It always amazes me how many of my relationship patterns have come from the fact that I was an attractive and am still, an attractive woman. That very prettiness that so many women want, has caused me so many issues in life and brought up so many patterns of protection and misunderstanding in relationships. And people think it’s easier to be pretty, but it’s not, it’s just different. It’s a different set of issues to deal with. A different set of lessons.
The world often forgets that being visibly beautiful can be both invitation and burden. You are born into a face, a body that turns heads, before your soul is ever glimpsed, and that shapes a life.
It shapes how others project onto you.
It shapes how early you learn to guard, to deflect, to read undercurrents in the room.
It shapes how often you’re praised for what you are before you’re seen for who you are.
And so, the beauty becomes a mask you didn’t choose to wear, but had to learn to wield, sometimes like a shield, sometimes like a trap, sometimes like a crown, one that topples very easily.
It gives rise to protector parts.
It bends your understanding of safety, love, and self-worth.
It makes you question the motives behind kindness, desire, even friendship.
I am letting all those protectors dissolve as I travel further and further into the patterns that have shaped my life, bit by bit. Letting myself be seen, not just for the shape of my face, but for the radiance of my soul. So I am baring all in the hope that it will allow you to look deeper too. Nothing here is to be read as anything but my own experience. If it triggers you than that is a mirror for you to look into. The following is from my journalling this morning after a big release of a protector in me. I journal my thoughts through speaking them. I have tidied this up, but it is a transcript of spoken thoughts followed by my written thoughts as I listened back, trying to glean the wisdom!
I’ve never experienced a male-female relationship as a friendship because I’ve always seen how men are attracted to me. That doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it. But I’ve seen the attraction. Even men that are happily married, I have often turned around and seen them glancing at me in a way that I know means they’re attracted to me. And then I feel guilty for taking their eyes off their wife or their girlfriend, because to me, a committed relationship means the man puts that woman first, as does the woman with her man. That doesn’t mean the man would do anything about that attraction. I don’t want to be the centre of somebody’s attention if it is taking away from, what I think should be just given to the person they’re with.
And that’s just my opinion, and that’s just how I feel, and other people might feel differently to that. But this has meant that I then struggle when I’m with men who have friendships with women other than me, because to me, the only relationships with men I have experienced have been born of attraction on one side or the other. So, I have no experience of how it can be different. And so, I really struggle with that. I struggle with his relationships with women, not because I’m… jealous, and not because I don’t trust him, but because from my experience, it means it takes his attention and his thoughts away from me, and that makes me feel insecure and unsafe. Another woman then becomes a threat to love. When you say it all aloud it makes no sense. His just shows how our patterns are emotional and experiential, not logical!
And again, I’m not blaming anybody here. I’m not casting blame. I’m not casting doubts. I’m just expressing my experience. And I often think how men are really not what women want. Men are not built to give women what they want, and women are not built to give men what they want. Not really. In a lot of ways, men and women are completely incompatible, but that’s the beauty here and that’s what we’re here to experience.
And I don’t know how it is in same-sex relationships because I’ve never experienced one of those. And I’ve never experienced somebody being attracted to me, who is of the same sex. I’ve never experienced that. Not knowingly, anyway.
I have been very attracted to gay men, but because I could just be with a man and be completely me, I suppose, not physically attracted, but emotionally so. Although some gay men are very good-looking! But it’s always been a friendship thing. Perhaps because there was no threat of them being attracted to me, and that was nice. That was really nice. That actually brought a sense of safety as well.
It’s all very interesting, and I think really, the whole point of the male-female relationship isn’t anything to do with love. When we look at it from the higher perspective, it’s just about meeting ourselves at our edges, meeting our mirrors, our reflections, so that we can heal something within us. And that’s the real reason for love in the first place. So really, we’re only ever being selfish, because we’re only ever really experiencing love to experience more of ourselves in different ways and noticing where we are resisting, where we are floundering, where we are not the nice person we thought we were, where we were missing something that we thought we needed to nourish us, that we thought needed to come from without us, rather than within us.
There’s a wisdom in this…noticing, awareness this morning. I will try to articulate it. Most of my relationships with men have carried the frequency of attraction, and thus, a weight. An expectation. A distortion of ease. The safety felt around gay men actually speaks volumes. I didn’t have to carry the weight of being wanted or feared or mistaken for a possibility. I could just be. And I am sure men don’t want me to be other than who I am. It’s my own expectations of who that SHOULD be that creates a tangled web.
And that longing for committed men to keep their eyes on their partners isn’t a judgment. I believe in devotion, in presence, in that unshakeable honoring of one another. And when someone flickers even momentarily from that, I feel it, not because I want to be seen, but because it touches a thread of grief: Why must love always be so leaky, so fleeting, so divided?
Love is a soul-refiner. Relationship is sacred friction. Desire is a path to the hidden room inside my own heart.
I also need to add this. When, as an attractive woman, you come across a man that actually isn’t interested in you, instead of feeling relief, you actually feel insecure because you start to say, well, what’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? Do I look awful? And you start to self-doubt. And it’s because your experiences have always told you otherwise, and when you experience the opposite, instead of that relief and that safety you would prefer, you actually feel more insecure than you did before, because it’s not an experience that you’re used to! It’s an unknown.
When being desired becomes the default mirror you’re shown by the world, its absence doesn’t create peace; it creates dissonance.
Not being seen through the lens of attraction when you always have been doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like a rupture in the known pattern. The mind scrambles to fill the silence: What’s changed? Am I less than I was? Have I lost something vital without realising it?
It’s not vanity. It’s conditioning. It’s a nervous system wired over years to equate attention with approval, desirability with worth, gaze with connection. And when that loop breaks, when you meet someone who doesn’t look, or doesn’t want, there’s no map. There’s just the not knowing who you are in that reflectionless space.
But that space, uncomfortable as it is, can become holy. It holds the key to something deeper: being untouched by need for reflection. Being radiant without requiring an echo. Being full even when no eyes are watching. And this is what I am currently trying to achieve through the lens of relationship.
And it makes sense that it feels disorienting. Walking out of a lifetime of programmed meaning, into the raw spaciousness of just being, without adornment, without response, without needing to be anything for anyone.
And in that space I hope to meet me. Whole. Enough. Radiant, even if all around me is silent. Even when the relationship is silent. I am whole. I am enough. I am love.
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