Manifesting means creating what wasn’t there before. Women love to manifest. The very act of starting with nothing and ending up with something thrills us in a deep pan of our being.
WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:
Women like to manifest beauty, celebration, connection, and love that did not exist before. When we do this, we feel a deep sense of fulfillment and purpose.
This joy we experience in manifesting expresses itself in big and small ways every day:
When women manifest, they can create a special moment, an experience for others to share, an improvement in the environment, something beautiful to look at, or something that brings another person joy.
Another way women manifest is in creating and re-creating ourselves. All you need to do for proof of this is to walk into any major department store and look around at the cosmetics department. There before you are dozens upon dozens of counters, each displaying hundreds of shades of eye shadow and lipstick, powder and blush, along with innumerable bottles of perfume, body lotion, and every other potion you could imagine. In front of those counters are hundreds of women trying on makeup, testing new scents, and enjoying themselves immensely. Men imagine this scene and roll their eyes, perhaps concluding that women are vain or superficial. But what’s happening in this store isn’t vanity – it’s creativity. It is women creating a look, an image, using their own face as a canvas as they become the artist.
It is the same with clothing, or jewelry, or any of the other ways women adorn our bodies – these female pastimes are all means for the female creative urge to express itself. This is why so many women love to shop, even when we don’t buy anything – we are doing research for our next creative undertaking!
These are things we and other women understand, but have a difficult time explaining to men. Why, for instance, do we need new makeup when we already own a drawerful of it? And must we really have so many different shades of lipstick? I mean, how many kinds of red are there? Women know the answers to these questions, of course: There are many kinds of red, and yes, they are all different, and yes, we need new makeup once in a while, just as an artist needs new paints and brushes.
Last week I decided to treat myself to a manicure and pedicure in a little beauty salon down the street from my house. I sat there in a chair watching all the other female customers and concluded that this salon was a hotbed of female creativity, a perfect example of what I’ve written about in this section of the book. Each woman who came in took time to carefully look over the hundreds of bottles of polish, seriously examining this one and that one before she chose the color that would be applied to her fingernails or toenails. Not just any red would do this week – it had to be a blue-red, as opposed to a fire engine red, or a coral red. Or maybe since last week it was red, this week it would be a dark chocolate color. Or for fun, icy blue! The nails had to be shaped just so, perhaps square or oval or round – each woman definitely had her preference. Any man who ever thought women were wishy-washy or indecisive should come to a beauty salon, where after witnessing the precision with which women choose their nail polish color and shape, he would change his mind forever!
What is it that a woman is actually doing in the beauty salon? She is turning her hands and feet into a work of art, decorating them for the enjoyment of herself and the man who might happen to have the good fortune to gaze upon her shimmering toenails. She is taking a few moments out of her busy day to express her creativity by choosing that hot pink polish. She is manifesting: Where there once were dull, boring toes, now there are exciting, sexy toes!
WHY WOMEN LOVE TO FILL A SPACE AND MAKE PLANS
One morning while Kim and her husband are having breakfast, she decides to discuss the schedule for a weekend coming up the following month.
“Listen, Eric, I wanted to remind you that Aimee is going to be on a trip with her school on the weekend after Easter, and since we have those days all to ourselves, I thought we should plan something special.”
“That’s weeks away” Eric responds casually, going back to reading his paper. “Let’s talk about it later.”
“But darling,” she replies, trying again, “it’s so rare that we have time together alone, and I just felt the sooner we discussed it, the more options we would have for doing something really terrific.”
“Why do we have to talk about it now? I don’t even know what I’ll be in the mood to do tomorrow, let alone next month. Besides, I don’t see what the rush is.”
“Well, I just don’t like not knowing what we’re going to do that weekend,” Kim explains. “Can’t you just focus on it for five minutes with me?”
Eric grabs his paper and gets up from the table. “I can’t do this now, Kim,” he says in a tense voice. “I really can’t.” And he leaves the room.
Kim sits staring at her calendar, feeling hurt and disappointed. The empty squares marking that weekend stare back at her.
Men and women have very different reactions to this story when I share it with them at my seminars. The men make comments like:
“Boy, can I relate to this. My wife tries to get me to plan every second of my free time, and I hate it I think she gets a kick out of locking me into a schedule.”
“The woman is trying to control her husband’s time, to pin him down so she can be in charge.”
“Kim is obviously insecure and high strung. Why else would she need to have every little detail of her life figured out in advance?”
The women, on the other hand, make these kinds of comments:
“I could scream, hearing this story. I go through this with my boyfriend all the time. He refuses to make plans, so I never have anything to look forward to.”
“Eric is a typical man. What is their problem with planning ahead? It just sets up his wife to look like a nag when she brings it up the next time.”
“This is one of my biggest complains about men – that they just seem oblivious to what’s happening around them. Doesn’t he realize that it takes time to plan special experiences? Kim’s just trying to be a good wife, and he isn’t respecting her at all.”
What do the women see in this scenario that the men are missing? They