Connor Beaton advises men to develop "emotional sovereignty": avoid personalizing a woman’s emotions and resist taking full responsibility for fixing her feelings. He contrasts healthy boundary-setting with the modern tendency for men to caretaking behaviors (e.g., "happy wife, happy life") that undermine rational response and attraction.
Develop emotional sovereignty. What does that mean? It means stop taking her emotions so personally. Stop personalizing how she's feeling constantly. This will create attraction. When you have some space and separation between how a woman that you're dating or married to is feeling and how you're responding doesn't mean that you don't take responsibility for some things. It doesn't mean that there's not apologies. It simply means that you're not personalizing everything. What happens for a lot of modern men is they've been told to caretake women's emotions and how they've interpreted that is that they're responsible for how a woman's feeling. You know, this whole notion of happy wife, happy life. And so what a lot of men do is they take on, I'm responsible for how she's feeling. And so if she's feeling sad or upset or angry, he gets all distraught and disheveled and his whole rational thinking and his whole being gets turned towards, how do I fix this problem for her?
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
