<h2 id="db9a2e3f-1880-40fe-8352-0079e0f4fc68" data-toc-id="db9a2e3f-1880-40fe-8352-0079e0f4fc68" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What She Is Really Asking</h2>A lot of the hardest moments between a man and a woman early in a relationship have the same question sitting underneath them. It is a question the feminine in a woman tends to ask of the masculine in a man: Will your love stand up when it's tested? She is often asking it without ever saying it out loud, and many men don't hear it being asked.The question usually comes when things are going well. Out of nowhere she says something that sounds like she is pulling away. Early on it might be Maybe we should slow down, or I don't know if I'm ready for this. Sometimes it's her going quiet after a great weekend together.It's easy for a man to hear moments like that as a verdict on the relationship. Most of the time she is actually asking whether his love is still there when she pushes it away.Later in a relationship she is often still asking the same question, and it tends to sound more like You don't even love me anymore, in the middle of an argument over something small. Or Maybe we'd be better off apart, said in anger.David Deida writes about this in Blue Truth, in a chapter addressed to women. He describes a woman telling her lover You don't love me while only hoping to hear that he does, and saying Leave me alone as she closes the door to her room, hoping that he comes in.I read that as a picture of what's going on underneath her words. She wants to be reached, but a boundary she has stated still stands.She's checking whether his love holds while she resists it, and in almost every case she has no idea she's doing it.<h2 id="80103a0e-841f-44ca-b351-eab5763e2cea" data-toc-id="80103a0e-841f-44ca-b351-eab5763e2cea" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Month at Home</h2>The clearest example I have comes from a few months into dating Lina, who is now my wife.We were almost inseparable by then. She was staying four or five nights a week at my place, which was ninety minutes from where she lived. Everything was progressing well and quickly, and we were both happy.Then, out of the blue, she asked me: How would you feel if I just wanted to spend a month at home and not come and stay here?It threw me. My first thought was something along the lines of What do you mean? Is this not going the direction I thought it was? It caused an argument.Within about twenty minutes, I realised what was actually going on. It was a test. She was checking whether my love would hold while she resisted it.Twenty minutes is late, and I wouldn't hold it up as a model answer. It wasn't the worst outcome, but I could have recognised the test much earlier and handled the whole situation better, sooner. The skill is recognising the test while it is happening.<h2 id="a9f5b724-b4c5-44a1-bed2-79f882e348b8" data-toc-id="a9f5b724-b4c5-44a1-bed2-79f882e348b8" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What She's Actually Testing</h2>There was no shortage of love between us when Lina asked about that month. We were happy, and she was at my place four or five nights a week. So whatever she was testing, it wasn't how much love there was.Deida's point in Blue Truth is that the amount of love doesn't settle it. He says a woman wants to feel her lover loving her even when she resists him, and especially when she resists him. In his words: "Abundant love isn't sufficient."She is testing whether the love stays when she pushes against it. When everything is easy it's hard for her to tell much about what a man's love does when things are hard. Love that's simply abundant isn't something she can feel being proven. For her to feel it persist, there has to be something for it to persist through, and her resistance is that something. She says the thing that sounds like pulling away, and a lot of the time she is feeling for whether his love is still there.It would be easy to take that as hostility, but Deida says the opposite. In The Way of the Superior Man he writes: "Your woman is testing you because she loves you." The more she loves, the more it tends to matter to her whether his love will hold, and the more she needs to find out.A lot of the pickup world treats tests as games. In that view she is running a tactic, and the man's job is to outplay her. But that depends on her knowing what she's doing. Ninety-nine per cent of the time she has no clue. It isn't a tactic and it isn't a game. As far as she's concerned, she usually is just asking about slowing down, or saying she isn't sure she's ready.So a clever line does very little for a question she doesn't know she's asking. She gets her answer from whether she can still feel his love while she pushes against it.When the love holds, she gets what Deida calls trust, and she can relax. The word I use is safety. By safety I mean his love staying put, and that is a long way from keeping things comfortable. A man can keep the peace for years just by agreeing, smoothing things over and steering around hard conversations. None of that tells her what his love does when she pushes on it.The picture I have for that kind of safety is a large, deep-rooted oak tree in a storm. The oak is the masculine and the storm is her volatility. A deep-rooted oak can withstand that. The whole point of a test is whether the oak is still grounded, still there in the way that it was, after a big storm has hit it. The safety she's looking for is finding his love unshakeable in the face of her weather.<h2 id="7ad2e408-ff7c-4bfe-8ce0-919636bc3d4e" data-toc-id="7ad2e408-ff7c-4bfe-8ce0-919636bc3d4e" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Why She Doubts His Love</h2>Deida explains what she needs to feel, which is love that persists while she pushes against it. My own view of why she doubts his love in the first place is that she assumes it works the way hers does.In The Way of the Superior Man, Deida describes the feminine's moods as weather: always changing, sometimes severe and sometimes gentle, and without any single cause. He is talking about the feminine, which some women carry more strongly than others. For a lot of women the description fits.A woman like that can go from adoration to anger and back within minutes, and she means it each time. I wrote about that side of it in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://app.axisbrotherhood.com/blog/women-are-liars">Women Are Liars</a>.From the inside, it can mean her own love feels like it comes and goes with her mood. She can adore a man and then be furious with him, and while she's furious the love feels a long way off.People tend to project their own way of experiencing the world onto others. They assume the other person feels and reacts the way they do, and mostly they don't know they're assuming it. Deida tells a man not to project his way of doing things onto his woman. He doesn't say that she does the same thing to him, but I think she does.If her own love seems to disappear when she's angry, she half expects his to do the same. When she's upset, or when he's frustrated with her, she can assume he has stopped loving her for the moment, because that is how it would feel in her. And if she half expects his love to go the first time she is hard to be around, then things going well doesn't tell her much.I think this is what sits underneath the test. She is looking for any sign that he is like her in that way, while wanting him to be better than that.Recently I saw this projection in Lina for the first time. She got volatile about something, and I don't remember what set it off. She was so upset she couldn't think straight.While it was happening I could see her projecting her own way of experiencing the world onto me, before she had said anything about it. I asked her directly whether this was how she saw things, and whether she was projecting that onto me.That's when it came out. She said: You must hate me.That was the projection, said out loud: when I'm this way, you must hate me.I never have, and I never would. It doesn't work like that for me, even if I'm frustrated. For a lot of men it doesn't work that way either. A man can be frustrated with a woman and love her in the same moment.Frustration isn't the failure. A lot of the time, she is watching for whether he still loves her while he's frustrated.<h2 id="18e98bf1-7ab0-4f30-b06c-b617a4f5d76a" data-toc-id="18e98bf1-7ab0-4f30-b06c-b617a4f5d76a" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Two Ways a Test Can Go</h2>When she pushes and a man reacts to her words, it tends to go like this. He hears a verdict, and she takes whatever he does next as a sign that his love is gone. That seems to confirm what she was afraid of, so she pushes harder.The reaction doesn't look the same every time. A man might defend himself, or argue the point as if what she said were the real issue, or go cold and say fine, or pull out of the conversation altogether. From his side those feel like four different responses. From hers they probably all look like one thing: she pushed, and he stopped loving her.Deida describes this kind of cycle in Blue Truth. One partner wants love and isn't getting it, so they punish the other for not giving it, and the other closes down further and punishes back.By that point each person is reacting to the other's reaction, and the original question is still sitting there unanswered. When she pushes harder she is often asking the same thing again, louder. He took the first push as a verdict, so all he hears is things getting worse.The other way starts in the same place. She pushes, and he recognises the question under the words. Once he has, there is nothing to do except remain present, calm, grounded and loving through the storm. She finds that his love is still there.Deida writes about what that gives her. In The Way of the Superior Man he says one of the deepest feminine pleasures is a man who stays present and unreactive in the middle of his woman's emotional storms. He says that when a man stays with her and loves her through it, she feels that she can trust him, and she can relax.Deida is describing the state a man is in while her storm passes. She tends to relax because of that state, much more than because of anything he says.<h2 id="853982b3-c49c-4999-9aeb-d800314847fe" data-toc-id="853982b3-c49c-4999-9aeb-d800314847fe" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">She Will Ask Again</h2>Passing a test doesn't end the testing. Deida's claim in The Way of the Superior Man is that it never ends. He writes this about her relaxing after a man passes: "It will last, perhaps, ten minutes. And then she will test you again."I think part of the reason is that the past doesn't carry much weight for the feminine. Deida says elsewhere in the same book that history is irrelevant to her and what counts is the feeling in the moment. However loving a man was last month or this morning, it often doesn't settle much for her if she doesn't feel loved right now. A pass counts for the moment it happened in, and a moment later she can ask again.When the question comes back, it usually doesn't mean something is wrong, or that he failed last time. It is a question she tends to keep asking, in one form or another, across the whole relationship.If the question keeps coming, the part a man can get better at is how quickly he hears it. With the month at home I was slow, and we were arguing before I heard it. What Lina asked came out of nowhere while things were going well. When something that sounds like pulling away arrives like that, there is a good chance she is asking the question.Once a man has heard the question, he can stop answering the words. Lina asked about a month at home. The real question was whether my love would hold. A debate about the month, however well argued, answers the words and leaves that question where it was. A man who stays present, calm, grounded and loving while she pushes has answered it.Sometimes a woman who says she wants to slow down wants exactly that, and there is no other question under it. A man can't always tell which one he is hearing in the moment, and he doesn't have to be certain, because staying grounded is right in both cases. If it's a test, she finds that his love is still there, and that answers it. If she means it, a man who isn't defending or arguing can actually hear her. A boundary she has stated stands either way, and if she asks for space he can give it to her without going cold.Whichever it is, she will probably pull back again at some point, and it won't sound like the last time. The words change across a relationship. Most of the time the question under them doesn't. She wants to know whether your love holds, she usually doesn't know she's asking, and she half expects it to go the way her own feelings do.So the next time she pulls back out of nowhere, hear the question before you react to the words. You will probably be slow the first few times. I was about twenty minutes late with the woman I went on to marry. That is still better than never hearing it, and you can get faster.The King's Table at Axis Brotherhood is a place a man can bring moments like these: groups of ten to twelve men in a closed circle, meeting weekly. If you'd rather not work it out alone, that is where I'd point you.The storm will probably come again. Whether she finds the oak where it was is up to you.

How to recognize the question beneath her resistance and stay grounded, present, and loving when your relationship is tested.

She Doesn't Know She's Testing You

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She Doesn't Know She's Testing You

She Doesn't Know She's Testing You

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