The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

The summary

Everything in this book follows from one premise: that masculine and feminine are real, opposed energies, and that sexual attraction is the charge between them. In David Deida’s scheme, the masculine is a drive toward freedom, direction and purpose; the feminine is the flow of love, radiance and ever-changing emotion. “You are always attracted to your sexual reciprocal,” he writes — so a strongly masculine man will be drawn to a strongly feminine woman, and the traits that exasperate him about her are the same energy that draws him. None of this is offered as psychology with evidence behind it. It is a metaphysics, delivered in the voice of a spiritual teacher, and the book stands or falls on whether you grant it.

Published in 1997 and reissued for its twentieth anniversary in 2017, it has sold over a million copies and carries endorsements from Tony Robbins and Ken Wilber. The form is part of its pull: 51 chapters in eight parts, most only two or three pages — an italicised law (Live As If Your Father Were Dead, Her Complaint Is Content-Free), then commentary and often an exercise. The register is tantric throughout: the man who stays present under provocation is, in Deida’s language, Shiva, the divine masculine.

Purpose comes before the relationship

The book’s bluntest instruction: admit to yourself that if you had to choose between the perfect intimate relationship and your highest purpose, you would choose the purpose. On Deida’s account this is honesty, not callousness — a man who shelves his mission for his partner “weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence.”

The surrounding chapters build the working method. Cut the invisible strings first: “A man must love his father and yet be free of his father’s expectations and criticisms in order to be a free man” — with homework attached: do the thing you’ve been avoiding because of his influence. Then find the edge: “Your edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.” His counsel is to lean just beyond it — neither hiding in a job that is secure but dead, nor faking a fearlessness you don’t have. And stop waiting: on his telling there is no future point where the work is done and life begins, so start today on what you keep postponing.

Polarity is his theory of desire

Deida is explicit that the poles are not the sexes. Keeping your word, he writes, is a masculine trait in men or women; a feminine-essence man will be drawn to a masculine woman’s direction; he offers “masculine and feminine, top and bottom, butch and femme” as versions of the same reciprocal charge. But the book speaks throughout to “the most common case of a masculine sexual essence: a heterosexual man with a masculine sexual essence,” and that man is its entire audience.

The practical claim is that sameness kills desire. Couples who share everything depolarise, in his term, into comfortable neutrality; passion, he argues, needs difference, and a man who tries to make his partner more consistent and reasonable is sanding off the very energy that attracted him. Her changing mind, on this premise, isn’t dishonesty: feminine speech expresses the feeling of the moment, not a commitment, so he tells the reader to hear her fully and then decide from his own core rather than build plans on her words.

The testing never ends

In Deida’s account, a woman tests the man she loves — and hardest at his moments of triumph. In one scene, a man comes home wanting to tell her he just made a million dollars; she says, “That’s nice.” She pokes at the weak spot, Deida says, because the success means nothing to her unless he stays free and loving — she wants to feel that nothing can collapse him. “It never ends,” he warns: another woman won’t end it, therapy won’t, money won’t. This chapter also holds the title’s definition: a superior man, for Deida, is one whose heart stays open and whose truth stays firm under his partner’s criticism — who can laugh at “That’s nice” on the day of the million. The same logic runs through his claim that she doesn’t really want to be number one — that if he makes her the point of his life, she feels his dependence and trusts him less.

A doctrine, not a finding

There are no studies here, and Deida doesn’t pretend otherwise; the laws arrive as revelation. That matters most where they sound medical or universal. “Although you and your woman are equal beings, you are very different creatures,” he writes, and goes on to claim that women who de-prioritise love for career predispose themselves to depression and disease. Another chapter sorts women’s energetic temperature partly by hair colour and ethnicity — “blonde, light-skinned, Japanese, and Chinese women are cooler,” in Deida’s words. This essentialism is the book’s most criticised feature: a Good Men Project reviewer found two dozen passages worth highlighting, wedged between what they called borderline sexist or outdated views of gender, and a 2021 Jezebel critique argued that for all the energies-not-genders caveats, Deida’s portrayal of the essences “falls along expected gendered lines.”

The bottom line

The purpose material is why the book survives: know your real edge, stop waiting for completion, and don’t make one person the point of your life. The account of women and desire wrapped around it is a doctrine — asserted, not argued — that you either grant or don’t. Read it if you want the source text behind so much of today’s men’s work and can hold both of those at once; skip it if you’re looking for anything resembling evidence.