"You Can't Outgive A Woman"

I have been married both to a woman and a man for about the same amount of time: ten years.  What stands out for me is that I love the yin yang that is a part of being with the opposite sex.  Where I was hard or rustic my wife was soft and refined.  There were many times when instead of confrontation (the experience I had with men I had been with) she was collaborative.  There was always an intention to be helpful and giving and it showed every day of the week in her actions and in her verbal loving supportive thoughts, which was rarely the case with the various males I experienced.  Although it was a famous man, television host and author on how women think, Steve Harvey was in fact the person who made the statement "You can't outgive a woman.  His research about women has been one of the most respected and his book has been on the best seller list and for good reason. If you watch his talk show Steve is on a mission to get men to understand how women feel and think in service to holding a better relationship with them.  I have to agree with him.  We (men) cannot outgive a woman.  It is a statement about men that some don't want to hear but it is a fact.  It is a fact that many men are starting to understand and some have stepped up to the plate, but we have a long way to go.  

When I was married to my wife Luz Maria I went into the relationship already believing that I was the big shot in the relationship or "the boss".  As time passed I realized that I was in fact not the boss and the love and compassion that she shared with me made me surrender to her knowledge of life, how to respond to life and be a better man.  She did this by giving seemingly without any intention of getting.  She did this by being a woman and being a giver.  Year after year it made me do things I'd never thought I would do like: ironing her outfit when we went out dancing or polishing her high heels.  I would even buy her a beautiful dress, shoes and a purse as a gift just because.  I learned how to give because she was a giver and she did not place any conditions on her loving me.  I never had that experience with any male in my life.  

I use to look up to the heavens and think: "Really Goddess, Is this a joke?"  I was referring to the fact that I was gay.  All of my emotional being was and still has an emotional intimacy and extreme love and emotional attraction to women.  Why was I attracted to men only physically?  Why were the men in my life so selfish and rarely gave without some agenda or with intention to get something from me?  What I uncovered in my life was that men do not think like women, even gay men.  The dynamic between two men is similar to the disfucntional dynamic of men with women.  Try as I might to bring the feminine giving, surrendering, compassionate side of me, it rarely worked.  What I have understood is that men do not think or behave like women and that my expectation was likely irrational to them.  I like to think that men are not forthcoming on purpose, but that some have not learned the same lessons I learned form the women in my life about giving without conditions or without a reason like a birthday.  

In the end I would like to think that we can be as giving as women.  I like to think that there are men who are as good at giving as women.  I have rarely experienced it in my life but there must be some men who are wired to give more and take a little less than the stereotype guy.  There is a side of me that wants that for men who seem clueless like the ones on the Steve Harvey show who give their wife a tool set for Christmas and a fishing pole for her birthday.  I for one understand these self-serving gifts because one year a man gave me tennis lessons for my birthday because he wanted me to play with him.  Although I went out of my way to learn to play it did not turn out that I liked the game much.  I later learned to play racket ball and loved it, introducing him to that sport.  Still the gift like other things was about competition versus collaboration.  Loving collaboration was simply not a part of his vocabulary like many men in our society who think so little about a gift for their wife of many years that they would give them a clock that did not work.  We truly have a long way to go and I must say that women and their clarity around giving is prevalent in our world and in my own life.  The irony is that men do not understand that having a woman who is a giver is a teacher and that they can learn from them.  

Elliott Maximo Collazo