I spent weeks with a group of international students teaching what constitutes healthy relationships and mental health.

Several participatory exercises encouraged assertiveness from participants.  

During a break 4 (single) women from the same leading industrial nation asked to speak privately with me. They informed me that if they lived according to the principles I was teaching no man from their culture would love or want them. Haltingly, they declared, their men want weak women, needy women, women who expect her man to be in charge.

Consequently I have routinely, on 5 continents, encouraged women to become the kind of people weak men find terrifying. Similarly I encourage men and boys to become the kind of men who welcome and embrace strong, self-starting, interdependent women. 

Interdependent? 

People who know how much they need others and how much they don’t. 

Weak men will, and do, confuse love and control, even regard control as some form of spiritual gift – and this they do in all areas of their lives. 

Such control or “care” parades as love and will seduce a woman looking for a “strong” man, any man.

I assured my students that there are indeed men within their culture who are men enough to love women who are women enough to be strong and assertive women.

Health and strength attract health and strength.

Love and control cannot co-exist in any relationship.

There is great power and pleasure in stopping, being still, getting off the treadmill of activity, halting your mind from scanning and searching and being on duty. There’s great pleasure and power in resting, reading nothing, checking nothing, getting caught up with nothing.

There is great pleasure and power in observing the surroundings, picking up designer themes, details which are easy to miss if seeing is done without concentration, or seeing is done without looking. To look deliberately can be transforming.

There is great power and pleasure and sometimes pain in listening with intensity to what people are saying. It may facilitate hearing what others are not saying which may be the core of a desired, even desperate message. What is skirted and avoided will be heard by the avid and trained listener. Listening is a full body activity. 

There is great power and pleasure in choosing to be present, to be near, to be focussed on what another person needs, wants to say, confesses fears, admits to loneliness, is anxious about almost everything. Presence is a gift that it seems few are aware they are able to give. Silence and presence often hold hands. 

There is great power in choosing to love even though he or she who seeks to love will seek no power (Msimimngu, in Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country).