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One morning while Kim and her husband are having breakfast, she decides to discuss the schedule for a weekend coming up the following month.

“Listen, Eric, I wanted to remind you that Aimee is going to be on a trip with her school on the weekend after Easter, and since we have those days all to ourselves, I thought we should plan something special.”

“That’s weeks away” Eric responds casually, going back to reading his paper. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“But darling,” she replies, trying again, “it’s so rare that we have time together alone, and I just felt the sooner we discussed it, the more options we would have for doing something really terrific.”

“Why do we have to talk about it now? I don’t even know what I’ll be in the mood to do tomorrow, let alone next month. Besides, I don’t see what the rush is.”

“Well, I just don’t like not knowing what we’re going to do that weekend,” Kim explains. “Can’t you just focus on it for five minutes with me?”

Eric grabs his paper and gets up from the table. “I can’t do this now, Kim,” he says in a tense voice. “I really can’t.” And he leaves the room.

Kim sits staring at her calendar, feeling hurt and disappointed. The empty squares marking that weekend stare back at her.

Men and women have very different reactions to this story when I share it with them at my seminars. The men make comments like:

“Boy, can I relate to this. My wife tries to get me to plan every second of my free time, and I hate it I think she gets a kick out of locking me into a schedule.”

“The woman is trying to control her husband’s time, to pin him down so she can be in charge.”

“Kim is obviously insecure and high strung. Why else would she need to have every little detail of her life figured out in advance?”

The women, on the other hand, make these kinds of comments:

“I could scream, hearing this story. I go through this with my boyfriend all the time. He refuses to make plans, so I never have anything to look forward to.”

“Eric is a typical man. What is their problem with planning ahead? It just sets up his wife to look like a nag when she brings it up the next time.”

“This is one of my biggest complains about men – that they just seem oblivious to what’s happening around them. Doesn’t he realize that it takes time to plan special experiences? Kim’s just trying to be a good wife, and he isn’t respecting her at all.”

What do the women see in this scenario that the men are missing? They understand what Kim is doing, because it is something all women do. They know she is doing much more than trying to make plans, or get her schedule sorted out – Kim is filing the space.

Filling the space is what women do when we see an empty table, and think about what we could put on it to make it look better; it’s what we do when there is an awkward silence in a conversation and we invent something clever to say to help break the ice; it’s what we do when we see a vacation is coming up, and we start fantasizing about where we could go with our lover.

This term describes one of the ways women express their desire to create – we like to fill up what is empty. Women’s creative force is stimulated by emptiness. It is as if when we see something that is empty or blank, we feel the need to fill it, to manifest something in that space so that it becomes occupied with life, with beauty, with love.

What is it about emptiness, whether in a space or a conversation or a calendar, that urges a woman’s creativity into action? Is it because in the sexual act, we feel the primal urge to fill the physical space inside ourselves with a man? Or is it something in our genetic makeup as life-givers that makes an empty space too tempting? Whatever the cause, one thing is certain – women like filling space with our energy.

One of the most common ways women fill the space is by making plans. We love to plan. We love to take what was a blank space in the future and turn it into something exciting and meaningful. We don’t do this, as some men conclude, out of insecurity or a need to control our partner’s time. We plan because it is a way for us to honor time, as we will see in Chapter 3, and because when we plan, we give our creative power a wonderful outlet in which to express itself.

WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:

Women love making plans because it allows us to fill up an empty space in time with our love, our passion, and our creativity.

I don’t think men realize the joy women take in planning, especially when it involves their intimate relationship. That’s because for most men, planning is not an emotional activity as it is for most women. When a man plans, he is doing a task, figuring out the details. He is getting something off his to-do list, and then he moves on to the next thing. When women plan, however, it is an act of love. Whether it’s a party, an evening out, a vacation, or a special dinner, the process of planning becomes a channel through which a woman’s devotion can flow. It is as creative an act for her as painting a picture or composing a song. She is giving birth to an event, a happening, an opportunity for relaxation or romance or recreation. And this makes her very happy.