TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Women Cannot Propose to Men
Date: 02/21/2025 Length: 00:29:38
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors. And I thought it would be interesting for us to take a little bit of a look at this topic, which I've entitled, women cannot propose to men. Now, what I mean by that is that marriage proposals from women to men are exceedingly rare. Marriage proposals from women to men that actually result in a marriage are even more rare, and women proposing to men that result in marriages that actually lost are still rarer, even more than that, and and so whenever I do this topic, particularly if I've done it on call in radio shows, invariably, somebody calls in and says, Well, she says, I propose to my husband. Okay, yeah, so there are exceptions. Obviously, I hardly need to say that. And wedding planning companies report, they say about 1% maybe one and a half percent of proposals are done by women and but whether they actually result in marriages, nobody knows. What we do know is that the failure rate of women proposing to men is far, far higher than of men proposing to women. So for instance, if you want to look on YouTube for failed marriage proposals. In other words, where a man gets down on one knee, sometimes in front of people. Although why anybody? Why would anybody want to propose to his future wife in front of an audience? I mean, do you really need a camera man there? Do you really need family and friends present. They're coming to your wedding. That's enough. Maybe they'll even come to your engagement party. But you don't need witnesses, you don't need an audience, you don't need a crowd for the proposal, for heaven's sake. But you will find some failures, you'll find a few cases where a woman is shocked, wasn't expecting it, maybe, whatever it is she runs away out of the frame, or she shakes her head, and it's obviously mortifying. However, if you are looking for failed proposals of women to men. There's any number of those. It's like a whole genre all of its own and that kind of makes sense. So I say women cannot propose to men, but can women propose to feminized men, who are not really men, unmasculine men? Yeah, probably so. And I realize what I'm saying. Obviously, if you are married and your wife proposed to you, and you've been happily married for a goodly period of time, then you are an exception, and I'm sorry, meaning I'm sorry for my comments, but and good for you. God bless you. But in general, a man does not accept a marriage proposal for a woman. Why not? Is the question, What's wrong with that? Well, when a woman proposes to a man, it's invariably out of a sense of frustration that he's taking too long to propose to her now in a in a sane marriage environment, and I know many communities of both Jews and Christians where this is the norm, meaning that you date for at most a couple of months, a few months, that it doesn't take any more than that, and you don't have to live together, you don't have to co habit, you don't have to do anything like that to know whether this can work. So in cases where and these are increasingly common today, the dating has been going on for months and months and then years. Three years is not abnormal. Five years and the woman starts getting uncomfortable. She might be late 20s, she might be mid 30s, she might be late 30s, and the guy is not proposing. So in many of those cases, she takes it upon herself, particularly when encouraged by friends and therapists and magazines. Yeah. Listen, men proposing to women is an old patriarchal legacy. There's no reason why. In mod. Progressive times where we know so much about male female relations and distinctions, and we realize there's absolutely nothing that a man can do that a woman can't do just as well or even better. And so if a man proposes, there's absolutely no reason why a woman can't propose, and she goes ahead and propose. And the majority of cases, it does not go down well. And in the cases in which it does, the it just goes on and on, they don't set a marriage date, the guy is just not going to do it. So the question is, you know, why is that? What's going on there? Well, first of all, let me again thank those of you who are part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, you Happy Warriors who've been helpful in promoting the show around I really, really appreciate that you help more and more people to understand how the world really works. So I thank you for that. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, well, please do that. And lastly, if you haven't yet become part of the Happy Warrior community, I'd love for you to do that too. There are many, many, many benefits. Just go on to the rabbi Daniel lapin.com website, and go on to the become a Happy Warrior part. You'll see everything that happens there. And last but not least, of course, I do a special bonus podcast specifically for members of the happy warrior community. So what is going on here? Why is it that proposals are usually initiated by the man? Why does that happen? Well, the reality is, and this is an important thing to understand that the nature of the male female relationship is one where the male is the more active and the female is the less active. And so in other words, taken to its ultimate moment, the moment of the ultimate consummation of a male female relationship, as everybody understands it is an action of male performance as it were, and so that's one of The reasons that that word performance is only associated with men, performance anxiety. What about women? There isn't such a thing. Essentially, the role of the woman is essentially, or comparatively passive. The role of the man is active, and therefore in the initiation of this union, namely the proposal, once again, it has to be done by the man, or else it's not done at all. It is not possible for a woman to rape a man. The reality is that if anything happens, you can be quite sure the man was indeed a willing participant. He may claim, well, I I wasn't involved, or I was asleep, or he could have claimed anything he likes. But the reality is that without his willing and eager participation, nothing happens at all, and it's more than participation. It's actually action that is, yeah, unavoidable. Now if therefore understanding this at its deepest level, understanding that the male female relationship depends on the man being the active one. We even find a language, sometimes it's in poetry and sometimes it's in more prosaic literature or reports, but
Daniel Lapin 9:21
a man takes his wife. The Book of Deuteronomy speaks when a man takes a woman. And so although Today we speak in in polite and correct terms, acceptable terms, the reality is that it is a man taking a woman, and that's why a woman might say, Please take me in the throes of passion. No man during the process of male female intimacy. No. Man is ever going to say, oh, please take me. It is definitely the action of the man that is valued and at its deepest level, cherished and even needed. And so when a woman initiates the relationship by proposing to a man, normal, natural people, men and women feel that something is off kilter. Something just doesn't feel right, and it would leave any masculine man feeling uncomfortable, feeling this is this is not completely something that he comfortable going along with another aspect of the of the relationship at its most fundamental, is that the man is a giver and the woman is a receiver. The man emits seed, the woman receives that. And so we find, again, that that is a physical manifestation of a spiritual reality. And so the man, a man needs to be a giver. And particularly with respect to his woman, a man feels the need to be the giver at its deepest level, a woman is able to enhance the order of her man by being enthusiastic and happy receiver. Men like to do whatever it takes to make their wives happy. That's, that's a hugely important thing to men, and it's, it's, it's related. It goes all the way deep down to a man's sense of masculine identity and so being a giver and her being a receiver. You've got to ask yourself, in the act of proposing marriage, one party proposes and the other one says, Oh yes, of course, I accept which of those actions is a giving action and which is a receiving action. Would you agree with me? Do you think that the act of proposing is giving something? The act of proposing is reaching out and saying, I want to marry you. I want to take you. Yes, but at the same time, it is a giving, and when the woman receives the proposal and accepts it, then that is an act of receiving, not so and the the next concern is rejection, because being able to handle rejection is a masculine trait. Women do not handle rejection as well as men. If a man has trouble handling rejection, then he needs to man up. He needs to become more masculine. He needs to focus on becoming more man like and it's one of the things that happens in sales. Men learn sales, and one of the first things you learn is handling rejection, because in the profession of sales, particularly early on, there's a great deal of rejection and we learn to handle that, and it doesn't impact us on an emotional level, and we get past it with women, for the most part, it's different. Now I don't have to tell you that there are women who tend towards the masculine and there are men who tend towards the feminine. These are bell curve distributions and you do have an overlapping of the two bell curves, obviously. And so, you know, there will be those women who doesn't bother and there'll be those men who it does a little while ago, Susan and I want to do just have some mindless screen time, and we put on a an Australian reality show, and I must say it was a lot more wholesome and a lot less vulgar than shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and all those real garbage shows. But this was called the farmer once a wife, I think, or, if not, those words precisely, something along those lines. And it involved six Australian ranchers who live far away from the city in the outback, and young single men in their 30s, and they all wanted to get married. And the show managed. To narrow down 10 women for each man, and I don't remember I wasn't paying that much attention. I didn't know I was going to be wanting to tell you about it. But I don't remember how that selection was done, and I don't think we saw it, as far as I recall, when the audience is exposed to the participants. There's, or there are already, 10 women, 10 women for each farmer to meet. And what they do is, I think they do a sort of speed dating, where each farmer gets about five or six minutes with each of the 10 women, and then out of that, from that, he's got to pick five of the women, if I remember correctly, to for him to get to know a bit better. And then out of that, he's got to pick the two, and one of the two is going to have the shot at marrying him. And so I must tell you, I found it hard to take. I it's just painful to see the faces of the rejected women, because you've got all the 10 women standing there, and the farmer says, you know, I'll take Mary and I'll take Jennifer and I'll take Helen, and and those are the ones that are selected. And then the camera shows the faces of those who are not select. It's rough. I've got to tell you. It's so hard to watch because they're suffering. And then later on, it's the five, and out of them, two. And so now three women are being rejected. And now it's, you know, they were in the in the semi finals, and these are women who really want to get married and they like the idea of being a farm wife, and it's just too painful to watch. And then finally, in in what is one of the strangest things I've seen lately. It's down to two of them, and the two of them are invited to the farm for a week or two weeks a long time. And there is no nothing impropriety, and there is no impropriety. It's all completely chaste and celebrated. It's literally just getting to know and the interesting thing is, so these two women are rivals. They're down to the wire. It's going to be one of them, and then it's down to the wire. These two are rivals for his attention. And you it's of in most interesting thing to see in in each case of each of the six farmers, the last two women, like become good friends, and they comfort each other, and they console each other, and they build each other up and then, you know, when it's close to the end, he's going to make his choice they I hope it's you. You know, really, no, you know, I wanted to be you. It's something to see. It's so fascinating, because if it were reversed and it was two men vying for one girl's attention, you know that the rivalry would not result in hugs of friendship and declarations of eternal concern and care and love? No, it wouldn't be like that at all. And so this was very different, but again, the rejected one, it's just too painful for words, and both Susan and I felt that same considerably more than awkwardness. We really felt, um, it was, it was, it was painful to watch. That's how sad it wasn't that. That's how it was. You were seeing the rejected girls
Daniel Lapin 18:56
suffering really, really badly in the and I think that's true in general. I think that women can do very well in sales, but rejection is tough, and here's what it does. It makes the more women experience rejection, it makes women less feminine, the more men experience rejection. It makes men more masculine. Rejection doesn't hurt men. Rejection really, really hurts women. And so I think in that sense, automatically, sensitive people would rather that the man makes the proposal, because if there is going to be a rejection. If there's going to be a no, let it be the man who receives it, not the woman. Let her dignity and self awareness, I suppose, remain intact, rather than risking that she is the one to sort of go. Down in flames when he rejects her, if necessary, let her reject Him. And by the way, in some of these women proposing to man failures, the look on the woman's face when the man turns and runs, walks away, or when he says, No, I'm not ready for this again. It it's just too painful for words just to watch, because it's so tough on women and then finally, there's the idea of male female polarity, the ecstasy and joy of being in a healthy, wholesome, functioning male female relationship is male mastery and female surrender. And these are our concepts. These are, these are not necessarily blueprints of how things have to be, but in general, women desire to surrender to a worthy man, to have a strong, good leading man, a man who assures safety and security protection. A woman yearns to surrender to that just as a man yearns to take a surrendering woman, that is the polarity, and when it comes to proposing, the act of proposing is in itself an act of an action of seizure. It's an act of claiming. It's an act of taking a man says, I choose you. I want you to be my wife. Would you agree? Will you be my wife? And she surrenders. She says, I will. But if the woman proposes, it feels weird to natural and normal men and women, because she is now the one not surrendering at all, but doing the taking. And many, many men who have experienced this or would theoretically reject it in questionnaires. One was done with about 800 students at University of California in Santa Cruz, a very liberal institution, the overwhelming majority of both men and women would not be interested in the woman proposing. And I found that very interesting one, and the men said, I don't want to feel emasculated. Now, I don't know whether they know exactly what that means, or whether they're using it as a general term, but on some level, a man wants to be the taker and the woman wants to be the taken. On some level, the man wants to be the dominant and the woman wants to surrender, and the woman proposing to the man reverses that. It makes it the opposite of what natural and normal people feel to be the way things be. The critique of everything I've been talking about in today's show is that, look, we no longer live under the rules of a patriarchal legacy. Today, we understand that gender equality is a real thing, and there are no heteronormative sexuality rules that apply, that men have to do this and women have to do that, and the reality all I have to say to those other than you wrong is that not everything is malleable in human beings, and we know that to be the case. And it's really funny that people who are on the far left of these issues are absolutely sure that homosexuality, while that is deeply genetically implanted in certain men, there's nothing you can do about it, and it's even wrong to try and do anything about it. That is a locked in unchangeable reality. But when it comes to masculinity and femininity, Oh, those are just very now, it's crazy, because male and female differentiations have been a part of the human condition since the creation. What could be more fundamental than that? But that is rejected. Things that men feel and do can be changed, things that women all can be changed. Homosexuality, that is absolutely unchangeable. It's immutable. It's fixed. That's how you are. So it just strikes me as very odd that on that one, they're quite sure there's no changing. But on the fact, if I say that men. Are more comfortable doing the proposing than being proposed to. All I'm doing is acting and speaking as a part of the patriarchal legacy which should have been long gone. You are a dinosaur Lapin, and you have absolutely no understanding of how things are today. And the truth is that certain things don't change. Things change technologically, no question about it. And technological change is so dramatic that it sometimes camouflages how little things have changed when it comes to the spiritual and non technological side of things, and so that people get irritated by their parents. That is as true in 2025, as it was in 1625, or 425, or 400 BCE, it's all that isn't anything that changes how people relate to siblings male female relationships, what men and women? None of this has changed, and it is these are immutable parts of human nature. Can you force yourself to behave differently? Absolutely, but it's not necessarily going to make you a healthy person. So can a man
Daniel Lapin 26:19
train himself to become more feminine in ways sure he can, he's not going to be a happier or more fulfilled man for it, and I'm not even sure that the woman for whom he's doing it will be very impressed with him by the time he's accomplished his goal. So yes, of course, we can change certain things about ourselves, but they're not permanent changes. We're not actually changing our nature. We're changing our behavior with respect to that nature. And the results not only on permanent but they actually do not result in you functioning in a better way. And I think that's exactly what we're finding with a lot of people who now de transitioning as people are realizing they were sold a bill of goods. A man can't become a woman. A woman cannot become a man. We all know what you can do, but that's something that you absolutely cannot do. So what do you do if you're a woman and you want your man to be more masterly. You want him to be more masculine, just become more feminine. That's all. Surrender more and in most cases, not every single case, but in the majority of cases, men will move in to fill the vacated power space. And as the woman becomes more feminine, he becomes more masculine. Other way around. Same thing, man, would you like to see your wife becoming more feminine? Lift some of the burdens of masculinity off her shoulders, assume them yourself, and you will find you're able to shift that conjunction point between masculine and feminine and reclaim the joy of polarity when masculine and feminine, when male and female, as male and female, are able to join together to form one remarkable unified thing called a married couple, quite an extraordinary thing. And it is something that lots and lots of people are experiencing in happiness and fulfillment and in good health, which is also a feature. And so it helps with fitness, but it also helps with finance. Being part of a functioning, healthy couple is good for you, man or woman, good for you in almost every imaginable way. But the way it begins is that a man's initiation, and if the man isn't ready to do that, then you need to find a man who is because, indeed, women cannot propose to men. That's as far as I think we'll go for today. And the website is Rabbi Daniel lapin.com and until next week, I your rabbi, wish you a week of achievement in your family and your faith, your finances, your friendships and yes, your faith. Did I say? Faith fitness. Thanks so much. Till next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
