The Interior Woman

Sometimes women become tired and cranky while waiting for their mates to understand them. The women say, ” Why can´t they know what I think, what I want ? ” Women become fatigued with asking this question. Yet, there is a solution to this dilemma, a solution which is efficient and effective.

If a woman wants a mate who is responsive this way, she will reveal to him the secret of woman´s duality. She will tell him about the interior woman, that one who, added to herself, makes two. She does this by teaching her mate to ask her two deceptively simple questions that will make her feel seen, heard, and known.

The first question is this: What do you want? Almost everyone asks some version of this, just as a matter of course. But there is yet one more essential question, and that is: ” What does your deeper self desire?”

If one overlooks a woman’s dual nature and takes a woman at face value, one is in for a big surprise, for when the woman’s wildish nature rises from her depths and begins to assert itself, she often has interests, feelings, and ideas which are quite different from those she expressed before.

To securely weave a relationship, a woman will also ask the same two questions of her mate. As women, we learn to poll both sides of our nature and that of others as well. From the information we receive reciprocally from both sides, we can very clearly determine what is valued most and how to respond accordingly.

To love a woman, the mate must also love her untamed nature. If she takes a mate who cannot or will not love this other side, she shall be in some way dismantled and be left to limp about unrepaired.

So men as much as women, must name their dual natures. The most valued lover, the most valuable parent, the most valued friend, the most valuable ‘wilderman,’ is the one who wishes to learn. Those who are not delighted by learning, those who cannot be enticed into new ideas or experiences, cannot develop past the roadpost they rest at now. If there is but one force which feeds the root of pain, it is the refusal to learn beyond this moment.

We know that the creature Wild Man is seeking his own Earthly Woman. Afeared or not, it is an act of deepest love to allow oneself to be stirred by the wildish soul of another. In a World where humans are so afraid of ‘losing’, there are far too many protective walls against being dissolved in the numinosity of another human soul.

The mate for the wildish woman is the one who has a soulful tenacity and endurance, one who can send his own instinctual nature to peek under the tent of a woman’s soul-life and comprehend what he sees and hears there. The good match is the man who keeps returning to try and understand, who does not let himself by deterred by the sideshows on the road.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves