Documentary Filmmaker & Production in Peru (Fixer)

Having a call yesterday with my Canadian ex made me reflect on a few things about myself that I wanted to share today as part of the awareness around Women’s Day.

One of the things I know best about myself, and something I always mention when dating guys, is that I am far from being a conventional woman. For many men this can sound exciting at the beginning, but the reality is that not many truly understand what it really means.

And I’m not going to approach this topic through feminism or any label. I’m simply speaking from my own experience after my most recent relationship.

Being an unconventional woman doesn’t only mean doing unconventional things but more importantly, have developed this internal strong confindence to do exactly the things on the way I want to experience them and not to follow what others do. And with this I don’t mean to diminish any other type of women, I just recognize myself like this in this season of my life right now.

Over the years I developed a strong inner voice and a clear position in how I perceive the world. From the outside, this can sometimes look like “not being too sweet” for some men. But what exactly does sweetness mean for certain men in a relationship? Later on, I realized that this often came from their avoidant side, feeling intimidated by deep conversations and by their own lack of emotional vulnerability.

All this honesty can simply challenge men who feel insecure about themselves and their inestable position in life. They don’t have the tools yet to provide security in this new times we are living in.

The work I do as a filmmaker, researcher, and documentary producer is certainly not a profession for a standard personality, and historically even less so for a woman because of the range of skills it demands. And something I feel deeply grateful to have developed over the years.

Doing Research requires an analytical mind capable of building hypotheses and drawing meaningful comparisons around a topic. Something that I don’t only do for work but naturally for my personal life as well. Skills that I I have written about in previous articles.

Producing requires a strategic and logical way of thinking to find the best solutions for each project, balancing creativity with efficiency and costs, specially to film in remote places inside Peru.

Being a filmmaker demands physical strength to carry equipment for long days, technical intelligence to handle digital tools, and above all the ability to create honest and genuine connections with people in order to bring out the best in interviews.

So, reading all this must feel like a big thing for men and their lack of capacity to bring safety in a different way than the ancestral times. Women now carry a sense of personal security that in the past were exactly the tools for admiration and validation to men. However these new times never meant that we don’t admire them anymore. True admiration and validation as a human being; regardless the gender; have little to do with exceptional titles or careers. They are more about the emotional stability someone can offer during difficult times.

And I am not talking about the “bad men.” I am talking about men who genuinely want relationships to work. The difficulty is that many of them no longer know exactly what they want in a relationship or where they fit, yet they still hope to make it work.

Men often love to feel a sense of certainty, almost as if they are your “everything.” But the truth is that nobody is anyone’s “everything.” Love was never really like the movies with all their emotional highs. Love is something built slowly, and a path two people create over time with only two essential things: Openness and trust.

But how can men open up and trust when they carry insecurities they may not even be aware of?

On one hand, many men love intellectual connection with someone adventure that now have the freedom in time and economy to do things with them; but at the same time they may still expect a more submissive dynamic where difficult conversations are avoided. This because these conversations trigger something inside them, or because they simply do not have the answers and prefer to avoid the discomfort.

This is also becoming challenging for women to meet conscious men who not only have good intentions for healthy relationships but who are also willing to do the inner work required. The ongoing process of understanding personal traumas and weaknesses. For sure, none of us has all the answers about ourselves, but it is a journey that can be carried with respect if both people are open to growing together.

I am not an unconventional woman because I want to prove something to men or because I want to become one. I am unconventional simply because I am unique and I genuinely love what I do as a human being. Not better or worse than anyone else, just different in how I think, feel, and approach life.

And this is not even about economic independence. Most of my ex-partners were financially successful and enjoyed taking care of me, something I appreciated as well. Developing my own unique skills has never been about competition. It is simply about joy and purpose.I used to tell my ex that even if someone offered to pay for my entire life so I could just travel and relax, I would not accept it. Living without a purpose would feel like dying to me.

What men are rarely told is that women can still feel safe with them. Yes, we naturally want their protection, but in a different way. We don’t need them to be the stronge one anymore. We learnt to survive ourselves in these new times. And on the contrary, vulnerability and deep conversations are actually some of the most powerful ways a man can make a woman feel safe. Someone with whom we can feel that whatever happens in the future, we will be a team capable of finding solutions together. But of course, to get to this point, men should have learn to be emotionally open and know about their needs. Unfortunately, many choose to remain in poor relationships where there is little growth. 

On the other hand, we women, both historically and today, still carry a strong intuitive sensitivity and a natural ability to nurture and we love doing that. This includes caring for our partners, family, and the home environment. From a biological perspective, women tend to be more attuned to these aspects of life and we are happy to honor this.

So our identity is not only defined by our great careers but also by who we are inside as human beings, each of us with our own unique qualities and weaknesses as well.

We do not choose our parents or the family we are born into, but our partners and friends are the relationships we truly get to choose in life. And I believe that the person with whom we choose to share our life should reflect the best version of what we hope to experience in love, not someone we settle for just because they seem “good enough”.

I remember that my ex got really surprised when I told him that I committed with him after seven years of being single, precisely because I don’t add to my life just anyone who simply seems “good enough.” In my case, I was surprised that he connected with me only two weeks after breaking up with his ex. It was definitely a huge difference in how we processed our previous relationships and personal growth. Later, it became a major incompatibility that triggered other issues that made it very difficult for us to stay together.

I feel like women, we are making enormous progress in understanding our emotional patterns and trying to break them in order to build healthier and better relationships. But it is also true that the gap between men and women in this process seems to be growing over time.

I am really thankful that podcasts like those of Lewis Howes, Jay Shetty and Matthew Hussey exist. They have helped me a lot to understand how to build better and loving relationships. And overall they are also trying to help men to be more open. Hopefully little by little we all find ourselves in more conscious romantic relationships.

Read more of my articles in this LINK.

Thanks for reading me.

Lizeth Yarlequé