One of the most important conversations I have with men who desire to be in female-led relationships is about defining their values for the relationship.
Your values are essentially the guiding lights for your life. They describe what is important to you. How you live your life in adherence to those values speaks to the quality of the relationships you have with yourself and with other people.
A person who doesn’t have a clear sense of values will, more often than not, live a fairly chaotic life because they struggle to identify what really matters to them. More often than not, they are reactive to what is happening around them rather than responsive to their values.
Desires are easy to discuss. We all have them and even if we struggle to express them, they are still identifiable. Your values, on the other hand, can be harder to define and describe even though we have words such as integrity, honesty, responsibility, or love to name those values.
When you have a clear sense of values, you are able to bring those values into the relationship. This actually creates a deeper sense of trust because she knows that you have a clear sense of your identity and how you are choosing to show up in the relationship.
This also tells her that you are capable of taking care of yourself and that you’re willing to take care of yourself because you are using those values as a way to define your actions and your choices. This even includes showing her that you’ve clearly made a conscious choice to be in a female-led relationship, which is a brave and bold decision on your part.
There are many men who long for this type of relationship and yet aren’t fully honest with themselves or with the women in their lives. As a result, they enter into an unconscious power dynamic where she may end up leading the relationship but it’s done by default as opposed to through a conscious decision on the part of both people.
Welcome to sovereignty through submission, leadership through service. This is the Substack for submissive men who value presence over performance and the dominant women who love them:
In the Sovereign Code Cohort, one of the areas that we focus on is defining the specific values that you are living in your life, both as a man and as a person. What I’ve discovered over and over again in relationships, both my own and in observing other men’s relationships, is that a clear lack of values often creates cracks in the foundation of the relationship because she can’t trust a man who doesn’t have an established sense of integrity. Your values form the bedrock of the integrity with which you live your life.
Your values tell you a lot about who you are. They tell her a lot about who you are. When you don’t know what your values are, by extension, you don’t really know yourself either. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know if what you want is really a conscious choice or if it’s an unconscious dynamic that you’ve entered into because you’re still trying to heal some part of yourself that hasn’t been adequately addressed in your life.
For much of my own life I did not have a clear sense of the values that were important to me. I didn’t know what they were. I lived my life by reaction. I would get into relationships from an unconscious place because I wasn’t in touch with who I was or what it meant to express my identity in the world. This created a lot of turmoil in my life, and in the relationships I was in. I was reacting to my own sense of loneliness and to the desires that I felt but I wasn’t balancing any of that with a sense of integrity or values. That could give me the necessary perspective to really look at both my own behaviors as well as my partner’s behaviors and evaluate whether or not we were the right fit for each other.
I am not alone in making these choices. Many men don’t know themselves and end up making choices that are not helpful for themselves or the relationships they are in. They make a choice on the basis of whether or not they find someone to be hot or sexy but they don’t necessarily take the time to really get to know that person and find out if, in fact, that person is really the right fit for them. Another mistake they’ll make is to focus so much on their kink or other desires that they have without balancing those desires with a system of values it speaks to the other areas of relationship, which are equally as important.
Become a supporting member (paid subscriber) and get access to:
Exercises like this one designed to help you practically apply this work to your life and relationship dynamic
The Under the Collar telegram support group for submissive men where you get weekly prompts and support from me.
The Sovereign Submission men’s circle for submissive men - meet with me and other submissive men once a month in a confidential and private space to get mutual support and connection.
You want to submit to her.
You want to surrender control and be led by her.
But she pulls back and gets cold and withdrawn.
Find out why and what to do in The Sovereign Submission Relationship Guide
One of the reasons that I emphasize values in my work with my clients is because when we have a clear sense of our values, we also have a better sense of our boundaries. We know what we are willing to accept and, more importantly, we also know what we are willing to say no to.
When a man can say no and walk away from a relationship, that man knows that he’s got himself and that he’s got a clear sense of his values. He’s not staying in a relationship from a place of co-dependent desperation or out of a fear of being alone. If he chooses to stay in a relationship, he stays in it because the person he has chosen to be with shares similar values as well as desires. He’s using both desires and values to create a stable foundation for himself, so he can be fully committed to the relationship.
Having a clear sense of your values also creates a happier and healthier life for yourself. Your values are part of your self-care. When you know what you stand for and you have a sense of purpose in your life, it provides you a sense of confidence that can be very appealing. You aren’t being defined by your need to be in a relationship. Instead you’re being seen as a person who has a life outside of the relationship.
This approach to relationships creates genuine love and connection between yourself and the people that you choose to be with. I didn’t always vet people in the past that I would get involved with. I would let my initial desire call the shots without even taking the time to really vet that desire or explore what was causing me to say yes to somebody that might not be a good fit for me. What I learned over time is that desires are multi-faceted. Some desires will be rooted in your shadow and the wounds that you haven’t faced yet. Other desires will be clean and clear because you’ve taken the time to read to learn about what it is you really want and you have situated it within the context of the values of your life.
When you choose to get involved with somebody but you haven’t really taken the time to examine your own desires and understand where they come from, you may end up repeating past patterns of behavior or be trying to heal old wounds through that relationship. That doesn’t serve you or that person. On the other hand when you’ve taken the time to get clear and clean about what really matters to you, you’re bringing that into a potential relationship. It helps you to be a lot more grounded. It shows her that you have figured some things out about yourself and it creates a much more stable foundation for the relationship to flourish.
A lot of what I share here can be applied to any type of relationship but my focus is on female-led relationships. I help men who desire these relationships make informed choices because they’ve taken the time to understand why they want what they, without judging themselves or shaming themselves for wanting it.
A female-led relationship is a natural desire for many men. It can be a very healthy choice. It simply requires that the man actually takes the time to understand what attracts him to this type of relationship so that he’s not repeating old patterns and bringing that into the relationship. In the Sovereign Code Cohort we explore what your values are in relationship to your desires.
This helps you do the inner work and be ready for the relationship. If you’re already in a female-led relationship, the cohort is also going to help you show up better for that relationship because you’re going to have a much more informed awareness of yourself to bring to her. You’ll be able to speak to your values and your desires in a way that shows her that you know yourself and what you want and that you’re not expecting her to automatically fulfill what you want. I help you orient toward her with the level of devotion and commitment that is conscious instead of being an unconscious play-through of your own unmet needs and wounds.
This is a cohort for men who desire or are in Female Led Relationships, but feel like something isn’t lining up.
You show more devotion and she pulls back.
You’re ready to show your service and she rebuffs you.
You say you want her leadership, but something within you resists.
You can try to solve this on your own or you can get the support you need, from men who are on the same journey as you.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.