what Netflix shows to watch together (sometimes through gritted teeth).

Some decisions we each own outright for ourselves: what food to put in our bellies, what spirituality to practice, who to befriend.

Some decisions we genuinely let the other be in charge of: Silvy has final say over when/whether we take our dog to the vet, and I run most of our finances.

However we get there, after ten years learning each other’s ways, needs, and sensitivities, we always strive to make choices that ultimately serve the health of our life together. As a result, neither of us ever feels under-represented, unappreciated, ignored, dismissed, or powerless in the life we’re creating together.

In the end, that’s what everyone wants, anyway: to feel seen, heard, appreciated, and powerful in the ways that matter most to them.

All that said .. there actually is a specific leadership a woman absolutely does need from a man:

She needs to know, every day, that he is fully choosing her again today. She needs to know he’s always leading (himself) in the direction of healthy relationship with her – that he has the courage to make even difficult decisions and take uncomfortable actions that ultimately serve her deepest heart, and his.

That’s the leadership she does need from him … and that he also needs from her.