There's a particular kind of guy who makes all the searching, all the endless online dates and late-night bitch-fests with girlfriends and self-improvement programs, feel worth it.
And while he's rare, he isn't unusual.
He's the kind of man who can play with all the complexities and levels of a woman with nuance and skill, whether he's penetrating you with his cock and his insightfulness or giving you feather-soft strokes and exquisite attention.
For him, whether it comes to sex or just life in general, none of it is about racing to the finish line, which is why it feels so good to be around him.
He's deeply present, dynamic, and grounded.
His honesty and straightforwardness are irresistible, but he's not a player because he doesn't use his confidence to manipulate or control others.
He's powerful, but this is the kind of power that is always used to ignite other people, especially women he's involved with.
If his profile sounds too good to be true, trust us-it isn't.
The kind of strong, present, capable man we want is well within arm's reach.
He isn't someone we have to magically summon up from the detritus of our fantasies.
Neither is he something we have to passively yearn for, like impatient princesses, tapping our toes and watching paint peel off the walls.
A man like this isn't born-he is created.
By women.
In order to create powerful, authentic, whole men who are capable of penetrating us deeply and whose desire is to connect and make us feel good, we must think outside our old paradigms.
We must get beyond the standard operating technology most people are using when they approach finding their dream mate.
In other words, we must be the change we wish to see in our men.
To be worthy of ignited men, we must be turned-on women.
Here are just some of the ways we can kill two birds with one stone and say goodbye to emotionally fragile man-children and non-committal players for good.
Keep your turn-on up.
Women tend to operate under the general unstated feeling that we lack a vital nutrient that could potentially get our blood flowing, our hearts pumping, and our bodies bursting with desire and a sense of newness.
Unfortunately, the things we tend to discount (sex and orgasm), that get relegated to the back burner, are precisely what we need to stay turned on.
When we are flowing with this kind of unadulterated sexual energy, it makes us magnetic to a similar level of man-it's almost as if we are emitting a silent signal that only those of our ilk are capable of recognizing.
This kind of magnetism is what makes a woman powerful, and it is precisely what is necessary when we want to generate men whose attention and capacity to hold us can match the potency of our turn-on.
As a woman, it is not that you need to get power.
You already are power.
And at the root of your power is your turn-on, also known as your desire, your hunger, your sexuality.
That very thing you likely spend most of your days and nights attempting to mediate, moderate, and manage is not just your power, but power itself.
So understand that when you are seeking fulfillment outside of yourself, you are denying that you hold the power in the relationship.
Decide here and now that you will hold the power, and you will create the kind of man you desire: the kind who is unabashedly up for the challenge of providing a sufficient and pleasurable container for all that juice.
Instead of being "nice," surrender to your own desire.
When a woman is so attuned to her desire that she has absolutely no interest in compromising it or slackening her standards (for the sake of security or a fear of hurting his feelings, perhaps), this fierce honesty is a force so compelling it cannot be denied.
Men know on some level that a passive-aggressive woman is hiding some primal truth that is raging to be released, and for some of them, this might feel like a relief-a necessary blockade against her emotional turbulence.
Such women, who hide behind long-suffering faces and secret complaints, think they're being nice-but in truth, nice women reinforce mediocrity and emotional stagnation in men.
Our kindness is the most cruel thing we can offer to men, because without challenge, he becomes mediocre.
And his mediocrity leads us to withhold and to withdraw, since we think he's too weak or stupid to see us in our full power.
In hiding behind the walls of our desire, we fail to entice a man into being the most superior version of himself, and we make ourselves miserable in the process.
We generate men who are steadfast in their ignorance, heartbreaking in their impotence.
When you as a woman honor what you want, not because you are being "demanding" or "high-maintenance" but because the force of your desire is so strong that it cannot be denied or swept under the rug, you are surrendering to a force much larger than either of you.
When that is the level at which you are playing, a man can relax and trust you, because he knows you're not dangling some kind of invisible carrot and that he isn't being manipulated.
From this place, he can begin to listen to you.
Because his deepest desire (even if it's completely unconscious to him) is to make you happy, your willingness to get behind your pleasure will lift him to a place where obstacles, impediments, and huge boulders are just small things he isn't sweating as he whizzes past them in his blaze of glory.
Your desire enables him to get fully behind it, and to realize his own excellence in the process.
Make requests, and stick around to negotiate.
Here's the thing most women don't completely understand: men never tire of succeeding, of being in service, of being well-used-so if you don't want to be bored by having him talk about work and sports all the time, set the bar higher and offer him the task of "winning" with you.
So many women, unfortunately, set men up for inevitable failure by dint of their anger, frustration, or silent chagrin-but if we only prioritized our pleasure and got him to prioritize it as well, we could ensure his success.
When men consistently fail in making you happy, that's when they typically throw in the towel and head for the bunny slope.
The trick is to know what you want, and ask for it.
Then stick around to negotiate the details.
You don't want to ease up on the challenge, but you do want to ease up on the inability to make clear requests that he can feasibly follow through with.
Tell the truth, but from approval and love rather than criticism.
Men require clear communication, pruned of ambiguity, subtle scorn, or mixed messages.
They also require the truth, and anything less than this contributes to everything from overinflated egos to just plain delusion.
Our men are only as good as the truth we are dishing out to them.
This is why you must tell him exactly what you want and how you want it; and when he delivers it, approve.
When he doesn't, appreciate and acknowledge what he did well, and offer him a loving adjustment.
More than anything, we generate capable men when we are extremely explicit about our desires, especially the desire for a deeply fulfilling relationship that requires never-ending engagement on both men and women's parts.
Getting each other isn't the end, but the beginning, of the game-and we set our men up for failure and mediocrity by forgetting to remind them of this basic truth.
Be a queen.
Most women are princesses, so it's no wonder they tend to draw princes, those eternally youthful men who are fun to be with but aren't particularly passionate or purpose-driven.
In order to magnetize a king, you must have the discipline that is required to settle down and know yourself.
Check your childishness and vanity at the door, if you're seeking the keys to the kingdom.
And stop acting like a broken-winged bird who is incapable of taking care of herself; you know that this is an act, and that any man who responds to it with the chivalrous desire to protect you will only be rewarded with your scorn and resentment.
As women, we essentially want to be with men who can worship our innate royalty-but in order to get that kind of acknowledgement, we must be deserving of it, and be willing to sacrifice the "broken" act (big eyes, cuteness and all) by seeking citizenship in true womanhood.
First and foremost, a queen takes responsibility for her life.
She handles her own basic needs-sexual, spiritual, emotional, physical, and otherwise-rather than laying the responsibility on anyone else.
She doesn't wait for a man to sweep her up with grandiose promises of fulfillment; she simply chooses where to place her attention, and she spends the currency of her turn-on in ways that multiply it in the world.
It's not about getting what she wants from him-his love and commitment may be an added bonus, but she doesn't need them in order to be happy.
A queen commits to living full, which makes a man even more devoted to her.
She is unafraid of showing her love and may even risk pushing her man's edges, given the amount of love she effortlessly pours onto him, which comes from her own sense of abundance rather than neediness or lack.
Most of all, a queen is the kind of woman who won't merely "support" a guy, but who will compel, propel, and forge him.
Don't withhold your sex.
A woman who keeps her sex under lock and key in order to entice or punish a man only ends up punishing herself, denying herself of the very fuel that is the source of her power.
In order to be with a man who is so irresistible that you cannot help but surrender to him, you must first and foremost recognize that you hold the sex in the relationship, not him.
When you operate from the understanding that sex is the source of your power, you stop giving him the breadcrumbs of your desire and you offer him the nourishment of your orgasm.
Opening up to your sex also places you in a state of unconditional approval.
You are no longer fixated on finding the perfect circumstances or person-you are still capable of having a fantastic experience, and you feel freer to express love and desire.
This is where a turned-on woman leads from, and when she does, other people-especially men-follow.
Men light up and discover their own depth and capacity for greatness simply by being around her.
Train him on how to handle you.
This isn't simply about making requests.
It's about handing him a bona fide user's guide that reveals all the minutiae, from how you like to be touched and kissed to the five most difficult to navigate behaviors in yourself.
Yes, this means giving up your game, but it's worth it.
Many women choose to leave things open-ended and murky because they fear hearing a "no" from their men, or because they think it gives them an extra advantage.
But the truth is that we very much want to be handled, to be assured that our men are strong and capable enough to take over and subdue our doubts.
However, we often let our fear inhibit us from this, so we stew in contradictory behavior or we simply expect him to read our minds.
And in the end, we both suffer for it-us more than him, perhaps, since this leads to the perpetuation of men who are baffled and mystified by women who just never seem to tell them what's wrong.
Love him for who he he is, not who you want him to be.
Perhaps the most fatal mistake we could possibly make with a man is allowing him to veer into the territory of silly game-playing like PUA or even the more socially accepted game of being the sensitive new-age guy-and he does this all because he thinks that on some level, it's preferable to being himself, since women are obviously not gonna be down with that.
Sadly, we are so unwilling to give men a clue about how to be with us that they end up enlisting the advice of men who are equally clueless, thereby turning into caricatures of themselves.
We need to let men know that we want them in all of their weird, quirky, imperfect, totally unpolished beauty.
Even the most seemingly solid of men will be reduced to a bumbling mess of nerves and inadequacy when he isn't accepted and loved for who he is.
Because, just as women want the purest quality of a man's attention, men desire women's approval more than anything else.
As women, we have the crucial role of training men to tease out our desire, and to do whatever we can in the process to ensure that they are successful.
One of the best ways we can do this is through unconditional approval and connection that are based on loving him, wanting him, for all of who he is-not for what we think we're going to get from him.
The truth of the matter is that men are essentially powder kegs of love, but this essential function becomes short-circuited somewhere along the way.
Because the approval of a woman is so important to a man, he is exploding with the desire to give, to serve-but this gets eroded, gradually, when he is faced with the bottomless pit of the desire that belongs to a woman who has never taken full responsibility for it.
Regardless of whether we see it as obvious or not, a man's most essential function in life is to serve.
And by serve, we don't mean service to his cock or masculinity, but service to his own highest desire-which involves getting behind his power to pleasure his woman and lead her to the deepest and sweetest surrender.