What Do You Do When She Leaves Your Relationship or Marriage for Another Man?

A simple, scary question with a complex answer: What do you do when the woman you love is with somebody else?

I’ve been talking with some people at another web site that tries to help people out of divorces and I’ve been getting a huge number of questions from them over the last few weeks. The most common one by far is “My wife left and is now seeing someone else (or is having an affair and refuses to stop). How can I win her back?” No big surprise, right? Do you want to know what IS surprising?

It’s not the answer to the question by a long-shot; indeed, the possible answers to that question are few and simple:

1. Stop abusing your wife

2. End your substance abuse, gambling, or fidelity problem and try to make a life with your wife instead of feeding your addiction

3. Read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and learn how to evaluate and manage relationships, communicate well with your wife, and find out whether you can fire up her attraction mechanisms beyond the point the other guy has created to get your honeymoon going again so that she is only interested in you.

One or more of those answers will take care of almost all cases. It won’t always take care of the case where the other guy has created so much attraction that you can’t get her attention to let her see your improvement; attraction is a sword of MANY sharp edges ; "double-edged" doesn't begin to describe how many ways it can work for or against you. But the big question isn’t what you should do to bring her back…

The big question, and the very first one you should ask, is WHETHER you should bring her back!

That’s right! I’ve spent hours and hours cruising relationship and marriage help web sites, and everyone is frantically begging for help to bring their spouses back (and being advised on how to do it by others who are apparently in the same boat, giving a strong appearance of “the blind leading the blind,” at least as far as the forum threads and blogs go), but nobody is asking whether it’s the right thing to do! Indeed, they label somebody who acknowledges such severe problems that no marriage ever should have happened, let alone be possible to save, as a “quitter” and a “loser.” Give me a break!

Right now, a great many of you are having a knee-jerk and responding, “Of course it’s the right thing to do! She’s his (or MY) wife!” If you stop to think about it, there will be some cases where it may not be!

For instance, what if you are the host in a codependent pair, and she is a substance abuser that has sucked the life out of you for years with the cost of feeding her habit, legal and medical costs, worrying you sick, making you feel responsible for all her bad choices and leaving you no room to enjoy anything about your life, let alone what you have earned?

What if she’s not a substance abuser, but still codependent and has kept you working 16 hours a day every day of the week just to keep her out of a jam?

What if she’s a spouse abuser, and married you to have someone to punish because the person who traumatized her is not available, and you were both available and easily manipulated into taking and holding the job of whipping boy?

What if she’s always exhibited a fidelity problem because she’s a gold-digging hussy that married you for your money and has just moved on to somebody with more money, or because she’s spent all you had?

What if she’s always exhibited a fidelity problem because she has a self-esteem problem that she refuses to address, and would rather seek the attention and approval of other men because it’s easier and more palatable than to admit the reason she feels crappy about herself is that she hasn’t done anything in her life to feel good about?

What if the two of you got married because she was pregnant, never did get along and weren’t happy, but comfortably numb and unhappy, and she was just the first one to wake up and realize that you never should have been married to start with and wasn’t rejecting you, but making the same move that you should be making to rectify that age-old mistake?

What if she wasn’t pregnant, but the two of you just were young and lonely and desperate, thinking that nobody else would have you, and latched onto each other thinking a bad marriage would be better than being alone?

What if one or both of you were trying to escape your parents’ abuse and married the first person that came along that provided a way to get out of the house, thinking it couldn’t possibly be worse than home but not realizing that if it was almost as bad you’d still need better?

What if you’ve had such philosophical or value system differences that you’ve always fought and never been happy together and really don’t know why you ever got married or stayed married, because you have no compatibility beyond breathing air?

What if you have compatible values, but your tastes are so different that you have never been able to find a way to spend quality time together, and sleeping, sex, and an occasional trivial conversation are all you really share?

What if you’ve suddenly become disabled somehow, and she’s the one who thinks she’s the victim, ignoring the fact that you haven’t let yourself become a victim and are still a great husband because she’s just too enthralled with the drama and attention? Or just too stinking bigoted to give you a chance to show you that you’re still worth having around?

There are a hundred more scenarios like that, but surely at this point you get the picture. The first question that needs to be asked when things look like they are breaking up isn’t how to stop the break-up...

It’s whether there is any reason for you to expect to be happy with that person if the relationship were to continue!

If there is no expectation of happiness, why continue? There is no productive purpose in trying to save a marriage when the underlying relationship that defines every aspect of that marriage is not a happy one and has no history or chance of being a happy one. The whole purpose of marriage is to bind yourself to a person for your mutual benefit – love, nurturing, friendship, watching each others’ back, companionship, exclusive (and hopefully therefore safe!) sex, etc. -- is it not?

On the other hand, if you have been truly happy, and have just drifted apart, there’s a most excellent chance that you can get things back on track, especially if things have just been in a rut and one or both of you have become “maritally bored.” It’s not at all rare for women to have affairs, leave home, and even file for divorce as a way of communicating to a man that he’d better straighten up and act like a man and be strong, fun, and interesting like he used to be instead of the “chronically beer-swilling remote-jockeying couch potato who never pays any attention to her” that he’s become. And it’s easy to tell the difference…

A woman who’s completely done with you moves on immediately and completely. The divorce papers are delivered with a restraining order, and there are instant barriers up everywhere. You have no contact with her, or even any way to contact her directly.

A woman who’s done with all parts of you except your checkbook still strings you along keeping you in approval-seeking mode and continues to be a drain on your resources, and may accept phone calls, go to dinner, etc., but you’ll notice that you pay for everything, and she keeps having money trouble that you need to bail her out of, even if she makes better money than you. She’ll also be chipping away at your self-esteem to get you deep into approval-seeking mode, making herself physically unavailable while talking about the future and getting back together, etc., trying to make you so utterly desperate for her attention that you’d spend your last dime trying to buy it while she’s out partying with others and secretly (or not) living it up at your expense.

It’s the woman who leaves or files papers, but continues to talk and especially to say things like, “I still love you, but I’m bored/not ‘in love with you’ (how I hate that convoluted expression!)/I can’t be with you right now/I can’t go on like we are and you’re going to have to show me you can change some things/etc.,” that has acted badly to get your attention and is wanting to come back home to the guy she wants to live with. She will tell you what it takes to win her back, and if you speak “feminese” you’ll hear her when she does and know exactly what to do.

Like when she says she loves you, but the guy she’s having an affair with makes her laugh, or is spontaneous, or anything about him that you are not, she’s giving you the laundry list of things you need to fix. Those things are not said to create competition or belittle you, but to communicate what is missing from your marriage. If she’s moved out and/or filed for divorce, and talking about the things you used to do together or the way you used to behave toward her, she’s telling you what she misses and what it will take to bring it back. And she may not “say” anything. She may ASK you if YOU miss things from the past to TELL you that SHE does!

But again, you have to speak “feminese” to understand, because she probably won’t just say, “you used to pay attention to me and make me feel special,” she’ll refer to things you did by asking if you remember them, like picking her a bunch of wildflowers, or cooking supper on the night that she had to work late, things that demonstrate how you did what she missed, and you have to be able to connect the dots to see what she’s really saying, because women never state what to them is “the obvious.” And more often than not, they will make these statements in the form of a question; “Do you think our marriage is good?” is in fact a statement that she thinks there’s a problem that she wants to talk about, and the next thing that comes out of your mouth could quite literally make or break your marriage.

Do you know what to say when asked a question like this, or why you should say it? Do you see how if you say something that rebukes her attempt to enter into a negotiation about the state of your marriage, that one act will be all she needs to give up? Or to take drastic action to wake YOU up so you can get things on track? The stakes are high at this point, so high that you MUST take responsibility for effective communication; failure to do so will cost you in more ways that you can imagine.

How do you learn to speak “feminese”? The same way you learn how to evaluate and manage relationships and learning how to be that alpha male that every woman wants and your woman will be thrilled to have, by downloading your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com before you do another thing, and especially before you take any more relationship advice from somebody whose own marriage is on the rocks, because this information has worked for everyone who has ever used it, and it will work for you, too.
In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

The First and Most Important Step in Having or Saving a Great Relationship and Marriage

The first step in any great relationship of any kind is being well-matched. If you are not well-matched, you may be able to survive together, but the odds of being happy together are slim to none; if you are, you’ll find you can conquer about anything! Unfortunately, some couples live in misery for years without ever asking this most fundamental and necessary of all relationship questions! This is one of those “must read” issues, so dig in…

Today I want to talk more about something that seems to be so logical that it would be self-evident to all, but obviously is not practiced by many, the first step in having a great relationship. We touched on this in another issue of this newsletter concerning what to do if your wife is with another man, and you should read that issue if you missed it. I try to go through this every two to three months because there are so many new people coming in and everyone needs to see it.

Those of you who have been banging your head against the wall after receiving advice from someone claiming that “any relationship can be saved regardless of circumstances” will want to pay particular attention to that and this issue, because this edition may be addressing your biggest relationship or marriage problem. And if people are going so far as to call you a “quitter,” or “loser,” because you’re tired of fighting a losing battle for a lost cause and can’t see how it can end well for anyone, you’ll not only want to read this, but share it with them, to at least get them off your back and possibly even help them get in touch with reality.

That first and most crucial step in any great relationship or marriage is being well-matched to your partner.

Yes, some of you are right now saying, “Duh!” but others are saying, “but can’t you learn to love someone?” Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Here are the facts and truth of the matter:

When you first meet someone, the emotion that pulls you together is either attraction or need (or in rare cases lust, but lust is seldom responsible for keeping two people together long enough to get married, unless they’re incredibly reckless or needy), which are both independent of love; indeed, need is in fact mutually exclusive of love – you cannot love someone that you need, because (in a nutshell) need actually makes you resent them as the object of your dependence, and fear their power to leave and remove the thing you need from your life. Fear is a partner to hatred, not love.

Love can only come later, when you’ve had a chance to discover your compatibility, which is the basis of love. “Love at first sight” is poetic nonsense. Attraction can happen at first sight, as can need and lust, but not love, because you can’t just see someone, know that compatibility exists in that instant, and be motivated to love. And this lack of understanding has ruined more lives than you can imagine.

This in itself is a complex and difficult concept for most to embrace, and if you find yourself wanting to argue with it, see Lesson 3 in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, entitled “Love, Need, Lust and Attraction – Do YOU Know the Difference?” or skip to the similarly-titled section of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and gain an effective understanding, because it is both factual and crucial. We’ll address need first because it’s easier to see, then we’ll get into attraction and love.

Need never develops into love, and sooner or later, the other person (unless they are hopelessly codependent) gets tired of neediness and moves on. There is nothing you can do about this, especially telling them that you need them and can’t live without them. That is the very drain, pressure, and stress that they are trying to get away from, and your fight for independence is going to take too long for them to wait around for you to complete it, if you can; most truly needy people, those who would be called parasites because they take from their partners without giving anything significant in return, spend their life moving from host to host because it’s just easier for them to find a new host than to evolve into a non-needy person of independence.

In short, if the person you are with is telling you it’s over because you are too needy, take the hint and grow up, become self-supporting and independent, and you’ll find that people enjoy being around you for the long term. Make no mistake, fighting this break-up is only going to make things worse, because you are severely mismatched; a chronically needy person cannot coexist with an independent person who resents neediness. You got away with it for awhile because you were somehow charming, physically attractive, wealthy, funny, or something, but now that the cat is out of the bag and it’s known that you’re a needy wuss, you have two options: find another host or evolve so that you can enjoy another’s company instead of needing it. It’s harsh, but it’s really just that simple.

Someone asked once why I didn’t talk about a case wherein the woman is the needy one. I didn’t because I didn’t realize how common it might be for a man to be trying to save a relationship with such a woman, wherein he is independent and she is the needy one. But lo and behold, I have run across them, and the “cognitive dissonance” within the men is overwhelming. They fight between wanting to get away from the stress of being stuck with a needy person and wanting to try to “salvage their investment in their marriage.” The truth is that for many, their protector circuit comes alive and they are driven rather than making a conscious choice, even to the point of self-destruction.

The only hope for you if you are in this case is to help your wife understand that what she is feeling is need, not love, and that she needs to develop some self-esteem before she can love either of you. Try to help her develop some self-esteem, and if she insists on living in denial (“Why can’t you just love me as I am?” and such questions are infallible evidence of such a problem) in spite of your efforts to get her to acknowledge her problem, seek counseling, etc., you have two choices: Get out or go down with a sinking ship. You can either lead her out of it, put up with it, or leave, and you won’t be able to lead her as long as she’s in denial. ‘Nuff said.

Now, on to the more complex case, where attraction was the reason for you to come together. Once attraction has brought you together and you’ve had your initial episode of “physical exploration and gratification,” there should be a period where you get to know each other, find that you have common interests, philosophies, values, etc., and come to value each other – love develops. This is the source of the friendship, respect, loyalty and commitment required for long-term relationships to survive, while attraction is where all the fun, excitement, and energy come from. There are several possible scenarios that arise from the various permutations of these two emotions between two people.

The most obvious two are having both love and attraction, in which case you can be together happily and feel like you’re in a never-ending honeymoon (the ideal situation, right? And it can be sustained for a lifetime if you are aware of its requirements and constituents and hold out to find and have it, and we’ll get back to this in a few minutes), and having neither love nor attraction, after events have eliminated them both, in which case the relationship must end, because even though lost attraction can usually be easily rekindled, lost love just doesn’t happen. Peoples’ values and personalities just don’t naturally move radically away from some baseline and then go back there.

Now, the other two are a bit trickier to deal with. We’ll talk about the harder of the two first, the case in which love is lost but attraction survives. It is common for people under tremendous pressure that they ultimately cannot handle, and they degrade themselves somehow. They could then become a loser, maybe a criminal or spouse abuser, and/or possibly a substance abuser, but they still project the personality traits that trip attraction triggers.

This would typically be a marriage that started out like a story book romance, but currently one spouse is drunk or high all the time after losing a loved one, a business, or career, etc. They have lost their self-love, self-esteem, and self-respect, but have still managed to somehow remain fun, funny, authoritative, somehow sexy or intriguing, or something that holds the other spouse’s attention. You can’t base a great relationship on nothing but sex, jokes, and parties, and you can’t “fix” somebody else, especially someone who won’t admit there is a problem and doesn’t want to fix anything.

Your only choices with such a relationship are to either get this person some professional help so that they can be redeemed or move on. Again, it sounds harsh, but statistically and historically, this is reality, and if they won’t get help, moving on is your only option; having once loved someone is no reason to go down with a sinking ship that refuses to be repaired. That’s martyrdom, the ultimate form of sacrifice, the trading of valuable life for nothing of value at all, not love.

The last possibility is the one I like dealing with the most, where love is still alive and healthy, but attraction has failed; you’re in the “friends column” but nobody else has created attraction in your partner and she still loves you, but is bored and vulnerable. In the dating world, lost attraction nearly always means that you blew it and you just move on immediately, because the other person already has; the window for creating attraction opens once, and very briefly, period. However, when you’ve been together for long enough for attraction to fade, you develop a vested interest in keeping the relationship alive. You acquire memories, security, a mortgage and property, and usually children, which motivate you to try to work things out. Hence, the window that closes in seconds in the dating world can be open for months or even years when you're committed.

Men are generally pretty easy when it comes to attraction. We’re attracted mostly to physical appearance and seductive talk and actions, and if attraction is lost and must be recreated, women seldom have to do any more than correct whatever major issues have developed with their appearance, if any, and act like a woman; self-respect and self-love in a woman are among the sexiest things a man can behold, and they cause the things that trip men’s attraction triggers, such as being height-weight proportionate, good grooming and posture, smiling, having fun, etc. Drama and depression are big turn-offs to men, but both tend to disappear when a woman feels attraction for a man.

Women aren’t so easy though. Physical appearance barely makes them curious, and then only for a short while, and that curiosity can be destroyed in an instant by any non-alpha male behavior, such as deferring decisions, approval-seeking or trying to impress them, being lazy or boring, etc.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible, or even difficult, to rekindle attraction. Indeed, if you have the right information to work from, it has been proven to happen in less than a week to a sufficient degree to halt the signing of divorce papers already prepared and move an estranged spouse back into the family home. This is the failing relationship that you fight for, even if there has been an affair, because love is hard to find and to earn, and a physical affair – which virtually always happens out of boredom and means absolutely nothing unless you choose to assign meaning to it – is no reason whatsoever to abandon a proven love.

Yes, I said that, and I’m about to say it another way: a one-time physical “fling” that happened out of boredom is not proof of lost love, nor a sign of disloyalty or disrespect. It’s an unfortunate and very STUPID thing that happens when two people can’t or just don’t effectively communicate with each other and allow their attraction to fade, nothing more, and nothing less. I’m not saying that the person who does it is stupid; I’m saying that it’s ridiculous that people will let their problems go to the point that this happens before realizing there is a problem and trying to fix it.

If you’re sitting on the couch with a beer and the TV remote every night while your partner is doing something else, and you’re part of that statistic that says that the average mature couple (mature meaning having been together, married or not, for two years or more) has sex six times per year (yes, that’s once every two months on average), trouble’s not just coming, it’s HERE!

And, there’s no sense waiting for it to get that bad before taking action; a good relationship is far easier to maintain than it is to fix if it gets broken, right? What you need is a plan for evaluating and then fixing and/or maintaining it and the knowledge required to empower you to do that. Luckily for you, it’s already been figured out, tested, proven, and published, and it can be yours in the next few minutes.

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you can download it right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, and it’s working for everyone who’s used it. Don’t make things rougher on yourself than they have to be by waiting. Do it now, and do it for keeps, because life is too short to do it any other way.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Relationships and Marriage Take Work, but not As Much As You Think, IF You Work SMART!

If your natural personality is such that you can’t attract and/or keep someone in a mutually fulfilling and enjoyable relationship with you, you need to spend your time and effort on self-improvement, not honing your hunting or acting skills and trying to learn a new way to fake it.

Well Gentlemen (and Ladies!), I’m on fire again. It never ceases to amaze me how people will believe that the hardest and least effective of all options available is the only option when they have a problem. I keep running into people who want to argue that relationships take a lifetime of hard work if they are going to amount to anything, and it’s therefore easier to have affairs or just put up with problems.

Never has so much time and energy been expended shoveling such a load of crap!

Indeed, if a little work is done on the front end, a good relationship can be almost maintenance free if a couple gets in tune and is well-matched.

Well-matched. What is that? Quite simply, if your values and tastes are similar, interests and ambitions are compatible or even complimentary, and you speak anything close to the same language, you’re well-matched. Being together is then natural, because your personalities and motivations are also compatible and possibly even complimentary. You cooperate instead of competing, and it feels good to be together, so much so that you look forward to it. Being well-matched isn’t a product of reinventing yourself; it’s the product of being yourself during the dating period so that you attract someone with whom you are compatible and therefore don’t have to walk on eggshells and jump through hoops to get along with them. Been there? Done that?

So you say, “What if I’m myself and nobody wants to be with me after the third date?” or “I’ve been married three times and none of them lasted longer than a year!” That’s where the work comes in! Not in faking your way into having someone keep your company, but by going through a self-evaluation and self-improvement period, and the thing that may need improved the most is your criteria and method for choosing a mate, not anything that makes you the person you are.

You may need to hone your evaluation skills. I’ve counseled clients who are really great people, but they tend to make very bad choices in a mate, being attracted to some trait that has a high probability of bringing with it something destructive, such as being attracted to the excitement of risk-taking behavior, which can be a mark of an achiever or someone bent on self-destruction, and they don’t make the effort to find out which. Or being attracted to someone who is very involved in charities, which often brings with it a tendency to be unavailable too much of the time and a heavy guilt element that dampens them and the relationship. You may be hung up on a particular type of woman, like the codependent that is constantly getting into trouble so that somebody can save her.

You may need to determine who you really are so that you can identify someone who is compatible with you in terms of your values, tastes, etc. Some people reach middle age and later without ever knowing who they really are, what they want from life, what they want out of a marriage, partner, or job, etc. You can’t pick a compatible partner if you have no idea what you’re trying to match them up to.

You may find that there are things about you that can be improved, maybe even easily. You may need to do whatever is necessary to gear up and truly become somebody that you can be proud of and that other people will enjoy being around. Sometimes people don’t get enough direction, mentoring, and exposure to the right things to choose appropriate and attainable goals, achieve, and develop the necessary self-esteem to attract people or even enjoy being around others.

You may indeed find that what needs the most improvement isn’t your self, but your self-image, and that you’re “bottom-feeding” because you can’t believe that a good woman would have you. Shyness and any other mild form of social discomfort is a huge symptom of self-esteem deficit. Drug companies want you to think that you need a pill to meet people, while bartenders recommend alcohol, but the truth is that except in the most unusual of circumstances, all you need to do to feel at ease with others – of either gender -- is to feel good about being yourself. It’s really that simple. And when you make these genuine changes, there is no stress to try to maintain a façade.

Whatever you find as the problem, the solution will require REAL change, not a repackaging, not an illusion, not a smoother act or a better line. Not a magic bullet or wonder drug, but a real, workable, and easily-sustainable solution. The good news is that you will enjoy the change process and the result, because it will make you feel better about yourself, which must happen before others will feel good about being with you.

I know this sounds simplistic, but folks, I can show you more real-world examples of this working than you can imagine, and I challenge anyone to present a genuinely happy couple that is faking anything to get along or a genuinely happy person that is faking anything at all. One of your fellow readers just went through this exercise, and went from being near divorce proceedings after his wife moved out of the house and negotiating visitation rights to having her moving back in the house and making plans for family relocation and career change in a little over a week! (And there have been several of these guys getting these dramatic results. It’s not an isolated incident or one those cases of “results not typical, yours may vary” you see disclaimed in fine print.)

They were well-matched, and still loved each other, but had both picked up bad habits since their son had been born and couldn’t stand being around each other because it was too stressful to try to be somebody they weren’t. He was being overly accommodating and she was trying to tolerate it because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by rejecting his favors, and the stress was getting to both of them. What’s sad is that he had every reason to see her as unappreciative of his accommodation, and she had every reason to be bored with his seemingly wussy attitude, because neither knew the real story.

He made a decision to be strong and decisive again, and return to the alpha male behavior that was natural to him in years past, and BOOM! She was instantly back into attraction, stress was eased for both of them, and life was suddenly very good, because they were doing what came naturally and it worked. No faking, no worrying, no wondering how long they could endure keeping up the façade.

A little work on the front end to become or realize that you are someone you enjoy being and whom others enjoy being around will save you a lifetime of having to live under the stress of living a lie and feeling inadequate. The same goes for finding someone that you really enjoy being with, and especially TALKING with – you have to have something to do to pass the time between sexual encounters!

Having a strong self-image and finding a good fit in a relationship makes you feel confident and worthy of the attention of others, and also makes you feel that the burden of proof, with regard to worthiness, is on everyone else. You know you’re worth having and can afford to wait for a good match instead of doing what everyone else does and settling for what’s available at the moment, scared to death that if they get away there will never be another chance. That sort of independence is one of the greatest feelings a human can feel, and you can’t appreciate just how good it really is until you’ve felt it.

Finding a good relationship isn’t about being liked, or being popular, and your quest to find a good relationship should be spent as a time of self-assessment, not assessment by others, as well as a time of exploration, during which candidates will be presenting themselves to you for you to evaluate. If you’re not attracting the kind of people that you feel good being around, it doesn’t mean that you’re bad, or inferior, or any kind of depressing crap like that. It means that you need to either get a more realistic image of yourself or grow a bit to mesh with the kind of people you like, and personal growth is ALWAYS a good thing, something to make you feel like you have achieved something worthwhile.

There is no downside to getting your self and your self-image squared away; just do it, because you can be supremely happy with others only if and when you are happy with yourself. The same goes for loving and respecting yourself, which must come before you can extend those feelings toward others or they can extend them to you. Sounds like it’s all about you, doesn’t it? Well, it is, so get busy.

Or maybe you’d like to be one of those old guys who has worked the same job for 40 years without promotion, sits around watching TV when he’s not working, and can’t figure out why he never seems to enjoy anything and nobody wants to spend any time with him because they’ve all grown while he’s remained stagnant. No? I thought not. ‘Nuff said.

Improvement, like life or a great relationship or even a marriage, is a journey, not a destination. Yes, here we go with another travel adventure metaphor, because it’s entirely accurate. You need to know where you are and where you want to go to plan the trip, and your travel guide for this trip to a great and lasting relationship and total understanding of women, which will hopefully be a very long one, is “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.”

It shows you how to figure out where you are by evaluating yourself and your relationship, then takes you down the right roads to understanding and communicating with each other and doing all the great and fun things that keep attraction alive, and therefore restart and/or keep the honeymoon going. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, because it will get you where you want and deserve to be.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Ex's: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Former Relationships and Marriage

Depending on circumstances, ex’s can be a valuable asset, a nightmare, and worst of all, an attraction-killer to your present partner. Let’s explore…

As you may remember from the bio on the MakingHerHappy.com web site, a lot of people have called me “Doc” since childhood, not because am a medical doctor, psychiatrist, dentist, veterinarian, or college professor, but because I’m the guy that makes whatever ails you go away, no matter what it seems to be.

Hence, I spend a large part of my life hearing other people’s problems and providing solutions for them, and one of the problems I hear about most are “ex’s” – ex-husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, employers, etc. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but how people become “ex’s” in your life and how you deal with them once they do says a lot about you. We need to talk about some of the things it can say, because some of it is really good, and some of it is really, REALLY bad. And whether you have an ex now or there is some chance you may have one in the future, you NEED to know this and think about it.

Let’s start with the worst case first, and work our way to the better ones. The worst case is the ex that became an ex because war was declared, and you got hurt and have never gotten over it. You talk about the relationship and the break-up all the time, even though it’s been years ago. Have you noticed how people react?

Have you noticed that they tend to “glaze over,” look at their watches, or roll their eyes, and suddenly remember somewhere else they need to be or rather aggressively change subjects? If not, open your eyes, because they do exactly that, and it’s costing you. People don’t like hearing the same lament over and over, and they don’t like being around people who harbor pain, depression, grudges, etc., instead of resolving their problems and moving on with their life. It’s annoying, embarrassing, and can be quite depressing. It’s also a major respect and attraction-killer, and labels you as a wuss who can’t deal with life and move on.

Face it, everybody goes through at least one bad relationship in their life, and they get over it. They learn how to better choose a girlfriend, wife, friend, business partner, employer, or whatever, and they move on to have a better life. Or they wallow in unresolved anger or misery and become a pain in the neck to everyone they know.

If you’re not resolving problems and moving on, the only thing keeping you from it is YOU. How you respond to past events is entirely YOUR CHOICE! Make the choice to accept reality and whatever responsibility is yours, stand up, dust off your pants, and step forward. If it was so traumatic that you need professional help, get it, and get it done. Life’s too short to spend it looking backward and feeling crappy (and annoying the hell out of everyone else) instead of moving forward and experiencing the joy that you were born to have if you only step up and choose to earn it.

“But you don’t understand!” you say. Oh yes, I DO understand. You loved her, you needed her, the sex was great, you really loved that job, you never thought that buddy would screw you over. You never thought you’d come home to find your brother or best friend in bed with your wife. You loved being self-employed, or having money, status, and respect. I’ve seen and heard it all. Lived through it, too. And I can tell you with authority that none of those things has any impact on TODAY, unless you CHOOSE to let them.

There are lessons to learn from the bad things that happened to you. Stop lamenting the events and seek out the lessons. Learn them. Consign yourself to using those lessons to be more successful in the future. And relegate those events to the past and never, ever look back. The clock is ticking, and every second that passes can never be regained. You can spend each second looking back and wasting it or looking forward and living a better life. It’s your call. Let that choice and that ability to choose empower you to live well and be happy.

Stepping down off my stump now… ;-)

The next worst case isn’t much better. It’s the dependent that you can’t quite get rid of. The ex-wife or lover that you’re constantly having to bail out of a jam that they stupidly chose to put themselves in but want someone else to pay for, the child who is well into adulthood that you keep bailing out, even though a person their age usually has a family, mortgage, and established a career, the ex-employer who either fired you and continues to call on you for help or the one you left that keeps leaning on you instead of hiring a competent replacement, any of which causes you to complain and be distracted when you’re around people who currently really do matter to you and want to enjoy your company.

Those around you don’t like listening to you repeat the same laments and frustrations any more than you want to hear it out of them. It labels you as a push-over, another breed of wuss who just can’t say “no,” no matter how badly “no” needs to be said. You guessed it, another major respect and attraction killer that will send both genders scurrying when they see you coming down the hall.

People who don’t want to be partners of some sort and share life with you, whether it’s a wife, girlfriend, buddy, employer, business partner, offspring, or whatever, don’t deserve to have you sacrificing yourself to their incompetence, delinquency, etc. Altruists around the world are cringing as I say this, but you know it’s true. Your life is too short and too precious to allow yourself to be bled dry by a bunch of parasites who won’t let go of your jugular vein. Let them keep themselves up instead of sucking you dry, Brother. Do you understand? Their need is not a demand on your life; a poor choice on their part does not constitute an obligation or emergency on yours. Remember that. Quote it daily.

There are good people around you more than willing to share life with you, no matter who or where you are, so why cheat yourself and them of the great things you can do -- and BE -- together while throwing your life’s energy away to these parasites? You’ll find that when you do this, all you will attract are more parasites, as well as a few predators, because good, competent, independent people will shy away, not wanting your problem overload to spill over on them, while parasites and predators will be watching for a sucker like you to come along and latch on as soon as you give them an opening.

What impact do you think this will have on any relationships or marriage you might enter into? If the good people are steering clear of you and the bad ones have you targeted, well…it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how that will turn out, especially when parasites and predators are masters of using guilt and a person’s own insecurities to manipulate people into doing things they know better than to do just for approval and acceptance. If this is you, you’re going for ride after ride until you either choose to live better or they drive you all the way to the gutter. And again, the choice is yours, not theirs, so make the right one.

The last kind of ex to which I want to call your attention is the only good kind to have, the kind with whom you have shared something for awhile, and as you grew apart or found yourself at odds, you responsibly recognized that you were evolving in two different directions or at incompatible paces or that you started a relationship without sufficient compatibility to sustain it and you went your separate ways on friendly terms. You’ve probably seen this at one time or another, a situation where both of you recognized that you were both good people in a bad match-up, and knew that you’d both be better off at arm’s length than close-up, “better friends than lovers” as the saying goes.

This would be the former employer who keeps you in their Rolodex as a potential consultant and gives you a good employment referral (not just a reference, but calls up somebody in their own network to help get you placement), and to whom you would refer competent sources of help, materials, or whatever. We’ve all seen a bad fit in the work place, and employers appreciate how it can happen and will often treat you much better if you sit down with them to discuss it instead of trying to hide the fact that it’s a bad fit until you’ve found something else and leave them hanging with a job to fill and no warning.

It would also be the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend who steers opportunities your way, and to whom you steer good quality people. Maybe you even double date from time to time to help each other meet new people, steer contacts to each others’ businesses, etc. This is highly attractive behavior to all but the most insecure of women, because it says that you can accept responsibility for your actions and decisions, keep a level head and reach workable agreements with people, and won’t be a needy wuss who hangs onto them if things don’t work out for the long term. It says that you’re strong and of good character, that you focus on the value in people, not their flaws. I don’t know about you, but that’s precisely the kind of thing that I want to be known for, and consequently, am known for.

Fights are neither necessary nor desirable to resolve a bad relationship of any kind. At 47 years old I’ve never been sued, and every conflict I’ve engaged in during my adult life has been settled in a logical and equitable manner by mutual consent, including all former marriages, contracts, employment, and customer relationships. I know of nobody that I’ve ever dealt with that I couldn’t call up right now and have a good conversation, and probably find some way of stirring up a business deal or some kind of fun. It sounds like quite an accomplishment, but while it may be unusual, it has never been difficult, and should not be difficult for you, either.

Why?

Because all it takes is the willingness and respect to deal squarely with those around you, looking for what you can accomplish together instead of what you can cheat each other out of or control. Being known for being such a person makes you attractive to everyone in all respects, and when it comes to women, they want a man who will take the lead, act responsibly and fairly, keep a positive attitude, help them to filter drama, and keep things moving for them, not somebody looking for every possible way to screw them, cheat them, lie to them, etc., or who feeds into their drama instead of trying to keep them from getting lost in it. Sounds rather like an employer, does it not?

They also want someone to share life with, who knows when to say, ‘Yes,” or, “No.” They evaluate men using an iron-clad rule: “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me, and if you can’t stand up for ME, you won’t stand up for US.” They don’t mind you sharing yourself with others, moderately, as long as you save the best part for them, which in a good relationship is a very fair trade for the nurturing, loyalty, and many other things a loving wife will give a good man who’s making her happy.

Knowing how to evaluate and maintain a good relationship at home, how to communicate with people, and how to create attraction in the woman you love has far-reaching effects, much farther-reaching than you might ever imagine before doing it. Look around you. Those men who are happy at home are happy at work as well, and they have solid relationships with all the people in their life. They know how to choose good relationships, how to communicate with people, and how to be the kind of guy that people want to be around.

You’ll find that when you do the things described in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," the rest of your life will start improving at the same pace that things improve at home. Your confidence level increases, your communications skills improve, and you become more fun, interesting, competent, and generally enjoyable to have around. You can keep putting it off because you don’t know if you can do it, or you can accept the fact that a lot have people have already done it, many of which may not be as sharp as you, and you can make just as big a difference in your life as they have, if not even bigger. All it takes is to claim your birthright as a man and BE a man.

Download this fascinating and highly-effective book at http://www.makingherhappy.com/. It’s guaranteed, it’s fun, you can easily afford it, and quite frankly, you can’t afford to not do it, at least not if you realize just how short life really is and don’t want to spend it watching everybody else enjoying it more than you do. Join us, right now!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Are You Happy, or Comfortably Unhappy In Your Relationship or Marriage? Your Life Could Depend on Knowing the Difference...

Settling for less and tolerating adversity because it’s easier than fixing it leads to the pathetic condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” It kills self-esteem, motivation, and hence, attraction. That in turn kills relationships and marriages. Don’t let this happen to you! Would you recognize it if you saw it? Let’s find out!

Happy New Year to all using the Julian calendar! (Yes, I have readers all over the world, on six of the seven continents -- no luck on Antarctica yet, but I doubt anybody who goes there is particularly worried about a relationship!) Today’s edition is something I touch on from time to time because it goes almost entirely unnoticed but wastes more lives than the words, “Let’s wait and see,” the deplorable condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron, but as you may have seen around you, even in yourself, it is entirely too easy to get comfortable with being unhappy.

People generally dislike major changes in their life, often even positive ones (that’s a topic for another newsletter, but before you think I’ve lost my mind, stop and consider all the people you’ve ever known who responded to things going well for them by finding some way of sabotaging themselves, such as showing up late for work when they’re in line for a promotion, etc.), and will often choose tolerating things that make them unhappy rather than endure the stress of change, especially if it requires a little effort on their part, even though it’s for the better.

Once this choice is made, its effects are insidious, far-reaching, and destructive. It sets a precedent of settling for less than one deserves, which is to live as happy a life as they can earn. Then it becomes easier and easier to choose to tolerate more and more, because the choices are now becoming more radically different, between a little more nuisance, aggravation, or pain and a radical improvement if they get tired of settling and decide to make a major effort and fix what’s wrong in their life.

They get comfortable with feeling worse and worse, until being depressed, frustrated, and just plain pissed off all the time is not only the status quo, it’s the EXPECTED NORM. Feeling good is at this point abnormal, and therefore, as strange as it seems, subconsciously UNDESIRABLE! (What’s REALLY undesirable for most people is putting out the effort to change, but for the comfortably unhappy, they may not even be able to tell the difference.)

It can creep up on you over weeks, months, or even years, and will start with a single choice to settle for less: a home or neighborhood that you settle for because that’s all that’s available at the moment, a job you don’t like but is easier to keep than finding a better one, a relationship that drags you down but is easier than breaking up, dividing up the stuff in the house, and looking for better company to keep, etc. Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open, and periodically evaluate what you’re doing and those with whom you’re doing it.

When things could be better, do yourself a favor and MAKE THEM BETTER! Upgrade the job with either a promotion, transfer, or a change of employer. Upgrade the relationship by either improving it or getting out of it, thereby freeing yourself of the restraints and conflict that make you unhappy and creating the freedom of navigation required to find and engage that which makes you happy.

And most important of all, in any situation or relationship, if improvement is impossible because the other party (or parties) won’t be involved in positive change that you’re willing to work for, cut bait and find a better pond to fish in, because you’re fishing in poisoned waters, and it will be the death of you.

Great relationships are uncommon, as are great marriages, but they are far from impossible, or even difficult to find and manage if you know yourself, know your desires, and have the guts to hold out for what you want instead of settling for something you hope you might mold into what you can tolerate. That kind of behavior is precisely the reason why great relationships and marriages are so uncommon. People get insecure and attach themselves to the first person who gives them a smile, approval, acceptance, or most commonly, sex, without checking to see if the rest of the package is something they can live with, let alone enjoy. That’s a recipe for disaster.

You MUST have compatibility and attraction for the relationship to last. If you have the compatibility, the attraction can be created or recreated, but if you don’t have the compatibility, your only choice is to get out and find it. Otherwise, you will consign yourself to a competitive relationship with an adversary instead of a cooperative relationship with someone you truly love and who truly loves you, and the best case scenario there is comfortably unhappy, while the worst one is catastrophic destruction of life as you know it, and in some cases, quite literally your life; substance abuse, suicide, and murder are what some people opt for or have inflicted upon them instead of divorce. Know what you have, what you need, and how to tell if they are the same or different.

If you want a great system for evaluating your relationship, and solid, tested advice for improving it (through better communication and creating attraction, getting her tuned in and turned on to all that is great about YOU) if you find it desirable, as well as solid advice and great contacts for getting the mess cleaned up and getting back into the dating game if this relationship is too far gone to save or never should have started in the first place, it’s in my e-book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Download your copy today, because life is too short to spend it unhappy, even comfortably unhappy.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Bad Relationships and Marriages Can End Well, IF You Let Them

Sometimes people get into relationships that simply never should have happened and can’t be made to work because the foundation just isn’t there. If you’re in one of these, don’t be afraid of letting go, because life does go on, a lot better than when you’re trapped in a no-win situation.

This is an unpleasant subject for a lot of people, and understandably so, but it’s one that I have to address from time to time because it can’t be ignored. There are a lot of reasons people get into relationships, as well as stay in them, and unfortunately, some of them are really, REALLY BAD reasons.

The high and still constantly climbing divorce rates of recent decades bear this out. Couples used to court for a long time to make sure that after the excitement of attraction wore off there was still something for them to base a relationship on, like love, attraction and compatibility, but that has long since past, especially now that premarital sex is the norm rather than the exception.

And I’m not saying that premarital sex is inherently good or bad, or even that it is a cause; in spite of what cleverly misrepresentative statistics suggest, it’s not a cause at all. Indeed, rationally speaking, premarital sex can keep you from marrying someone with whom you are sexually incompatible. Sexual incompatibility is just as big a problem and just as common a cause of divorce as value incompatibility, no matter what your religious affiliation.

Whether or not fornication and divorce are sins and which you would prefer to ask forgiveness for is your concern, not mine. My point is that people get caught up in the emotions of life, a relationship and sexual issues and make ill-conceived and self-destructive decisions about lifelong commitments that they later find they can’t hold to, because after all that excitement is gone and they have to actually start talking, they discover problems, like their values are diametrically opposed, or their personalities or majority of tastes are at odds, or there is some other compatibility problem that makes for too many points of contention in their life for them to coexist.

It’s a scary feeling when you’re faced with the reality of a bad choice like that, because by the time attraction naturally wears off and a problem is recognized an average of two years has passed, and then another few years are spent trying to overcome problems that are too big to handle (because people’s core values don’t change and their tastes seldom change) and everybody starts being angry with everybody else for not trying hard enough or not being “good enough” to handle it.

That’s utter rubbish, because in reality it’s not about being good enough, but about being compatible enough, but it still causes fights and helps attorneys to get rich getting you out of it, especially when you get with one of the less scrupulous ones who tries to escalate the fighting to create more hard feelings and fighting, and consequently more work and more money for themselves. And there’s a much better way to handle the situation when you realize that, like Andy did:

David, Hello!

I wrote to you many months ago about my ex-wife and how she just walked out on me after 20 years of marriage. She actually did me the biggest favor anyone could ever do, and that I had bought your book to learn what I had done wrong in my marriage! Well things have really changed in my life since I read your book and applied what I have learned!

Your book is a Godsend and it has changed my life! I've met a fantastic woman, her name is Shari. She says that I am the most awesome man she has ever met! She is always coming on to me as if she can't get enough! I've never been so happy in my life! What you teach is so true! A man doesn't have to ever ask for sex, all he has to do is act like a real man!

Thanks for helping me change my life for the better!
Andy

Andy was one of the lucky ones. According to his letters, he and his wife were “comfortably unhappy” for two decades before she left, and when Andy sat down and did a thorough evaluation of what his relationship had been in trying to figure out what went wrong with his marriage, it was clear that it never should have happened to start with. He learned from his mistakes, made a few personal improvements along the way, and now has women chasing him, and is able to pick from all of them the one whom he’ll spend the rest of his life with when she finally turns up, which is what dating is really all about.

Yes, really! Dating is not about trying to “catch” somebody or find somebody that you can make enough compromises with to get them to marry you. It’s about exposing yourself to enough candidates that the right one is finally exposed for you to select! And in the meantime, it’s about learning and having fun, not sitting by the phone wondering if you were “good enough” to get somebody to call you. But…and it’s a big but…

If you don’t feel good about yourself and have the self-esteem, sense of adventure and natural comfort that comes from being happy with yourself, dating is a nightmare scenario, because as these candidates are exposing themselves to you, you’re also exposing yourself, the self that you are not comfortable with, to them. You have to HAVE a life to SHARE a life, right? And you have to love, respect and enjoy yourself before you can love, respect or enjoy anyone else. But as you will see in my book, that’s the easiest part, once you find out how.

So where are you today? Are you happy, or comfortably unhappy? Or are you just plain miserable and scared to death to move on because you think that being unhappy with somebody is better than being unhappy and alone? No matter what shape you’re in, good or bad, it can be better, and as people like Andy will tell you, it doesn’t take much to make it better. Think not? Come to http://www.makingherhappy.com and I’ll prove it to you!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Why Is Breaking Up So Hard? Surviving the End of Relationships and Marriage

We’ve talked about stopping a break-up in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, but what about those times when a break-up really is the best thing for both parties? Specifically, why is it so bloody hard? Would you believe it doesn’t have to be?

This is one of those newsletters that had to be written; one that a fool would hope that none of you would ever need, but which reality says nearly all of you will find useful, either in surviving your present or some part of your future, or in understanding something very painful in your past, the difficulty of breaking up, even when it’s the best thing for both parties and everybody, including the two parties in the relationship, know that it’s best.

Some people get into relationships that are based on things like faith and hope instead of reality. Others based them on need, attraction, or simple lust instead of a combination of love and attraction. These couples ultimately find themselves painfully mismatched and moving apart is the only solution to the problem they have caused themselves. You can’t put a mongoose and a snake in the same place and expect them to just bend to meet each others’ needs and get along, nor can you expect incompatible men and women. Compatibility doesn’t come from the choices you make, but from the values and tastes that cause you to make the choices you make. Those things just don’t change that much over the course of an entire lifetime, and they certainly don’t change because somebody else wants or needs for them to.

I’m not like most of today’s “relationship guru’s.” I won’t tell you that all relationships can or should be salvaged, and have no respect for those who would. That’s why you’ll find the list of other relationship gurus I do respect and endorse very short. I maintain a list of those who have been recommended to me by my readers in this newsletter and in the margin on my main blog at http://blog.makingherhappy.com/ and those are the only others offering advice on the emotions and issues of relationships that I would have any of you read, because they do embrace this self-evident truth instead of trying to convince you to buy what they are selling to have you save that which should not be and ultimately cannot be saved, playing on your emotions to sell something that won’t help.

Notice that’s a very short list of resources taken from a very large pool of authors. Sad, isn’t it? And by the way, feel free to help me add to it by letting me know if you have had a positive result with any product. Word-of-mouth isn’t just the best advertising; it’s also the best way of weeding out the charlatans and bad ideas that sound good “on paper” but don’t work in the real world.

I’ve been working closely with one of your fellow readers, one whom at this point is facing the possibility that the break-up his wife initiated may indeed be the best thing that could happen to him because they are so grossly mismatched and she’s carrying a ton of baggage that she may well choose to hang onto, in spite of the fact that right now she’s facing the greatest opportunity of her life to drop all that baggage and make some incredible improvements in her life.

I’ll spare you the intimate details of their problems, but the bottom line is that he’s on solid ground, logically, morally, ethically, and every other way I’ve been able to observe, while she is hyper-creative and therefore rejects reality with impunity, is morally ambiguous, and is thirty-nine years old going on about seven.

He’s highly analytical and disciplined, knows what’s before him and how to react to virtually any word or action from her now (he read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and we’ve been talking as well), and yet, there are times when he still has a hard time accepting what he knows to be reality, that in all likelihood, they never should have come together and he made a bad choice, because his wife appears incapable of growing up and becoming responsible enough to rejoin him as his wife, or indeed as anything more than a chronic, irresponsible and dangerous dependent.

He asked me why he was having a hard time accepting and emotionally committing to that which he knew to be irrefutable reality, and why people generally found breaking up so hard even when it was painfully obvious that it was the only option that could allow either of them to ever be happy.

I answered, "We all make bad choices, and being human, we tend to try to make the best of them and pick up a lot of good memories along the way that end up confounding us when we finally are faced with the reality that our bad choice is working against us."

It struck a chord in both of us. I did not, until the moment I wrote that to him, understand why I had had trouble with break-ups in the past, and those who know me closely would describe me to you as the most ruthlessly logical person they have ever met. I never stopped to ask myself while I was going through it why it was so hard. I was too busy asking myself another ridiculous question: “Why does this have to happen?” when I already knew the answer.

His reply to that pearl was as profound as the pearl itself:

“That needs to go in the evaluation section of your book - over and over! The main struggle in deciding whether it [salvaging his relationship] is a go or no-go is in sifting through all the wonderful memories to decide if they were ‘real’ or not...”

That’s the real rub, isn’t it? Were all those “good times” born of real love, friendship, respect, and loyalty worth celebrating? Or were they just born of two people trying to make the best of a bad situation they had created and didn’t want to face? Or was it something somewhere in the middle? Was it just two people with raging hormones having an adventure with no way to follow through in the long run, a good time that couldn’t be the basis for a life? Trying to resolve those questions, and cope with the reality the resolution presents, is what makes breaking up so hard when every available fact tells you both that there is no other alternative.

So in the event that you have to go through this torture, what do you do?

Look at the whole relationship and weigh the good and the bad. Identify what can and cannot be repaired, and how important those things are to you. In the end, if the relationship can’t be fixed, get out, but do it like a civilized adult, with dignity, and leave the other partner room to do the same. Indeed, LEAD HER to do the same. And if a friendship can be maintained, by all means do so; you may not have enough compatibility to live together happily, but you may still have common interests that you can enjoy together. Think about that...

Not being able to live together happily is by no means an indication that you can’t have an enjoyable conversation or dinner from time to time, help each other with a project or hobby on occasion, or do any of the other things that friends do. It takes a lot more compatibility to live together than it does to visit, as the focus of a visit is much more narrowly defined and creates boundaries that protect you from the things that caused trouble while you were married – if you pay attention to them, that is.

Don’t ever let things fall into the context or perspective of who is or isn’t good enough for the other. It has nothing to do with that. People are who and what they are, and have spent a lifetime becoming so. Thinking that you can or should be “good enough” to induce someone else to change for your sake that which they would not change for their own sake is foolish, arrogant to the point of being narcissistic, and just plain childish!

(Pay attention, Ladies, in case you’re thinking that you’re going to rebuild your man as you want him. If you do manage to accomplish it, you won’t respect him precisely because you were able to change him. A man who can’t stand up TO you can’t stand up FOR you, right? The attitude that "he should love me enough to change for me," has broken more women's hearts than men ever could.)

Admit that there have been problems, and that those problems have been caused by the two of you having too many fundamental differences to be compatible. You gave it a good shot, you had some fun and good times, made some money and accumulated a few things, and have a few fond memories, but the stress of walking on eggshells trying to keep from tripping over your differences is killing you both.

You’re good people, just not good for each other, and if you are the type who needs to or enjoys being married, you need to get out and find someone whom you are good for and who is good for you, compatible with you, and whom you can enjoy living with as your natural self. Work together to divide the rewards of your combined efforts fairly and help each other get a fresh start by introducing each other to friends that are more like them. You may not be worth a plug nickel together as husband and wife but may be great assets to each other in starting over. (This is all assuming that your problems are differences in your values, preferences, priorities, etc., and not that one of you is an abuser of some sort.)

There is no point in your life where being able to evaluate a relationship will not serve you well. You need to know yourself as well as your needs and desires, and you need to be with someone who can naturally fulfill those needs and desires while being fulfilled by you. That in turn requires that you know other peoples’ needs and desires with regard to you, does it not? You don’t want to enter a relationship in which you have no chance of fulfilling the other’s needs and desires, do you?

That means knowing before you get into a relationship what the relationship should look like if it’s good. It means knowing after you get into a relationship if it is going to work based on how well you meet each others’ needs and desires. It means being able to communicate factually and honestly to express those needs and desires to each other, as well as how well those needs and desires are being met.

Contrary to how it often appears, relationships and marriages very seldom fail after ten or twenty years or more. What really happens is that they fail at their inception due to bad choices and that failure isn’t conceded until years later, when every option has been exhausted, there is no longer anything to hide behind (like children), and both partners have become miserable spending so much time and effort trying and failing. If you have a good foundation for a relationship, it’s not hard to tell; there’s little if anything fundamental and significant that you’d want to change about your partner, such as their values, political leanings, etc. You can talk and get along, and have probably just become a bit bored because attraction is waning. That’s fixable.

But…

If you’re in one of those relationships where the only place you get along is in the bedroom, and especially if you find yourself fighting to have an excuse to make up because that’s the only part of your relationship that IS working, you have a serious problem, and believe it or not, there are people with whom you can get along both in and out of the bedroom.

And since so many of you have asked, yes, it is still a good idea to learn about attraction and try to create it for your partner even if you are breaking up. Being attractive is about being a leader, being smart, being fair, handling tough situations and being able to keep your sense of humor about you. Stirring up a little attraction in your partner as you are splitting up will help ease the transition for her and you both, because it tends to keep tempers at bay. It will help her to feel that you are being strong and supportive during this crisis, and make her feel good that you are making the effort to help her hold herself together emotionally while you go through the process together. Nothing bad can come of that for either of you, and may indeed help you to part friends instead of killing each other in a war that never had to be fought, a war in which the only victors are the lawyers.

There you have it, the dark side of relationships and marriage. It is my sincere desire that you never have to go through a break-up, and that if worse comes to worst and you do have to go through one, that you can get through it with your dignity (and assets) intact and help each other to move on to a better life with someone better matched to yourselves by understanding what it is that you’re fighting: the basic human tendency to try to make the best of even the worst situation, no matter how inappropriate or even self-destructive it might be, not each other.

No matter where you are in your relationship, from looking for one to having been in one for 40 years or longer, there’s help waiting for you in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and it’s just a few mouse clicks away at http://www.makingherhappy.com/. Go check it out, and get the straight story while you can; there are very few of us around who can and will give it to you, and your life is too short to fail to have and use it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

The Fool, the Smart, and the Wise -- Which One Wins in Relationships and Marriage?

There are three kinds of people, the foolish, the smart, and the wise. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become wise, learning from the mistakes and successes of others and thereby avoid the mistakes that others have made, especially in regards to your relationship and marriage. Here’s how…

This week is almost gone! Time to buckle down and learn something useful to put to work this coming week, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve got plenty of time for beer and sports, so give me a few minutes here to teach you something productive, albeit in one of the longer pieces I’ve given you (just a few extra paragraphs, so don’t panic), and then you can go out and play with your friends.

I had a pretty tough childhood because I was precocious and insisted on knowing everything. That in itself isn’t too tough, but I was also independent, and wanted to know everything by learning it the hard way. I learned a lot, too.

On the day my military career started, I was labeled a “mustang” or “maverick,” a guy who has a hard time getting with the program because he has a knack for finding a better way to do things and doesn’t toe the line when he should. I got through basic training, and then got into some sticky situations.

Nobody got hurt or killed because of my choices or actions, but hellfire did rain down on my head a few times, because for every few “atta-boy’s” I’d get for going above and beyond the call, there would be an “oh sh*t” to negate them in one fell stroke. My commanding officer was constantly running interference for me with the big brass, and finally everything came to a head and I was ordered to report to my CO’s CO, a two-star general who shall remain nameless for a variety of reasons, for an “operational competency review.”

After introductions and the traditional reading of my file (I still don’t know why they go through that little ritual, and I’m not sure they do), the general said to me, “Cunningham, you’re smart, too damned smart for your own good. I need you to wise up before you compromise an op and get yourself or one of my other men killed. Do you know the difference?”

Everybody in my unit, including myself, was young, full of piss and vinegar, drawing hazardous duty pay, and got off on all the gung ho ritual language; in true gung-ho form I replied, “Sir, I do not know. If the general would explain the difference I will deploy that knowledge in a swift, proficient, and distinctly military manner.” I had no idea what he meant by, “The difference,” let alone what “the difference was, so it seemed like a good time to let him to all the talking.

He got a glint in his eye and said, “Very well. There are three kinds of people in the world, the foolish, the smart, and the wise. The foolish are those grab-asstic pieces of crap who waste time and life by never learning from their mistakes. The smart do learn from their mistakes, even if they are like you and make a lot of them because they want to be smarter. The wise move through life with patience and purpose, paying attention to what’s going on around them and learning from the mistakes and successes of others so that they don’t waste time and life making the same mistakes that others have made before them.

“I need you and every man under my command to be a wise man. We have a system here that is based on the mistakes and successes of those who came before you. It is not perfect, but it does work. You may be able to improve upon it, but you will do so by following the system during operations and providing any feedback you have during the post-operation debriefing. We want anything you can offer that will help to achieve objectives and save the lives of well-trained fighting men, but the time to deviate from the program is not when you are taking fire. That is your CO’s job, and my job, not yours. Do you get me?”

I never forgot that bit about the foolish, the smart and the wise. My mission changed that minute, from trying to do it all on my own to trying to learn everything I could the most efficient way that I could, which for the most part has been to watch and learn from the behavior of others. To that end, we’re going to have an exercise right now to show you just how much you can learn from somebody else, even someone you don’t expect to have anything to teach you.

The following letter is one of the many success stories I’ve received. I chose it for this exercise because it explodes a myth and because on the surface it doesn’t even appear to be relevant to saving a stale or failing marriage or other committed relationship, yet it holds some of the best lessons you’ll ever learn. Meet Tom:

David,

I wanted to take a moment to give you some feedback. My wife and I were recently divorced after 15 years of marriage. We are both in our early 50's. I worked really hard to save my marriage using logic.

I lost her to a bad boy. He is a real bum, without a job and still lives with his mother even though he is in his 50's. What a real mooch.

For the longest time I tried to apply logic to what was happening to my marriage and I failed to understand just what was going wrong. I guess I was too ingrained into my habitual patterns. It was only after the divorce that I started to get your material and receive your newsletters. WOW. Boy, was I ever wrong in my approach to women. I did all the nice guy stuff and provided a good home, clothes, jewelry, cars etc. I worked my ass off to provide for her.

As I started to read your material I came to realize what a bad relationship I had been in and what really went wrong.

I came to realize that I had failed to create attraction in her although I had her affection. That was my fault. The dishonesty (for many years), the deceit, the cheating, the character defects, etc., are all her fault. In many ways our divorce is a blessing in disguise.

I have followed your advice and that of David DeAngelo's program of Sexual Communication. Man what a difference it has made in my life and my approach to dating. I am now not trying to be the nice guy and "win" her favors. I am more confident in myself and out to have fun. I have played with and am learning the real way to create attraction and it is working. My successes with the new me are just outstanding and I am enjoying my life and playing a lot more. I don't have to call for dates...they are calling me. Really attractive and quality women.

So I wanted to thank you for putting out the information that you do, in such a professional manner that us nice guys can see where we went wrong and how to fix it. Keep up the good work.

Sincerely
Tom

PS: Oh and by the way. The ex has noticed and wants back into my life. NO way in hell will I ever get back into her games again. She has lost the house, cars, clothes, her reputation, is in debt up to her eyebrows, etc. I could go on and on with what she has done to herself. Life is funny sometimes, but I have the ultimate revenge and it does taste good. Thanks.

So what can you learn from this story that will make you a wise man?

For starters, Tom didn’t just automatically blame everything on somebody else and assume no responsibility for what happened that led to his divorce. He buckled down and found information that gave him answers as to what happened and what he could change to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Lesson: Take personal responsibility when things don’t go as planned, figure out what happened, and learn how to make it go the right way.

Also note I didn’t write one word of advice targeted at those who are dating in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," yet Tom found all kinds of advice in it that helped him to be more successful in his dating life, BECAUSE HE WAS LOOKING FOR IT. Good information isn’t always where you EXPECT to find it, but it is always WHERE YOU FIND IT, if you know what I mean.

Lesson: be ever-vigilant in looking for things that can make your life better; you may not find a pearl in every oyster, but finding a gold nugget lying in a pile of animal manure or a trash can doesn’t make it any less valuable than if it was found in a creek or a mine.

Tom also didn’t limit his options in solving his problems, and took advice to broaden his search. In "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," I teach readers how to evaluate their relationship or marriage to determine if they should try to salvage it, because if you are grossly mismatched in areas like your personal value system or personal tastes, it’s never going to work, and your time and effort is far better applied to make a dignified and peaceful exit instead of beating a dead horse only to fail in the end and exit under fire after war is declared.

Included in the advice for those making such an exit are people to contact to help protect your assets in the event that a property settlement war does break out, and advice to seek out advice specific to succeeding in the dating game by Shelley McMurtry, F.J. Shark, John Alanis, Tiffany Taylor, David D’Angelo, etc., because jumping back into the dating game blind is one of the scariest things a person can do, and I’ve found their material to be very logical and rooted in real-world cause-and-effect relationships.

Instead of saying, “I’m tired of reading. I’ve done this before, I’m just going to jump in and it will be better this time,” Tom recognized that a recommendation from one good source of information about another source of information was likely a good call because no information seller will risk trashing his reputation by steering a customer in the wrong direction for an affiliate sale and blow any possibility of future direct sales.

Lesson: Know your limitations, and do everything you reasonably can to obtain help in overcoming them by seeking the advice of those who have succeeded before you.

And as big as they are, those are the small lessons. Look in Tom’s post script (the paragraph that follows the “P.S.,” which stands for “post script,” for those of you who skipped that class in high school). His ex has noticed the changes in him and wants back into his life! The dating gurus will often say that this can’t happen, but you must remember that in the dating world, that’s most often correct. When you meet a stranger, your window of opportunity for creating attraction can be measured in minutes, maybe even a few seconds. But…

When you’ve been together for awhile and your interest is fully vested, that window could be measured in YEARS in some cases, and months in almost all cases. Women like the protective feeling of stability, and will give you ample opportunity to make things right IF they see that you’re trying to do so.

Lesson: Even if the divorce is final, as long as she hasn’t filed for restraining orders (which indicate that all hope is indeed lost in nearly all cases in the long term, and in ALL cases in the short term), or some other man hasn’t created intense attraction within her (which usually results in a restraining order anyway) ,it’s NEVER too late to fix it as long as the compatibility is there to support it.

Also note he held her accountable for her mistakes, and that ultimately being held accountable and having to live the life that she chose was the worst punishment that could be heaped upon her.

Lesson: Justice is sweet, while revenge is a dish that simply should never be served, unless it’s “self-served.” War isn’t just “the most spectacular of all human endeavors” (General George S. Patton), it’s the most costly and utterly destructive, on any scale.

Here endeth the lessons. Right now, some of you are saying, “Geesh, that guy is long-winded. That’s annoying!” while others are thinking, “Wow! That guy must really care about this stuff, because it must have taken him a long time to put that together to share it with me.” I do, and it did, several hours in fact. Several hours that I could have spent with family and friends, building something in my beloved workshop or enjoying another hobby, cooking an elaborate gourmet dinner, or numerous other things for myself instead of for you. If you don’t need this much help from me, I’m happy for you, really, but I’m doing this to help people in crisis make their lives better just as much as I’m doing it to help other people keep their relationships from falling into crisis.

Lesson: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist that last one. Seriously, I have a lot to teach you and everybody else who needs it so that you can be wise and keep from making the mistakes that others have made before you. We hit the high spots here in this newsletter and in my blog posts, but dig deep into the tangled and dark nitty-gritty in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and no matter what shape your relationship is in, there are many valuable lessons in there for you, lessons that will help you make your relationship better than it has ever been if you should be in it or help you get out of it with your dignity and a few dollars in your pocket and move on to find happiness elsewhere if you’re in the wrong relationship.

Your next move is to http://www.makingherhappy.com to download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started, because life is too short to wait. Never put off until tomorrow the success and happiness you can have today!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Why Do Women Have Affairs? Knowledge is Powerful Preventive Medicine In Protecting Your Relationship and Marriage

Why do women have affairs? For the same reason most men do: because there’s nothing exciting them at home. What excites them may be quite different from what excites us, but boredom is even harder for them to handle than for us, so don’t expect them to handle it – do something about it before it happens!

I had a wonderful phone call from an old friend (I’ll call her Dina), and I do mean OLD – we went to grade school together and have kept in touch ever since. We had a mutual “crush” in the third grade, became good friends, and eventually got to be so much like brother and sister that “hooking up” was never a thought, let alone an option, for either of us. She got married in the middle of college, had three kids, and the kids are grown now and she and her husband, Danny, also a long-time friend, are left with a great big empty nest and each other. They’d had a major problem develop a few months prior, and she called to give me the details of how things were back on track and better than they had ever been.

Like so many other couples, they had been so involved in their kids that they had grown apart and while they still love and respect each other, their life together was much more like that of casual roommates than a married couple. They didn’t have much to talk about, didn’t sleep together often – I’m really talking about sleeping here; he fell asleep on the couch most nights watching TV, and had “intimate relations” a couple times a year. OUCH!

That’s a lot of problems for two people to deal with, especially when you bring the causes into the mix. Their intimacy was severely hampered by occasional prostate problems he suffered, lack of personal interaction, different interests and schedules, “empty nest” syndrome – the couple had defined a huge portion of who they were as “parents” so when the kids were gone they had overwhelming feelings of lack of purpose and loneliness from the hole that was left in their lives -- and it finally caught up with them.

Dina had been particularly taken with a new employee in her office, a manager, her new boss (yes, that’s about as cliché as it gets, but remember that things become cliché because they are so common), and was working late both for the extra money and something to do. She enjoyed working for him, because he was a strong leader, good motivator, was genuinely interested in his employees’ welfare, and had a great sense of humor. He was also married and quite bored, being in a similar situation to Dina.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what came next, does it? Look at the boss. Strong leader, an alpha male characteristic. Good motivator and great sense of humor, both traits indicative of above average communications skills and very ANTI-BORING. Leadership and motivational skills coupled with his position as her boss put him in a position of defining authority for her frequently. Genuine interest in employees’ welfare coupled with good communications skills is intimacy waiting to happen.

He tripped her attraction triggers nine ways from Sunday, and in her mid-forties, she’s still quite physically attractive, intelligent, a good conversationalist, and has always been playful and a little flirtatious, so she tripped his, too. They finally succumbed to the temptation and immediately knew they had done something that they shouldn’t have done and couldn’t undo. Dina called a few months ago to tell me about all of this, and I went to visit them.

She disclosed all of this, and we went through all that had happened over the years (the same process described in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” for determining if you are with someone who is a good match for you, a critical step in fixing any major problems in mature relationships – if they’re bad for you, why fight to keep things together???) and she knew beyond any doubt that he was the man for her and that they had slowly and surely grown apart as they focused too much on their kids and careers and not enough on each other.

She knew she had to tell Danny what had happened, for a number of reasons, and asked me for advice. I gave her a copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and told her to go through it with him, to help him prepare for the news he was about to get and be better able to understand what had happened. She was scared, but he was and is pretty level-headed, so she agreed.

When he got home, she showed him the book and told him I had written it and wanted their evaluation of it, which was true (I’m always interested in reader feedback on any of my books), and over the days that followed I got letters and phone calls from him about various things, and when it was obvious that he had a good grasp of what attraction is, and how powerful a force it is in a woman, especially when she is bored and vulnerable, I told Dina it was time to find an opportunity to confess, which she did within a couple of evenings as they were discussing part of the book. She kept a small digital recorder handy waiting for the discussion so she could send it to me, and e-mailed a recording to me with some notes.

He had read a passage in the book talking about how women get bored and can literally lose their ability to reason and control of their actions when somebody restores that feeling and he said, “Man, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. If you were to get caught up in something like this, I wouldn’t like it, but I don’t think I could blame you, at least not any more than I would have to blame myself.”

Being a bit more direct than most women, and a lot more direct than I was accustomed to her being, she looked him dead in the eye and said, “Danny, it has happened, just once, and I knew the minute it was over that it shouldn’t have. I love you, and I’m taking responsibility for this. I didn’t choose to let you grow away from me, but I didn’t choose to prevent it either. I didn’t know what was happening, and thought it was something that just happened to everyone when they’d been together as long as we have, and didn’t think it would be a problem. I want you, and nobody else. I want to grow very, very old with you. I can’t promise you that I can live long enough to do that, but I can certainly promise you that we can keep this from happening again for as long as we are alive, and you know we can, too. I’m not going to ask for your answer now, because I can see you’re in shock and need time to think things through. You tell me when you’re ready to talk about this.”

He said to her, “I’m ready now. I’m no fool. I know why you did it. We’ve been sitting here talking about it for weeks. I’ll share the responsibility with you, because I’m just as guilty of ignoring both of us as you are. I knew things weren’t right, but didn’t know what to do about it. I love you, we’ve raised three kids and paid off two mortgages together, and frankly, I’m sick to death of the way things have been going. We’re in a rut, and we’ve got a tow-truck here in this book. It may be awhile before I can be with you without thinking of another man being with you, but as long as I know that we’re working on this together, I’ll get over it. I’m going to Randy’s (his brother) for the weekend to do some fishing and get my mind right, and when I get back, we’re going to take back our marriage.”

Dina was weirded completely out. Danny got up, threw some stuff in a bag, kissed her on the cheek as he went out the door, sent her a couple of text messages while he was gone that just said, “Thinking of you…” and came home Sunday night and went to bed. Come Monday morning, he woke her up with a kiss and a smile, and said, “This is it, Kiddo. Time to get back to being us. I’m going to go cook us some breakfast while you shower.”

Danny’s always been pretty much a “take-charge” kind of guy, and he did. He took what was in my book, added it to what he already knew of Dina, and had her swept completely off her feet in about three days. They still have occasional problems; Dina transferred to another department for obvious reasons, and didn’t enjoy the job as much as she did because she was working for her old boss, who was a bit weak and disinterested, and Danny occasionally has a nightmare about her affair, but they’re on track, regularly intimate, and haven’t had any discussions of the affair in several months now. Dina’s now found another job, not to leave the company where the affair happened, but to find something to do she can enjoy. Things are looking up all around.

There was a lot that went into saving their relationship. It took knowing that they were right for each other – highly compatible -- and that their 22 years together was a good investment that they needed to keep. It took knowing exactly what happened and why, so that there were no grudges, feelings of guilt or betrayal, or especially unworthiness. It took knowing how to fix the problem, choosing to fix it, and following through on that choice, too.

These things came from my book, some personal coaching to help them get through the emotional upheaval at times, and their knowledge of each other. The biggest thing required was the commitment to do what was necessary to fix the problem, which was much easier to make when they had read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and therefore knew that it not only COULD be done, in their case it SHOULD be done, what would be required, and that it was worth it.

Affairs can be avoided if you’re proactive, and they can often be overcome if you’re not, as long as you know what to do and just do it. I can give you all you need to know in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but learning it and doing it is up to you. I strongly recommend the proactive approach, because the obvious emotional upheaval of an affair can be devastating, and it’s a risk of sustaining permanent damage that you don’t have to take at all. It’s rare that the easy way out is the best possible way, and you should always take advantage of such an opportunity, because it doesn’t come around that often. Your easiest and best way out of this situation is waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com, so go get it and get started, because life’s too short to do things the long and hard way (unless of course you’re talking about sex!)

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Where Have All the Real Men Gone? Fighting the Extinction of Great Relationships and Marriage

Real men, alpha males, are nearly an extinct species, in spite of all the information available to help men avoid drowning in a sea of wussitude. Why? What can you do to protect yourself and reverse the damage that has been done? Will the woman in your life appreciate it? (You BET she will!)

There is something I have to talk about from time to time because it bugs the hell out of not only me, but out of every woman alive. Women and the dating gurus are also mentioning it, so it’s not just me. Men are rapidly deteriorating into miserable wusses at an accelerating rate, and it’s getting scary.

During conversations with men, the most ridiculous things keep coming up. Fights over things that wives have found out from non-family members that they should have found out from their husbands, leaving decisions about outings, dates, etc., to the women, total indecision about career and asking their wife not for input, but for decisions about what they should do! Men being afraid to be men!!! It’s a disgusting and unfortunate by-product of a lot of miscommunication in the 80’s and 90’s.

I still keep tabs on the gurus in the dating world, and Shelley McMurtry has reported that she went into a bunch of bars in a major Texas city where men and women used to “hook up” with regularity, and it was the same story, singles style – the bars full of women, dressed to the nines and obviously looking for action while the men are playing pool, talking to each other in hushed tones with slumped shoulders and drinking, sneaking a peek at the women and mentally undressing them but rarely if ever walking up to them and introducing themselves, let alone initiating a conversation. Again, disgusting!

Being married, I’m seldom in a bar, but on the rare occasions I’m in a bar, coffee house, or anywhere else that single men and women are, I see the men eyeing the women, looking sheepish, and not approaching; the only ones who appear to be taking any action are the nerdy-looking pick-up artists, sporting their peacock gear a la Neil Strauss, in “The Game,” and as Strauss describes finding out at the end of his book, that’s all just a show to get women’s attention, and has nothing behind it worthy of a relationship or that could ever sustain a relationship, and women are so aware of this that they refer to the pick-up artists’ approach as “running game” on them.

("The Game" is a great book, by the way, and while you won’t learn much about long-term relationships other than what to avoid doing if you want one, it’s still fascinating to see how far wusses will go to try to make up for not having alpha male characteristics they could easily develop in themselves.)

When I’m out and watching couples interact, I rarely see a man walking with his head up, smiling and looking confident; he’s usually looking either angry or lost as his wife or girlfriend seems to be leading him around and making all the decisions, and when she stops to talk to another woman, you can see the looks of “yeah, I’m out with stupid wuss-boy here again, and I’ll call ya later and give you a good laugh about his latest stupidity” from across a shopping mall. Double disgusting!

Gentlemen, it is our station in life to make decisions – not to force our decisions on everyone else, mind you – but to be decisive when we have information; strong, and confident to the point of being benevolently aggressive and even a slight bit arrogant, and having the gonads and intestinal fortitude to talk to women about whatever we want or need to discuss with them, looking into their eyes, not at our feet. We are born and bred to lead. There is no excuse for failing in this regard. Nor is there an excuse for being towed around a place we don’t want to be like a little red wagon, or more appropriately, a child being led by the nose or ear to a place to be punished for his bad behavior.

Yes, we’ve been programmed by our mothers, our teachers, ex-girlfriends, Hollywood, etc., to be “nice,” to “share our feelings,” to be “sensitive,” and do a whole bunch of ridiculous crap that literally annoys women to death, whether they realize it as they are doing it or not, but we are not born or built that way. We are born male, with the capacity to be “alpha male,” and it is our natural state. No matter how long and how severely you have been programmed, you can deprogram yourself with a little knowledge and very little effort.

By the way, how are women responding to all these candy-asses? They’re getting more and more bored and frustrated with them, and pushing them harder and harder towards an emotional explosion in hopes of just getting a glimpse of their maleness. They want us to be real men, to the extent of risking a huge fight to see us do it, and when they don’t get what they want, they continue to escalate until your worst nightmare begins: they decide you may be unsalvageable, and then either affairs or divorce proceedings start, because such things will either get your attention and finally call you to action or at least provide them some relief in the form of drama and a change of scenery. (The one partial exception I’ve noted is in marriages where there is a high level of religious involvement, in which cases the woman “wears the pants in the family,” and both parties to the marriage are obviously unhappy, usually stuck in that “comfortably unhappy” state I warn you about.)

At that point, they have nothing to lose either way. It takes time, and they don’t like going through it, and if they see you suddenly start trying to improve, they will cautiously encourage you while skeptically testing you to see if you have the courage of your convictions and will see it through, or just shrug it off and consign yourself forever to terminal wussitude.

You can fix this, starting right now, if you have the desire and guts and of course, know how to read. That’s all it takes. You’re reading this, so you’re one third of the way home already. Go for broke. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” right now. Fix this before it gets out of hand, and be one of the few and the proud instead of one of the many and lame.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Mistakes Create Distractions, and Distractions Create Mistakes, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

Sometimes what looks like the easiest thing to do for a relationship problem ends up creating more trouble than you can imagine. Let’s take a look at some options and what really makes sense…

I once got a note from my buddy Ken that I’m sure many of you will find amusing, especially if you noticed the same mistake he did:

Hi David

I found it interesting reading the header on this email. I have read in the past that one of your pet peeves are emails that you get with improper punctuation and sentence structure. It is a pet peeve of mine also. So when I read the header of this email I had to chuckle.

I’m in a mood to bust chops of anyone who deserves it today, so I figured I’d start with you. No hard feelings, it’s all in fun my friend.

By the way, my wife is moving back in at the end of September.

Cheers

(I did this several years ago. For those of you who weren’t around or didn’t notice, the title read “What Is Does Your Partner REALLY Keep You Around?” but was supposed to read “Why Does Your Partner Really Keep You Around?” Let’s look at what happened, because there’s a lesson in it…)

My reply:

Hi Ken!

What can I say? BUSTED!!! LOL! I started using one title (What Is Your Partner’s Motive for Keeping You Around) and decided to change it to “Why Does Your Partner REALLY Keep You Around,” and got interrupted by a phone call. Not an excuse by any means, but rather an example of what happens when you’re distracted. Can you imagine the mistakes that we make and never find out about while we’re having relationship troubles? Yikes! In fact, I think we just scored the topic for tomorrow’s newsletter! Thanks for the inspiration!

Congratulations on your progress! Keep me posted!
David

I didn’t mention to him that the verb “are” doesn’t agree with his subject, “one,” because I was distracted by the lesson I was formulating for you folks! Indeed, I just noticed it. Distractions, distractions. What’s a guy to do except have a good laugh. ;-)

So think with me here for a minute; have you thought about the distractions relationship problems can bring, and the problems those distractions create?

What happens when you have trouble? It can make you bored, depressed, nervous, fearful, frustrated, maybe feeling dejected, rejected, disconnected, etc. All of these feelings require huge amounts of mental and emotional energy, especially for a man, since we are wired for problem-solving, right?

What’s the most popular quick fix? An affair, right? But does it fix anything? Maybe it temporarily relieves some of the negative feelings you have about your wife, or yourself, but they simply get replaced with other distractions, don’t they?

During a new affair, you feel relieved, thrilled, excited, etc., which makes you daydream about meeting up with your lover, and juggling your schedule and telling all the lies to cover everything has you pulled in too many directions at once, causing things to fall through the cracks. And it doesn’t end there, does it?

If the affair ages, you hit that 2-3 month mark where a woman starts wanting to know the relationship is going somewhere, you know, wanting to have “the relationship talk,” and now the resentment starts setting in. You resent your partner for leaving you hanging, and resent your lover for the pressure to commit, and all that resentment mixes with new fears that start to pop up, like will the lover get impatient and expose the affair, or blackmail you in revenge for not committing to her if you break it off. Right?

What is all this commotion and distraction costing you? How many blunders have you made while you weren’t at the top of your game because you were distracted by a fight you had before you left the house, wondering if it was going to continue when you got back home, or if there was even anybody there waiting to continue it? I’ve known a lot more guys than I care to count who have lost jobs, trashed careers, made trading errors that bankrupted them, and even a few who ended up being sued into bankruptcy or in jail over their choices while distracted by a fight or an affair. We’ve all seen a suicide or murder in the newspapers over this same thing as well, right?

So how well do you think those affairs really worked for them in the end?

Guys, I’m going to ask a huge favor of those of you who have had affairs. I want each of you to go to Hotmail, Yahoo, G-mail, or any other place you can think of and create an anonymous e-mail account with bogus information that can’t be traced to you, and send me anything you care to write about your affairs without so much as initials or a nickname so that we can save those who have never been through one the hassle and risk without reward. E-mail your response to support@makingherhappy.com and then delete the account and clear your browser history, Internet cache, etc., so nothing can be traced back to you. I want to show the men (and women) who haven’t yet made the mistake of an affair what can go wrong and what they can expect when they get into one. Your experience could save more than one person the pain of repeating your mistake, and they will appreciate it.

So what SHOULD you do when things start downhill, or even reach the bottom of the hill?

The first thing to do is see if the relationship is fixable. There are problems like incompatible values and life goals that are not fixable, and others like poor communication and lost attraction that can be easily fixed. Believe it or not, the biggest bonehead that will ever be on this mailing list will be able to make this determination accurately within an hour or less, depending on how fast he reads and how long it takes him to think something over. It’s crystal clear when you know what to look for and want an honest answer enough to put your emotions aside and look at the truth for a minute, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Based on that evaluation, you either get out of the relationship or fix it. Getting out can be achieved as friends just as easily as mortal combatants, and probably easier, for most people, but less frequently because most people don’t stop to realize that those really big problems like compatibility issues are not value judgments, but just simple reality, the result of not asking the right questions when you first got together in most cases, and getting out to have a chance at a happy life is a favor to both of you, not an insult as it is usually taken, like tossing out yesterday’s trash. But you have to know how to talk about it, and we’ll get to that in a minute as well.

If you have the foundation for a good relationship in terms of compatibility, shared values, etc., and have just fallen in a rut or have never communicated well enough to know how to excite each other, have fun together, speak to and listen to each other in a way where there are seldom if ever any kind of understandings, YOU GRAB THE BULL BY THE HORNS AND FIX THE RELATIONSHIP! And guys, it’s not just easy to do once you know how things work, it’s also a lot of fun! What?

Yes, it’s fun to learn be able to understand a woman. It’s incredible fun to see the things that you’ve seen a million times before and know what they really mean this time. It’s fun to know that you’re probably the only guy you know who knows everything you know!

It’s fun to be able to flip her attraction triggers on and off like a light switch, dialing the attraction up, then easing back a bit to tease her and let her savor the anticipation before ramping it up higher. And you know it has to be fun to watch her getting more and more excited and anxious until she can’t wait any longer and pounces on YOU! I can tell you from personal experience and that of many of my readers that there is a lot of fun to be had on this planet, and that certainly ranks in the top few!

So yes, there is a clear path to follow: Evaluate, and then either acknowledge your mistakes and move beyond them to try again in a different relationship or acknowledge your mistakes and remedy them within your existing relationship. In the end, it’s really that simple over 99% of the time.

Results require action, action requires a plan, and a good plan that brings successful action requires solid information. If you’re ready to be a man and get things in your life back on track, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started. Life is short, and it’s getting shorter by the second, so make what you have left of it count.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Don't Be a Deer Caught in the Headlights…What to Do to Fix Your Relationship and Marriage

I have some feedback for you, from the men this time, which demonstrates just how easy it really is to use good information when you have it, and how you have a choice of getting results or being road kill.

Over 98% of all the e-mail I receive falls into one of three categories: Success stories, questions from newsletter readers who haven’t yet read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" about their relationships, and the ones I really feel sorry for, the ones who are in such turmoil that they are too scared to try anything. Take this very typical letter from Dane:

Hi David,

I have enjoyed your newsletters and want to get your book, but I just do not know what to do. What you say in your newsletters makes sense to me, but I can not see myself doing it. I can not afford to make a mistake at this point because my wife is already talking about divorce. How can I know that this will work for me, or that I can even do it? Anything you can tell me will be appreciated.

Dane

The reason Dane and the many others like him are concerned is quite clear. They’re facing crisis and are too scared of making a wrong move to make a right one, and there they sit, like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to decide to move left or right, forward or back, and finally die without having made a decision.

What’s really sad is that the answer to their question is almost always included in their letter, and they’re too emotionally amped up and therefore mentally blinded to see it: Dane doesn’t know that it will work for him or that he can do it precisely because he can’t see himself doing it! He is focused on the impending catastrophe, and not the successful resolution of his problems.

One of the greatest and most motivational things I have ever heard in my life is, “What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve.” It’s been quoted so many times that I can’t verify for you who first said it, but that doesn’t make it any less true; if you can see yourself doing it, you can make the choice to follow through and get it done, like these guys:

Hi David,

I just wanted to say this you are so right: when women speak, "Questions are statements and statements are questions, men state, while women negotiate"

But what I have noticed is funny, this basic fact of life must certainly be ingrained in ALL women.

What I mean is my current girlfriend is a French Quebecer and that's the way she communicates... by asking questions when she really wants to say something! I talked to her about it and she told me how bright I was for noticing it, while I know I did not ask for your copyright!

SO bottom line would be: it doesn't matter if a girl only speaks French, only Chinese or Spanish! She will deliver statements by asking questions. Why is that so? I guess it is a mystery of life! Maybe they are always searching authority from the man, they always want his approval unconsciously.

And on BOREDOM: My ex-girlfriend was cheating on me and one sentence she said will stick with me forever: "I'm bored with you" or in French "Je m'ennuies avec toi". Anyways, if I had read your materials while I was with this particular woman, I could have turned the tables if you know what I mean...

But past is past and I now vow to never let my current girlfriend feel that terrible feeling of BOREDOM.

Sincerely,
MV

(No MV, it’s no mystery at all. It’s biological, a matter of the structure of the female brain, and yes, because of that, it does transcend geography, race, language, and everything else. Women naturally do it because they are women, and we naturally don’t do it because we are men and wired differently. It’s really just that simple.)

David,

I subscribe to several email newsletters from John Alanis, Shelley (McMurtry, a great source of female perspective which I highly recommend), and even David DeAngelo. And, I've purchased materials from several, but this email about the baseball player was quite possibly the best of all of you yet.

The club metaphor, bubble blowing irreverence, etc., was excellent. The best part was using other people as mentors. In the past, I had always been intimidated by people with superior skills, but using them to improve myself is a much better idea.

Thank you so much,
Mike

You see? These guys can see themselves doing as I recommend and see the benefits of it, and instead of asking “will this work for me?” they’re not only applying it, they’re even abstracting greater lessons by following the logic path to its inexorable conclusion.

It’s hard to thrive on reason and logic when your life seems to be falling down around you unless you’re disciplined and have learned through experience that the more logic and facts you apply the quicker the situation and the bad feelings it creates will pass. You should always look into yourself for your confidence and courage, but when all else fails, you can still look at those around you and say to yourself, “Well, if they can do it, I can do it!”

What I’m talking about doing isn’t something unnatural that takes years of study and practice. Most of it is simply removing unnatural, wussifying programming and letting your true self show through, maybe for the first time in your life. The few things you have to learn are things you’ve wanted to know all your life, like what makes women tick and what they really want, and how to really communicate with them, which really boils down to three very simple rules. You would literally have to be brain damaged to not be able to do it; indeed, if you can read this newsletter, you can do everything that you need to do if you simply choose to do it.

So why not get started, right now, while you’re thinking about it and have access to the tools you need to make it happen, quickly and easily? Stop looking for reasons to abstain from acting and take action. It’s the only way you’ll get results.

Your next action is to go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and join the ranks of men who are happy and with happy women, instead of living bored, celibate, in fear of affairs or divorce, or any of that other nasty stuff that so many of us have lived with since the 1980’s.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Lying, Part 3: Lie Detection, a VERY Useful Skill in Relationships and Marriage

Part of determining whether you should attempt to reverse a break-up is determining whether you can trust your partner. Knowing how to detect a lie is a VERY useful skill, even when everyone is truthful!

No discussion of lying in a relationship would be complete without a discussion of lie detection, especially for men, because women are naturally more adept at both lying and its detection than we are; their brain structure makes them more sensitive to “tells” (and are VERY dangerous poker players if they have math skills!) and more creative. It could in fact take years with a woman to determine how her character dictates whether, when, and for what reasons she will lie to you, but chances are that if you are lying to her, you’re already busted whether you know it or not, so let’s level the playing field a bit.

And, by the way, I’m not talking about “leveling the playing field” in the context of helping you to lie, but in determining whether you’re being lied to. Nor am I saying that every woman is a liar and is lying to you; I’m saying that due to brain structure – higher creativity and more advanced communications infrastructure – they are capable of being far better at it than we are. So stop typing that nasty-gram and listen up. ;-)

The following is from an article I first published as part of my crash course in stopping and reversing a break-up now, my “Break-Up Busting 101” free report. I’m reprinting it today both because it gets the job done and because my subscriber list doubles every few months, and many of you have not yet taken advantage of the very valuable information in either of the free reports linked at the bottom of this newsletter or in the right-hand margin of this blog. I strongly suggest that all of you read those two free reports thoroughly; they contain more solid, proven information than a lot of authors’ for-fee products, and they can help you to avoid many of the potential disasters that can befall a relationship as well as start you on the road to recovery if you’re having problems.

Now let’s get into the meat of today’s lesson:

Lie detection is a necessary survival skill in all facets of your life, because unfortunately, there are those who think that lying is a survival skill. It’s not. The truth always ends up coming out, and then on top of whatever mistake you’ve made, you’ve destroyed trust. At best, it's a tactic for stalling the inevitable. The only people who get away with lying in the long term are those who spend their life on the run, bouncing from place to place, customer to customer, acquaintance to acquaintance, and not staying anywhere long enough for anyone to catch them in a lie before they’ve left. That’s not going to work in a long-term relationship, is it?

Gentlemen, the deck is stacked against you from the beginning with regard to lying, because women are better at both doing it and detecting it than men. Both of those advantages come from their more highly-evolved communications infrastructure and skills (as compared to our own). However, since you shouldn’t be lying anyway (statistically, women will tolerate just about anything before they will tolerate a liar, even if they are chronically “factually challenged” themselves), you need only concern yourself with how to detect if and when she is lying.

Making you an expert on the subject would require an entire book, and we only have the space of this article to work within, so I’m going to hit the high spots for you to show you how easy it is if you have good information and then point you to some other very good information which, incidentally, I am not selling. (I am developing a primer on lie detection to include as a free report with my other e-books, and anyone who has purchased “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at the time of its release will be receiving a free copy if I have your current e-mail address on file.)

First, everyone has heard about how body language can be used to detect lies. That’s true, yet not true. There are many body language clues that indicate both that a person is lying and that they are very nervous about telling an unpleasant truth. When attempting to determine if someone is lying, you must watch for several different indicators and make sure they are all consistently pointing in the same direction.

A person who exhibits a single indication of lying may indeed only be nervous about the truth, have an itchy nose, be trying to cover bad breath, etc., but when the signs start stacking up and you see five or even ten signs that someone is lying, the statistical probability that they are telling the truth becomes such a long-shot that a penny placed on that bet would win you roughly the sum of the world’s oil and currency trade for a day – literally trillions-to-one. So where do you start?

Let’s start with the eyes. The eyes move when the brain does certain things. When a right-handed person attempts to access short-term memory, their eyes will move up and to the left, where if they are lying, which engages a creative center in the brain, they go up and to the right. Oddly, this is reversed in left-handed people. A big clue as to whether someone is right- or left-handed (if you don’t know them well enough to know) is to look for their wristwatch, which will be on the opposite hand, if you can’t get them to write something down for you. (Ask for their phone number, and if they try to hand you a business card, get them to write something on the back like their cellular phone number, business hours, secretary’s name – anything at all will do, just to see which hand wields the pen.)

People also tend to become less animated when they are lying, clasping their hands or crossing their arms when you have observed them “talking with their hands” in most of the rest of the discussion. Liars will also tend to look away from you and even move away from you as they lie, a subconscious effort to try to distance themselves from an uncomfortable situation. Touching the nose and covering the mouth while speaking are classic body language signs, but when you look at these, you’re looking for CHANGE in behavior, not so much the behavior itself. People do sometimes get an itch in their nose, or realize they have bad breath or ugly teeth, or shift their posture because of an aching joint.

It’s because of this that you must realize that it takes several minutes of observing someone to make this determination, not just a quick jab with an incriminating question. You must see enough of how they act when they are speaking normally and truthfully (by getting them to talk about something non-threatening or non-incriminating) before bringing up the subject you think they lied about or before thinking they’ve lied about something they brought up with you. That’s the value of small-talk, something that most men are very, very poor at engaging in because we really just don’t like to talk that much; we prefer to take action. That’s another reason women have such an edge on us; they enjoy small talk and are very good at conducting it, especially in getting to the truth. However…

There are some techniques that can be combined with body language reading that nobody, not even experienced con-artists, can beat. They involve watching for hesitation in response to a question. Let’s say you think your partner was on a date with someone else, and you say that somebody she works with whose name you can’t remember stopped you in the grocery store to say hello and asked how you were getting along after the break-up, and mentioned that they assumed there had been a break-up since she was dating this other guy. If she is innocent, she will immediately protest, because she has no idea what you are talking about, but if she hesitates, it’s because she’s guilty and has to think and make a choice about whether it is safer in that moment to accept that she’s been caught or to try to deny it and bluff through. The hesitation before she speaks, not whatever she says, is what tells the tale.

Another good tactic is a diversionary one. You tell a partner that you know all about something they’ve been doing (that you really are only suspecting), and that you understand how and why it happened and are willing to let that go if they will promise that something lesser won’t be happening again, like hearing it from her friends instead of her. When she agrees to make the promise, which is easier than the confession, she has confessed to the transgression.

Even here, you can still take advantage of hesitation. A person with nothing to confess will immediately deny they did anything, and a person with something to confess looking for an easy way to do it will immediately make the promise or will pause while weighing their chances of getting away with another denial, the only reason for them to hesitate. I don’t care for this particular tactic because it requires lying to detect the lie, but my job is to instruct you, not judge you, and it is highly effective.

People also tend to objectify and generalize when they are lying. A person who really worked late will tell you that they worked until 10:30PM, while someone who is lying is much more prone to say they “worked really late.” Also, they will tend to say, “left MY office” if they were really there, as opposed to, “left THE office” if they were not. Again, this must be weighed with other indicators, as the use of these pronouns can vary because of personality, level of detail-orientation, etc. It’s the change from using words like “my” to words like “the” or the change from speaking actively, like “I did this,” to passively, like “this was done,” focusing on the event or act rather than on them that tells the tale.

There is a book by David Lieberman, PhD, called “Never Be Lied to Again,” that has been on the NY Times Best Seller list and is an excellent book if you really want to dig deep into this subject and become a true expert. I’ve also used a lot of the hand-held lie detection gadgets and computer software that do voice print analysis, but was not impressed; there were too many false positives and false negatives for me to see them as useful tools at the time (the manufacturers’ reports of their own tests indicated that they were proud of numbers like 62% accuracy, which is only 12% better than half the time!). Over time, you can expect these products to increase in accuracy, just as voice recognition software that lets you give input to your computer has improved, but it may not happen until most of us are too old to care.

Communications is a tough subject, even when everyone is telling the truth. There are good and bad ways to ask questions of women, good and bad ways to start conversations, and good and bad ways to end them as well. When you’re already in a stressful situation like a fight or after a break-up, the last thing you want to do is trip over some protocol or miscue that you don’t know about and end up with your foot in your mouth and your signature on divorce papers because of it. Let me help you with that…

Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now, and get with the program. If your relationship is not in crisis, it will show you exactly how to not only keep it from getting there, but how to make it better. If you are in crisis, it will show you how to determine whether you should indeed reverse it or let it go, and if it is a relationship that you should save, it will show you what to do to quickly get things on stable footing and get everyone in a state where they are receptive to working things out and making positive change.

If it shouldn’t be saved, you’ll learn how to turn your combative soon-to-be ex into a cooperative soon-to-be ex who may go so far as to set you up with dates after a non-contested divorce without using control, threats, tricks, or deceit. Seemingly far stranger things have happened to my readers…

I’m sure you’ve heard that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure;” this is about a pound of prevention and it’s worth several tons of cure, and it can be yours for less than the price of a good meal for two, so get it done – or would you prefer to be alone after shelling out that $34,000 that the average contested divorce costs in the U.S.??? I didn’t think so!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Women's Biggest and Loudest Complaint About Men, and Fixing It Can Fix Your Relationship or Marriage

Boredom is every woman’s arch-nemesis; it literally poisons them and threatens their life and sanity. How can you spot it, and what can you do about it? You’d better know, because left to her own devices, you may not be part of the solution, or if you are, you may be wishing you weren’t!

When I was researching "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" women’s biggest and loudest complaint about their men could be summed up in a single word: “BORING.” It’s the last word you ever want to hear a woman use to describe you in any interaction with them, no matter who they are or the nature of the relationship.

I received a letter that I want to share with you, because in one respect it’s sad and in another it’s downright annoying. Meet Dan:

Dear David,

I am writing this letter in hopes you can help me. It seems of late that my wife is not as interested in me as she used to be. I have tried all types of things to get her back to where we were a year ago when we got married, but nothing seems to work. I feel neglected, and it’s starting to feel like she is getting bored with me. The tone in her voice is different and sometimes she makes me feel like I am just a toy to be used when she needs one.

I want her back the way it was when we had fun and I was not worried about upsetting her with what I had to say. I love this woman in every way possible and can not imagine my life without her in it. It’s just like I never say the right thing to her anymore. Could you please tell me what I could be doing wrong?

Thank you for your time,
Dan

My reply:

Yes, Dan, I can, but before I do, I want to ask you a question: I get letters literally every day from people who read this newsletter and especially those who are using "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" talking about the great results they get and how fast they get them, and how their wives no longer see them as a boring dolt, but as exciting and fun. You’ve been subscribing for several months now. Do you know why are you not getting the same results?

The short answer is because you’re not really reading these newsletters, which describe all these problems to you, and you’ve not yet read and used "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" in your relationship to recognize and fix these problems. I give more advice on this subject than any other, and more free advice in these newsletters than most authors provide in their premium products, and you simply haven’t been paying attention. Now your situation has become critical, so listen up while you still have a chance to fix this.

Your wife is indeed bored, and if you’ve been reading even a small percentage of the newsletters I’ve been sending you every day you know that she needs you to do something about it. That’s your job as her husband. Take responsibility and get it done.

You should also know by now that she has been trying to communicate precisely what she needs to you, but because you and she are not wired with the same biological communications circuits, you’ve not been hearing her, and she’s thinking that you’ve heard her and chosen to ignore her. That’s a bad problem, and the reason that she is now making you feel neglected.

In addition, you should know that what she is needing for you to do to break her boredom is to create attraction for her, to give her that “swept off her feet” feeling from time to time, which gets her neurotransmitters, endorphins, hormones, and everything else in balance, saving her from that antsy torment that causes women to seek and create drama to substitute for the attraction you are failing to create.

The other thing that you should know by now is that if you don’t do something about this, she will, and at best, you’ll find yourself dealing with the spill-over from the drama she creates and at worst you’ll be dealing with affairs and even divorce that are used in a last-ditch effort to communicate to you that either you shape up or one of you is shipping out, if she gives you that last chance; many women will just divorce a man outright without a second thought once you let them go this far if another man creates attraction for them.

Obviously, the thing to do to fix all this is to go ahead and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and put it to work. Depending on how fast you read, the average person can get through it the first time in 2-4 hours, and it’s a book that you’ll want to re-read periodically as your experience base broadens and your skills develop.

In its pages, you will learn how to evaluate yourself, your wife, and your relationship, making it easier for you to know what’s broken before you start trying to fix things, or if you and your wife are so mismatched that fixing it will never be possible. You’ll learn how she communicates, so that you can finally pick up on all those signals that you’ve been missing all your life. You’ll know what makes women tick in general, and what they want, and with your newly-developed communications skills, will know your wife so well that she’ll describe you to her friends as “he always just knows what I want.”

And finally, you’ll learn about attraction, what creates it and what kills it, and that because it is a biological, not logical, process, you will always be able to give your wife that “swept off her feet” feeling that keeps the two of you intimate and keeps your life fun and exciting, both in and out of the bedroom, and save her from her arch-enemy, boredom.

So there it is, Dan (and YOU!), all spelled out. All that’s left for you to do is to download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and put it to work for you, because it’s the best thing you as a man can do for your marriage, and one of the most fun things you’ll do in your entire life to boot!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Ex's: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Former Relationships and Marriage

Depending on circumstances, ex’s can be a valuable asset, a nightmare, and worst of all, an attraction-killer to your present partner. Let’s explore…

As you may remember from the bio on the MakingHerHappy.com web site, a lot of people have called me “Doc” since childhood, not because am a medical doctor, psychiatrist, dentist, veterinarian, or college professor, but because I’m the guy that makes whatever ails you go away, no matter what it seems to be.

Hence, I spend a large part of my life hearing other people’s problems and providing solutions for them, and one of the problems I hear about most are “ex’s” – ex-husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, employers, etc. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but how people become “ex’s” in your life and how you deal with them once they do says a lot about you. We need to talk about some of the things it can say, because some of it is really good, and some of it is really, REALLY bad. And whether you have an ex now or there is some chance you may have one in the future, you NEED to know this and think about it.

Let’s start with the worst case first, and work our way to the better ones. The worst case is the ex that became an ex because war was declared, and you got hurt and have never gotten over it. You talk about the relationship and the break-up all the time, even though it’s been years ago. Have you noticed how people react?

Have you noticed that they tend to “glaze over,” look at their watches, or roll their eyes, and suddenly remember somewhere else they need to be or rather aggressively change subjects? If not, open your eyes, because they do exactly that, and it’s costing you. People don’t like hearing the same lament over and over, and they don’t like being around people who harbor pain, depression, grudges, etc., instead of resolving their problems and moving on with their life. It’s annoying, embarrassing, and can be quite depressing. It’s also a major respect and attraction-killer, and labels you as a wuss who can’t deal with life and move on.

Face it, everybody goes through at least one bad relationship in their life, and they get over it. They learn how to better choose a girlfriend, wife, friend, business partner, employer, or whatever, and they move on to have a better life. Or they wallow in unresolved anger or misery and become a pain in the neck to everyone they know.

If you’re not resolving problems and moving on, the only thing keeping you from it is YOU. How you respond to past events is entirely YOUR CHOICE! Make the choice to accept reality and whatever responsibility is yours, stand up, dust off your pants, and step forward. If it was so traumatic that you need professional help, get it, and get it done. Life’s too short to spend it looking backward and feeling crappy (and annoying the hell out of everyone else) instead of moving forward and experiencing the joy that you were born to have if you only step up and choose to earn it.

“But you don’t understand!” you say. Oh yes, I DO understand. You loved her, you needed her, the sex was great, you really loved that job, you never thought that buddy would screw you over. You never thought you’d come home to find your brother or best friend in bed with your wife. You loved being self-employed, or having money, status, and respect. I’ve seen and heard it all. Lived through it, too. And I can tell you with authority that none of those things has any impact on TODAY, unless you choose to let them.

There are lessons to learn from the bad things that happened to you. Stop lamenting the events and seek out the lessons. Learn them. Consign yourself to using those lessons to be more successful in the future. And relegate those events to the past and never, ever look back. The clock is ticking, and every second that passes can never be regained. You can spend each second looking back and wasting it or looking forward and living a better life. It’s your call. Let that choice and that ability to choose empower you to live well and be happy.

Stepping down off my stump now… ;-)

The next worst case isn’t much better. It’s the dependent that you can’t quite get rid of. The ex-wife or lover that you’re constantly having to bail out of a jam that they stupidly chose to put themselves in but want someone else to pay for, the child who is well into adulthood that you keep bailing out, even though a person their age usually has a family, mortgage, and established a career, the ex-employer who either fired you and continues to call on you for help or the one you left that keeps leaning on you instead of hiring a competent replacement, any of which causes you to complain and be distracted when you’re around people who currently really do matter to you and want to enjoy your company.

They don’t like listening to you repeat the same laments and frustrations any more that you want to hear it out of them. It labels you as a push-over, another breed of wuss who just can’t say “no,” no matter how badly “no” needs to be said. You guessed it, another major respect and attraction killer that will send both genders scurrying when they see you coming down the hall.

People who don’t want to be partners of some sort and share life with you, whether it’s a wife, girlfriend, buddy, employer, business partner, offspring, or whatever, don’t deserve to have you sacrificing yourself to their incompetence, delinquency, etc. Altruists around the world are cringing as I say this, but you know it’s true. Your life is too short and too precious to allow yourself to be bled dry by a bunch of parasites who won’t let go of your jugular vein. Let them keep themselves up instead of sucking you dry, Brother. Do you understand? Their need is not a demand on your life; a poor choice on their part does not constitute an obligation or emergency on yours. Remember that. Quote it daily.

There are good people around you more than willing to share life with you, no matter who or where you are, so why cheat yourself and them of the great things you can do -- and BE -- together while throwing your life’s energy away to these parasites? You’ll find that when you do this, all you will attract are more parasites, as well as a few predators, because good, competent, independent people will shy away, not wanting your problem overload to spill over on them, while parasites and predators will be watching for a sucker like you to come along and latch on as soon as you give them an opening.

What impact do you think this will have on any relationships or marriage you might enter into? If the good people are steering clear of you and the bad ones have you targeted, well…it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how that will turn out, especially when parasites and predators are masters of using guilt and a person’s own insecurities to manipulate people into doing things they know better than to do just for approval and acceptance. If this is you, you’re going for ride after ride until you either choose to live better or they drive you all the way to the gutter. And again, the choice is yours, not theirs, so make the right one.

The last kind of ex to which I want to call your attention is the only good kind to have, the kind with whom you have shared something for awhile, and as you grew apart or found yourself at odds, you responsibly recognized that you were evolving in two different directions or at incompatible paces or that you started a relationship without sufficient compatibility to sustain it and you went your separate ways on friendly terms. You’ve probably seen this at one time or another, a situation where both of you recognized that you were both good people in a bad match-up, and knew that you’d both be better off at arm’s length than close-up, “better friends than lovers” as the saying goes.

This would be the former employer who keeps you in their Rolodex as a potential consultant and gives you a good employment referral (not just a reference, but calls up somebody in their own network to help get you placement), and to whom you would refer competent sources of help, materials, or whatever. We’ve all seen a bad fit in the work place, and employers appreciate how it can happen and will often treat you much better if you sit down with them to discuss it instead of trying to hide the fact that it’s a bad fit until you’ve found something else and leave them hanging with a job to fill and no warning.

It would also be the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend who steers opportunities your way, and to whom you steer good quality people. Maybe you even double date from time to time to help each other meet new people, steer contacts to each others’ businesses, etc. This is highly attractive behavior to all but the most insecure of women, because it says that you can accept responsibility for your actions and decisions, keep a level head and reach workable agreements with people, and won’t be a needy wuss who hangs onto them if things don’t work out for the long term. It says that you’re strong and of good character, that you focus on the value in people, not their flaws. I don’t know about you, but that’s precisely the kind of thing that I want to be known for, and consequently, am known for.

Fights are neither necessary nor desirable to resolve a bad relationship of any kind. At 47 years old I’ve never been sued, and every conflict I’ve engaged in during my adult life has been settled in a logical and equitable manner by mutual consent, including all former marriages, contracts, employment, and customer relationships. I know of nobody that I’ve ever dealt with that I couldn’t call up right now and have a good conversation, and probably find some way of stirring up a business deal or some kind of fun. It sounds like quite an accomplishment, but while it may be unusual, it has never been difficult, and should not be difficult for you, either.

Why?

Because all it takes is the willingness and respect to deal squarely with those around you, looking for what you can accomplish together instead of what you can cheat each other out of or control. Being known for being such a person makes you attractive to everyone in all respects, and when it comes to women, they want a man who will take the lead, act responsibly and fairly, keep a positive attitude, help them to filter drama, and keep things moving for them, not somebody looking for every possible way to screw them, cheat them, lie to them, etc., or who feeds into their drama instead of trying to keep them from getting lost in it. Sounds rather like an employer, does it not?

They also want someone to share life with, who knows when to say, ‘Yes,” or, “No.” They evaluate men using an iron-clad rule: “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me, and if you can’t stand up for ME, you won’t stand up for US.” They don’t mind you sharing yourself with others, moderately, as long as you save the best part for them, which in a good relationship is a very fair trade for the nurturing, loyalty, and many other things a loving wife will give a good man who’s making her happy.

Knowing how to evaluate and maintain a good relationship at home, how to communicate with people, and how to create attraction in the woman you love has far-reaching effects, much farther-reaching than you might ever imagine before doing it. Look around you. Those men who are happy at home are happy at work as well, and they have solid relationships with all the people in their life. They know how to choose good relationships, how to communicate with people, and how to be the kind of guy that people want to be around.

You’ll find that when you do the things described in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," the rest of your life will start improving at the same pace that things improve at home. Your confidence level increases, your communications skills improve, and you become more fun, interesting, competent, and generally enjoyable to have around. You can keep putting it off because you don’t know if you can do it, or you can accept the fact that a lot have people have already done it, many of which may not be as sharp as you, and you can make just as big a difference in your life as they have, if not even bigger. All it takes is to claim your birthright as a man and BE a man.

Download this fascinating and highly-effective book at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It’s guaranteed, it’s fun, you can easily afford it, and quite frankly, you can’t afford to not do it, at least not if you realize just how short life really is and don’t want to spend it watching everybody else enjoying it more than you do. Join us, right now!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

The First and Most Important Step in Having or Saving a Great Relationship and Marriage

The first step in any great relationship of any kind is being well-matched. If you are not well-matched, you may be able to survive together, but the odds of being happy together are slim to none; if you are, you’ll find you can conquer about anything! Unfortunately, some couples live in misery for years without ever asking this most fundamental and necessary of all relationship questions! This is one of those “must read” issues, so dig in…

Today I want to talk more about something that seems to be so logical that it would be self-evident to all, but obviously is not practiced by many, the first step in having a great relationship. We touched on this in the July 14 issue of this newsletter, concerning what to do if your wife is with another man, and you should read that issue if you missed it. I try to go through this every two to three months because there are so many new people coming in and everyone needs to see it.

Those of you who have been banging your head against the wall after receiving advice from someone claiming that “any relationship can be saved regardless of circumstances” will want to pay particular attention to that and this issue, because this edition may be addressing your biggest relationship or marriage problem. And if people are going so far as to call you a “quitter,” or “loser,” because you’re tired of fighting a losing battle and can’t see how it can end well for anyone, you’ll not only want to read this, but share it with them, to at least get them off your back and possibly even help them get in touch with reality.

That first and most crucial step in any great relationship or marriage is being well-matched to your partner.

Yes, some of you are right now saying, “Duh!” but others are saying, “but can’t you learn to love someone?” Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Here are the facts and truth of the matter:

When you first meet someone, the emotion that pulls you together is either attraction or need (or in rare cases lust, but lust is seldom responsible for keeping two people together long enough to get married, unless they’re incredibly reckless or needy), which are both independent of love; indeed, need is in fact mutually exclusive of love – you cannot love someone that you need, because (in a nutshell) need actually makes you resent them as the object of your dependence, and fear their power to leave and remove the thing you need from your life. Fear is a partner to hatred, not love.

This in itself is a complex and difficult concept for most to embrace, and if you find yourself wanting to argue with it, see Lesson 3 in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, entitled “Love, Need, Lust and Attraction – Do YOU Know the Difference?” or skip to the similarly-titled section of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and gain an effective understanding, because it is both factual and crucial. We’ll address need first because it’s easier to see, then we’ll get into attraction and love.

Need never develops into love, and sooner or later, the other person (unless they are hopelessly codependent) gets tired of neediness and moves on. There is nothing you can do about this, especially telling them that you need them and can’t live without them. That is the very drain, pressure, and stress that they are trying to get away from, and your fight for independence is going to take too long for them to wait around for you to complete it, if you can; most truly needy people, those who would be called parasites because they take from their partners without giving anything significant in return, spend their life moving from host to host because it’s just easier for them to find a new host than to evolve into a non-needy person of independence.

In short, if the person you are with is telling you it’s over because you are too needy, take the hint and grow up, become self-supporting and independent, and you’ll find that people enjoy being around you for the long term. Make no mistake, fighting this break-up is only going to make things worse, because you are severely mismatched; a chronically needy person cannot coexist with an independent person who resents neediness. You got away with it for awhile because you were somehow charming, physically attractive, wealthy, funny, or something, but now that the cat is out of the bag and it’s known that you’re a needy wuss, you have two options: find another host or evolve so that you can enjoy another’s company instead of needing it. It’s harsh, but it’s really just that simple.

Someone asked once why I didn’t talk about a case wherein the woman is the needy one. I didn’t because I didn’t realize how common it might be for a man to be trying to save a relationship with such a woman, wherein he is independent and she is the needy one. But lo and behold, I have run across them, and the “cognitive dissonance” within the men is overwhelming. They fight between wanting to get away from the stress of being stuck with a needy person and wanting to try to “salvage their investment in their marriage.”

The only hope for you if you are in this case is to help your wife understand that what she is feeling is need, not love, and that she needs to develop some self-esteem before she can love either of you. Try to help her develop some self-esteem, and if she insists on living in denial (“Why can’t you just love me as I am?” and such questions are infallible evidence of such a problem) in spite of your efforts to get her to acknowledge her problem, seek counseling, etc., you have two choices: Get out or go down with a sinking ship. You can either lead her out of it, put up with it, or leave, and you won’t be able to lead her as long as she’s in denial. ‘Nuff said.

Now, on to the more complex case, where attraction was the reason for you to come together. Once attraction has brought you together and you’ve had your initial episode of “physical exploration and gratification,” there should be a period where you get to know each other, find that you have common interests, philosophies, values, etc., and come to value each other – love develops. This is the source of the friendship, respect, loyalty and commitment required for long-term relationships to survive, while attraction is where all the fun, excitement, and energy come from. There are several possible scenarios that arise from the various permutations of these two emotions between two people.

The most obvious two are having both love and attraction, in which case you can be together happily and feel like you’re in a never-ending honeymoon (the ideal situation, right? And it can be sustained for a lifetime if you are aware of its requirements and constituents, and we’ll get back to this in a few minutes), and having neither love nor attraction, after events have eliminated them both, in which case the relationship must end, because even though lost attraction can usually be easily rekindled, lost love just doesn’t happen. Peoples’ values and personalities just don’t naturally move radically away from some baseline and then go back there.

Now, the other two are a bit trickier to deal with. We’ll talk about the harder of the two first, the case in which love is lost but attraction survives. It is common for people under tremendous pressure that they ultimately cannot handle, and they degrade themselves somehow. They could then become a loser, maybe a criminal or spouse abuser, and/or possibly a substance abuser, but they still project the personality traits that trip attraction triggers.

This would typically be a marriage that started out like a story book romance, but currently one spouse is drunk or high all the time after losing a loved one, a business, or career, etc. They have lost their self-love, self-esteem, and self-respect, but have still managed to somehow remain fun, funny, sexy, or something that holds the other spouse’s attention. You can’t base a great relationship on nothing but sex, jokes, and parties, and you can’t “fix” somebody else, especially someone who won’t admit there is a problem and doesn’t want to fix anything.

You’re only choices with such a relationship are to either get this person some professional help so that they can be redeemed or move on. Again, it sounds harsh, but statistically and historically, this is reality, and if they won’t get help, moving on is your only option; having once loved someone is no reason to go down with a sinking ship that refuses to be repaired. That’s martyrdom, the ultimate form of sacrifice, the trading of valuable life for nothing of value at all, not love.

The last possibility is the one I like dealing with the most, where love is still alive and healthy, but attraction has failed; you’re in the “friends column” but nobody else has created attraction in your partner and she still loves you, but is bored and vulnerable. In the dating world, lost attraction nearly always means that you blew it and you just move on immediately, because the other person already has; the window for creating attraction opens once, and very briefly, period. However, when you’ve been together for long enough for attraction to fade, you develop a vested interest in keeping the relationship alive. You acquire memories, security, a mortgage and property, and usually children, which motivate you to try to work things out. Hence, the window that closes in seconds in the dating world can be open for months or even years when you're committed.

Men are generally pretty easy when it comes to attraction. We’re attracted mostly to physical appearance and seductive talk and actions, and if attraction is lost and must be recreated, women seldom have to do any more than correct whatever major issues have developed with their appearance, if any, and act like a woman; self-respect and self-love in a woman are among the sexiest things a man can behold, and they cause the things that trip men’s attraction triggers, such as being height-weight proportionate, good grooming and posture, smiling, having fun, etc. Drama and depression are big turn-offs to men, but both tend to disappear when a woman feels attraction for a man.

Women aren’t so easy though. Physical appearance barely makes them curious, and then only for a short while, and that curiosity can be destroyed in an instant by any non-alpha male behavior, such as deferring decisions, approval-seeking or trying to impress them, being lazy or boring, etc.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible, or even difficult, to rekindle attraction. Indeed, if you have the right information to work from, it has been proven to happen in less than a week to a sufficient degree to halt the signing of divorce papers already prepared and move an estranged spouse back into the family home. This is the failing relationship that you fight for, even if there has been an affair, because love is hard to find and to earn, and a physical affair – which virtually always happens out of boredom and means absolutely nothing unless you choose to assign meaning to it – is no reason whatsoever to abandon a proven love.

Yes, I said that, and I’m about to say it another way: a one-time physical “fling” that happened out of boredom is not proof of lost love, nor a sign of disloyalty or disrespect. It’s an unfortunate and very STUPID thing that happens when two people can’t or just don’t effectively communicate with each other and allow their attraction to fade, nothing more, and nothing less. I’m not saying that the person who does it is stupid; I’m saying that it’s ridiculous that people will let their problems go to the point that this happens before realizing there is a problem and trying to fix it.

If you’re sitting on the couch with a beer and the TV remote every night while your partner is doing something else, and you’re part of that statistic that says that the average mature couple (mature meaning having been together, married or not, for two years or more) has sex six times per year (yes, that’s once every two months on average), trouble’s not just coming, it’s HERE!

And, there’s no sense waiting for it to get that bad before taking action; a good relationship is far easier to maintain than it is to fix if it gets broken, right? What you need is a plan for evaluating and then fixing and/or maintaining it and the knowledge required to empower you to do that. Luckily for you, it’s already been figured out, tested, proven, and published, and it can be yours in the next few minutes.

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you can download it right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, and it’s working for everyone who’s used it. Don’t make things rougher on yourself than they have to be by waiting. Do it now, and do it for keeps, because life is too short to do it any other way.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Giving in -- or Kissing Ass -- Has NEVER Saved a Good Relationship or Marriage

About any trained salesperson will tell you that to resolve any conflict, you should always agree. That’s ill-advised when a woman is involved. Why? Do you relish the idea of wearing the label of “WUSS”?

I generally try to focus on what works and avoid discussion of what doesn’t, but over the years I’ve run into some advice that has the potential to be extremely dangerous, based on what I’ve observed and proven in my own research. Over the next two days, I want to talk about that advice and show you both the pitfalls of following that advice and a much safer tactic that I found to be entirely effective in real-world application.

Today’s issue will concern the advice to “always agree” to resolve conflict, and tomorrow’s will be the idea of trying to stop a divorce (or any kind of break-up) before thoroughly evaluating a relationship to see if indeed it should be stopped, because a great many relationships that break up do so because the participants are horribly mismatched and should have never come together in the first place.

Now, let’s talk about this business of always agreeing to resolve conflict. This is a very old basic tactic used by sales people to overcome objections to a sales pitch, and has been taken out of context for use in relationship problem and dispute resolution. The idea is to agree to get the other person to calm down and let you disagree peacefully while you steer them around to your point of view. It originated from the old “Feel, Felt, Found” negotiating gambit.

You may have run into this with a real estate agent or car or other big-ticket item salesperson. Let’s say they offer you a car with a diesel engine, and you say, “I don’t want a diesel. I heard they don’t have as much power going up a hill.” And the salesperson replies, “Yes, I understand how you FEEL. We FELT the same way for a long time, but then some of our customers FOUND they still liked it, so we recommend everyone try it.”

Simple diffusion of an objection. And it sells a lot of cars. (I won’t venture a guess at how many go to people who end up liking a diesel. ;-) ) But later, psychologists urged people to take that tactic one step farther and just agree with anything to diffuse the objection and then build rapport. Once rapport is built, then ease back into the subject after the defenses are down.

But there are a couple of big pitfalls in this premise, especially with regard to relationships and marriage. First, holding a relationship together is a matter of cooperation, not of salesmanship. Women communicate on a level that is so far above men that they will immediately recognize this as just a tactic more often than not (it has always been known to work better on men than women anyway – remember, I’m also a marketing and management consultant, and this was something I used to be intimately involved in and teach almost daily). To make matters worse, when you give in to a woman to quell a stressful situation, you are instantly labeled a wuss! Really! You think not? You’re gonna love this:

I got several of the women “advisors” on the phone and told them about the “always agree advice,” and the most common response was a tie between “You’ve got to be kidding!” and “Oh my God! They didn’t say that!” Their overwhelming consensus was that a woman will lose any respect she still has left for a man who deploys such a tactic because women hate it when a man just gives in instead of holding out for what’s right. Now, notice I said “holding out for WHAT’S right,” not “holding out to BE right.” Hang with me here…

As a little background, while the biggest cause of rocky relationships, fighting, and destructive competition in relationships is incompatibility, the biggest cause of break-ups and divorce is lost attraction – plain old everyday boredom. This happens to a woman when a man just stops being manly, fun, and interesting, and the woman gets bored and wants out, or gets bored and plays around and gets caught. (Women do things that cause men to lose attraction for them too, but I’m writing to men today.)

The last thing in the world you want to do under those circumstances is something wussy like always agreeing with her every gripe, because some of her gripes are not going to be real gripes, but rather tests to see if you are going to remember that you are a man and stand up against an obvious falsehood. A woman’s first criteria in evaluating a man is “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me.”

The next big thing you want to avoid is use the words “I” or especially “YOU” at the beginning of a sentence during an argument or while the problem is being identified. Once you start pointing fingers, talking about people instead of issues, the conflict escalates and everybody loses. What’s the right move?

First, you must understand that women don’t speak to report information. Everything with them is a negotiation. They make statements to ask questions and ask questions to make statements, and will seldom if ever state the obvious. It’s all very diplomatic, even when they are angry. To keep from escalating what’s already a very delicate and volatile situation, you must shift the focus away from “I” or “YOU” to “WE,” and then move her focus to the actual ISSUE. “WE have a problem, and it is [whatever the problem is], so what needs to be done to fix it?” You must absolutely shift the focus from “WHO” is the problem to “WHAT” is the problem as much as possible to address the issues instead of the blame for (and emotions caused by) the issues. For example…

Let’s say you have the stereotypical male habit of grabbing the TV remote and starting to channel surf every time you come into the room, and she resents you being so disrespectful of her to interrupt something she is watching without asking. She starts out by saying, “You really make me mad as hell when you just start flipping channels when I’m watching something.” (That’s the statement she’ll be making with the question that you’ll actually hear: “How would you feel if I changed the channel while you were watching TV?” Or she might take the opposite tack, saying, “Didn’t you see me sitting here watching that?” meaning, “You inconsiderate jerk! I WAS watching that, and now I’m pissed off at you.” Statements are questions and questions are statements, remember?) If you respond with, “Well then why didn’t YOU tell ME?” it comes across as blaming her for your ignorance and disrespect, and that won’t fly.

If you respond with, “I’m sorry. I’LL let YOU be in charge of the remote from now on,” you’ve probably just ensured that you won’t have sex again for about 2 months, whether she does or not, because you just gave in. Something like, “Well, it’s MY house and MY TV and I’LL change the channel whenever I feel like it,” will get you more punishment over the coming months than you could ever fathom, and you won’t know that most of it hit you, although you probably will wonder why your underwear has been starched, your shirts are suddenly tighter and you can never seem to find your keys. ;-)

She wants you to take the lead in decision-making and be a stand-up guy, but in trade for respecting that position of leadership, she reserves the right to an input channel, in ALL negotiations, and you have to respect that or pay a price that you will invariably find you don’t want to pay. So your only option is to recognize that a negotiation has begun, and negotiate cooperatively, responding with something like, “Then WE obviously need to come to some kind of resolution here so that WE don’t continue to have this problem.”

Now you have her attention, and respect, because you have followed the form that she needs to follow to ensure involvement and a fair hearing. At this point it becomes okay to say “I” and “you” as long as you aren’t slinging mud with them. The purpose here is a peaceful and equitable settlement, resolving a problem, not winning a battle, remember?

Follow up with something like, “I didn’t realize that you were interested in that show, and to be honest, I probably never gave it due consideration. In the future, I will make sure that you aren’t enjoying a show before I change the channel. Will that satisfy you?”

Now, there are several really big things that you need to notice in that. First, you will notice that nowhere are you directly apologizing. You are indirectly apologizing by saying “never gave it DUE consideration,” and that is important, because you are acknowledging the mistake without being a big mushy wuss about it. Believe it or not, the words “I’m sorry” should rarely if ever come out of your mouth.

Acknowledging your mistakes in a manner that says that you should have performed better or with more consideration of her input is almost always enough and often even preferred because it refers to something specific instead of a generic apology that everybody gets all the time. (If there’s ever a time that it’s not enough, she’ll let you know.) The words, “I’m sorry” have come to be associated with deceit, incompetence, and inconsiderate jerkitude, the epitome of the principle that it is far easier to get forgiveness than permission, and you need to separate yourself from that stigma no matter what you do, in everything you do.

Next, you are offering the first suggestion for the resolution, again, taking the lead, but not dictating terms. It doesn’t matter whether your idea is perfect for her or not, just as long as it’s not asinine. It’s a negotiation, and she will let you know if she sees any part of your suggestion as unsatisfactory. Taking the lead like this is a HUGE deal to a woman; a man who won’t lead, can’t make decisions, and can’t consider the input of others in decisions isn’t worth having around, just as any man who can’t stand up TO her can’t be expected to stand up FOR her. It’s really that simple.

Also notice that you ask if your suggestion will “satisfy her.” (Or if you prefer a more casual, phrase, ask if it will “work for her.”) You are not asking if it is “okay for her,” or anything that sounds even remotely like you are asking her permission to proceed in this manner, which is also good for several months of celibacy as you shatter any respect for you she may still be holding. You are asking for her input, inviting her to take part in the negotiation in which she expects to engage. Incidentally, she will punish you severely for shutting her out of it or giving in to avoid it. What’s next?

Chances are, in this simple example, she would have been satisfied with this plan because it fully addresses her issue, but you’re not done yet. She cannot have the last word, because whomever has the last word makes the decision, and you must be the one to formally declare the decision made. After she says, “Yes, that will do,” or whatever, then you must wrap it up with the formal declaration, something like, “Then that is precisely what I will do in the future, and if you catch me slipping, I expect you to remind me of it and let me fix it instead of jumping down my throat about it. I will do my best to treat you with the same respect. We are adults and partners and we can both do a much better job of handling problems. I don’t want us to be one of these couples that fight all the time over everything any more than you do.”

That’s leadership, and it gets you more than a solution to your problem, it gets you respect and trust, which in turn creates attraction, which breeds intimacy, and starts an upward spiral that may last anywhere from minutes to years, depending on how diligent you are about acting like a man – a REAL man.

Relationships aren’t always easy, especially when they start coming apart. Indeed, they’re a lot like houses. If the relationship has a solid foundation, it can usually be repaired; if not, it’s better to tear it down and start over. We’ll be talking about how to determine that tomorrow.

For today, just realize that as a man, to make any relationship work, you have to be able to assess the relationship to see if and how well it is working and compare that to how well it can work. You have to be able to communicate with a woman in a way that is considerate of her communication style, which is grossly different from a man’s to say the least; otherwise you can never even identify the strengths and weaknesses in your relationship, let alone fix them.

You also have to understand what it is that makes a woman tick -- what she wants, out of life, her relationship with you, etc., and what flips her switches, especially those that trigger sexual interest and excitement and create that emotion that women will literally kill to have and maintain, full-blown swept-off-her-feet sexual attraction. Sounds like the Holy Grail of relationships, doesn’t it? While it’s true that men have searched for centuries to find such knowledge, this grail has been found, it’s been right under our noses the whole time, and to make things about as embarrassing as they can possibly get, the women have been trying to tell us where it is!

Well, I finally listened to nearly 200 of them, wrote it all down, gave it back to the women it came from to see if I had translated it right and then gave it to their husbands to use to make sure it was accurate. It was then refined and tested again until it was working for everybody involved after we found that there were a few things that women thought they wanted that they didn’t want at all after they got them. I did all of this to save my own marriage, not to write a book. The book was simply a by-product of the success of the research I needed to conduct to find a way to get my own marriage and life in order. It will work for you, too. Really.

No matter what you have tried, no matter what the state of your current relationship, there’s a lot of information in this book that will help you make it better. Readers have busted their own divorces with it in as little as a week, others have kicked their relationships up to notches previously unknown, while some have found that they have been in the wrong relationship with the wrong person and that getting out was the first step in getting on the real path to happiness, for EVERYONE involved.

This book is called "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and you can download your copy now at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Don’t wait, don’t sit there wondering if it will work for you, and don’t waste time asking me if it will work for you. It will, so just grab it and growl, because life is too short to spend it unhappy, scared, frustrated, bored, celibate, angry, or any of those other nasty things that bad relationships make you feel.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

What Do You Do When She Leaves Your Relationship or Marriage for Another Man?

A simple, scary question with a complex answer: What do you do when the woman you love is with somebody else?

I’ve been talking with some people at another web site that tries to help people out of divorces and I’ve been getting a huge number of questions from them over the last few weeks. The most common one by far is “My wife left and is now seeing someone else (or is having an affair and refuses to stop). How can I win her back?” No big surprise, right? Do you want to know what IS surprising?

It’s not the answer to the question by a long-shot; indeed, the possible answers to that question are few and simple:

1. Stop abusing your wife

2. End your substance abuse, gambling, or fidelity problem and try to make a life with your wife instead of feeding your addiction

3. Read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and learn how to evaluate and manage relationships, communicate well with your wife, and find out whether you can fire up her attraction mechanisms beyond the point the other guy has created to get your honeymoon going again so that she is only interested in you.

One or more of those answers will take care of almost all cases. It won’t always take care of the case where the other guy has created so much attraction that you can’t get her attention to let her see your improvement; attraction is a sword of MANY sharp edges; "double-edged" doesn't begin to describe how many ways it can work for or against you. But the big question isn’t what you should do to bring her back…

The big question, and the very first one you should ask, is WHETHER you should bring her back!

That’s right! I’ve spent hours and hours cruising relationship and marriage help web sites, and everyone is frantically begging for help to bring their spouses back (and being advised on how to do it by others who are apparently in the same boat, giving a strong appearance of “the blind leading the blind,” at least as far as the bulletin board threads and blogs go), but nobody is asking whether it’s the right thing to do! Indeed, they label somebody who acknowledges such severe problems that no marriage ever should have happened, let alone be possible to save, as a “quitter” and a “loser.” Give me a break!

Right now, a great many of you are having a knee-jerk and responding, “Of course it’s the right thing to do! She’s his (or MY) wife!” If you stop to think about it, there will be some cases where it may not be!

For instance, what if you are the host in a codependent pair, and she is a substance abuser that has sucked the life out of you for years with the cost of feeding her habit, legal and medical costs, worrying you sick, making you feel responsible for all her bad choices and leaving you no room to enjoy anything about your life, let alone what you have earned?

What if she’s not a substance abuser, but still codependent and has kept you working 16 hours a day every day of the week just to keep her out of a jam?

What if she’s a spouse abuser, and married you to have someone to punish because the person who traumatized her is not available, and you were both available and easily manipulated into taking and holding the job of whipping boy?

What if she’s always exhibited a fidelity problem because she’s a gold-digging hussy that married you for your money and has just moved on to somebody with more money, or because she’s spent all you had?

What if she’s always exhibited a fidelity problem because she has a self-esteem problem that she refuses to address, and would rather seek the attention and approval of other men because it’s easier and more palatable than to admit the reason she feels crappy about herself is that she hasn’t done anything in her life to feel good about?

What if the two of you got married because she was pregnant, never did get along and weren’t happy, but comfortably numb and unhappy, and she was just the first one to wake up and realize that you never should have been married to start with and wasn’t rejecting you, but making the same move that you should be making to rectify that age-old mistake?

What if she wasn’t pregnant, but the two of you just were young and lonely and desperate, thinking that nobody else would have you, and latched onto each other thinking a bad marriage would be better than being alone?

What if one or both of you were trying to escape your parents’ abuse and married the first person that came along that provided a way to get out of the house, thinking it couldn’t possibly be worse than home but not realizing that if it was almost as bad you’d still need better?

What if you’ve had such philosophical or value system differences that you’ve always fought and never been happy together and really don’t know why you ever got married or stayed married?

What if you have compatible values, but your tastes are so different that you have never been able to find a way to spend quality time together, and sleeping, sex, and an occasional trivial conversation are all you really share?

What if you’ve suddenly become disabled somehow, and she’s the one who thinks she’s the victim, ignoring the fact that you haven’t let yourself become a victim and are still a great husband because she’s just too enthralled with the drama and attention? Or just too stinking bigoted to give you a chance to show you that you’re still worth having around?

There are a hundred more scenarios like that, but surely at this point you get the picture. The first question that needs to be asked when things look like they are breaking up isn’t how to stop the break-up...

It’s whether there is any reason for you to expect to be happy with that person if the relationship were to continue!

If there is no expectation of happiness, why continue? There is no productive purpose in trying to save a marriage when the underlying relationship that defines every aspect of that marriage is not a happy one and has no history or chance of being a happy one. The whole purpose of marriage is to bind yourself to a person for your mutual benefit – love, nurturing, friendship, watching each others’ back, companionship, exclusive (and hopefully therefore safe!) sex, etc. -- is it not?

On the other hand, if you have been truly happy, and have just drifted apart, there’s a most excellent chance that you can get things back on track, especially if things have just been in a rut and one or both of you have become “maritally bored.” It’s not at all rare for women to have affairs, leave home, and even file for divorce as a way of communicating to a man that he’d better straighten up and act like a man and be strong, fun, and interesting like he used to be instead of the “chronically beer-swilling remote-jockeying couch potato who never pays any attention to her” that he’s become. And it’s easy to tell the difference…

A woman who’s completely done with you moves on immediately and completely. The divorce papers are delivered with a restraining order, and there are instant barriers up everywhere. You have no contact with her, or even any way to contact her.

A woman who’s done with all parts of you except your checkbook still strings you along keeping you in approval-seeking mode and continues to be a drain on your resources, and may accept phone calls, go to dinner, etc., but you’ll notice that you pay for everything, and she keeps having money trouble that you need to bail her out of, even if she makes better money than you. She’ll also be chipping away at your self-esteem to get you deep into approval-seeking mode, making herself physically unavailable while talking about the future and getting back together, etc., trying to make you so utterly desperate for her attention that you’d spend your last dime trying to buy it while she’s out partying with others and secretly (or not) living it up at your expense.

It’s the woman who leaves or files papers, but continues to talk and especially to say things like, “I still love you, but I’m bored/not ‘in love with you’ (how I hate that convoluted expression!)/I can’t be with you right now/I can’t go on like we are and you’re going to have to show me you can change some things/etc.,” that has acted badly to get your attention and is wanting to come back home to the guy she wants to live with. She will tell you what it takes to win her back, and if you speak “girly-ese” you’ll hear her when she does and know exactly what to do.

Like when she says she loves you, but the guy she’s having an affair with makes her laugh, or is spontaneous, or anything about him that you are not, she’s giving you the laundry list of things you need to fix. Those things are not said to create competition or belittle you, but to communicate what is missing from your marriage. If she’s moved out and/or filed for divorce, and talking about the things you used to do together or the way you used to behave toward her, she’s telling you what she misses and what it will take to bring it back. And she may not “say” anything. She may ASK you if YOU miss things from the past to TELL you that SHE does!

But again, you have to speak “girly-ese” to understand, because she probably won’t just say, “you used to pay attention to me and make me feel special,” she’ll refer to things you did by asking if you remember them, like picking her a bunch of wildflowers, or cooking supper on the night that she had to work late, things that demonstrate how you did what she missed, and you have to be able to connect the dots to see what she’s really saying, because women never state what to them is “the obvious.” And more often than not, they will make these statements in the form of a question; “Do you think our marriage is good?” is in fact a statement that she thinks there’s a problem that she wants to talk about, and the next thing that comes out of your mouth could quite literally make or break your marriage.

Do you know what to say when asked a question like this, or why you should say it? Do you see how if you say something that rebukes her attempt to enter into a negotiation about the state of your marriage, that one act will be all she needs to give up? Or to take drastic action to wake YOU up so you can get things on track? The stakes are high at this point, so high that you MUST take responsibility for effective communication; failure to do so will cost you in more ways that you can imagine.

How do you learn to speak “girly-ese”? The same way you learn how to evaluate and manage relationships and learning how to be that alpha male that every woman wants and your woman will be thrilled to have, by downloading your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com before you do another thing, and especially before you take any more relationship advice from somebody whose own marriage is on the rocks, because this information has worked for everyone who has ever used it, and it will work for you, too.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

The Key to Conflict Resolution in Relationships and Marriage

Many people get so hung up on WHO’s right that they can’t see WHAT’s right, making them push a bad position to “win” instead of focusing on getting the right answer in everybody’s head and moving forward. Alienating everyone around them is all they achieve, and they’re usually the only one who doesn’t see it. That’s bad enough when at a social gathering, even worse at work, but what if it’s happening in your relationship or marriage? Just how long do you think such a relationship can last? Luckily, the condition is treatable with a little self-injection of self-esteem and an attitude adjustment.

Good grief! This has been the week for phone calls from very disturbed people. I just got off the phone with a consulting client who bought “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and he was frantic. His relationship with his wife was on the rocks, she had filed for divorce, and it didn’t take but a very few minutes to see why she was divorcing him.

First, a little background: The poor guy has such an extreme self-esteem deficit that no woman would ever have him for long (I questioned whether his wife married him for his money because he described her as coming from a rather “low-maintenance” background, he’s loaded with “old money,” and there’s just no way this guy was ever able to spark attraction in anyone through any means other than dressing well and exhibiting the trappings of money and power), and every part of our conversation was about “who was right” instead of “what will work for him.”

You’ve probably met people like him, and if you haven’t, ignore them when you meet them. Don’t bother trying to get to know them, because they will try to get to know you by telling you that they know more about your life than you do before you’ve said much more than, “Hello.”

His wife had apparently had enough of it and was bailing out after only two months, and he maintained that she knew nothing about herself, what she wanted from herself or him, didn’t have a clue what relationships were about, and he couldn’t get her to understand that he was smart because he was wealthy. Attention all disciples of the Church of Cause and Effect…all together now…1…2…3…CRINGE!!!

I’ve heard a lot over the years of being a business consultant and executive coach, but this guy beat anything I’ve ever seen in terms of being in denial, having a sub-zero self-esteem level, and having absolutely no concept of cause-and-effect relationships. He actually believed that inheriting a large estate made him intelligent! Being intelligent gives one the ability to build a fortune, but receiving an unearned fortune obviously does not include a brain infusion or transplant.

Now that you have the background, picture the fun part. He calls up, introduces himself, describes in great detail all of the above, and after agreeing to a $250 consulting fee for a 2-hour block of my time, proceeds to spend the first hour trying to first justify everything he did and then trying to tell me why nothing in the book he purchased could possibly help him, and that since he was wealthy, he could afford to spend time with me to suggest changes that had occurred to him as he was reading the Table of Contents – he had NOT yet read the book!

Now, in case this is your first edition of this newsletter and you’ve not heard it before, a team of 118 couples helped me conduct and test all the research that went into this book, and anything that was less than 90% effective was not included; things that were between 50% and 90% effective were noted for discussion in this newsletter (you’ll occasionally see me mentioning test results and asking you to write with your own experience) to see if there might be a way to fine tune them for acceptable performance to be added to the book, and anything less than 50% effective was consigned to individual circumstances or personal tastes and omitted entirely. Now, think about that for just a second…

…a 118-page book full of advice and concepts, each of which at least 90% of 118 women agreed on being effective with them, and at least 90% of men agreed were easy and enjoyable to do. There have been only two refunds in over five years, and both were the result of some misunderstanding about the purpose or content of the book (one of which had inadvertently purchased the same book twice and wanted one of them refunded!). I also have unsolicited testimonials from almost everyone who has ever bought it stating that it works wonders. That kind of thing is unheard of with information products. Most authors brag if they can keep their refund rate down to 10%, and mine is currently under 0.00004%.

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for error, does it? It has worked to improve everyone’s lives, but this guy, who’s bought this book to try to head off a divorce and starts the conversation with the words, “My name is XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX and my wife is divorcing me and I don’t know what to do,” is going to be charitable and spend an hour of paid consulting time telling me that everything in my book, which he has not yet read, is wrong and then asking me for help. Sound familiar?

Are you like this guy, more interested in being heard or being “right” than in being happy? Is your partner? Can you see what a strain it’s putting on your relationship? If either of you are like this man, you can bet that at some point it will end your relationship if it’s not fixed; good relationships, of any kind, have compatibility and cooperation at their core, not conflict and competition. The first steps in fixing any problem is admitting there is a problem, defining it, and taking responsibility for fixing whatever part of it you can impact. Only after those three things are accomplished can an effective solution be developed.

And, by the way, taking responsibility does not mean taking the blame; it means committing to act in solving and eliminating the problem. Indeed, people who won’t take responsibility are very prone to focus on blame and point the finger everywhere but at themselves, making it impossible to show them how they may have contributed to the problem and determine how they might modify their perspective or behavior to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future. As you might expect, this was the hardest part of this phone call – getting this man to see that his self-esteem deficit was the vast majority of the problem so that he could begin building self-esteem through genuine achievements and eliminate the problem.

It took two hours of him yelling and screaming and arguing with me, and me countering every argument with the very irrefutable facts he had given me, but finally a light came on (“No bad idea, no matter how popular, can withstand the onslaught of logic.” – Aldous Huxley) and he was able to see that he had spent the entire call rejecting the help he had paid to obtain because he wanted to be right.

There was no way to shorten the process. I kept asking, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” and he kept answering “I want both!” It was when he finally realized that if he could be both he would have never needed to call me in the first place that he finally had a revelation that made me think he’d had a heart-attack. He didn’t speak for about five minutes and there were all manner of stressful sounds on his end where he was trying to either hold back or silence his crying so I wouldn’t hear it. I mercifully let him get it out of his system without asking if he was alright, and he finally said, “Okay, I’m a clean slate. Tell me what I need to know.”

I said, ‘What you need to know first is that everything in that book you bought has worked for everyone who has used it; within the last week a young man in your predicament pulled his literally out of divorce court, his wife is back home, and they’re making long-term career and family plans now. Go back and read the book, thoroughly, this time looking for answers instead of validation and expecting to be happy in the future instead of expecting to be right throughout your history, and then call me if we need to talk further. Now that you have come this far, I have every confidence you can go the distance.” Tear ‘em down and build ‘em back up the right way…facing reality and embracing it with a fury.

(Update: He did as I instructed, and he eventually turned out to be one of my star students. It turned out that he was quite intelligent, not because he was wealthy, but because he had an analytical mind and the ruthlessness to learn anything, once we got his ego out of the way; emotion and rational thinking don’t mix. Congratulations, J.G. – you still hold the title as my biggest challenge of this project, even bigger than finding a whole book full of facts about women that over a hundred women agreed upon!)

As I said, this situation can destroy your relationship – ANY relationship of any kind -- if it goes on continuously, but I didn’t mention that you can do extreme damage to your relationship in a single argument with this mistake. As tempers rise, things are said that can be apologized for, but not taken back; you cannot “unring” a bell. When there is a disagreement, focus on WHAT is right, not WHO is right. You’re partners, and supposed to be a team, so the important thing is not to win an argument (competitive), but to score a win for the team in the situation (cooperative), is it not?

So why do we do this to ourselves and our partners, the people whom we should love and seek cooperative and mutually beneficial existence with the most??? As with many people problems, low self-esteem puts us in a competitive mode, thinking that we’ll feel better if we beat somebody at something – anybody at anything! How much self-esteem will you be garnering by making an ass of yourself and putting your relationship on the rocks? Think before you open your mouth, because you can certainly get your foot in it much easier than you can put back into it any words that came out of it. Keep things in perspective, and you can keep things moving in the right direction always.

So, are you going to concern yourself with what’s right, or with who? Have you ever heard that old ditty, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got…”? There’s a little more to it, but that’s the gist of it.

I’m telling you, straight up, achiever-to-achiever, I have what you need, right here. Solid, factual information, tested by over a hundred regular couples in long-term committed relationships, most of them married, all of them long-term enough to have developed significant problems that threatened their relationships, before this book was every published, and thousands more since..

It’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s just a few mouse-clicks away. Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because with information like this and a little study and desire, you can start putting an end to silly little traps like this one once and for all within minutes of downloading it. And I have a whole bunch readers who will tell you that you can’t get results like you’ll get with this information, anywhere or at any price.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Emotional Pain and Clear Thinking Don't Mix, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

A reader’s letters over a three-month period demonstrate how the pain and stress of a troubled relationship or break-up can kill your ability to think clearly and make you very vulnerable to having your buttons pressed by people trying to help you, and how you can recover if you choose to.

I want to get away from the subject of break-ups for awhile, but I have to give you this one last lesson before we get completely away from the subject, because this level of stress may happen to you someday and I need to prepare you for it.

Fair warning, this is a little longer than usual because I’m quoting several e-mails, but men and women alike can learn a lot from this if you’ll take a few extra minutes to read it.

Fights, fear, insecurity about your future, etc., those things that eat at you when your relationship isn’t going well or has ended, are a lot more destructive than most people imagine. Yes, it’s obvious that it hurts and makes you lose sleep, but the degree to which it can inhibit logical thought and even make you lash out at those who want to help you through tough times is not so obvious.

I’m going to share with you three letters, all written by the same reader, two of which were written within less than a week of his subscribing to this newsletter, and the third one today. Bear with me, as the point will become very clear toward the end. Meet J., a man who has been in a lot of pain but is obviously finding his way out of it and back to mental clarity and stability:

(His first letter, captioned “ohmigod,” received after he had read only one issue of this newsletter:)

astounding

does anyone actually believe any of this?

so - if your partner is bored of you, its your fault

my parents told me that only boring people get bored

its you, the man's job, to dance attendance on her and make her feel special

just what kind of relationship do your readers have with their women - and what kind of woman is it who lounges around like a spoiled teenager expecting to be "swept off her feet" by her man

maybe if she made an effort to find stimulating shared experiences and PUTTING SOMETHING INTO the relationship, instead of seeing her husband as some kind of personal satisfaction service, she might not be quite the miserable self-centered bitch you think all women are

holy cow, get a grip - if you REALLY think this kind of woman is the best a man can get you're lost lost lost buddy

kind regards,

J

Kind regards, huh? I didn’t know it until later, but he had just come out of a bad relationship, and pretty much got the meaning of the newsletter he read entirely backwards, as any of you who have been reading my newsletters longer than a couple of days already realize. It was pretty obvious that he was angry and in pain, especially in the level of sarcasm in his writing, but I wasn’t yet sure that it was a relationship at the core of his problem.

I wrote back to tell him so, and not realizing that he had just been through a break-up and was looking for an outlet to ventilate, replied with a fairly short and demure response:

Good morning, J.,

I'm sorry, but you have taken whatever it is that you're responding to so far out of context that I can't even determine what post or newsletter you might be speaking of. I don't ever speak of fault, except to tell men and women not to preoccupy themselves with fixing fault and blame, and to take responsibility for whatever they may be able to improve in their relationship instead.

As for being part of the problem, yours is the first negative comment I have received from anyone since I began this, and I can forward you hundreds of e-mails from readers of both my newsletter and my book where these people are telling me that they have turned their relationships completely around and that they are now better than they have ever been, including their original honeymoon period. I can only guess that you either have a hot button that was pressed by something you read or that this is yet another case of two peoples being separated by a common language.

I appreciate you taking the time to write, but frankly, I might have been a lot more interested in what you have to say had you exercised a bit of tact in lieu of sarcasm about how I write and where I live. I hope you find whatever it is that you are missing, because you are obviously not a happy man.

Regards,
David

…and he replied with the following, captioned “OK” the next day:

read your latest contribution with interest

of course men shouldn't habitually complain about how little support they get from their wives

but its my experience that men are caught in a double bind, their women are allowed to be behave like dependent irrational little girls and be as assertive and independent as they like - they are encouraged to be both - "girls" and "women" - and woe betide any man who questions their right to be which they want to be at any given time

men on the other hand are expected to be supportive and independent at the same time, and find their support away from the relationship - "Big Guys"

support, unfortunately, is often needed at inconvenient times

so men are screwed, not by women, but by blogs like yours which tells them to stop being a "wuss" and insists that its their fault that they can't be superheroes and not have ordinary human needs like everyday love

well, buddy, you seem to be part of the problem and not the solution

and you use 10 words (badly written American corporate-speak at that) where one will do

keep up the good work!

kindest fraternal greetings

J

"Keep up the good work!" and "Kindest fraternal greetings"??? At this point it was pretty obvious that he’d been through a break-up or two, was awash in a sea of negative emotions, and needed somebody to rough him up a bit to wake him up to the fact that he was indeed reacting emotionally and needed to pull back and look at what he was doing, attempting to alienate me with sarcastic remarks and possibly others who were interested in helping him.

I hate having to “read somebody the riot act” as the saying goes, but every man knows that there’s nothing like getting stomped on a bit to make you realize that somebody does care about what’s going on with you, else they would just leave you, exposed and vulnerable, to wallow in pain and self-pity, so I sent him the following:

J.,

You'd probably be a much happier person if you spent a little more time listening and learning and a little less time trying to argue with people to defend the mistakes you've made in your life. People use all of this, every day, and they write letters to confirm how well it works. Before it was ever published, it was tested on over a hundred couples with complete success. The information I use concerning attraction is based in part on information that people like John Alanis, David D'angelo, F.J. Shark, and Ross Jeffries (dating gurus) proved effective as much as ten years or more before I ever took it up and adapted it for use by people in committed relationships.

I couldn’t care less what your parents taught you. Mothers teach their sons to be "nice guys" and kiss women's behinds, try to buy their affection, and dump all the decisions in their laps with regularity, because it's what they think they want, but when they get it, it turns them off completely. Making a woman feel special is done by listening and responding, and by acting like a man, not by "dancing attendance on her" or any other form of serving her.

I have no idea where you get this idea that I said anything about a woman lounging around like a spoiled teenager. Women do day-dream frequently throughout the day about feeling sexual attraction. It's why they read romance novels, and why they start fights when men ignore them. It’s how they prevent boredom if left to their own devices, and is far preferable to affairs and such. Women do try much harder than men to put something into relationships, but it usually comes after attraction is triggered and after they feel commitment. I don't know of any mentally healthy women who see their husband as some sort of personal satisfaction service, and I see no evidence of them being miserable or self-centered.

This is the last time I'm going to waste my time writing you. You've read one of my newsletters, apparently half-assed because you have no clue what I am telling people, and you're trying to argue with me that what I'm teaching doesn't work when (a) you don’t even know what I'm teaching, (b) if you were such an expert, you wouldn't be reading anything I've written to start with, you'd be getting rich selling what you know, and (c) everybody who has and is using it is doing so with outstanding success. Nobody who has ever used my information has ever said anything about it except how well it works, and nobody who has ever used it has asked for a refund, and I extend a satisfaction guarantee for a full year after purchase, so if they wanted to do so, they would have. That speaks for itself, as does the reality of the results that my material is giving those who use it.

Your options now are to either read and learn or argue with somebody else, because I don't really care what you think, what you agree with, or what your parents told you, and until you understand what I'm saying and have tried it, you're not in any position to criticize it. What I'm teaching came straight from working with hundreds of women to find out what they respond to, and then working with their men to make sure that men can understand and do what is required. It's reality, there is no arguing with it, and if you don't like it, you can sod off and be miserable while the rest of us are enjoying a great relationship with our wives and girlfriends. I don’t deal in opinions and have no time for armchair pundits; either get in the game or get off the field.

David

I didn’t hear back from J. for awhile, and he did exactly what every real man does when confronted with such a wake up call. He dug in, paid attention, found his way out of the pain and frustration, and put his brain back in charge of his well-being, proving to himself and the rest of the world that the pain of even the worst break-up can be very temporary if you can keep your wits about you, with or without the help of friends and other concerned parties. This message was received captioned “from your (former) tormentor”:

Hi David,

Remember me? I was the guy who pissed you off a few months ago.

Well, I still haven't read your book, but I have been reading your daily emails and I am not too proud to admit when I have made a misjudgment. I'm looking forward to reading your book, but a lot of what you say in your emails makes rock solid sense to me (and at 41, I've had enough unhappy girlfriends/bad relationships to realise that I must be getting something wrong).

I'm going to recommend your project to friends, read your book and come back with some constructive comments (I am presumptuous to say). I think you come from a good place.

I latched onto "makingherhappy" in a bad way, because, in my last relationship, I spent a huge amount of energy trying to make an immature girl happy and made myself very unhappy and ill in the process.

Here's a thought though: I have to go into a workplace where this girl will be. Ex-partners and work, now there's a thorny issue. Maybe not for you, but it’s a tricky one nonetheless.....

with all good wishes,

J

So, J., no, you didn’t piss me off, and this time I believe you when you send “best wishes.” And you’ll know how to handle the girl in the workplace after you’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," so don’t worry.

You see, Folks? When you’re having relationship troubles and feeling like your guts are being ripped out at every turn, you need a release for that frustration, and the most likely and unfortunate outlet is someone who is trying to help you precisely because you have their attention. Remember that, and guard yourself against it, because not everyone is able to recognize that an outburst is an act of reaching out for help, and you have to admit that it’s a very poor way to ask for help in any case.

What I recommend when anyone is having relationship or other problems that breed frustration, fear, pain, etc., is ACTION! Don’t sit back wondering what will happen next and waiting for it to happen. Dig in and find the cause of the problem and do something about it. It’s an excellent outlet for all that negative energy because it converts it into something constructive, achievement and stress relief, and it has the added benefit of MAKING THE PROBLEM GO AWAY! You can’t beat that with a stick, can you?

Whether you’re facing nuisance or disaster, the key to making it go away is two-fold: knowing what to do and then doing it. “Think things through, then follow through,” was famed U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager’s “six-word formula for success,” and it works. “Thinking things through” in your relationship requires a sense of reason and a solid working knowledge of what you and your partner want and need and how you can best communicate.

Yep, that’s in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you will find at http://www.makingherhappy.com. The best news is that if you read it before you have problems, you’ll likely never have any because you’ll work together to keep them out of your relationship, but if you do have problems, you can fix them. Just don’t alienate everybody you know while you’re trying to get through it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Why Is Breaking Up So Hard? Surviving the End of Relationships and Marriage

We’ve talked about stopping a break-up in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, but what about those times when a break-up really is the best thing for both parties? Specifically, why is it so bloody hard? Would you believe it doesn’t have to be?

This is one of those newsletters that had to be written; one that a fool would hope that none of you would ever need, but which reality says nearly all of you will find useful, either in surviving your present or some part of your future, or in understanding something very painful in your past, the difficulty of breaking up, even when it’s the best thing for both parties and everybody, including the two parties in the relationship, know that it’s best.

Some people get into relationships that are based on things like faith and hope instead of reality. Others based them on need, attraction, or simple lust instead of a combination of love and attraction. These couples ultimately find themselves painfully mismatched and moving apart is the only solution to the problem they have caused themselves. You can’t put a mongoose and a snake in the same place and expect them to just bend to meet each others’ needs and get along, nor can you expect incompatible men and women. Compatibility doesn’t come from the choices you make, but from the values and tastes that cause you to make the choices you make. Those things just don’t change that much over the course of an entire lifetime, and they certainly don’t change because somebody else wants or needs for them to.

I’m not like most of today’s “relationship guru’s.” I won’t tell you that all relationships can or should be salvaged, and have no respect for those who would. That’s why you’ll find the list of other relationship gurus I do respect and endorse very short. I maintain a list of those who have been recommended to me by my readers in this newsletter and in the margin on my main blog at http://blog.makingherhappy.com, and those are the only others offering advice on the emotions and issues of relationships that I would have any of you read, because they do embrace this self-evident truth instead of trying to convince you to buy what they are selling to have you save that which should not be and ultimately cannot be saved.

Notice that’s a very short list of resources taken from a very large pool of authors. Sad, isn’t it? And by the way, feel free to help me add to it by letting me know if you have had a positive result with any product. Word-of-mouth isn’t just the best advertising; it’s also the best way of weeding out the charlatans and bad ideas that sound good “on paper” but don’t work in the real world.

I’ve been working closely with one of your fellow readers, one whom at this point is facing the possibility that the break-up his wife initiated may indeed be the best thing that could happen to him because they are so grossly mismatched and she’s carrying a ton of baggage that she may well choose to hang onto, in spite of the fact that right now she’s facing the greatest opportunity of her life to drop all that baggage and make some incredible improvements in her life.

I’ll spare you the intimate details of their problems, but the bottom line is that he’s on solid ground, logically, morally, ethically, and every other way I’ve been able to observe, while she is hyper-creative and therefore rejects reality with impunity, is morally ambiguous, and is thirty-nine years old going on about seven.

He’s highly analytical and disciplined, knows what’s before him and how to react to virtually any word or action from her now (he read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and we’ve been talking as well), and yet, there are times when he still has a hard time accepting what he knows to be reality, that in all likelihood, they never should have come together and he made a bad choice, because his wife appears incapable of growing up and becoming responsible enough to rejoin him as his wife, or indeed as anything more than a chronic, irresponsible and dangerous dependent.

He asked me why he was having a hard time accepting and emotionally committing to that which he knew to be irrefutable reality, and why people generally found breaking up so hard even when it was painfully obvious that it was the only option that could allow either of them to ever be happy.

I answered, "We all make bad choices, and being human, we tend to try to make the best of them and pick up a lot of good memories along the way that end up confounding us when we finally are faced with the reality that our bad choice is working against us."

It struck a chord in both of us. I did not, until the moment I wrote that to him, understand why I had had trouble with break-ups in the past, and those who know me closely would describe me to you as the most ruthlessly logical person they have ever met. I never stopped to ask myself while I was going through it why it was so hard. I was too busy asking myself another ridiculous question: “Why does this have to happen?” when I already knew the answer.

His reply to that pearl was as profound as the pearl itself:

“That needs to go in the evaluation section of your book - over and over! The main struggle in deciding whether it [salvaging his relationship] is a go or no-go is in sifting through all the wonderful memories to decide if they were ‘real’ or not...”

That’s the real rub, isn’t it? Were all those “good times” born of real love, friendship, respect, and loyalty worth celebrating? Or were they just born of two people trying to make the best of a bad situation they had created and didn’t want to face? Or was it something somewhere in the middle? Trying to resolve those questions, and cope with the reality the resolution presents, is what makes breaking up so hard when every available fact tells you both that there is no other alternative.

So in the event that you have to go through this torture, what do you do?

Look at the whole relationship and weigh the good and the bad. Identify what can and cannot be repaired, and how important those things are to you. In the end, if the relationship can’t be fixed, get out, but do it like a civilized adult, with dignity, and leave the other partner room to do the same. Indeed, LEAD HER to do the same. And if a friendship can be maintained, by all means do so; you may not have enough compatibility to live together happily, but you may still have common interests that you can enjoy together. Think about that...

Not being able to live together happily is by no means an indication that you can’t have an enjoyable conversation or dinner from time to time, help each other with a project or hobby on occasion, or do any of the other things that friends do. It takes a lot more compatibility to live together than it does to visit, as the focus of a visit is much more narrowly defined and creates boundaries that protect you from the things that caused trouble while you were married – if you pay attention to them, that is.

Don’t ever let things fall into the context or perspective of who is or isn’t good enough for the other. It has nothing to do with that. People are who and what they are, and have spent a lifetime becoming so. Thinking that you can or should be “good enough” to induce someone else to change for your sake that which they would not change for their own sake is foolish, arrogant to the point of being narcissistic, and just plain childish!

(Pay attention, Ladies, in case you’re thinking that you’re going to rebuild your man as you want him. If you do manage to accomplish it, you won’t respect him precisely because you were able to change him. A man who can’t stand up TO you can’t stand up FOR you, right? The attitude that "he should love me enough to change for me," has broken more women's hearts than men ever could.)

Admit that there have been problems, and that those problems have been caused by the two of you having too many fundamental differences to be compatible. You gave it a good shot, you had some fun and good times, made some money and accumulated a few things, and have a few fond memories, but the stress of walking on eggshells trying to keep from tripping over your differences is killing you both.

You’re good people, just not good for each other, and if you are the type who needs to or enjoys being married, you need to get out and find someone whom you are good for and who is good for you, compatible with you, and whom you can enjoy living with as your natural self. Work together to divide the rewards of your combined efforts fairly and help each other get a fresh start by introducing each other to friends that are more like them. You may not be worth a plug nickel together as husband and wife but may be great assets to each other in starting over. (This is all assuming that your problems are differences in your values, preferences, priorities, etc., and not that one of you is an abuser of some sort.)

There is no point in your life where being able to evaluate a relationship will not serve you well. You need to know yourself as well as your needs and desires, and you need to be with someone who can naturally fulfill those needs and desires while being fulfilled by you. That in turn requires that you know other peoples’ needs and desires with regard to you, does it not? You don’t want to enter a relationship in which you have no chance of fulfilling the other’s needs and desires, do you?

That means knowing before you get into a relationship what the relationship should look like if it’s good. It means knowing after you get into a relationship if it is going to work based on how well you meet each others’ needs and desires. It means being able to communicate factually and honestly to express those needs and desires to each other, as well as how well those needs and desires are being met.

Contrary to how it often appears, relationships and marriages very seldom fail after ten or twenty years or more. What really happens is that they fail at their inception due to bad choices and that failure isn’t conceded until years later, when every option has been exhausted, there is no longer anything to hide behind (like children), and both partners have become miserable spending so much time and effort trying and failing. If you have a good foundation for a relationship, it’s not hard to tell; there’s little if anything fundamental and significant that you’d want to change about your partner, such as their values, political leanings, etc. You can talk and get along, and have probably just become a bit bored because attraction is waning. That’s fixable.

But…

If you’re in one of those relationships where the only place you get along is in the bedroom, and especially if you find yourself fighting to have an excuse to make up because that’s the only part of your relationship that IS working, you have a serious problem, and believe it or not, there are people with whom you can get along both in and out of the bedroom.

And since so many of you have asked, yes, it is still a good idea to learn about attraction and try to create it for your partner even if you are breaking up. Being attractive is about being a leader, being smart, being fair, handling tough situations and being able to keep your sense of humor about you. Stirring up a little attraction in your partner as you are splitting up will help ease the transition for her and you both, because it tends to keep tempers at bay. It will help her to feel that you are being strong and supportive during this crisis, and make her feel good that you are making the effort to help her hold herself together emotionally while you go through the process together. Nothing bad can come of that for either of you, and may indeed help you to part friends instead of killing each other in a war that never had to be fought, a war in which the only victors are the lawyers.

There you have it, the dark side of relationships and marriage. It is my sincere desire that you never have to go through a break-up, and that if worse comes to worst and you do have to go through one, that you can get through it with your dignity (and assets) intact and help each other to move on to a better life with someone better matched to yourselves by understanding what it is that you’re fighting: the basic human tendency to try to make the best of even the worst situation, no matter how inappropriate or even self-destructive it might be, not each other.

No matter where you are in your relationship, from looking for one to having been in one for 40 years or longer, there’s help waiting for you in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and it’s just a few mouse clicks away at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Go check it out, and get the straight story while you can; there are very few of us around who can and will give it to you, and your life is too short to fail to have and use it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Boredom Can Creep in After YEARS to Destroy Your Relationship or Marriage

It may only take a few weeks, or it may take years, but sooner or later virtually every couple falls prey to boredom, unless you understand a few basic things about attraction and intimacy and can avoid it. Once lost, you can get it back if you act in time, but it’s far easier and loads more fun to keep it going, like an eternal honeymoon, instead of watching the slow decay of something wonderful and then having to go through heroic efforts to heal the wounds.

This edition could rightly have been part of my “Want Women Want” free report, because one of the biggest things that women really want is to avoid being bored, but the issue and message here is bigger than that. In case you’ve only been following for a short while, boredom is a woman’s most dreaded state, and is at the most negative end of her emotional range, like fear, anger, and frustration are at the negative end of men’s emotional range.

Interestingly enough, the physical manifestations of either gender being at the negative end of their emotional range are the same: extreme agitation, tendency to be entirely illogical and act out of desperation, physical symptoms like sleeplessness, nausea, tremors, etc.

Boredom’s effect on women is grossly misunderstood by most men (and some women as well) because it doesn’t affect us the same way, so for future reference, Gentlemen, imagine the feelings you would experience in losing your job, having difficulty getting another, watching the bills pile up, and suspecting that your wife is about to leave. Those feelings build up over time and eventually can make you entirely unstable. Those sensations of depression, desperation, fear, agitation, etc., that you would feel under those circumstances are what a woman feels as she gets more and more bored.

Borrowing from medical terminology, “acute boredom” is a short-term severe problem with an immediate symptomatic cure usually gained from radical treatment: a fight, usually over nothing. “Chronic boredom” is a bigger problem. It develops over months or even years of very gradual decline in the excitement level in a woman’s life caused by routine, lack of “adult time,” career stagnation, and watching her partner grow apathetic, fat, lazy, and desirous of spending evenings drinking and channel surfing too much and talking with her too little. Yes, months or even years, and when it builds up enough pressure, fights won’t cure it, and affairs and divorce start slipping into the picture as options, options that look dangerously alluring and even rational when a woman gets too far gone.

The following letter caught my attention, not because of the decay of the relationship or its resurrection after reading and applying what’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but the amount of time it took for the relationship to fade! Meet Karen:

Dear David,

I have been in a love relationship with my best friend for seven years now. I have always tried to take care of myself and be attractive to him. Last year I began to think that maybe we should have just stopped our relationship at being friends and never become lovers. I found myself looking at other men and wishing that Jack had some of the qualities I found so attractive in them. I made one last attempt at talking and trying to tell him that we were no longer attractive to each other and one way or the other something would have to change or we were over.

He came across your website and bought your book a short time later. Within a few days I noticed a big difference and within a month I was not living with the same man I was thinking of leaving the month before. I was living with the guy I fell in love with 7 years ago! No one could prepare me for the changes not only in Jack, but myself as well. “Taking it to the next level,” whatever that would be, wouldn’t begin to cover what happened to us over the next couple of months, and we’re getting married this weekend, after living together seven years and almost losing it all!

I can not understand why anyone would pass up the chance to have the kind of relationship like what we have after reading your book. The words “thank you” seem so little compared to what your book as done for us. My whole life is right out the dreams I had as a young woman.

Karen B.

Well Karen, dreams do come true, but you usually have to take charge of making it happen like you and your husband-to-be did, and congratulations for doing so!

Folks, what kills me about this letter is that most relationships die of boredom somewhere between a few minutes and two years, yet this one survived six years before the couple started drifting. Some would blame something once known as “the seven year itch,” and I couldn’t argue with that, but these days I mostly see people who either make it or don’t very early in the relationship.

Indeed, I’ve been working with couples who have been together as long as 57 years, and the most common thread in all of them is boredom. What’s shocking is how quickly a woman can build up a head of steam after all that time and start moving for separation; one went from “status quo” to out of the house in four days!

I spoke with her in a counseling session, and she said that she still loved her husband deeply, but after 37 years of marriage, the idea of him disappearing into his study to spend the remainder of the evening with his carving hobby until bedtime even one more time was too much to bear, and at 61 years of age, she was ready to start over if that was the only way to escape the nightly abandonment and boredom. I will never forget her saying that she felt like she was already a widow. The problem has been resolved and they are again happy and reengaging one another, but it was a VERY close call.

Let me be clear; I’m not saying divorces happen that fast, it’s that couples report settling into routine, losing excitement, get lazy, and the magic goes away that fast, even though they may remain committed to each other (or the institution of marriage, the kids, or whatever they cling to in order to hold it together) for decades, like my grandparents did. Karen says they had fun and excitement for six years, and then trouble started.

Boredom is insidious, covert, unpredictable, and deadly to your relationship, and it can slip in unnoticed the minute you drop your guard, just as it did with this couple. The trick is to know the opponent, and know how to guard yourself against it, which in this case is by remaining aware of each other’s needs, lives, excitement level, and having fun and growing together in ways that keep you close, intimate, excited, etc.

As Karen said, what’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” is information for men about women, but a lot of it is also information that women aren’t aware of about themselves and men! It can do you both a world of good to read it, because it will let you keep the home fires burning bright instead of having them go out and having to rebuild and reignite them in the dark and under duress later. Do yourself a favor and go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, because life is definitely too short to spend it bored and doing all the ridiculous things people do to fight boredom (like affairs, or weekends in a therapy retreat!), especially when you have such an option that is so easy and affordable as this.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

The First and Most Important Step in Having a Great Relationship and Marriage

The first step in any great relationship of any kind is being well-matched. If you are not well-matched, you may be able to survive together, but the odds of being happy together are slim to none; if you are, you’ll find you can conquer about anything! This is one of those “must read” issues, so dig in…

Today I want to again talk about something that seems to be so logical that it would be self-evident to all, but obviously is not practiced by many, the first step in having a great relationship. Those of you who have been banging your head against the wall after receiving advice from someone claiming that “any relationship can be saved regardless of circumstances” will want to pay particular attention to this issue, because this edition may be addressing your biggest relationship or marriage problem. (And “Dr. Frank,” this is one you should pass along to your friends in that “wasteland” we were talking about, where you’re recruiting men for my boot camp, because it addresses them specifically.)

That first and most crucial step in any great relationship or marriage is being well-matched to your partner.

Yes, some of you are right now saying, “Duh!” but others are saying, “but can’t you learn to love someone?” Here are the facts and truth of the matter:

When you first meet someone, the emotion that pulls you together is either attraction or need (or in rare cases lust, but lust is seldom responsible for keeping two people together long enough to get married, unless they’re incredibly reckless or needy), which are both independent of love; indeed, need is in fact mutually exclusive of love – you cannot love someone that you need, because (in a nutshell) need actually makes you resent them as the object of your dependence, and fear their power to leave and remove the thing you need from your life. Fear is a partner to hatred, not love.

This in itself is a complex and difficult concept for most to embrace, and if you find yourself wanting to argue with it, see Lesson 3 in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, entitled “Love, Need, Lust and Attraction – Do YOU Know the Difference?” or skip to the similarly-titled section of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and gain an effective understanding, because it is both factual and crucial. We’ll address need first because it’s easier to see, then we’ll get into attraction and love.

Need never develops into love, and sooner or later, the other person (unless they are hopelessly codependent) gets tired of neediness and moves on. There is nothing you can do about this, especially telling them that you need them and can’t live without them. That is the very drain, pressure, and stress that they are trying to get away from, and your fight for independence is going to take too long for them to wait around for you to complete it, if you can; most truly needy people, those who would be called parasites because they take from their partners without giving anything significant in return, spend their life moving from host to host because it’s just easier for them to find a new host than to evolve into a non-needy person of independence.

In short, if the person you are with is telling you it’s over because you are too needy, take the hint and grow up, become self-supporting and independent, and you’ll find that people enjoy being around you for the long term. Make no mistake, fighting this break-up is only going to make things worse, because you are severely mismatched; a chronically needy person cannot coexist with an independent person who resents neediness. You got away with it for awhile because you were somehow charming, physically attractive, wealthy, funny, or something, but now that the cat is out of the bag and it’s known that you’re a needy wuss, you have two options: find another host or evolve so that you can enjoy another’s company instead of needing it. It’s harsh, but it’s really just that simple.

Someone asked once why I didn’t talk about a case wherein the woman is the needy one. I didn’t because I didn’t realize how common it might be for a man to be trying to save a relationship with such a woman, wherein he is independent and she is the needy one. But lo and behold, I have run across them, and the “cognitive dissonance” within the men is overwhelming. They fight between wanting to get away from the stress of being stuck with a needy person and wanting to try to “salvage their investment in their marriage.”

The only hope for you if you are in this case is to help your wife understand that what she is feeling is need, not love, and that she needs to develop some self-esteem before she can love either of you. Try to help her develop some self-esteem, and if she insists on living in denial (“Why can’t you just love me as I am?” and such questions are infallible evidence of such a problem) in spite of your efforts to get her to acknowledge her problem, seek counseling, etc., you have two choices: Get out or go down with a sinking ship. You can either lead her out of it, put up with it, or leave, and you won’t have be able to lead her as long as she’s in denial. ‘Nuff said.

Now, on to the more complex case, where attraction was the reason for you to come together. Once attraction has brought you together and you’ve had your initial episode of “physical exploration and gratification,” there should be a period where you get to know each other, find that you have common interests, philosophies, values, etc., and come to value each other – love develops. This is the source of the friendship, respect, loyalty and commitment required for long-term relationships to survive, while attraction is where all the fun, excitement, and energy come from. There are several possible scenarios that arise from the various permutations of these two emotions between two people.

The most obvious two are having both love and attraction, in which case you can be together happily and feel like you’re in a never-ending honeymoon (the ideal situation, right? And it can be sustained for a lifetime if you are aware of its requirements and constituents, and we’ll get back to this in a few minutes), and having neither love nor attraction, after events have eliminated them both, in which case the relationship must end, because even though lost attraction can usually be easily rekindled, lost love just doesn’t happen. Peoples’ values and personalities just don’t naturally move radically away from some baseline and then go back there.

Now, the other two are a bit trickier to deal with. We’ll talk about the harder of the two first, the case in which love is lost but attraction survives. It is common for people under tremendous pressure that they ultimately cannot handle, and they degrade themselves somehow. They could then become a loser, maybe a criminal or spouse abuser, and/or possibly a substance abuser, but they still project the personality traits that trip attraction triggers.

This would typically be a marriage that started out like a story book romance, but currently one spouse is drunk or high all the time after losing a loved one, a business, or career, etc. They have lost their self-love, self-esteem, and self-respect, but have still managed to somehow remain fun, funny, sexy, or something that holds the other spouse’s attention. You can’t base a great relationship on nothing but sex, jokes, and parties, and you can’t “fix” somebody else, especially someone who won’t admit there is a problem and doesn’t want to fix anything.

You’re only choices with such a relationship are to either get this person some professional help so that they can be redeemed or move on. Again, it sounds harsh, but statistically and historically, this is reality, and if they won’t get help, moving on is your only option; having once loved someone is no reason to go down with a sinking ship that refuses to be repaired. That’s martyrdom, the ultimate form of sacrifice, the trading of valuable life for nothing of value at all, not love.

The last possibility is the one I like dealing with the most, where love is still alive and healthy, but attraction has failed; you’re in the “friends column” but nobody else has created attraction in your partner and she still loves you, but is bored and vulnerable. In the dating world, lost attraction nearly always means that you blew it and you just move on immediately, because the other person already has; the window for creating attraction opens once, and very briefly, period. However, when you’ve been together for long enough for attraction to fade, you develop a vested interest in keeping the relationship alive. You acquire memories, security, a mortgage and property, and usually children, which motivate you to try to work things out. Hence, the window that closes in seconds in the dating world can be open for months or even years when you're committed.

Men are generally pretty easy when it comes to attraction. We’re attracted mostly to physical appearance and seductive talk and actions, and if attraction is lost and must be recreated, women seldom have to do any more than correct whatever major issues have developed with their appearance, if any, and act like a woman; self-respect and self-love in a woman are among the sexiest things a man can behold, and they cause the things that trip men’s attraction triggers, such as being height-weight proportionate, good grooming and posture, smiling, having fun, etc.

Women aren’t so easy though. Physical appearance barely makes them curious, and then only for a short while, and that curiosity can be destroyed in an instant by any non-alpha male behavior, such as approval-seeking or trying to impress them, being lazy or boring, etc.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible, or even difficult, to rekindle attraction. Indeed, if you have the right information to work from, it has been proven to happen in less than a week to a sufficient degree to halt the signing of divorce papers already prepared and move an estranged spouse back into the family home. This is the failing relationship that you fight for, even if there has been an affair, because love is hard to find and to earn, and a physical affair – which virtually always happens out of boredom and means absolutely nothing unless you choose to assign meaning to it – is no reason whatsoever to abandon a proven love.

Yes, I said that, and I’m about to say it another way: a one-time physical “fling” that happened out of boredom is not proof of lost love, nor a sign of disloyalty or disrespect. It’s an unfortunate and very STUPID thing that happens when two people can’t or just don’t effectively communicate with each other and allow their attraction to fade, nothing more, and nothing less. I’m not saying that the person who does it is stupid; I’m saying that it’s ridiculous that people will let their problems go to the point that this happens before realizing there is a problem and trying to fix it.

If you’re sitting on the couch with a beer and the TV remote every night while your partner is doing something else, and you’re part of that statistic that says that the average mature couple (mature meaning having been together, married or not, for two years or more) has sex six times per year (yes, that’s once every two months on average), trouble’s not just coming, it’s HERE!

And, there’s no sense waiting for it to get that bad before taking action; a good relationship is far easier to maintain than it is to fix if it gets broken, right? What you need is a plan for evaluating and then fixing and/or maintaining it and the knowledge required to empower you to do that. Luckily for you, it’s already been figured out, tested, proven, and published, and it can be yours in the next few minutes.

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you can download it right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and it’s working for everyone who’s used it. Don’t make things rougher on yourself than they have to be by waiting. Do it now, and do it for keeps, because life is too short to do it any other way.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Cheating in Relationships and Marriage, Part 3, Basic But Effective Methods for Detecting and Confronting an Affair

To conclude our series (part 3 of 3) on affairs and cheating, let’s look at some ways of finding the truth without being too obvious about looking for it.

Now that you have a better and hopefully thorough understanding of the nature, causes, and appropriate action to take in dealing with an affair, let’s talk about how to detect one. These methods are not fool-proof and should not be used in isolation, but if you should see multiple symptoms the odds increase to the point where confronting your partner and trying to resolve the problem (or proceeding with divorce preparations if you decide that you simply cannot continue the relationship) is entirely appropriate.

The most significant indications of a woman having an affair are fairly sudden changes in behavior, especially frequent breaks in any established routine. Routines are established by things becoming a priority, and they are displaced by something else becoming a higher priority. It happens gradually over time as people and situations evolve, or suddenly when something suddenly enters someone’s life and affects them radically, causing a shift in their priorities.

Among the things you can look for to change is her level of neediness. If she has a history of acting needy and seeking your attention and then suddenly doesn’t seem as if she needs you to cater to her or cover for her, it’s far more likely that someone else is doing it than she just woke up one morning and found her independence under her pillow, a gift from the Tooth Fairy’s cousin. The same thing goes for your presence or attention.

A sudden change in her emotional displays in your presence is another telltale sign. Women will get emotional with you when they have excess emotional energy that they need to bleed off, whether it’s positive or negative (remember our previous discussions on emotional scales and the creation of drama to alleviate boredom, which you can view in the archive). If she’s suddenly detached, there’s either a bottle of some new tranquilizer in the medicine cabinet or she’s found a new outlet for her emotion.

A sudden change in her attention level -- catering to you, gifts, etc., is often a sign of a guilty conscience and an effort to try to conceal her interest in another. (Men are generally bad about this one too, buying roses or jewelry at non-holiday times to appease their own guilty conscience, and women watch for this, so if you give a “legitimate” non-seasonal gift, make sure you clearly express the reason so that it is not misconstrued.)

Need I mention suddenly becoming secretive? Women naturally have a tendency to give us much more detail about what’s happening in their lives than we are comfortable hearing; I’ve personally listened to a half-hour melodrama of the trials and tribulations of a cat belonging to a woman I never met and didn’t want to know because it came up in a conversation that a woman I know had participated in during the day, and I had made the mistake of asking “How was your day?” to a woman who naturally interpreted the question as “What happened during your day?”

If that openness suddenly stops, she’s limiting information to try to limit your opportunities to catch her in a lie. She may even try to make up for this by answering questions with questions, trying to change the subject to YOUR day so that you will do the talking. The same thing goes for refusal to answer questions, asking why you want to know before answering, and if she gets defensive over a question that she hasn’t had a problem with in the past, like “Did you have a good workout at the gym today?” she’s busted.

Sudden guarding of cell phones, computers, and other communications devices are a HUGE signal as well. In short, anything that limits your access to her communications infrastructure or any information source that would only be incriminating if she was in fact having an affair is a big red flag.

Hesitation before an answer to an obvious question, or repeating your question back to you before answering, is a classic sign of someone needing to stall while they decide whether to lie and to formulate a lie. Obviously, asking someone to recite the presidents of the United States in chronological order including their years of office might cause someone to pause before they answer, but a simple question like, “Why did you not answer your phone all afternoon?” doesn’t require a lot of thought if they in fact did not hear it ring, left it in their desk while they were in a meeting due to departmental or company policy, etc. They were there, whatever happened, and the answer is readily available if they want to share it with you; else they need a few seconds to try to figure out if they’re busted, whether they should try to lie their way out of it, and then make up what they hope is a convincing lie.

As an aside, there is a recent three-part series of newsletters in my newsletter archive concerning lying and its impact on relationships and marriage, and the last edition in that series is about techniques for lie detection, if you missed it. If you wish to review, see Part 1, Faking It Until You Make It, Part 2, A Reader Response to Part 1 with Additional Advice and Part 3: Lie Detection, Confrontation, and Correction

I probably should turn that series into another free report, along with this series on cheating, and I may do that as soon as I can make some time. ;-)

Suddenly picking up a habit of being critical of your every move is a bad sign, especially if you find her moving from critical to angry at every turn. Women tend to seek validation for their emotions, and as Lenin is famous for pointing out, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” so if she can find enough reasons to be angry at you, even if she has to contrive them, she can justify her attraction to another man and her infidelity. That’s not to say that any anger she feels will be because of an affair; it could be a legitimate issue or it could be boredom starting to build up a good head of drama. But if this symptom is combined with even one other, you need to be taking a hard look around you.

If you find her talking about somebody new frequently but without much detail, look out, especially if you say something like, “Wow, he sounds really interesting and like somebody I’d enjoy talking to. How about introducing us?” You can imagine how awkward a situation that might be, and she will resist being put into it. Otherwise, her social nature will press her to be a social conduit and make the introduction.

The biggest telltale sign of all for most women is no sex at all, and seeming defensive or even angry at the mention of it or any advance. Some even go so far as to stop allowing you to see them in anything more alluring than an old sweat suit at bed time; it’s like she’s being “faithful” to someone else. You may also notice that the only time you see her looking like she wants male attention is when she leaves the house – without you.

And if she comes home from “a long day at the office” or evening out with fresh make-up, fresh perfume, and especially with an underlying smell of fresh soap, don’t be surprised if you also find the back of her hair wet, especially at the back of the neck, where she’s been in the shower after being in someone else’s bed. Jumping in the shower immediately upon returning home is also a big tip-off unless she’s been to the gym and has an established aversion to the showers at the gym. Speaking of the gym, a sudden interest in the gym, not by itself but coupled with one or more of these other symptoms, is at least grounds to start watching more carefully or even start talking.

Detectives and courts use much more sophisticated means, including electronic surveillance, checking phone records, cross-matching receipts with schedules, etc., but those techniques are for building evidence for a divorce or criminal prosecution; what I’m describing here is more than adequate for recognizing you have a problem and confronting a delinquent spouse. Then there’s the big question…

What do you say to her when you confront her? That's waaaay too much to try to include in a free newsletter, so you’re going to have to read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" to learn how to handle that. It’s going to take a lot more than simply calling her on it, including some skillful communicating and some specific references to events in your own past with her. You’re also going to have to be able to pick them out appropriately and express how you recognize them as errors and are prepared to do better and lead her into a better future.

Or, if you’re really smart, you can read it today and keep these problems from ever developing so that you never have to experience the pain, frustration, and for some of us, sheer terror of seeing your world come crashing down around you. Either way, you need to read it, so go to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now and download a copy. Sure, you can very likely fix it if it breaks, but it’s a whole lot easier to keep it from ever being broken in the first place, so get it done now, while it’s easy and fun!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Are You Happy, or Comfortably Unhappy In Your Relationship or Marriage? Your Life Could Depend on Knowing the Difference...

Settling for less and tolerating adversity because it’s easier than fixing it leads to the pathetic condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” It kills self-esteem, motivation, and hence, attraction. Don’t let this happen to you! Would you recognize it if you saw it? Let’s find out!

Today’s edition is something I touch on from time to time because it goes almost entirely unnoticed but wastes more lives than the words, “Let’s wait and see,” the deplorable condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron, but as you may have seen around you, even in yourself, it is entirely too easy to get comfortable with being unhappy.

People generally dislike major changes in their life, often even positive ones (that’s a topic for another newsletter, but before you think I’ve lost my mind, stop and consider all the people you’ve ever known who responded to things going well for them by finding some way of sabotaging themselves, such as showing up late for work when they’re in line for a promotion, etc.), and will often choose tolerating things that make them unhappy rather than endure the stress of change, especially if it requires a little effort on their part, even though it’s for the better.

Once this choice is made, its effects are insidious, far-reaching, and destructive. It sets a precedent of settling for less than one deserves, which is to live as happy a life as they can earn. Then it becomes easier and easier to choose to tolerate more and more, because the choices are now becoming more radically different, between a little more nuisance, aggravation, or pain and a radical improvement if they get tired of settling and decide to make a major effort and fix what’s wrong in their life.

They get comfortable with feeling worse and worse, until being depressed, frustrated, and just plain pissed off all the time is not only the status quo, it’s the EXPECTED NORM. Feeling good is at this point abnormal, and therefore, as strange as it seems, subconsciously UNDESIRABLE! (What’s REALLY undesirable for most people is putting out the effort to change, but for the comfortably unhappy, they may not even be able to tell the difference.)

It can creep up on you over weeks, months, or even years, and will start with a single choice to settle for less: a home or neighborhood that you settle for because that’s all that’s available at the moment, a job you don’t like but is easier to keep than finding a better one, a relationship that drags you down but is easier than breaking up, dividing up the stuff in the house, and looking for better company to keep, etc. Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open, and periodically evaluate what you’re doing and those with whom you’re doing it.

When things could be better, do yourself a favor and MAKE THEM BETTER! Upgrade the job with either a promotion, transfer, or a change of employer. Upgrade the relationship by either improving it or getting out of it, thereby freeing yourself of the restraints and conflict that make you unhappy and creating the freedom of navigation required to find and engage that which makes you happy.

And most important of all, in any situation or relationship, if improvement is impossible because the other party (or parties) won’t be involved in positive change that you’re willing to work for, cut bait and find a better pond to fish in, because you’re fishing in poisoned waters, and it will be the death of you.

Great relationships are uncommon, as are great marriages, but they are far from impossible, or even difficult to find and manage if you know yourself, know your desires, and have the guts to hold out for what you want instead of settling for something you hope you might mold into what you can tolerate. That kind of behavior is precisely the reason why great relationships and marriages are so uncommon. People get insecure and attach themselves to the first person who gives them a smile, approval, acceptance, or most commonly, sex, without checking to see if the rest of the package is something they can live with, let alone enjoy. That’s a recipe for disaster.

You MUST have compatibility and attraction for the relationship to last. If you have the compatibility, the attraction can be created or recreated, but if you don’t have the compatibility, your only choice is to get out and find it. Otherwise, you will consign yourself to a competitive relationship with an adversary instead of a cooperative relationship with someone you truly love and who truly loves you, and the best case scenario there is comfortably unhappy, while the worst one is catastrophic destruction of life as you know it, and in some cases, quite literally your life; substance abuse, suicide, and murder are what some people opt for or have inflicted upon them instead of divorce. Know what you have, what you need, and how to tell if they are the same or different.

If you want a great system for evaluating your relationship, and solid, tested advice for improving it (through better communication and creating attraction, getting her tuned in and turned on to all that is great about YOU) if you find it desirable, as well as solid advice and great contacts for getting the mess cleaned up and getting back into the dating game if this relationship is too far gone to save or never should have started in the first place, it’s in my e-book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Download your copy today, because life is too short to spend it unhappy, even comfortably unhappy.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

You Can't Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity: Problems in Relationships and Marriage Don't Just Go Away

What could it be costing you to put off dealing with your relationship problems until tomorrow? I’ll wager that it’s a lot more than you might think…

Don’t forget Valentine’s Day is this coming Saturday, and make sure that if you’re not already prepared for it that you read my Valentine’s Day lesson immediately. (And if you think you already have it covered with the traditional box of chocolates and dozen roses, think again!)

Getting into today’s lesson, I was out running some errands one afternoon and noticed a sign in front of a church that read, “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity.” I don’t know how they may be looking at that sentence, or if they fully realize its meaning, but the instant I read it I was reminded of a bunch of letters I’ve received from people who were having problems. I’m not going to disclose their names or anything personally identifiable because being in such a predicament is stressful and embarrassing enough for them, but I want you to see the kinds of things that can happen when you let little problems go unresolved (each paragraph is from a different reader comment or letter):

I filed for divorce after he physically abused me, so poor choice in mate, he wouldn't take your site seriously, so wish you all the best of success. You have some great advice and wonderful readers.

Question: we split up and now she is seeing someone else ... any advice on how to win her heart back?

My wife has sex when she wants & not when I want this has gone on so long that I don't even bother trying to be sexy with her, once again we have spoken but this ends up in a shouting match

My wife and I have been married for 18 years. We haven’t had sex more than once every few months since our second anniversary, and I’m sick of it. Can you help us?

For years my wife won’t kiss me I tell her it hurts but she says there’s no need. My wife thinks I am odd because I want a kiss & cuddle from her but she won’t when I tell her how I feel she ends up shouting at me then crying then sayings things will change & they do for a day or two then she is the same cold person with me, can I go on for the rest of my live feeling so unloved by her, I am 42 after 17 years marriage.

After reading the above, even though I am not sure that I could leave her as we have 2 children but is there any point if feeling so low all the time & never seeing the light should I leave whilst I am able to start a new life, this would be the hardest ting that I have ever even thought about.

You need to know that my wife of 4 1/2 yrs (dated for one, lived together for one, then married) has decided to divorce me. We have a two year old son. She says she's lost her feelings for me, she doesn't hate me, she still cares about me, she still likes me as a friend, but the love is gone. There are some side issues, but nothing that I believe is the real problem. I have been coming to realize that I have been "weak" not asserting my "alpha male" thing. I suppose I have always wanted to please her, and when we have a problem (fight) I always give in, or she always "wins". I think that I need to get stronger, before this divorce is final. How can I win her back? How can I show her that I am attractive (physically, emotionally, etc.) How can I trigger the emotions I believe are still there? We had a fantastic dating life, we had a great marriage, then after my son was born I assumed the "father role" and quit all the romanticisms, and stopped helping out around the house and didn't help out with the child-care. I have come to grips with the fact that I lacked in those areas, and am willing to change, but I need to "win her back" first. What can I do before it's too late? Oh, I hope you can give me some good advice. I hope there is something I can do before it's too late. Please, help! I love my son, and my wife, I want this family to be unified again!

Do you see what’s going on here?

These people have let problems fester for months, most for years, and there are some things that should be jumping off the page at you. First, and most important, is that they steadily get worse; real problems never just “fix themselves,” so don’t be a fool and wait for them to do so. You’ll also notice that it doesn’t matter if the deterioration of their relationship is fast or slow, the result is the same; they are either terminally unhappy and holding on out of fear, or they’re divorcing, and it’s not so easy to get out of or get over a 20-year relationship and start over in your forties or fifties, and one of these readers is in his sixties, and the wife he refers to is his second wife.

They’re all reaching out for help now, and most of them have chosen or will choose to accept it (some will reject help because they find the solution unpalatable, choosing instead of seek a “magic bullet” that makes all the problems go away with no effort or responsibility on their part), but look at how many years they’ve spent being miserable that they could have spent being happy with each other if they had addressed their problems early and corrected them at that time. What’s the old saying? “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Financially speaking, with divorce and the burden of legal fees, settling estates that may value as high as in the millions and more, alimony, child support (that will end up going for something other than the children), etc., an ounce of prevention would seem worth hundreds or thousands of tons of cure. Anybody want to compute the return on investment there?

Emotionally, it’s the same story; you can make a few small changes and live happily or fail to maintain your relationship properly and live miserably for years before finally either trying to undo the damage you’ve done or getting so sick of each other you go to war, pronounced “divorce court,” and then have to start over, and be miserable and alone during what should be the prime of your life.

Every minute you spend putting off a solution holds the potential for one more mean-spirited and vengeful remark that can never be taken back, one more vengeful or stupid act that can’t be undone, one more toll of a bell that can never be unrung. And the more pain you inflict and endure, the harder it is to fix the problem. Any takers on the prevention offer?

The offer is this: Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and read it, learn a few really important things about relationships, women, and how to get along with them, and do a few cool and fun things as a result. Then watch what happens! It will save you years of misery and a small (or maybe large!) fortune that you’ll get to spend in your retirement with your wife instead of giving it all away to her and her lawyers to go somewhere else and enjoy while you sit around heartbroken, financially ruined, and wondering what happened.

Life is short, too short to miss a chance, and second chances rarely come around. If you’re reading this, you’re looking for a second chance, and it’s here, staring you straight in the eye. Jump on it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Too Much of a Good Thing Kills a Woman's Pleasure, and Hence Your Relationship and Marriage

Too much of a good thing gets boring, especially for women, who generally have a very low tolerance for routine, especially in their love life. Have you made any of these classic mistakes?

What a lovely day it’s turned out to be! There are some days when just being competent and attentive are enough to get everything done, and this is looking like it will be one of them. I hope yours goes as well!

I get a lot of letters every day from readers about their problems and successes, and amongst the problem letters are a few common threads, the biggest of which seems to be female boredom. It permeates every situation in some manner, especially those where the man thinks that everything is going well until the very moment he gets slapped with divorce papers (I’m waiting for permission from a reader before reprinting a classic example of this scenario and the solution!) and when, in his shock, he asks, “I thought everything was fine! What’s this about?” he hears the words, “See! YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!”

What happened?

She’s bored to tears, tried to tell him in what she thinks is the most verbose means possible (which unfortunately often means that she rolls her eyes with her back turned to him or has asked him if he would like to do something different instead of TELLING him that SHE NEEDS to do something different – we’ll touch on that again in one of the upcoming issues on inter-gender communications, but it’s covered in detail in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage”), and being a man, he didn’t pick up on the complaint, and she got fed up.

That’s what caused the divorce threat (which incidentally, may be only a wake-up call, which you can determine immediately if you know what to look for, which is also discussed in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage”), but what caused the root problem, the boredom itself?

Whoa! Did you think about that when you read it? The threat of a break-up or a divorce is a problem, but in the bigger picture, it’s a very telling symptom of a bigger problem, and stopping the divorce is only a temporary stay of execution, not a problem solution. Getting the relationship back on track requires fixing the problem(s) that got you to the stage of the divorce threat.

Getting back to the boredom problem, as men, we like a simple life. We don’t mind routine nearly as much as women because for us, a neutral (neither perilous nor exciting) environment means the absence of problems, and that’s a big plus; we’ll take excitement when we can get it too, but we’re happy to just be outside the reach of problems for a day. Our emotional scale is such that negative emotion is on one end and positive emotion is on the other end, and emotional neutrality is in the middle, and therefore better than negative emotions.

All the men who don’t know any better are right now saying, “So what? Anything else would be crazy!” Well, you and I might think so, but…

All the women are right now saying that we are the crazy ones! Their emotional scale runs from zero to infinity, not negative to positive; to them, lack of emotional outlet for their energy is the worst possible state, and they really don’t distinguish that much between positive and negative emotion, at least as far as their biological need for emotion is concerned (which is different from their conscious tolerance of it). That’s why they enjoy and even NEED tear-jerking movies that we think are a depressing (and somewhat masochistic) waste of time. Do you see the problem?

They need things stirred up more than we do, and in our quest for the problem-free environment, not knowing that our needs are different from theirs, we misinterpret their cooperation as their approval; wrong answer! They cooperate because they are social, and are expecting something in exchange for their cooperation, not because they enjoy being bored. That’s why they need you to be an alpha male, a leader, to get naughty with them when they aren’t expecting it, to leave little surprises for them in places they don’t expect them, the impromptu picnics and vacations, etc. Without things like that, they go nuts! However, don’t go overboard; too much of a good thing ruins it!

This is the other classic mistake that men make. We have such a hard time figuring out what women want that when we find something, we drown them in it. I’ve seen guys find out that a woman likes chocolate and be shoving it in her mouth every time she opens it until she’s literally sick of chocolate, ruining one of her favorite things for her, and women really hate that.

It’s very easy to give a woman too much of a good thing, even when it comes to sex. If you want to ruin your sex life to the point that it wrecks your relationship, all you have to do is find out that she likes something in bed, and do it every single time you have sex until she tells you to stop doing it. She’ll not only grow bored with the act, she’ll hate you for ruining one of her favorite sexual things.

And guys, be honest. Just about every one of us, alive now and who has ever lived, has heard a woman say something like, “oh, I love to be on top,” or “I love doggie-style,” and let that suddenly become 99% of your sexual repertoire. The magic was gone pretty fast after that, wasn’t it? You must mix it up in the bedroom just as much as you must mix it up in the rest of the house and outside the house. Use her favorite things as a reward, put forth at the climax (no pun intended!) of some event, not as part of any standard operating procedure.

Repeat after me: “BORING IS THE LAST WORD A MAN EVER WANTS TO HEAR A WOMAN USE TO DESCRIBE HIM!” Never forget that; you can bet that she won’t. She can’t! Avoiding boredom is literally a survival skill for women. It ultimately terrifies and destroys them.

Guys, long-term committed relationships, whether you’re married or not, aren’t just a piece of cake sitting there waiting for you to bite. They don’t necessarily take a lot of work, especially if you are well-matched and attentive, but there is some work that has to be done no matter how well-matched you are. You can do it on the front end by finding someone with whom you are well-matched and live happily ever after, or you can do it when everything blows up in your face to try to save the situation (and if there are significant compatibility problems, you will inevitably find that it cannot be saved), but either way, you have to be prepared to be in a long-term committed relationship to maintain one whether you have to save it or not.

You have to know whether you are indeed well-matched with a woman, you have to know how to communicate with her so that you can keep things open, developing and committed, and you have to know what sparks and maintains her attraction for you to keep everything fun, exciting, intimate and everything else that keeps it from being boring. Luckily for you, you can find all this in a single source, an instantly downloadable e-book called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com, tested, proven, and working for everyone who is using it. Do it now, because life’s too short to spend it trying to work your way out of the doghouse.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Ex's: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Former Relationships and Marriage

Depending on circumstances, ex’s can be a valuable asset, a nightmare, and worst of all, an attraction-killer to your present partner. Let’s explore…

As you may remember from the bio on the MakingHerHappy.com web site, a lot of people have called me “Doc” since childhood, not because am a medical doctor, psychiatrist, dentist, veterinarian, or college professor, but because I’m the guy that makes whatever ails you go away, no matter what it seems to be.

Hence, I spend a large part of my life hearing other people’s problems and providing solutions for them, and one of the problems I hear about most are “ex’s” – ex-husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, employers, etc. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but how people become “ex’s” in your life and how you deal with them once they do says a lot about you. We need to talk about some of the things it can say, because some of it is really good, and some of it is really, REALLY bad. And whether you have an ex now or there is some chance you may have one in the future, you NEED to know this and think about it.

Let’s start with the worst case first, and work our way to the better ones. The worst case is the ex that became an ex because war was declared, and you got hurt and have never gotten over it. You talk about the relationship and the break-up all the time, even though it’s been years ago. Have you noticed how people react?

Have you noticed that they tend to “glaze over,” look at their watches, roll their eyes, and suddenly remember somewhere else they need to be or rather aggressively change subjects? If not, open your eyes, because they do exactly that, and it’s costing you. People don’t like hearing the same lament over and over, and they don’t like being around people who harbor pain, depression, grudges, etc. It’s a major respect and attraction-killer, and labels you as a wuss who can’t deal with life and move on.

Face it, everybody goes through at least one bad relationship in their life, and they get over it. They learn how to better choose a girlfriend, wife, friend, business partner, employer, or whatever, and they move on to have a better life. If you’re not doing it, the only thing keeping you from it is YOU. How you respond to past events is entirely YOUR CHOICE! Make the choice to accept reality and whatever responsibility is yours, stand up, dust off your pants, and step forward. If it was so traumatic that you need professional help, get it, and get it done. Life’s too short to spend it looking backward instead of moving forward.

“But you don’t understand!” you say. Oh yes, I DO understand. You loved her, you needed her, the sex was great, you really loved that job, you never thought that buddy would screw you over. You never thought you’d come home to find your brother or best friend in bed with your wife. You loved being self-employed, or having money, status, and respect. I’ve seen and heard it all. Lived through it, too. And I can tell you categorically that none of those things has anything to do with TODAY, unless you choose to let it.

There are lessons to learn from the bad things that happened to you. Stop lamenting the events and seek out the lessons. Learn them. Consign yourself to using those lessons to be more successful in the future. And relegate those events to the past and never, ever look back. The clock is ticking, and every second that passes can never be regained. You can spend each second looking back and wasting it or living a better life. It’s your call. Let that choice and that ability to choose empower you to live a better life.

Stepping down off my stump now… ;-)

The next worst case isn’t much better. It’s the dependent that you can’t quite get rid of. The ex-wife or lover that you’re constantly having to bail out of a jam that they stupidly chose to put themselves in, the child who is well into adulthood that you keep bailing out, even though a person their age usually has a family, mortgage, and established a career, the ex-employer who either fired you and continues to call on you for help or the one you left that keeps leaning on you instead of hiring a competent replacement, any of which causes you to complain and be distracted when you’re around people who currently really do matter to you and want to enjoy your company.

They don’t like listening to you repeat the same laments and frustrations any more that you want to hear it out of them. It labels you as a push-over, another breed of wuss who just can’t say “no,” no matter how badly “no” needs to be said. You guessed it, another major respect and attraction killer.

People who don’t want to be partners of some sort and share life with you, whether it’s a wife, girlfriend, buddy, employer, business partner, offspring, or whatever, don’t deserve to have you sacrificing yourself to their incompetence, delinquency, etc. Altruists around the world are cringing as I say this, but you know it’s true. Your life is too short and too precious to allow yourself to be bled dry by a bunch of parasites who won’t let go of your jugular vein. Let them keep themselves up instead of sucking you dry, Brother. Do you understand?

There are good people around you more than willing to share life with you, no matter who or where you are, so why cheat yourself and them of the great things you can do -- and BE -- together while throwing your life’s energy away to these parasites? You’ll find that when you do this, all you will attract are more parasites, as well as a few predators, because good, competent, independent people will shy away, not wanting your problem overload to spill over on them, while parasites and predators will be watching for a sucker like you to come along and latch on as soon as you give them an opening.

What impact do you think this will have on any relationships or marriage you might enter into? If the good people are steering clear of you and the bad ones have you targeted, well…it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how that will turn out, especially when parasites and predators are masters of using guilt and a person’s own insecurities to manipulate people into doing things they know better than to do. If this is you, you’re going for ride after ride until you either choose to live better or they drive you all the way to the gutter. And again, the choice is yours, not theirs, so make the right one.

The last kind of ex to which I want to call your attention is the only good kind to have, the kind with whom you have shared something for awhile, and as you grew apart or found yourself at odds, you responsibly recognized that you were evolving in two different directions or at incompatible paces or that you started a relationship without sufficient compatibility to sustain it and you went your separate ways on friendly terms. You’ve probably seen this at one time or another, a situation where both of you recognized that you were both good people in a bad match-up, and knew that you’d both be better off at arm’s length than close-up.

This would be the employer who keeps you in their Rolodex as a potential consultant and gives you a good employment referral (not just a reference, but calls up somebody in their own network to help get you placement), and to whom you would refer competent sources of help, materials, or whatever. We’ve all seen a bad fit in the work place, and employers appreciate how it can happen and will often treat you much better if you sit down with them to discuss it instead of trying to hide the fact that it’s a bad fit until you’ve found something else and leave them hanging with a job to fill and no warning.

It would also be the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend who steers opportunities your way, and to whom you steer good quality people. Maybe you even double date from time to time to help each other meet new people, steer contacts to each others’ businesses, etc. This is highly attractive behavior to all but the most insecure of women, because it says that you can accept responsibility for your actions and decisions, keep a level head and reach workable agreements with people, and won’t be a needy wuss who hangs onto them if things don’t work out for the long term. It says that you’re strong and of good character, that you focus on the value in people, not their flaws. I don’t know about you, but that’s precisely the kind of thing that I want to be known for, and consequently, am known for.

Fights are neither necessary nor desirable to resolve a bad relationship of any kind. At 46 years old I’ve never been sued, and every conflict I’ve engaged in during my adult life has been settled in a logical and equitable manner by mutual consent, including all former marriages, contracts, employment, and customer relationships. I know of nobody that I’ve ever dealt with that I couldn’t call up right now and have a good conversation, and probably find some way of stirring up a business deal or some kind of fun. It sounds like quite an accomplishment, but while it may be unusual, it has never been difficult, and should not be difficult for you, either. Why?

Because all it takes is the willingness and respect to deal squarely with those around you, looking for what you can accomplish together instead of what you can cheat each other out of or control. Being known for being such a person makes you attractive to everyone in all respects, and when it comes to women, they want a man who will take the lead, act responsibly and fairly, keep a positive attitude, and keep things moving for them, not somebody looking for every possible way to screw them, cheat them, lie to them, etc. Sounds rather like an employer, does it not?

They also want someone to share life with, who knows when to say, ‘Yes,” or, “No.” They evaluate men using an iron-clad rule: “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me, and if you can’t stand up for ME, you won’t stand up for US.” They don’t mind you sharing yourself with others, moderately, as long as you save the best part for them, which in a good relationship is a very fair trade for the nurturing, loyalty, and many other things a loving wife will give a good man who’s making her happy.

Knowing how to evaluate and maintain a good relationship at home, how to communicate with people, and how to create attraction in the woman you love has far-reaching effects, much farther-reaching than you might ever imagine before doing it. Look around you. Those men who are happy at home are happy at work as well, and they have solid relationships with all the people in their life. They know how to choose good relationships, how to communicate with people, and how to be the kind of guy that people want to be around.

You’ll find that when you do the things described in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," the rest of your life will start improving at the same pace that things improve at home. Your confidence level increases, your communications skills improve, and you become more fun, interesting, competent, and generally enjoyable to have around. You can keep putting it off because you don’t know if you can do it, or you can accept the fact that a lot have people have already done it, many of which may not be as sharp as you, and you can make just as big a difference in your life as they have, if not even bigger. All it takes is to claim your birthright as a man and BE a man.

Download this fascinating and highly-effective book at http://www.makingherhappy.com, it’s guaranteed, it’s fun, you can afford it, and quite frankly, you can’t afford to not do it, at least not if you realize just how short life really is and don’t want to spend it watching everybody else enjoying it more than you do. Join us, right now!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

An Eye-Opening Confession About Bad Relationships and Marriage from the Comfortably Unhappy

One of your fellow readers offers a compelling confession of her 15 years of being comfortably unhappy – nearly half her lifetime! Look to see if you see any part of yourself in her confession…

A very dear friend in London wrote to me confessing having spent nearly half her life in this condition before she finally broke free of her husband, a philandering, abusive, substance-abusing codependent wussy parasite who thought her purpose in life was to provide for him and his was to take advantage of it. Meet Heather:

David....sorry but I read your lesson about “Comfortably Unhappy” from yesterday and do you realise that was me for a long time before I contacted you, comfortably unhappy? You could use me as a perfect example of how not to do what I did and waste years of your life.

I was evaluating how long I was truly unhappy and you know what I came up with..............I was with [him] for 15 years.......at 7 years I had an affair with an older man (gosh how I wish I'd run away then, but things wouldn't have led me to the other things I have today, like my career, if I'd done that, so it’s ok really!!) and I'd been miserable for a good year before that so and the friendship with the guy had been growing through that time where we were meeting each other in a plutonic way before we got it on so to speak and that means I was comfortably unhappy for 8 years David......why I stuck it for so long I do not know and all that happened is things got worse and worse even after I stayed after the affair as his possessive controlling behaviour escalated so how do we explain why people dont 'wake up' to what's going on for so long.............

I mean I didn't properly think about leaving when I was caught in the affair at that time it was easier to stay in the comfy situation than change everything, and I felt awful for the hurt I'd caused [my ex] despite the fact I knew the reason I had done it was because I was being taken for granted and treated like a maid even back then. Is that weird or what?!!

I think after embracing the change I had this time I'd be the first one to say if you’re not happy, run! Do whatever it takes! Just don’t waste life.

Life is a precious gift that is far too short already and the only thing I have grieved for through all of this isn't my failed marriage or my lost childhood love/sweetheart. It’s my wasted years of my life that I cannot ever get back, years literally spent being comfortable but unsatisfied and unhappy in every way.

Do you think if people realised how much you actually kick yourself afterwards they would wake up and sort out their own situations now, rather than waiting and waiting and watching the years of their life ticking away until they can't take it anymore?!!!!

Just my thoughts on the newsletter and if you want to use any of them feel free.......

Heather

Guys, it’s no different for us. We get in a rut, we spend years seeking a woman’s approval, or looking to her for our self-esteem when we should be looking to ourselves and she has none of her own, let alone any to give us. We mistakenly think that things get stale and boring because that’s the way they are supposed to be, and that’s the price we pay for sex, and then the sex stops, too, but we look at the calendar and think that we’re better off putting up with it and having an occasional affair than to give up half or more of everything we’ve earned and a big chunk of our future earnings to get out of it and have a life. What a load of crap that turns out to be!

For starters, unless you are with some kind of parasite or predator, or someone with whom you are grossly mismatched and never should have married, life doesn’t have to be like that at all. The truth is that she probably got bored at the same time you did, or even before, if she’s like most women, and would love for things to be fun and exciting again. Women are nesting creatures, right?

They don’t like crises that cause major changes in their life (like divorce!) any more than we do, even though you will see them craving the adrenaline it causes to combat their eternally-tormenting boredom. It is foolish, not to mention catastrophic, to let a little drama convince you that the average woman would destroy her household and her marriage just to get a little adrenaline rush. According to the best information I’ve been able to find, only one in two thousand is that insanely damaged.

And no, it’s not easier to have an affair than to fix things with your wife if you have the foundation of a good marriage. That’s a myth that I’d like to strangle somebody for propagating, not because I think everybody should be married, but because it’s simply not true and has ruined so many marriages that could have been fixed. What does it take?

It doesn’t take much at all! It takes knowing whether you have the foundation for a good relationship, which is a matter of answering a few questions that I have for you. It takes knowing how you and your wife differ as man and woman, and using those differences to enhance your relationship instead of allowing them to remain points of contention, competition, and frustration.

It takes learning three simple rules that govern all communication with a woman, and using them to hear things she’s been telling you for years that you never knew you were being told. It takes shedding the “nice guy” programming that you’re drowning in, and getting back to being the “real guy” that your Y-chromosome has set you up to be, strong, competent, fun, and feeling good about yourself.

It’s the easiest process a man can go through, because it’s a return from your current unnatural self to your natural self, and a process that gives you the answer to questions you’ve spent a lifetime thinking you’d never see answered, like “What do women really want?” and “What makes women tick?” not to mention “Why did she just get mad at me for answering her question???”

So what do you say? Are you comfortably unhappy? Are you ready to learn things you never thought possible to know and enjoy your life – and your wife – like you never thought possible? Start the new year right! Go now, right now, before you do another thing, to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and see just how easy enjoying a great life can be!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Are You Happy, or Comfortably Unhappy In Your Relationship or Marriage? Your Life Could Depend on Knowing the Difference...

Settling for less and tolerating adversity because it’s easier than fixing it leads to the pathetic condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” It kills self-esteem, motivation, and hence, attraction. Don’t let this happen to you! Would you recognize it if you saw it? Read and find out!

Let’s start the year off right. Today’s edition is something I touch on from time to time because it goes almost entirely unnoticed but wastes more lives than the words, “Let’s wait and see,” the deplorable condition of being “comfortably unhappy.” Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron, but as you may have seen around you, even in yourself, it is entirely too easy to get comfortable with being unhappy.

People generally dislike major changes in their life, often even positive ones (that’s a topic for another newsletter, but before you think I’ve lost my mind, stop and consider all the people you’ve ever known who responded to things going well for them by finding some way of sabotaging themselves, such as showing up late for work when they’re in line for a promotion, etc.), and will often choose tolerating things that make them unhappy rather than endure the stress of change, even though it’s for the better.

Once this choice is made, its effects are insidious, far-reaching, and destructive. It sets a precedent of settling for less than one deserves, which is to live as happy a life as they can earn. Then it becomes easier and easier to choose to tolerate more and more, because the choices are now becoming more radically different, between a little more nuisance, aggravation, or pain and a radical improvement if they get tired of settling and decide to make a major effort and fix what’s wrong in their life.

They get comfortable with feeling worse and worse, until being depressed, frustrated, and just plain pissed off all the time is not only the status quo, it’s the EXPECTED NORM. Feeling good is at this point abnormal, and therefore, as strange as it seems, subconsciously UNDESIRABLE! (What’s REALLY undesirable for most people is putting out the effort to change, but for the comfortably unhappy, they may not even be able to tell the difference.)

It can creep up on you over weeks, months, or even years, and will start with a single choice to settle for less: a home or neighborhood that you settle for because that’s all that’s available at the moment, a job you don’t like but is easier to keep than finding a better one, a relationship that drags you down but is easier than breaking up, dividing up the stuff in the house, and looking for better company to keep, etc. Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open, and periodically evaluate what you’re doing and those with whom you’re doing it.

When things could be better, do yourself a favor and MAKE THEM BETTER! Upgrade the job with either a promotion, transfer, or a change of employer. Upgrade the relationship by either improving it or getting out of it. In either case, if improvement is impossible because the other party (or parties) won’t be involved in positive change that you’re willing to work for, cut bait and find a better pond to fish in, because you’re fishing in poisoned waters, and it will be the death of you.

Great relationships are uncommon, as are great marriages, but they are far from impossible, or even difficult to find and manage if you know yourself, know your desires, and have the guts to hold out for what you want instead of settling for something you hope you might mold into what you can tolerate. That kind of behavior is precisely the reason why great relationships and marriages are so uncommon. People get insecure and attach themselves to the first person who gives them a smile, approval, acceptance, or worst of all, sex, without checking to see if the rest of the package is something they can live with. That’s a recipe for disaster.

You MUST have compatibility and attraction for the relationship to last. If you have the compatibility, the attraction can be created or recreated, but if you don’t have the compatibility, your only choice is to get out and find it. Otherwise, you will consign yourself to a competitive relationship with an adversary instead of a cooperative relationship with someone you truly love and who truly loves you, and the best case scenario there is comfortably unhappy, while the worst one is catastrophic destruction of life as you know it, and in some cases, literally your life. Know what you have, what you need, and how to tell if they are the same or different.

If you want a great system for evaluating your relationship, and solid, tested advice for improving it (through better communication and creating attraction, getting her tuned in and turned on to all that is great about YOU) if you find it desirable, as well as solid advice and great contacts for getting the mess cleaned up and getting back into the dating game if this relationship is too far gone to save or never should have started in the first place, it’s in my e-book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Download your copy today, because life is too short to spend it unhappy, even comfortably unhappy.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

YOU Can Make a Bad Relationship or Marriage End Well

Sometimes people get into relationships that simply never should have happened and can’t be made to work because the foundation just isn’t there. If you’re in one of these, don’t be afraid of letting go, because life does go on, a lot better than when you’re trapped in a no-win situation.

This is an unpleasant subject for a lot of people, and understandably so, but it’s one that I have to address from time to time because it can’t be ignored. There are a lot of reasons people get into relationships, as well as stay in them, and unfortunately, some of them are really, REALLY bad reasons.

The high and still constantly climbing divorce rates of recent decades bear this out. Couples used to court for a long time to make sure that after the excitement of attraction wore off there was still something for them to base a relationship on, like love, attraction and compatibility, but that has long since past, especially now that premarital sex is the norm rather than the exception.

And I’m not saying that premarital sex is inherently good or bad, or even that it is a cause; in spite of what cleverly misrepresentative statistics suggest, it’s not a cause at all. Indeed, rationally speaking, premarital sex can keep you from marrying someone with whom you are sexually incompatible. Sexual incompatibility is just as big a problem and just as common a cause of divorce as value incompatibility, no matter what your religious affiliation.

Whether or not fornication and divorce are sins and which you would prefer to ask forgiveness for is your concern, not mine. The point I’m trying to make is that people get caught up in the emotions of life, a relationship and sexual issues and make ill-conceived and self-destructive decisions about lifelong commitments that they later find they can’t hold to, because after all that excitement is gone and they have to actually start talking, they discover problems, like their values are diametrically opposed, or their personalities or majority of tastes are at odds, or there is some other compatibility problem that makes for too many points of contention in their life for them to coexist.

It’s a scary feeling when you’re faced with the reality of a bad choice like that, because by the time attraction naturally wears off and a problem is recognized an average of two years has passed, and then another few years are spent trying to overcome problems that are too big to handle and everybody starts being angry at everybody else for not trying hard enough or not being “good enough” to handle it.

That’s utter rubbish, because in reality it’s not about being good enough, but about being compatible enough, but it still causes fights and helps attorneys to get rich getting you out of it, especially when you get with one of the less scrupulous ones who tries to escalate the fighting to create more work and more money for themselves. And there’s a much better way to handle the situation when you realize that, like Andy did:

David, Hello!

I wrote to you many months ago about my ex-wife and how she just walked out on me after 20 years of marriage. She actually did me the biggest favor anyone could ever do, and that I had bought your book to learn what I had done wrong in my marriage! Well things have really changed in my life since I read your book and applied what I have learned!

Your book is a Godsend and it has changed my life! I've met a fantastic woman, her name is Shari. She says that I am the most awesome man she has ever met! She is always coming on to me as if she can't get enough! I've never been so happy in my life! What you teach is so true! A man doesn't have to ever ask for sex, all he has to do is act like a real man!

Thanks for helping me change my life for the better!
Andy

Andy was one of the lucky ones. According to his letters, he and his wife were “comfortably unhappy” for two decades before she left, and when Andy sat down and did a thorough evaluation of what his relationship had been in trying to figure out what went wrong with his marriage, it was clear that it never should have happened to start with. He learned from his mistakes, made a few personal improvements along the way, and now has women chasing him, and is able to pick from all of them the one whom he’ll spend the rest of his life with when she finally turns up, which is what dating is really all about.

Yes, really! Dating is not about trying to “catch” somebody or find somebody that you can make enough compromises with to get them to marry you. It’s about exposing yourself to enough candidates that the right one is finally exposed for you to select! And in the meantime, it’s about learning and having fun, not sitting by the phone wondering if you were “good enough” to get somebody to call you. But…and it’s a big but…

If you don’t feel good about yourself and have the self-esteem, sense of adventure and natural comfort that comes from being happy with yourself, dating is a nightmare scenario, because as these candidates are exposing themselves to you, you’re also exposing yourself, the self that you are not comfortable with, to them. You have to HAVE a life to SHARE a life, right? And you have to love, respect and enjoy yourself before you can love, respect or enjoy anyone else. But as you will see in my book, that’s the easiest part, once you find out how.

So where are you today? Are you happy, or comfortably unhappy? Or are you just plain miserable and scared to death to move on because you think that being unhappy with somebody is better than being unhappy and alone? No matter what shape you’re in, good or bad, it can be better, and as people like Andy will tell you, it doesn’t take much to make it better. Think not? Come to http://www.makingherhappy.com and I’ll prove it to you!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Why Is Breaking Up So Hard? Surviving the End of Relationships and Marriage

We’ve talked about stopping a break-up in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, but what about those times when a break-up really is the best thing for both parties? Specifically, why is it so damned hard? Would you believe it doesn’t have to be?

This is one of those newsletters that had to be written; one that a fool would hope that none of you would ever need, but which reality says nearly all of you will find useful, either in surviving your present or some part of your future, or in understanding something very painful in your past, the difficulty of breaking up, even when it’s the best thing for both parties and everybody, including the two parties in the relationship, know that it’s best.

Some people get into relationships that are based on things like faith and hope instead of reality. Others based them on need, attraction, or simple lust instead of love. These couples ultimately find themselves painfully mismatched and moving apart is the only solution to the problem they have caused themselves. You can’t put a mongoose and a snake in the same place and expect them to just bend to meet each others’ needs and get along, nor can you expect incompatible men and women. Compatibility doesn’t come from the choices you make, but from the values and tastes that cause you to make the choices you make. Those things just don’t change that much over the course of an entire lifetime, and they certainly don’t change because somebody else wants or needs for them to.

I’m not like most of today’s “relationship guru’s.” I won’t tell you that all relationships can or should be salvaged, and have no respect for those who would. That’s why you’ll find the list of other relationship gurus I do respect and endorse very short. I maintain a list of those who have been recommended to me by my readers in this newsletter and in the margin on my blog, and those are the only others offering advice on the emotions and issues of relationships that I would have any of you read, because they do embrace this self-evident truth instead of trying to convince you to buy what they are selling to have you save that which should not be and ultimately cannot be saved. (That’s a very short list of resources taken from a very large pool of authors. Sad, isn’t it? And by the way, feel free to help me add to it by letting me know if you have had a positive result with any product.)

I’ve been working closely with one of your fellow readers, one whom at this point is facing the possibility that the break-up his wife initiated may indeed be the best thing that could happen to him because they are so grossly mismatched and she’s carrying a ton of baggage that she may well choose to hang onto, in spite of the fact that right now she’s facing the greatest opportunity of her life to drop all that baggage and make some incredible improvements in her life.

I’ll spare you the intimate details of their problems, but the bottom line is that he’s on solid ground, logically, morally, ethically, and every other way I’ve been able to observe, while she is hyper-creative and rejects reality with impunity, morally ambiguous, and is thirty-nine years old going on about seven.

He’s highly analytical and disciplined, knows what’s before him and how to react to virtually any word or action from her now (he read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and is a very quick study, and we’ve been talking a lot as well), and yet, there are times when he still has a hard time accepting what he knows to be reality, that in all likelihood, they never should have come together and he made a bad choice, because his wife appears incapable of growing up and becoming responsible enough to rejoin him as his wife, or indeed as anything more than a chronic, irresponsible and dangerous dependent.

He asked me why it was that he was having a hard time accepting and emotionally committing to that which he knew to be irrefutable reality, and why people generally found breaking up so hard even when it was painfully obvious that it was the only option that could allow either of them to ever be happy.

I answered, "We all make bad choices, and being human, we tend to try to make the best of them and pick up a lot of good memories along the way that end up confounding us when we finally are faced with the reality that our bad choice is working against us."

It struck a chord in both of us. I did not, until the very instant that I wrote that to him, understand why I had had trouble with break-ups in the past, and those who know me closely would describe me to you as the most ruthlessly logical person they have ever met. I never stopped to ask myself while I was going through it why it was so hard. I was too busy asking myself another ridiculous question: “Why does this have to happen?” when I already knew the answer.

His reply to that pearl was as profound as the pearl itself:

“That needs to go in the evaluation section of your book - over and over! The main struggle in deciding whether it [salvaging his relationship] is a go or no-go is in sifting through all the wonderful memories to decide if they were ‘real’ or not...”

That’s the real rub, isn’t it? Were all those “good times” born of real love, friendship, respect, and loyalty worth celebrating? Or were they just born of two people trying to make the best of a bad situation they had created and didn’t want to face? Or was it something somewhere in the middle? Trying to resolve those questions, and cope with the reality the resolution presents, is what makes breaking up so hard when every available fact tells you both that there is no other alternative.

So in the event that you have to go through this torture, what do you do?

Look at the whole relationship and weigh the good and the bad. Identify what can and cannot be repaired, and how important those things are to you. In the end, if the relationship can’t be fixed, get out, but do it like a civilized adult, with dignity, and leave the other partner room to do the same. Indeed, LEAD HER to do the same. And if a friendship can be maintained, by all means do so; you may not have enough compatibility to live together happily, but you may still have common interests that you can enjoy together. Think about that...

Not being able to live together happily is by no means an indication that you can’t have an enjoyable conversation or dinner from time to time, help each other with a project or hobby on occasion, or do any of the other things that friends do. It takes a lot more to live together than it does to visit, as the focus of a visit is much more narrowly defined and creates boundaries that protect you from the things that caused trouble while you were married – if you pay attention to them, that is.

Don’t ever let things fall into the context or perspective of who is or isn’t good enough for the other. It has nothing to do with that. People are who and what they are, and have spent a lifetime becoming so. Thinking that you can or should be “good enough” to induce someone else to change for your sake that which they would not change for their own sake is foolish, arrogant to the point of being narcissistic, and just plain childish!

(Pay attention, Ladies, in case you’re thinking that you’re going to rebuild your man as you want him. If you do manage to accomplish it, you won’t respect him precisely because you were able to change him. A man who can’t stand up TO you can’t stand up FOR you, right? The attitude that "he should love me enough to change for me," has broken more women's hearts than men ever could.)

Admit that there have been problems, and that those problems have been caused by the two of you having too many fundamental differences to be compatible. You gave it a good shot, you had some fun and good times, made some money and accumulated a few things, and have a few fond memories, but the stress of walking on eggshells trying to keep from tripping over your differences is killing you both.

You’re good people, just not good for each other, and if you are the type who needs to or enjoys being married, you need to get out and find someone whom you are good for and who is good for you, compatible with you, and whom you can enjoy living with as your natural self. Work together to divide the rewards of your combined efforts fairly and help each other get a fresh start by introducing each other to friends that are more like them. You may not be worth a plug nickel as husband and wife but may be great assets to each other in starting over. (This is all assuming that your problems are differences in your values, preferences, priorities, etc., and not that one of you is an abuser of some sort.)

There is no point in your life where being able to evaluate a relationship will not serve you well. You need to know yourself as well as your needs and desires, and you need to be with someone who can naturally fulfill those needs and desires while being fulfilled by you. That in turn requires that you know other peoples’ needs and desires with regard to you, does it not? You don’t want to enter a relationship in which you have no chance of fulfilling the other’s needs and desires, do you?

That means knowing before you get into a relationship what the relationship should look like if it’s good. It means knowing after you get into a relationship if it is going to work based on how well you meet each others’ needs and desires. It means being able to communicate factually and honestly to express those needs and desires to each other, as well as how well those needs and desires are being met.

Contrary to how it often appears, relationships and marriages very seldom fail after ten or twenty years or more. What really happens is that they fail at their inception due to bad choices and that failure isn’t conceded until years later, when every option has been exhausted and both partners have become miserable spending so much time and effort trying and failing. If you have a good foundation for a relationship, it’s not hard to tell; there’s little if anything fundamental and significant that you’d want to change about your partner, such as their values, political leanings, etc. You can talk and get along, and have probably just become a bit bored because attraction is waning. That’s fixable.

But…

If you’re in one of those relationships where the only place you get along is in the bedroom, and you find yourself fighting to have an excuse to make up because that’s the only part of your relationship that IS working, you have a serious problem, and believe it or not, there are people with whom you can get along both in and out of the bedroom.

And since so many of you have asked, yes, it is still a good idea to learn about attraction and try to create it for your partner even if you are breaking up. Being attractive is about being a leader, being smart, being fair, handling tough situations and being able to keep your sense of humor about you. Stirring up a little attraction in your partner as you are splitting up will help ease the transition for her and you both, because it tends to keep tempers at bay. It will help her to feel that you are being strong and supportive during this crisis, and make her feel good that you are making the effort to help her hold herself together emotionally while you go through the process together. Nothing bad can come of that for either of you, and may indeed help you to part friends instead of killing each other in a war that never had to be fought.

There you have it, the dark side of relationships and marriage. It is my sincere desire that you never have to go through a break-up, and that if worse comes to worst and you do have to go through one, that you can get through it with your dignity (and assets) intact and help each other to move on to a better life with someone better matched to yourselves by understanding what it is that you’re fighting: the basic human tendency to try to make the best of even the worst situation, not each other.

No matter where you are in your relationship, from looking for one to having been in one for 40 years or longer, there’s help waiting for you in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and it’s just a few mouse clicks away at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Go check it out, and get the straight story while you can; there are very few of us around who can and will give it to you, and your life is too short to fail to have and use it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Preparation: Key to Easy Success in Relationships and Marriage

It’s pretty easy to see that taking on any challenge fully prepared is infinitely better than doing so unprepared. This is just as true in relationships and marriage as it is in anything else. Were you prepared when you started? Are you prepared now? It’s never too late…

I’ve talked about preparedness before, but I got an e-mail from a reader that really drives the message home, and I want to share it with you. Meet Mark:

Hey David,

How's it going!

Well I'm doing pretty good indeed!

You know what, before, like a year ago, my girlfriend told me that she wasn't ready to move with me in a apartment. I wasn't either. After applying the information in your guide now she sure is! And I, also! She called me yesterday to ask me if I was ready to move in with her!

Like many of your readers, after reading your guide I now have much more respect for my woman. And I understand much more her needs, which is extremely important.

Here are a few things I've realized, summarized:

I've got to keep doing the things that attracted her to me at first.
I've got to display an alpha male personality in her presence.
I've got to improve my life in every way possible.
Finally, I've got to make her FEEL great about herself

David, thanks for everything, you’re the man!

Mark

Mark is one of many who is seeing the value of preparedness in relationships. When you’re unprepared, it shows, not just in your incompetence, but in your confidence level. And women can pick up on that from light years away.

And rightly so. It’s a defense mechanism. As I’ve shown you many times in the past, much of our courtship and relationship behavior is biologically driven and involves filtering mechanisms that have protected our ability to procreate and continue our existence at the top of the food chain for as long as we’ve been walking upright, or longer. They need to feel safe, especially in making an emotional investment in a relationship with us, and if they don’t, the relationship suffers.

And it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship, either. It doesn’t matter if you’re married, contemplating marriage, living together, dating steadily (committed or not), dating to find a relationship, dating for fun, or if the relationship is even of such a nature that se’xual contact might ever be an option or consideration. Women are just as protective of their lives and feelings with friends, family, coworkers, etc., as they are with men they may have some sort of se’xual contact with. And you should be, too! Think about that…

We’re talking about your life, are we not? Would you let a guy off the street act as a brain surgeon and start hacking at your head with a hammer, chisel, and table knife? Would you let a guy who didn’t know which part of your car was the engine start working on yours?

Would you employ the services of a doctor who didn’t speak the same language as you, so that information about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment could be exchanged? Would you put your retirement nest egg in the hands of a person who knew nothing about using it to build wealth for you?

Certainly not! Yet so many people will enter into human relationships without knowing the first thing about the corresponding issues of getting along with people, without understanding what makes men and women who they are, how they are alike and different, how to communicate effectively with them, how to know when something is broken and how to try to fix it.

And it continues to blow my ever-loving mind that these things are so crucial and so easy to learn and use, yet nobody seems to be insisting on getting this information until they’ve already screwed up, possibly several times. We spend years of our lives either chasing this information, begging people who purposely make it more complicated than it is to protect either their livelihood or the secret of their incompetence and ignorance, or consigning ourselves to the mistaken idea that knowing what we need to know about the opposite gender – and ourselves, for that matter – is some “great mystery of life” that we are doomed to never solve, and that having any kind of satisfying relationship is a matter of luck, fate, compromise, sacrifice, or some sort of divine intervention. A load of “bovine male fecal matter” if ever there was one.

The good news is that no matter how unprepared you are right now, you can get prepared, quickly and easily. And I’m talking hours, not days. Hell, I’ve had sex for longer than it will take you to get prepared, without any sort of chemical support or enhancement, and I’ll bet that if you go back to your teens or twenties, you probably have, too, so we’re really not talking about a lot of time here!

And even if it’s too late for this relationship, you can get prepared for the next one. Speaking of which, do you even know how to really tell when it’s over and no matter what you do she’s not coming back? Don’t you think you should know this before a conflict arises so that you don’t waste your life beating a dead horse? I know, and I can tell you. We’ll get to that in a minute…

Gross compatibility problems – personal values, goals, etc. – are the main reason that relationships fall apart, and about the only good reason to not try to put one back together, but when people get emotional they forget about reason and will sometimes go so far as to cut off their nose to spite their face. And believe it or not, sometimes a woman might just have a better grip on the situation than you do.

But either way, the only time that it’s not even worth your time to try to determine whether your relationship should be saved is when a woman puts up barriers to communication – court-issued restraining orders, moving to another town, changing her number and not giving you the new one, saying nothing at all to you except, “Don’t talk to me anymore,” having friends answer her phone to filter you out or directing you to her attorney for all communication.

That’s right. As long as she is still talking to you, even if she’s yelling and screaming at you, she’s emotionally engaged, and resolution is possible. You still have to determine if there is a sound basis for the relationship and act accordingly, but if you can make her feel safe in joining you in looking at everything and making that determination according to what’s best for both of you, she will calm down and work with you. But you have to be prepared for that, too.

You have to know enough about women in general to be able to also grasp the things that make her an individual. You have to be able to speak and listen to her in such a way that the message gets through and is interpreted correctly by both of you. You have to understand what part of her needs are the same as yours, different from yours, compatible with yours and in conflict with yours. And this is not something that you were born to do, else you wouldn’t wind up in such a predicament, but as the people whose letters I keep sharing with you clearly demonstrate, it can be learned. I can’t say that EVERYBODY is doing it, but I can say that EVERYBODY WHO IS USING WHAT IS IN MY BOOK is doing it, and I have their testimonials to back it up.

Yes, I said EVERYBODY. It’s really that good. And for the simplest of reasons: I was prepared to write it by gathering data from the source, a large group of women, and tested and refined that data by turning it over to the men in their lives to test on them. No opinions, no theories, no “branded methodology,” just the facts and a process for using them to quickly and easily set things right. And again, I have the testimonials of a lot of real people who had real problems to back it up.

So how about you? Do you want a piece of this action? Would you like to discuss something with your wife or girlfriend and know going in that even if the subject matter is touchy the two of you will be able to talk about and work something out instead of usual result of eye-rolling, shouts of “whatever!” as somebody leaves the room, and the accusations of “never listening” and “being a bitch” that always seem to come up? Would you like to go back to feeling like the woman in your life is a partner instead of an antagonist, or competitor?

The correct answer here is “yes!” by the way…

So go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get prepared for a relationship that makes you both happy. It certainly beats hiding at the office or at “happy hour” somewhere to minimize the time you have to spend at home, wouldn’t you think?

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Time Is On YOUR Side When Saving a Relationship or Marriage

The rules for creating and maintaining attraction can be slightly to radically different when moving from the “first encounter” scenario (like bumping into a stranger or trying to pick up a stranger in a bar) to a committed relationship. One such rule is the one governing your “window of opportunity,” which is as short as a few seconds when meeting someone new but can be months long when trying to rekindle the fire in a mature but stale or damaged relationship, because the woman would rather have her partner being a “naughty hottie” than being bored or having an affair; she has a vested interest in giving him a chance to enliven the relationship.

I received an interesting letter over the weekend from an achiever who has not yet bought “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but has subscribed to this newsletter, has bought materials from some of the dating gurus like John Alanis and David DeAngelo, and subscribes to their newsletters, and has noticed a discrepancy between my material and theirs:

Hi David,

I bought books and CD’s from John Alanis, David DeAngelo, and others, and subscribe to everybody’s newsletters trying to find a way to get things back into gear here at home. After 6 years of marriage, things have been in a downhill slide for awhile, and it’s obvious that there is an attraction problem, and they’re all saying that once attraction has died it’s nearly impossible, if not entirely impossible, to rekindle, yet you guarantee I can do it. What am I missing?”

Buddy G.

Well, Buddy, it’s pretty simple. They’re absolutely right, and so is what I’m telling you. The difference is in the context, particularly the timeframe. Remember, they are talking about creating attraction and keeping it going in order to ESTABLISH a relationship. In the dating world, there’s no commitment yet formed and nothing invested; you’re on strict probation before you ever approach her and introduce yourself, and at your first slip-up she’s gone because there are hundreds of other men in her world still left to inspect. She has no motivation to wait around for somebody exhibiting the same nice-guy, loser behavior that every other nice loser exhibits when she could be hooking up with a guy who “gets it” and trips her attraction triggers, giving her that feeling women will kill for.

HOWEVER! As you’ll find in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” the rules of attraction in committed relationships are often quite different from those of attracting someone new. In your case, and the case of anyone in a committed relationship that has survived long enough to get a little stale and boring or damaged, you’ve already made the grade and fallen from grace.

In the meantime, ties have been built, maybe kids, mortgage, and other commitments and/or motivations for further commitment have come into the picture, and it’s to your mutual advantage to put things back together. Nobody likes break-ups or divorces, even when they come out ahead, because they almost always entail fighting, complications, and extreme changes in the way you live. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when that happens. ;-)

Look closely at the two situations, the requirements of the participants, and think with me for a minute. The “chick in the bar” would have no reason to give you a second look or thought if you said the wrong thing because there will be at least a hundred other opportunities for her that same evening, but the woman with whom you’ve been partnered, in whatever capacity, for months or years has a vested interest in the relationship!

She wants you to straighten up because having you “back in true form” (read “that attractive stud muffin you used to be, and even more so if you can do it”) is much more enjoyable and far less scary than dropping back into the dating world and having to go back to defending herself from perverts, stalkers, geeks, losers, liars, philanderers, and others who would either use, hurt, or bore her.

(And if there are kids involved, her drive to protect her children from a destabilized environment will make her want you to work with her to work things out ten times more than if there were no kids!)

Think about that! If you screwed up with the chick in the bar and she would say, “What for?” when you asked if you could try another date and attempt to make up for your transgression, the woman who has been in your life and enjoyed it would usually try to help you get it done! (To wit, the last several times I have checked, one third of my book sales have been to women!) She wants that feeling back, and would do about anything to have it back, and her choices are to:

a) leave you and find somebody else who gives it to her, or
b) don’t leave you, just find a “toy boy” and cheat
c) wait for you to get it done
d) help you get it done so she can have it back faster!

Now, which one do you think she’s most likely to choose if she has a choice of the four options above? Where most men screw up is only offering her “a” and “b,” and a few more will offer her “c”. You have before you the option of a book that, according to a great many people, will give you the knowledge you need to get the job done if you’ll just do it, and if your wife knows you’re genuinely trying she’ll help!

Seriously, if you were trying to date this woman, your chances of success would be pretty slim at best, but you’re married to her, and she doesn’t want to have a boring marriage any more than you do, nor does she want her whole world turned upside-down by a divorce unless that’s her only option. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Read it. Study it. Learn from it. Have a laugh or two along the way, too. And do it NOW, because attraction is a double-edged sword; the only thing that can keep her from responding to you when you straighten up and act like a man is if ANOTHER MAN creates intense attraction for her before you do, in which case attraction still wins, as always, but it wins the fight for the other guy, not you. But you can be certain that where women are concerned, attraction will be the deciding factor the vast majority of the time, no matter who wields it, so proceed in earnest.

If you get through the evaluation section and you know that you’re with the right woman, get her to read it with you. That way she’ll know that you’re trying to make things better for both of you and that the positive changes that she’s about to see in your behavior are because you’re committed to making things better with her, not because you have a new girlfriend making you feel sexy again. (Yes, they really do that!) Get it done, and get on with your new, sexy, exciting life with your wife. Why? Because it’s a whole lot easier and better than being bored or risking getting caught in an affair. You love her, so treat her like you love her! ‘Nuff said…

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Forbidden Knowledge to Help YOUR Relationship and Marriage

A gift, from me to you, disclosing a lot of the “forbidden knowledge” about what women really want from men, and something even more important, what they respond to without realizing it!

Today I’m just going to issue a quick reminder, but it’s one that you’ll find useful. I’ve compiled another free report, called “What Women REALLY Want,” and it’s composed of eleven of my favorite e-mail lessons on the subject. Some of my peers are pretty angry that I’m giving it away, because it’s 50 pages long, full of real information, and makes some of their primary products look pretty weak by comparison.

But I don’t care!

You, my readers, are a great group, and with the holidays coming and my new web-site and shopping cart operational I’m feeling generous! You can get your copy immediately as a free download and since it’s a subject that has been erroneously considered “forbidden knowledge” for as long as any of us can remember, feel free to forward it to your friends, post it on file-sharing networks, or distribute it in any other manner you can think of. It will help your friends, or at least entertain them, and it will help get the word out as well. The bigger this group gets, the more I can do for you and the less it’s going to cost you.

Links to this report are embedded in the newsletter and blog templates, but many of you new readers may not have found them. I’ve posted over a thousand newsletters, some multiple times, and my archive is getting admittedly large. So bringing all these lessons together like this in a targeted, hand-picked collection seems to help a lot of people see situations more clearly. You can never start fixing problems too early when you know how to fix them, so make good use of it and spread it around!

While you’re at it, go ahead and grab my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, too. It’s the same kind of thing, about 45 pages of great information on how problems evolve into break-ups, often unnecessarily, and how to reverse them, and a few paragraphs about my book, "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" as well, which you can find at http://www.makingherhappy.com.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Mistakes Create Distractions, and Distractions Create Mistakes, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

Sometimes what looks like the easiest thing to do for a relationship problem ends up creating more trouble than you can imagine. Let’s take a look at some options and what really makes sense…

I got a note from my buddy Ken once that I’m sure many of you will find amusing, especially if you noticed the same mistake he did:

Hi David

I found it interesting reading the header on this email. I have read in the past that one of your pet peeves are emails that you get with improper punctuation and sentence structure. It is a pet peeve of mine also. So when I read the header of this email I had to chuckle.

I’m in a mood to bust chops of anyone who deserves it today, so I figured I’d start with you. No hard feelings, it’s all in fun my friend.

By the way, my wife is moving back in at the end of September.

Cheers

(I did this last year. For those of you who weren’t around or didn’t notice, the title read “What Is Does Your Partner REALLY Keep You Around?” but was supposed to read “Why Does Your Partner Really Keep You Around?” Let’s look at what happened, because there’s a lesson in it…)

My reply:

Hi Ken!

What can I say? BUSTED!!! LOL! I started using one title (What Is Your Partner’s Motive for Keeping You Around) and decided to change it to “Why Does Your Partner REALLY Keep You Around,” and got interrupted by a phone call. Not an excuse by any means, but rather an example of what happens when you’re distracted. Can you imagine the mistakes that we make and never find out about while we’re having relationship troubles? Yikes! In fact, I think we just scored the topic for tomorrow’s newsletter! Thanks for the inspiration!

Congratulations on your progress! Keep me posted!
David

So think with me here for a minute; have you thought about the distractions relationship problems can bring, and the problems those distractions create?

What happens when you have trouble? It makes you bored, depressed, nervous, fearful, frustrated, maybe feeling dejected, rejected, disconnected, etc. All of these feelings require huge amounts of mental and emotional energy, especially for a man, since we are wired for problem-solving, right?

What’s the most popular quick fix? An affair, right? But does it fix anything? Maybe it relieves some of the negative feelings you have about your wife, or yourself, but they simply get replaced with other distractions, don’t they?

During a new affair, you feel relieved, thrilled, excited, etc., which make you daydream about meeting up with your lover, and juggling your schedule and telling all the lies to cover everything has you pulled in too many directions at once, causing things to fall through the cracks. And it doesn’t end there, does it?

If the affair ages, you hit that 2-3 month mark where a woman starts wanting to know the relationship is going somewhere, you know, wanting to have “the relationship talk,” and now the resentment starts setting in. You resent your partner for leaving you hanging, and resent your lover for the pressure to commit, and all that resentment mixes with new fears that start to pop up, like will the lover get impatient and expose the affair, or blackmail you in revenge for not committing to her if you break it off. Right?

What is all this commotion and distraction costing you? How many blunders have you made while you weren’t at the top of your game because you were distracted by a fight you had before you left the house, wondering if it was going to continue when you got back home, or if there was even anybody there waiting to continue it? I’ve known a lot more guys than I care to count who have lost jobs, trashed careers, made trading errors that bankrupted them, and even a few who ended up being sued into bankruptcy or in jail over their choices while distracted by a fight or an affair. We’ve all seen a suicide or murder in the newspapers over this same thing as well, right?

So how well do you think those affairs really worked for them in the end?

Guys, I’m going to ask a huge favor of those of you who have had affairs. I want each of you to go to Hotmail, Yahoo, G-mail, or any other place you can think of and create an anonymous e-mail account with bogus information that can’t be traced to you, and send me anything you care to write about your affairs without so much as initials or a nickname so that we can save those who have never been through one the hassle and risk without reward. E-mail your response to support@makingherhappy.com and then delete the account and clear your browser history, Internet cache, etc., so nothing can be traced back to you. I want to show the men (and women) who haven’t yet made the mistake of an affair what can go wrong and what they can expect when they get into one. Your experience could save more than one person the pain of repeating your mistake, and they will appreciate it.

So what SHOULD you do when things start downhill, or even reach the bottom of the hill?

The first thing to do is see if the relationship is fixable. There are problems like incompatible values and life goals that are not fixable, and others like poor communication and lost attraction that are easily fixable. Believe it or not, the biggest bonehead that will ever be on this mailing list will be able to make this determination accurately within an hour or less, depending on how fast he reads and how long it takes him to think something over. It’s crystal clear when you know what to look for and want an honest answer enough to put your emotions aside and look at the truth for a minute, and we’ll get to that in a minute.

Based on that evaluation, you either get out of the relationship or fix it. Getting out can be achieved as friends just as easily as mortal combatants, and probably easier, for most people, but less frequently because most people don’t stop to realize that those really big problems like compatibility issues are not value judgments, but just simple reality, the result of not asking the right questions when you first got together in most cases, and getting out to have a chance at a happy life is a favor to both of you, not an insult as it is usually taken, like tossing out yesterday’s trash. But you have to know how to talk about it, and we’ll get to that in a minute as well.

If you have the foundation for a good relationship in terms of compatibility, shared values, etc., and have just fallen in a rut or have never communicated well enough to know how to excite each other, have fun together, speak to and listen to each other in a way where there are seldom if ever any kind of understandings, YOU GRAB THE BULL BY THE HORNS AND FIX THE RELATIONSHIP! And guys, it’s not just easy to do once you know how things work, it’s also a lot of fun! What?

Yes, it’s fun to learn be able to understand a woman. It’s incredible fun to see the things that you’ve seen a million times before and know what they really mean this time. It’s fun to know that you’re probably the only guy you know who knows everything you know!

It’s fun to be able to flip her attraction triggers on and off like a light switch, dialing the attraction up, then easing back a bit to tease her and let her savor the anticipation before ramping it up higher. And you know it has to be fun to watch her getting more and more excited and anxious until she can’t wait any longer and pounces on YOU! I can tell you from personal experience and that of many of my readers that there is a lot of fun to be had on this planet, and that certainly ranks in the top few!

So yes, there is a clear path to follow: Evaluate, and then either acknowledge your mistakes and move beyond them to try again in a different relationship or acknowledge your mistakes and remedy them within your existing relationship. In the end, it’s really that simple over 99% of the time.

Results require action, action requires a plan, and a good plan that brings successful action requires solid information. If you’re ready to be a man and get things in your life back on track, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started. Life is short, and it’s getting shorter by the second, so make what you have left of it count.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

What to Do When She Gets Bored: Saving Yourself, Your Partner, and Your Relationship and Marriage

Boredom is every woman’s arch-nemesis; it literally poisons them and threatens their life and sanity. How can you spot it, and what can you do about it? You’d better know, because left to her own devices, you may not be part of the solution, or if you are, you may be wishing you weren’t!

When I was researching "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" women’s biggest and loudest complaint about their men could be summed up in a single word: “BORING.” It’s the last word you ever want to hear a woman use to describe you in any interaction with them, no matter who they are or the nature of the relationship.

I received a letter that I want to share with you, because in one respect it’s sad and in another it’s downright annoying. Meet Dan:

Dear David,

I am writing this letter in hopes you can help me. It seems of late that my wife is not as interested in me as she used to be. I have tried all types of things to get her back to where we were a year ago when we got married, but nothing seems to work. I feel neglected, and it’s starting to feel like she is getting bored with me. The tone in her voice is different and sometimes she makes me feel like I am just a toy to be used when she needs one.

I want her back the way it was when we had fun and I was not worried about upsetting her with what I had to say. I love this woman in every way possible and can not imagine my life without her in it. It’s just like I never say the right thing to her anymore. Could you please tell me what I could be doing wrong?

Thank you for your time,
Dan

Yes, Dan, I can, but before I do, I want to ask you a question: I get letters literally every day from people who read this newsletter and especially those who are using "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" talking about the great results they get and how fast they get them, and how their wives no longer see them as a boring dolt, but as exciting and fun. You’ve been subscribing for several months now. Do you know why are you not getting the same results?

The short answer is because you’re not really reading these newsletters, which describe all these problems to you, and you’ve not yet read and used "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" in your relationship to learn how to recognize and fix these problems. I give more advice on this subject than any other, and you haven’t been paying attention. Now your situation has become critical, so listen up while you still have a chance to fix this.

Your wife is indeed bored, and if you’ve been reading even a small percentage of the newsletters I’ve been sending you every day you know that she needs you to do something about it. That’s your job as her husband. Take responsibility and get it done.

You should also know by now that she has been trying to communicate precisely what she needs to you, but because you and she are not wired with the same biological communications circuits, you’ve not been hearing her, and she’s thinking that you’ve heard her and chosen to ignore her. That’s a bad problem, and the reason that she is now making you feel neglected.

In addition, you should know that what she is needing for you to do to break her boredom is to create attraction for her, to give her that “swept off her feet” feeling from time to time, which gets her neurotransmitters, endorphins, hormones, and everything else in balance, saving her from that antsy torment that causes women to seek and create drama to substitute for the attraction you are failing to create.

The other thing that you should know by now is that if you don’t do something about this, she will, and at best, you’ll find yourself dealing with the spill-over from the drama she creates and at worst you’ll be dealing with affairs and even divorce that are used in a last-ditch effort to communicate to you that either you shape up or one of you is shipping out, if she gives you that last chance; many women will just divorce a man outright without a second thought once you let them go this far if another man creates attraction for them.

Obviously, the thing to do to fix all this is to go ahead and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and put it to work. Depending on how fast you read, the average person can get through it the first time in 2-4 hours, and it’s a book that you’ll want to re-read periodically as your experience base broadens and your skills develop.

In its pages, you will learn how to evaluate yourself, your wife, and your relationship, making it easier for you to know what’s broken before you start trying to fix things, or if you and your wife are so mismatched that fixing it will never be possible. You’ll learn how she communicates, so that you can finally pick up on all those signals that you’ve been missing all your life. You’ll know what makes women tick in general, and what they want, and with your newly-developed communications skills, will know your wife so well that she’ll describe you to her friends as “he always just knows what I want.”

And finally, you’ll learn about attraction, what creates it and what kills it, and that because it is a biological, not logical, process, you will always be able to give your wife that “swept off her feet” feeling that keeps the two of you intimate and keeps your life fun and exciting, both in and out of the bedroom, and save her from her arch-enemy, boredom.

So there it is, Dan (and YOU!), all spelled out. All that’s left for you to do is go to http://www.makingherhappy.com, download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and put it to work for you, because it’s the best thing you as a man can do for your marriage, and one of the most fun things you’ll do in your entire life to boot!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Ex's: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of a Former Relationship and Marriage

Depending on circumstances, ex’s can be a valuable asset, a nightmare, and worst of all, an attraction-killer to your present partner. Let’s explore…

As you may remember from the bio on the MakingHerHappy.com web site, a lot of people have called me “Doc” since childhood, not because am a medical doctor, psychiatrist, dentist, veterinarian, or college professor, but because I’m the guy that makes whatever ails you go away, no matter what it seems to be.

Hence, I spend a large part of my life hearing other people’s problems and providing solutions for them, and one of the problems I hear about most are “ex’s” – ex-husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, employers, etc. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but how people become “ex’s” in your life and how you deal with them once they do says a lot about you, and we need to talk about some of the things it can say, because some of it is really good, and some of it is really, REALLY bad.

Let’s start with the worst case first, and work our way to the better ones. The worst case is the ex that became an ex because war was declared, and you got hurt and have never gotten over it. You talk about the relationship and the break-up all the time, even though it’s been years ago. Have you noticed how people react?

Have you noticed that they tend to “glaze over,” look at their watches, roll their eyes, and suddenly remember somewhere else they need to be or rather aggressively change subjects? If not, open your eyes, because they do exactly that, and it’s costing you. People don’t like hearing the same lament over and over, and they don’t like being around people who harbor pain, depression, grudges, etc. It’s a major attraction-killer, and labels you as a wuss who can’t deal with life and move on.

Face it, everybody goes through at least one bad relationship in their life, and they get over it. They learn how to better choose a girlfriend, wife, friend, business partner, employer, or whatever, and they move on to have a better life. If you’re not doing it, the only thing keeping you from it is YOU. How you respond to past events is entirely YOUR CHOICE! Make the choice to accept reality and whatever responsibility is yours, stand up, dust off your pants, and step forward. If it was so traumatic that you need professional help, get it, and get it done. Life’s too short to spend it looking backward instead of moving forward.

The next worst case isn’t much better. It’s the dependent that you can’t quite get rid of. The ex-wife or lover that you’re constantly having to bail out of a jam that they stupidly chose to put themselves in, the child who is well into adulthood that you keep bailing out, even though a person their age usually has a family, mortgage, and established a career, the ex-employer who either fired you and continues to call on you for help or the one you left that keeps leaning on you instead of hiring a competent replacement, any of which causes you to complain and be distracted when you’re around people who currently really do matter to you and want to enjoy your company.

They don’t like listening to you repeat the same laments and frustrations any more that you want to hear it out of them. It labels you as a push-over, another breed of wuss who just can’t say “no,” no matter how badly “no” needs to be said. You guessed it, another major attraction killer.

People who don’t want to be partners of some sort and share life with you, whether it’s a wife, girlfriend, buddy, employer, business partner, offspring, or whatever, don’t deserve to have you sacrificing yourself to their incompetence, delinquency, etc. Altruists around the world are cringing as I say this, but you know it’s true. Your life is too short and too precious to allow yourself to be bled dry by a bunch of parasites who won’t let go of your jugular vein. Let them keep themselves instead of sucking you dry, Brother. Do you understand?

There are good people around you more than willing to share life with you, no matter who or where you are, so why cheat yourself and them of the great things you can do -- and BE -- together while throwing your life’s energy away to these parasites? You’ll find that when you do this, all you will attract are more parasites, as well as a few predators, because good, competent, independent people will shy away, not wanting your problem overload to spill over on them, while parasites and predators will be watching for a sucker like you to come along and latch on as soon as you give them an opening.

The other kind of ex to which I want to call your attention is the only good kind to have, the kind with whom you have shared something for awhile, and as you grew apart or found yourself at odds, you responsibly recognized that you were evolving in two different directions or at incompatible paces or that you started a relationship without sufficient compatibility to sustain it and you went your separate ways on friendly terms. This would be the employer who keeps you in their Rolodex as a potential consultant and gives you a good employment referral (not just a reference, but calls up somebody in their own network to help get you placement), and to whom you would refer competent sources of help, materials, or whatever.

It would also be the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend who steers opportunities your way, and to whom you steer good quality people. Maybe you even double date from time to time to help each other meet new people, steer contacts to each others’ businesses, etc. This is highly attractive behavior to all but the most insecure of women, because it says that you can accept responsibility for your actions and decisions, keep a level head and reach workable agreements with people, and won’t be a needy wuss who hangs onto them if things don’t work out for the long term. It says that you’re strong and of good character, that you focus on the value in people, not their flaws. I don’t know about you, but that’s precisely the kind of thing that I want to be known for, and consequently, am known for.

Fights are neither necessary nor desirable to resolve a bad relationship of any kind. At 46 years old I’ve never been sued, and every conflict I’ve engaged in during my adult life has been settled in a logical and equitable manner by mutual consent, including all former marriages, contracts, employment, and customer relationships. I know of nobody that I’ve ever dealt with that I couldn’t call up right now and have a good conversation, and probably find some way of stirring up a business deal or some kind of fun. It sounds like quite an accomplishment, but while it may be unusual, it has never been difficult, and should not be difficult for you, either. Why?

Because all it takes is the willingness and respect to deal squarely with those around you, looking for what you can accomplish together instead of what you can cheat each other out of. Being known for being such a person makes you attractive to everyone in all respects, and when it comes to women, they want a man who will take the lead, act responsibly and fairly, keep a positive attitude, and keep things moving for them, not somebody looking for every possible way to screw them, cheat them, lie to them, etc. Sounds rather like an employer, does it not?

They also want someone to share life with, who knows when to say, ‘Yes,” or, “No.” They evaluate men using an iron-clad rule: “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me, and if you can’t stand up for ME, you won’t stand up for US.” They don’t mind you sharing yourself with others, moderately, as long as you save the best part for them, which in a good relationship is a very fair trade for the nurturing, loyalty, and many other things a loving wife will give a good man who’s making her happy.

Knowing how to evaluate and maintain a good relationship at home, how to communicate with people, and how to create attraction in the woman you love has far-reaching effects, much farther-reaching than you might ever imagine before doing it. Look around you. Those men who are happy at home are happy at work as well, and they have solid relationships with all the people in their life. They know how to choose good relationships, how to communicate with people, and how to be the kind of guy that people want to be around.

You’ll find that when you do the things described in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," the rest of your life will start improving at the same pace that things improve at home. Your confidence level increases, your communications skills improve, and you become more fun, interesting, competent, and generally enjoyable to have around. You can keep putting it off because you don’t know if you can do it, or you can accept the fact that a lot have people have already done it, many of which may not be as sharp as you, and you can make just as big a difference in your life as they have, if not even bigger. All it takes is to claim your birthright as a man and BE a man.

Download this fascinating and highly-effective book at http://www.makingherhappy.com, it’s guaranteed, it’s fun, you can afford it, and quite frankly, you probably can’t afford to not do it, at least not if you realize just how short life really is and don’t want to spend it watching everybody else enjoying it more than you do. Join us, right now!

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

How Much Is Too Much? Rings, Gifts, Appreciation, and Predators in Relationships and Marriage

Where do you cross the line from an appropriate gift to a red flag? Where does she cross the line from a woman of taste to a gold-digging abuser? It’s not hard to tell if you know what to look for…do YOU?

I get quite a few questions about specific gifts, how to choose them, what is appropriate, etc., but most aren’t really questions that make for good copy for this newsletter (because the topic has already been covered pretty thoroughly in previous editions) and are answered privately, but there is one issue that came up that is pretty sticky, that of engagement rings.

One of my friends has been dating a woman for nearly two years, and finally decided it was time to pop the question, and she said, “No!” – immediately, emphatically, and with conviction. Why?

Because he had made two mistakes. The first was in buying and presenting the ring before she answered, a blatant wussy maneuver if ever there was one, and unfortunately a very common mistake. Guys, think for a minute: If you have to buy a woman’s acceptance of your marriage proposal with a piece of jewelry, what does that say about each of you?

First, it says that you don’t think you’re worth marrying and are trying to buy your way into her life. It also says that you think that she can be bought, which is one whale of an insult to any woman of character. However, in this case, making this mistake probably saved my buddy’s life, because she rejected him due to his second mistake, which in truth was no mistake at all…

She rejected him because the ring wasn’t expensive enough! She flatly told him that if he couldn’t present her with at least a two-carat stone he could forget it. He was heartbroken when he called, thinking he’d been a fool and had blown the best thing that could ever happen to him. I beg to differ!

It was actually the greatest thing he could have done, because she proved in that one simple statement that she could be bought, wanted to be bought, and was high-priced and high-maintenance. I asked him to describe their history to me and it was just as you would expect.

They met in a bar, he bought all the drinks, the dinner later, paid for everything every time they went out, ended up buying her a car when hers broke down, ended up making all the deposits and down payments on a new apartment when she was evicted for not paying her rent, refused to talk to him days and even weeks at a time if he showed up without a satisfactory gift, etc. He was calling me to find out how big a ring to try to buy to salvage the situation. Can you guess what I told him?

I told him to not bother, because she was a gold-digging parasite who had bled him for two years already, and that if he didn’t believe me, she would gladly prove it to him. Just don’t call her, and when she calls, tell her that he didn’t want to talk to her because he had realized that she was just asking for too much. Her response would be one of the following:

1. Indignation, to try to press his buttons and guilt-trip him into reversing himself,

2. Abuse, to try to shift him into approval-seeking mode and get him to try to buy her approval,

3. Complete capitulation without discussion, as she realized that she pushed too hard and scrambled to try to regain control of her meal ticket.

He agreed after considerable discussion, and she didn’t make him wait long. She called two days later wanting to know why he hadn’t called. He responded as instructed, and she went berserk, first yelling at him about how he didn’t appreciate all she’d done for him in the last two years, which pretty much came down to being late every time he was to pick her up and giving him something other than his retirement account to stuff money into, as there had been no sex in months and it turned out he’d asked her to marry him in hopes of reigniting their sex life. (If I had known this was happening I could have helped long ago, but guys don’t easily talk about these problems with other guys.)

He pointed out to her that the relationship had been terribly one-sided and that in fact he had done a whole lot more for her than she had for him, and she shifted gears and went into the pity ploy, talking about all her hard times and how if he really loved her like he said he did he would have tried to make it up to her with a bigger ring. (Guilt trip!) He responded that those problems had been the result of her own choices, many of those choices against his advice, and that he was tired of paying for her to have the luxury of making bad choices.

Right on cue, she burst into tears, started begging, promising that she’d change, there’d be sex every day, and it would be better than it ever was, and all that nonsense. Just too predictable for words.

Now, most bad women will not go into a melt-down like that. She was betting large holding a trash hand and he called her bluff. Most bad women would only go through one of those three little dances, not all three, but apparently she was an amateur. Some women actually hate men so badly that they want nothing but to control them and bleed them dry. Others are just losers who drift from bank account to bank account…er…I mean, man to man, draining them dry along the way.

Fortunately, these are a minority, and as you can see, or are about to see, pretty easily spotted. Good women want a good man, and want to share love, life, victories, celebrations, tender moments, sex, and even bad moments, not as a parasite or predator, but as a partner. They are driven to nurture and commune, not consume. Thankfully, they greatly outnumber the bad ones.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while or have your own copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you’ve seen me post quite a few red flags, especially in the book. Here’s a list of the biggies:

1. A woman who makes demands about gifts, especially if she isn’t contributing to the household income, and doubly especially if she insists on choosing her own gifts, especially her own engagement ring, or makes sure that you get a message through one of her friends about anything except the size of her ring finger (not the size of the diamond, but the diameter of the ring, i.e., size 7.5, not some number of carets)

2. A woman who is frequently in trouble, and expecting you to bail her out

3. A substance abuser whose abuse is having an obviously negative impact on their life yet defends their substance abuse in any way

4. A woman who seems to always be having and complaining about problems but never doing anything about them

5. A woman who has all the trappings of wealth but no visible means of support, i.e., expensive clothes, car, etc., but expecting you to pay for everything (Women of means generally insist at least on going Dutch-treat and often prefer to pick up the check themselves to demonstrate that they are independent women of good quality.)

6. A woman who constantly acts helpless, especially if she is also overly-flirtatious with everyone at all times, obviously seeking attention and assistance.

As I said, this list is not comprehensive, it’s just the biggies; there are a lot more in my book and in past issues of this newsletter, available in the archive (see the link below) or past posts on my blog. If you’re currently in a relationship with one of these women, face it, you’ve screwed the pooch, and you need to face reality: she’s not going to get any better, and you’re going to continue to foot the bill, financially, emotionally, etc., for her indiscretions, until you make the choice to stop and move on.

There are a lot of good women in the world, luckily far more good ones than bad ones. Identifying them isn’t that hard when you know what to look for, and getting along with them is really pretty easy when you understand how to communicate with them and what they want, out of life and out of you. Luckily for you, there is a single source where you can learn everything you need to know to do exactly that, to have a great relationship with a great woman, even if you have to get a bad one out of the way first. Best of all, you can afford it!

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It costs less than dinner for two at a good restaurant, and is guaranteed to work. Download it now and start putting your life back on track, because life’s too short to live it doing anything less than enjoying it.

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Time Is On Your Side in Fixing Ailing Relationships and Marriage

The rules for creating and maintaining attraction can be slightly to radically different when moving from the “first encounter” scenario (like bumping into a stranger or trying to pick up a stranger in a bar) to a committed relationship. One such rule is the one governing your “window of opportunity,” which is as short as a few seconds when meeting someone new but can be months long when trying to rekindle the fire in a mature but stale or damaged relationship, because the woman would rather have her partner being a “naughty hottie” than being bored or having an affair; she has a vested interest in giving him a chance to enliven the relationship.

I received an interesting letter over the weekend from an achiever who has not yet bought “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but has subscribed to this newsletter, has bought materials from some of the dating gurus like John Alanis and David DeAngelo, and subscribes to their newsletters, and has noticed a discrepancy between my material and theirs:

Hi David,

I bought books and CD’s from John Alanis, David DeAngelo, and others, and subscribe to everybody’s newsletters trying to find a way to get things back into gear here at home. After 6 years of marriage, things have been in a downhill slide for awhile, and it’s obvious that there is an attraction problem, and they’re all saying that once attraction has died it’s nearly impossible, if not entirely impossible, to rekindle, yet you guarantee I can do it. What am I missing?”

Buddy G.

Well, Buddy, it’s pretty simple. They’re absolutely right, and so is what I’m telling you. The difference is in the context, particularly the timeframe. Remember, they are talking about creating attraction and keeping it going in order to ESTABLISH a relationship. In the dating world, there’s no commitment yet formed and nothing invested; you’re on strict probation before you ever approach her and introduce yourself, and at your first slip-up she’s gone because there are hundreds of other men in her world still left to inspect. She has no motivation to wait around for somebody exhibiting the same nice-guy, loser behavior that every other nice loser exhibits when she could be hooking up with a guy who “gets it” and trips her attraction triggers, giving her that feeling women will kill for.

HOWEVER! As you’ll find in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” the rules of attraction in committed relationships are often quite different from those of attracting someone new. In your case, and the case of anyone in a committed relationship that has survived long enough to get a little stale and boring or damaged, you’ve already made the grade and fallen from grace.

In the meantime, ties have been built, maybe kids, mortgage, and other commitments and/or motivations for further commitment have come into the picture, and it’s to your mutual advantage to put things back together. Nobody likes break-ups or divorces, even when they come out ahead, because they almost always entail fighting, complications, and extreme changes in the way you live. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when that happens. ;-)

Look closely at the two situations, the requirements of the participants, and think with me for a minute. The “chick in the bar” would have no reason to give you a second look or thought if you said the wrong thing because there will be at least a hundred other opportunities for her that same evening, but the woman with whom you’ve been partnered, in whatever capacity, for months or years has a vested interest in the relationship!

She wants you to straighten up because having you “back in true form” (read “that attractive stud muffin you used to be, and even more so if you can do it”) is much more enjoyable and far less scary than dropping back into the dating world and having to go back to defending herself from perverts, stalkers, geeks, losers, liars, philanderers, and others who would either use, hurt, or bore her.

(And if there are kids involved, her drive to protect her children from a destabilized environment will make her want you to work with her to work things out ten times more than if there were no kids!)

Think about that! If you screwed up with the chick in the bar and she would say, “What for?” when you asked if you could try another date and attempt to make up for your transgression, the woman who has been in your life and enjoyed it would usually try to help you get it done! (To wit, the last several times I have checked, one third of my book sales have been to women!) She wants that feeling back, and would do about anything to have it back, and her choices are to:

a) leave you and find somebody else who gives it to her, or
b) don’t leave you, just find a “toy boy” and cheat
c) wait for you to get it done
d) help you get it done so she can have it back faster!

Now, which one do you think she’s most likely to choose if she has a choice of the four options above? Where most men screw up is only offering her “a” and “b,” and a few more will offer her “c”. You have before you the option of buying a book that, according to a while bunch of people, will give you the knowledge you need to get the job done if you’ll just do it, and if your wife knows you’re genuinely trying she’ll help!

Seriously, if you were trying to date this woman, I’d say forget it, but you’re married to her, and she doesn’t want to have a boring marriage any more than you do. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and get your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Read it. Study it. Learn from it. Have a laugh or two along the way, too. And do it NOW, because attraction is a double-edged sword; the only thing that can keep her from responding to you when you straighten up and act like a man is if ANOTHER MAN creates intense attraction for her before you do, in which case attraction still wins, as always, but it wins the fight for the other guy, not you. But you can be certain that where women are concerned, attraction will be the deciding factor the vast majority of the time, no matter who wields it, so proceed in earnest.

If you get through the evaluation section and you know that you’re with the right woman, get her to read it with you. That way she’ll know that you’re trying to make things better for both of you and that the positive changes that she’s about to see in your behavior are because you’re committed to making things better with her, not because you have a new girlfriend making you feel sexy again. (Yes, they really do that!) Get it done, and get on with your new, sexy, exciting life with your wife. Why? Because it’s a whole lot easier and better than being bored or risking getting caught in an affair. You love her, so treat her like you love her! ‘Nuff said…

In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham

Winning Her Back From Somebody Else: The Holy Grail of Saving Relationships and Marriage?

What do you do when the woman you love is with somebody else?

I’ve been talking with some people at another web site that tries to help people out of divorces and I’ve been getting a huge number of questions from them over the last few weeks. The most common one by far is “My wife left and is now seeing someone else (or is having an affair and refuses to stop). How can I win her back?” No big surprise, right? Do you want to know what IS surprising?

It’s not the answer to the question by a long-shot; indeed, the possible answers to that question are few and simple: