What is Overnurturing? It's doing too much in a relationship. Giving too much. It's the reverse of how a relationship works best for a woman.Giving is what men are supposed to do. Women are supposed to receive the love, affection and gifts that men give, and then give love and affection back to them. Though many of us have caught onto this, it’s challenging to stop doing what we’ve always done, what we’ve been told is the way to do things, and to fly in the face of the fallout we fear. So I’m going to tackle one little issue – Nurturing.
Nurturing is masculine. If you want to get what he wants to give, stop nurturing your man.
Radical as this sounds, try it. Stop doing. Stop giving. Stop massaging your husband’s feelings. Stop helping your date do the relationship thing and let him flounder until he figures it out. He will.
This whole concept of nurturing is a dilemma for most of us. We think of mothering, nurturing, caring for our young as a feminine aspect of ourselves.
It isn’t.
Nurturing and caring for others may be a female trait – Motherhood is female – but it’s still about action! Nurturing is about doing. Giving. Your energy goes out of you and toward or into someone else. When you give, you are acting from a masculine energy place.
We are so accustomed to the idea of nurturing being feminine, we get confused. We think being loving to our men is nurturing them. Massaging their bodies, minds and spirits. There is nothing wrong with the idea of nurturing – it’s the form our nurturing takes that causes so much difficulty. We are all composed of masculine and feminine (yin and yang) energies. We move through them fluidly at our best, and are stuck in one or the other at our worst.
But most of us are stuck at one extreme or the other. We either give too much all the time and then find ourselves resentful all the time, or we go the other way and make ourselves emotionally unavailable to our dates, our husbands, our boyfriends, and every man we meet.
Too often, our nurturing energies are perceived by men as mothering. Our actions seem intrusive. We seem to be judging them and finding them coming up short – otherwise why would they need taking care of? On the other hand, they love attention. Don’t we all?
To strike some sort of balance when we are all so mightily out of balance, I’m asking you to pull back to zero. To at least imagine pulling back to zero. The baby steps you actually take may seem huge. When you stop doing for your man what he doesn’t need you to do, yet has grown accustomed to your doing, may resent your not doing, and will certainly find himself relieved that you’ve stopped doing, things may get messy before they get better. But they will get better.
This is all about Overfunctioning.
What does Overfunctioning and Overnurturing look like?
You come to the door the moment he gets home and ask him how his day went. You offer to massage his neck, his feet, his back because he looks so tired (even though you’re just as tired.) Or you give your date directions to your house before he asks. And you invite him in and offer him something to eat or drink without even knowing what he has in mind for the evening. You offer to cook him a meal when he’s barely taken you out to a decent restaurant. You offer sex to your husband, without being asked, and even if you’re not in the mood, because you figure you should. You ask him how he feels, and demonstrate concern for his feelings and moods.
This sounds nurturing, but it’s not. It’s mothering. Nurturing a grown-up is giving him what he wants, not what you think he needs. Nurturing a grown-up is not tolerating what you don’t want. Not tolerating him treating himself badly or carelessly if it’s damaging to you or his relationship with you – this means smoking, eating badly, not working, never leaving the house.
And you do it not by telling him what he needs to do and helping him do it, but by telling him how angry it makes you feel when it’s happening. Or telling him how good it feels when he does something that makes you happy. Let him figure out how to take responsibility for making you and the relationship happy – on his end of it.
This is feminine energy – the expression of honest-to-goodness feelings. All the caretaking and fixing and doing and massaging and concern is masculine energy in action, and it will get you nowhere near what you want.
Try it the feminine way. Stop nurturing a grown-up man, and start expressing your feelings moment by moment. The first time is scary – but then, you’ll see – you’ll wonder how you ever loved any other way.
