Understanding Women In Relationships: The Happiness Quotient

Understanding women in relationships is not an oxymoron. Understanding women in relationship is highly possible and surely probable as long as you’ve got one thing: what I call The Happiness Quotient.

What exactly is the key to understanding women in relationships? How exactly is women’s enlightenment the key to “save the world?”

I know for sure it doesn’t mean a lot of women ACTING enlightened, or behaving in the “enlightened” fashion de jour. Acting enlightened, rather than living it as our truth, tends to just make us more cranky and frankly, un-enlightened. To me, the key is a whole lot of women fed by the realization of who they are, awake to their nature, alive with the privilege of being a woman, full of light, turned on (rather than off); turned up (rather than down); hooked up to our passions and desires; and then living, acting and behaving from there. I also know that they key to enlightenment, especially for women, lies also in our full joy and happiness.

In the section, Men In Relationship, in my website, I not only give men the keys to support and bring about women’s joy and happiness, but also the essential skills and tools for men to simply be happy and successful themselves in relationships.

I’ve spent much of the past eight years throwing myself headlong into research of the seemingly elusive condition, happiness. Through varied trainings, studies with folks who’ve been studying happiness for the past 40 years, work with clients and testing it all out on myself and my own relationship, I’ve come to a glorious conclusion: the health of a group, whether that is as large as a culture or as small as a relationship or family, can be measured by the happiness of the women.

When the women are happy, everyone is happy; when they women are unhappy, somehow no one else is happy. However, if you look around in your own life experience, you’ll likely notice that many, maybe even most, women around you are shut down and pissed off. Maybe you’ve never even seen what a happy, radiant woman looks like.

There is no universal standard of happiness; you know when you are happy and when you are not. Generally, though, as defined by the veterans I’ve studied with, happiness is a function of appreciating what is so, not what you wish to be so. When you find your life and yourself good, right and wonderful, you are happy.

When you find your life and yourself bad, wrong and miserable, you are unhappy.

Our cultural, societal, economic, emotional, medical, sensual – and many spiritual – belief systems are all prejudiced to reference the male as standard. We also live inside of a “top dog, bottom dog” paradigm. The top dog has the power, the bottom dog doesn’t; and power is defined by power over another. As many advances and liberations as women enjoy currently, we are still defaulted to “bottom dog” status in the hierarchy. Often, any straying from these standards is considered deviant.

So women, like other oppressed groups, have learned – as those considered to be deviants from the norm learn – that it is not necessarily safe to be as we are and that we are not fully welcomed as we are. We cannot have full power as we are. We have learned, however subtly or overtly, that since the playing field is not equal, the easiest option is then to lie, cheat and manipulate to make up for the unfair advantage in order to get what we want. We have also learned that what we want is not important; we have learned to bury what we want - or we attempt to not want at all. The result is a bunch of shut-down, cut-off and royally pissed-off women, swimming in a sea where we are constantly found wrong and bad; hungry, unhappy and depleted at most every level.

The remedy is simple. Fill up the women.

As I, along with my partner, practiced these simple, organic, generous philosophies, my heart and head blew wide open. Imagine: recognition of the anger I didn’t even realize I had; a system that saw me, appreciated me and invited me to do the same; and practical, actual tools to lead a happy life. I also began see all the ways I was doing a disservice to me and my relationships by focusing on what wasn’t working. Since that put my attention on what was wrong or bad, that’s what we both got more of.

There is an astounding universal law at play: you can’t move from bad to better, you’ve got to go from bad to OK, then from OK to good, and then from good to better. It’s just the way the progression goes, like a law of physics: bad to OK to good to better. No short-cuts. When something is bad, even though we want it to be better, we can’t skip the next step of OK. OK, it IS; not OK the way it is. Saying OK means to cease resisting and denying the bad thing, but simply notice that it IS. It is our resisting and denying that causes our suffering, not the pain of the bad thing itself.

And once we can say OK to something, it can become good. Or we can then free up some space to look around and find what else in us or the world is good. And then from good, things can get better and better and better.

The magical thing is to start from finding the good, right here right now. And from this heart-opening, gratitude-overflowing place of what is already good, you can address what’s not working and help things to move toward better. When I work with women as well as couples, this is where we start – from what’s already good. Only from good, only from appreciating what is so – not what we wish was so – can things get better.

Any person, but especially a woman, who can find her life and self good, begins the necessary process of filling up. A woman who can find her life and self good, can also relocate her desires, wants and passions, for her self, for others and for life itself, which also begins to fill her up. Full – and fulfilled – women are by nature happy and living their passionate joy.

Women are in need of nourishment, emotionally, physically, spiritually and sensually. A gratified woman is a unique and precious commodity; she is a fountain overflowing. Giving from a surplus (that is naturally created when anything is full) creates more; giving from deficit creates anger and resentment, even if you are really good at hiding it or burying it. A woman in surplus is a delight and a gift to everyone around her. A woman in deficit might just be the meanest thing around.

Many spiritual traditions define enlightenment and spiritual ecstasy from a male perspective – so often women try to fit themselves in to a model of spirituality that is passed off as a universal model, but is more a male model. In everyday terms, it still costs more to dry-clean a blouse than a shirt, and a woman still earns about 77 cents to a man’s dollar. But regardless of how, why, when and from whence it all came to be, you need only to look around to see women drying up and gasping for air.

How then to feed and fill up a woman? Women are accustomed to being overlooked, ignored and disregarded. One simple and powerful antidote is to see us, pay attention to us and to give us your full-hearted regard. We want to be noticed not as a formula or how close we’ve come to emulating a male model of success in business, spirituality or sex, but as a unique being – a woman. This may seem overly simple, but it is the profound start to a much-needed cultural shift.

Women want to be radiant and happy, but we cannot wait around for others to catch on and start offering their high-quality attention to us. It has to start with taking personal responsibility for our own happiness. It has to start with a large dose of radical, revolutionary courage to find ourselves and lives right and good, right now, and to connect with our desires and wants. All this, I have noticed over eight years of working with women and couples alike, takes a huge paradigm shift. It takes a level of self-awareness and understanding how you are wired and what to do with that. It takes a realization that if you feel like losing in your life, it could very well be by your compliancy. It takes the ability to communicate, to tell the truth, to be open and vulnerable. It takes the ability to know what you want, need and desire; to be OK THAT you want, need and desire; to ASK for what you want, need and desire; and to be OK GETTING what you want, need and desire! Shifting paradigms to shift painful patterns in order to become wildly happy and joyfully radiant – this is right where I always start. It may take a long time of this to fill us up – our wells might be very dry indeed.

When you have to pick either the chicken or the egg - focusing on the happiness of the women or of the men in a group – it’s best to pick the women as a starting place. A truly happy woman naturally wants everyone else around her to be happy and get exactly what they want. She’s like the best kind of epidemic there is. But this is not necessarily the case with happy men. A happy man is a great thing, no doubt, but he does not necessarily affect the level of happiness of the group, as does a woman. And often, what makes a happy man is that the women around him are happy. And often, when women focus worried attention on whether the men are happy, her worrying makes the men unhappy.

It is not that men get ignored in this equation. It does no good for either gender to feel disregarded, unable to give their deepest gifts. Generally what happens when a woman receives attention and appreciation from a man is that she wants more than anything for him to be happy and enjoying his life. A woman who is full and gratified is full of the very creative life energy that created us all. Anything that is full overflows generously on everything that is in its path.

Here we are, men and women alike, in the middle of our lives playing the most engaging, intimate and intense game of love, sex and relationship, and playing it from an enlightened perspective. The founding father of Morehouse, one of the veteran places I studied, Dr. Victor Baranco says, “If you're going to play the game anyway, why not win?”

It would seem the winning formula is to start, every last one of us, with appreciating and placing positive attention on women and appreciating what’s right and good, thereby nourishing us in all our dry, cracked places. We women cannot delay our joy one moment nor wait an instant for our culture to catch up; we must take full responsibility for our own happiness. We must dive headlong in the waters of our desires, passions and that which brings us deep pleasure. And somewhere in the middle, the women get watered. And when the woman are watered, springtime returns to quench the thirsty land.

Is a woman who is happy and radiant a fully enlightened being? Rather than speculating, let’s ask her, shall we? And either way, I figure, a world abounding with happy women, defining “happiness” by our own surplus, joy and generosity, defining “enlightenment” by our own lit-up behavior, is a pretty great start.