Thanks for your comment Gareth. I often hear women’s needs described in this way, but I rarely hear it from women. Most often I hear men declaring that women want alpha males or “assholes.” My wife didn’t want a man like that.
The challenge actually is, as you describe it. Boys who grow up operating outside the man box tend to have very low self-esteem. It’s a result of being bullied all our lives inside hierarchical dominance-based masculine culture. The resulting debilitating lack of self-esteem is what turns women off. But those of us bullied in the man box generally end up with low self esteem which no one finds appealing, not even ourselves. Once we do our men’s work, and move past the low self-esteem that man box culture inflicts on us, then our relationships with others, including women, change substantially. But the trick is to learn that we as distinctive individual human beings have our own intrinsic value., regardless of how we perform being a man.