Too Much of a Good Thing Will Kill Your Relationship or 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 this has 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 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 with the male, typically limited communications structure we are born with, 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 merely a very revealing 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 a little 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. We’re biologically wired to seek status quo, situation normal, a stable, threat-free environment because we’ve evolved as protectors for a hundred thousand years or more.

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 emotional energy 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, their sharing of our need to have a calm, stable environment; wrong answer! They cooperate because they are social, and are expecting something in exchange for their cooperation, not because they enjoy being bored.

They are also, intentionally or not, following your lead, waiting for you to get around to the fun and exciting part. 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. And when men do it and it doesn’t work out, they think, “Well, that ungrateful bitch! I gave her unlimited supply of her favorite thing and this is the thanks I get?!” No, Dude. You’re not getting thanks at all. And after ruining her enjoyment of one of her favorite things, be it a food, an activity, a sexual position, or whatever, you shouldn’t be expecting thanks, either.

That’s right. 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. Contrary to popular belief, most women (and all the good ones) like a challenge, and like to earn the reward of meeting that challenge, even and especially when the challenge is seducing their husband.

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. Just ask one. Indeed, ask several. And listen to the stories they tell you of what happens when they get bored. You can search my blogs (http://blog.makingherhappy.com/ is the oldest and has the most content) or my newsletter archive (at http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?mhh_tips) for some of those stories, too. Some of their stories will scare the mortal hell out of you when you see what some desperately bored women did to their husbands and even themselves, just because they were bored.

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

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

Don't Air Your Dirty Laundry in Public If You Want to Keep Your Relationship or Marriage

Problems at home can be so frustrating that you want to vent them outside the home. Don’t do it, unless of course you like the idea of sleeping alone…

We’re going to do something just a bit different today. I usually write primarily to and for the benefit of the men, occasionally throwing in something that the women reading will also find useful or at least amusing, but today I’m speaking to everyone equally, and I hope that the majority of you will have at least one person to whom you can forward this little wake-up call to help them stop making this really big mistake. It’s not just an attraction-killer, it’s a relationship-killer, as sure as the sun rises in the east every morning. It’s also a symptom of a pretty big problem, much bigger than the one being voiced when this happens, as you will see.

One of the two couples who live next door to me are an elderly couple who married late in life, and for the life of me, I don’t know why they got married or have remained married. They don’t even like each other, let alone love each other, and don’t seem to need each other either, unless it’s simply in the capacity of having someone available to call for an ambulance if they collapse from a heart attack or something. They seemed okay when I first met them several years ago, but either their relationship has steadily declined or they have become less concerned with keeping their problems private, and they are now constantly at each other’s throat whenever I visit them or see them away from their home in a public place.

The main problem seems to have started because they don’t communicate very well. They’re both head-strong, and neither are good listeners, but people manage to live like that for fifty years or longer without the kind of malicious behavior I see these two engaged in regularly. So what’s continuing to escalate the hostilities?

Every time I talk to either of them, they are demeaning and insulting the other, and even worse, wanting me to validate their insults and other behavior, and they both know this is going on, so when I see the two of them together, it’s like a competition to see which of them can say the nastiest things about the other to me and another competition to see who can defend themselves against whatever insults they suspect have been dealt in their absence. Hence, they’re both hurt, mad, and frustrated all the time, and quite paranoid about what is being said about them while they aren’t present to defend themselves.

I remember the day it started like it was yesterday. The man and I were standing in my front yard talking about grass seed, fertilizer, weed killer, etc., as our lawns had not fared well through the winter, and she drove up, having been out shopping. He had remarked to me earlier that she was out and he’d had to give her all his cash because they were out of checks and they had cut up all their credit cards, much more personal information than I would have ever been comfortable hearing from a neighbor. He went on to say that he hoped she’d not spent all his cash while she was out because the home center where he was going to buy fertilizer and seed was only a little over a mile from our homes but his closest credit union branch was across town and he didn’t want to have to drive that far out of the way to get more cash. When she got out of the car, he said, “Well, I’d better go see if I have any money left,” and she heard him. Most unfortunate…

She exploded! “What are you doing telling our neighbor that I spend all your money all the time??? What else are you saying about me behind my back???” she yelled. That one remark, taken almost entirely out of context, caused an explosion, the shockwave from which is still tearing their relationship down and the fallout from which has not begun to settle, several years later. What do you think happened next?

You guessed it! She found occasion later that day to come over to my house to defend herself, and make a few nasty remarks about him in retaliation. He walks up quietly behind her while she’s railing about him using her good towels (“the show towels”) and messing up the kitchen, stands listening for several minutes before clearing his throat to let her know that she’s busted, and then says, “And you had the nerve to jump on me about talking behind your back???” War was at that moment declared.

Since that time, they’ve thrown each other out of the house regularly; every other week I’m outside getting the mail or something and hear, “Why don’t you just pack your s**t an get out?!” and they’ve become the two unhappiest people I know; combatants seemingly locked in a duel to the death to see who can get in the last and worst word about the other.

The lesson? Keep your problems to yourself, especially your relationship problems, and don’t succumb to the temptation of verbally bashing your partner, whether in front of them or not.

Ladies, I know that is a particularly hard pill for you to swallow, but face it, if there’s a problem between you and your man, it’s between you and your man, not between your man and your fourteen girlfriends with you acting as the mediator. You know as well as I do that your girlfriends will most often say either whatever they think you want to hear or whatever they think will keep you upset so they can continue to feed on your emotion, and that’s okay when you’re discussing a television show or a party that didn’t work out well, but don’t take chances on screwing up your relationship or marriage by inviting your girlfriends into your intimate life. You never know which of them has secretly wanted your husband since she met him and might take the opportunity to drive a wedge that will help her get him, right?

Nor do you know which of them is competitive and jealous of your relationship and secretly watching for a way to help you become as miserable as she is, do you? Or what about the one who wants to break up your relationship or marriage because she wants more time with you? Or doesn’t like your husband and thinks she knows what’s best for you better than you do?

I know you’re driven to share and commiserate, but the stakes are too high when it comes to marital issues to risk having someone say something to you to manipulate your emotions or sabotage your relationship under the guise of helping you. And before you say, “Oh, my friends would NEVER do that, that’s what every woman I’ve interview on the subject has said before or while her friend did EXACTLY that.

And guys, even though we’re generally not as socially-oriented as women, there are still times when you’re sitting in the bar, the barber’s chair, a coworker’s office or the break room, etc., during which you might be sorely tempted to vent as well. For some of you it’s like some kind of bonding experience. Don’t do it. Nothing good can come of it. Be a man, and deal with the problem at its source, and don’t wait for your partner to take the lead. That’s your job, and if you can’t do it, there are others who can. And you can bet she knows where to start looking for them and has plenty of time to do so while you’re out with your friends bitching about her instead of being at home fixing your marriage.

And do I need to remind either gender that anything you say can eventually make it back to your partner or spouse? Would you care to guess how that news will be received and the damage that will be done?

If you have a problem with your partner, you need to be at home fixing it, not bitching about it to someone outside your family. The person you need to be talking with is your partner, not your bowling buddy, your drinking buddy, your girlfriend, your hairdresser, or anybody else, other than maybe a professional counselor if the two of you can’t work it out on your own. The likelihood of anyone else being able to give you much appropriate and competent input is very slim at best, unless that person’s own marriage is such a shining example of a truly great marriage that they’re a bona fide expert, and that’s going to be hard to know if they are keeping private things private like they should. You never know what really goes on behind closed doors.

Look at what usually happens in such a situation, attacks bring defensive action and then counter-attacks, and then the feud has started and isn’t going to go quietly into the night. The fastest way on Earth to escalate such a feud is to bring the outside world into it, especially by trashing your partner in front of his or her friends. It’s embarrassing, demeaning, even humiliating, and if you think trying to take back something you’ve said in anger to your partner is hard to take back, trying taking something back that you’ve said to or in front of your partner’s friend or coworker, or to anyone who lets something you said get back to her.

Treat each other with respect. If some of your friends start trashing their partners or your partner’s gender in general, try to break the momentum quickly by saying something positive about your partner, especially if they are standing there listening, before your partner has too much time to wonder if you’re thinking the same thing about them. When you show each other that kind of respect and support instead of publicly airing your dirty laundry, you will be more willing and able to work your problems out peacefully, and will try harder to work them out before they become a heated debate or a fight that you’ll later regret. It creates trust, which is crucial in any problem-solving operation, not to mention a secure relationship or marriage.

There is nothing about heated conflict that is good for a relationship. If you’re in one of those relationships where you’re constantly at the extremes, either fighting or in bed together, you need to take a good hard look at your relationship, your life’s desires, yourself, and your partner. I can tell you what you’ll find: a relationship that is based on attraction or need, not compatibility and love coupled with attraction. Lacking anything in common, your life together is one contest or conflict after another, one fight after another, and the only part left to enjoy, or escape to, is the sex. That’s no way to live, and you can both do a lot better.

Good relationships that last require being well-matched to your partner, communicating effectively, and keeping the fun and attraction level up to the point that you enjoy living your life and living with each other. That sounds difficult because you see so few couples doing it successfully in the long-term these days, but it’s not. The reason that you don’t see it often isn’t because it’s hard; it’s because very few remember how or ever learned how. “Knowledge is power” became a cliché because it was universally true, not universally false, right?

Opinions are like bowels; everybody has one, and they are usually full of crap. Real, factual knowledge IS power, the power to create a great relationship and the power to fix one that you started but has become stale and boring over the years, as well as the power to take one that is going fairly well and kick it up to notches unknown to humankind! That knowledge is contained in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and if you don’t have your copy, get over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download it right now, because you’re missing out on a better life. Life’s too short as it is, without wasting it in a bad relationship that could be improved or replaced, so get to work!

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

Don't Let Hot Buttons Make You Lose Perspective, or Your Relationship or Marriage

Watch out for somebody pressing one of your “hot buttons,” and for you pressing somebody else’s as well. Whether inadvertent or intentional, the fallout can wreck a relationship quickly, and even permanently, and when it hits, it will likely come out of nowhere, so know what to do before it happens…

I started my day today with a big cup of coffee and my e-mail, and found the following letter, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so profoundly wrong and out of character, but there’s a very good lesson in it for you, so hang with me, because you’ll definitely find that it’s worth it. Meet Carol:
David,

You and people like you make me sick! All you can talk about is how to pick up and sed’uce a woman, or how to manipulate her to get what you want out of her, like we’re all stupid and can be led around by the nose like cattle. It’s no wonder women can’t get any respect these days. Thanks for being yet another a**hole helping men to screw up my life. I really feel sorry for your wife.

Carol

In every one of my newsletters is a link to the archive of everything I’ve published since switching to Aweber Communications as my newsletter broadcaster several years ago (my previous vendor didn’t provide an online archival service), and anyone can plainly see that:

1. I don’t ever write about picking up anybody. I leave that to the dating gurus.

2. I only write for people in committed relationships or who are trying to prepare for the time when they are in a committed relationship (including marriage, the most committed relationship).

3. The only context in which I ever mention “seduct’ion” is in explaining to men that women enjoy doing it if properly motivated by having a man create attraction for her, and it works out far better for everybody than for him to try to sed’uce her.

4. If I had a nickel for every time that I’ve publicly said that most women are smarter than we give them credit for because we don’t recognize that they simply do things differently, I could buy a country and retire there.

5. As for respect, see what one of you who has read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" had to say about how my work relates to respecting women:

“It's funny how these things work, but all the studying I've been doing about understanding women and how they think HAS LEFT ME WITH MUCH MORE RESPECT FOR THEM THAN BEFORE, where I was often just frustrated or disgusted with their behavior. I seriously doubt anyone could read AND UNDERSTAND your book and not have the same experience. Another reason [my wife] should read it.” -- Larry

And this one:

Hi David,

In these uncertain and confusing days, you are a jewel of unlimited value. Because you leave no confusion in the minds of your readers. And you provide a wonderful service. You are not out to simply make lots of money on phony theories with sensational story titles. YOU ARE THE REAL DEAL WHO IS NOT OUT TO EXPLOIT WOMEN, BUT RATHER TO TEACH US MEN HOW TO VALUE THEM FOR THE FANTASTIC CREATURES THAT THEY ARE. You want to preserve relationships and marriages, not bust them up. I commend and thank you. I place you on the same list as the greatest of the greats. You deserve a thundering round of applause. And I personally thank you for the wisdom you share in your writings.

I remain your devoted fan,

Cordially,
Ron

Now, add to that the fact that Carol has been subscribing for a little over two months, and has sent me a couple of e-mails complimenting my understanding of women and hoping that I’m successful in teaching other men how to do the same. She also impressed me as being fairly bright and reasonable. So this outburst appears totally out of character and illogical, right? So what happened?

The only thing that ever causes such an instantaneous and explosive departure from expected, normal behavior is what many refer to as “pressing a hot button,” “touching a nerve,” etc., accidentally triggering a memory of a bad event that alters one’s perception of what is happening now and changes the way they would normally respond to it. I would be surprised if you’ve not seen it, because unfortunately, it’s all too common, but what do you do when it happens?

As tough as it sounds, just let it go, at least until the person who explodes at you has a few minutes to calm down and realize that they just exploded at you for something that somebody else did sometime in the past. Don’t apologize, don’t argue, don’t try to explain anything. Just calmly say, “We’ll discuss this later when you’ve calmed down,” disengage, and don’t take it personally. It’s not you that they are upset with; it’s that demon from the past that they’ve never managed to vanquish.

Later, when the discussion resumes (and you should be the one to reinitiate it for the sake of taking a leadership position, so pay attention to her mood), let the aggressor speak freely for a few minutes, and if they aren’t apologizing for jumping on you for something that you didn’t do, point out to them that they have taken whatever was said or done out of context, and that they are upset about something else. If that’s not good enough, just let it go.

If it becomes a pattern of abuse, it’s time to start looking at options like professional counseling, and if they refuse to acknowledge it’s a problem, it’s time to move on, because you can’t help somebody fix a problem they won’t acknowledge having and life is too short to spend it with an abuser that makes a habit of punishing you for someone else’s sins.

If somebody pushes one of your hot buttons, and you’ll know they have because you’ll feel a sudden escalation in your emotional energy level along with an unusually strong urge to either defend or attack, try to stop the eruption by telling yourself, aloud if you must, that something isn’t right and you need to think about what you’re doing before you say or do something that can’t be undone. The discipline to step back from an emotional surge and make sure that it is rooted in reality is one of the most useful tools you can ever develop.

If you can’t recognize it and stop it before it happens, don’t be shy about apologizing to whomever catches the brunt of your upset. I am not a big fan of apologies because a lot of people tend to use them as license to behave badly, thereby nullifying their credibility and the credibility of others who offer apologies, but in these circumstances, it is necessary and appropriate that you volunteer it as a lead-in to discussion. No matter who has their hot button pushed, make it a top priority to determine what the unresolved issue is that triggered the eruption; get it resolved so you or they can heal from it and not be bothered by it again.

Life has enough troubles waiting for you each day without continuing to harbor trouble from times long past, and while those who care about you may forgive you for your outbreaks, you may not, and they may not after awhile. Failure to address a problem that you know about is the result of choice, not fate, and sooner or later you will be held accountable and as I was saying above, apologies will no longer be accepted. There are few feelings any worse than those that come with the knowledge that you ruined a great relationship that didn’t have to be ruined.

Speaking of which, there are just as many ways of unnecessarily ruining a great relationship as there are of building one, and the bad news is that building a great relationship by accident is highly unlikely while accidentally destroying one is next to inevitable if you don’t know what you need to know to build and protect one.

Building and protecting a great relationship is not at all difficult, it’s simply that the path to success is not obvious to the vast majority of us. For every person who knows what it takes and is willing to share it, there are thousands who don’t know what it takes but are all too willing to poison your relationship with their pet theories and opinions as if they were giving you knowledge and expertise. My refusal to engage in opinion and theory is legendary – and much appreciated -- among those who know me, and has been the secret to my success as a counselor, coach, consultant and troubleshooter all my life. Among my favorite phrases of all is, “I don’t know, but now that you’ve given me a good reason to find out, and I’ll be back with you shortly with facts in hand.”

There are no theories here, no opinions, and plenty of proof to back up every word I put in front of you, in this newsletter, any reports I offer you, and my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, that is, if you’re a man who’s tired of not knowing what women want from a man and guessing wrong more often than not. I have facts in hand for you, derived from extensive research with 118 couples before the initial release and the comments and successes of thousands that have followed since.

Life is too short for you to be stumbling along blindly stepping in crap and more crap when information like this is so easily and quickly available to you. Regrets aren’t born of the things we try, but of the things we fail to try, are they not? Think about it, and then exercise the only reasonable option open to you: ACT!

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

Retail Therapy, a Sure Sign of a Much Bigger Problem in Your Relationship or Marriage, One That You Can Fix!

If you’ve noticed your wife (or yourself!) buying things not for the benefit of ownership, but for the thrill of making the purchase, you have a problem on your hands. Yes, you are responsible, but it’s something you can easily fix…

I wish every one of you could know how much fun it is at times to be me and do what I do with and for all of you. Yes, there’s a lot of stress and frustration at times, but the success stories are exhilarating and some of the questions I get are just downright hilarious, like this one. Meet Kent:

David,

My wife and I have been married for 18 years, and we love each other deeply. However, we’ve fallen into that rut that everybody seems to fall into. We do things together and talk, but we just don’t seem to have real fun or real intimacy anymore. We’ve done nothing but sleep in our bedroom every night this year but three, and I know exactly which three they were.

If it weren’t for our hobbies, I don’t know what we’d do. I spend much of my evenings in my workshop making jewelry boxes, turning pens, and doing other small woodworking projects, and my wife watches mystery and cop shows on TV. Every few days, she’ll get particularly antsy and fidgety and announce that she’s “going out for retail therapy” and come home with a bunch of stuff that she never wears or uses and it just ends up cluttering up the house, and then she complains about it and gives it away.

I keep telling her that she’s giving away our retirement when she does this, and that she should keep receipts and return items that she’s not going to use, but she claims that’s too embarrassing for her. I’m at the end of my rope. Can you tell me how to explain to her why she needs to stop this?

Thanks,
Kent

My response:

Hi Kent!

There’s no amount of explaining that you can do that will help the situation, and that’s not because you’re wife is stupid, impetuous, or enjoys trying to put you into the poor house. It’s because she’s bored. The thrill of the purchase gives her a temporary rush of adrenaline that relieves her boredom for about long enough for her to get home, then she’s over it, and the purchases go into storage where she doesn’t have to look at them and admit that the purchase was a mistake and face her embarrassment.

I don’t see your name on my customer list and you’ve only been on this newsletter list for a little over a week, so I’m going to bet that you have no idea just what a destructive emotion boredom is for women. In a nutshell, it has much of the same impact on them that sheer terror has on us. Yes, that’s right. I’ve proven it 100% consistently with several hundred women. They have feelings and thoughts of desperation, are almost entirely incapable of logic, and in extreme cases even have physical manifestations like trembling hands and nausea. The good news is that this is something you can fix.

Boredom is one of the things for which a woman looks to a man to for protection; it’s the price you pay for her nurturing, and it’s a biological mechanism, not a logical one. It’s the result of chemical reactions natural to the female brain, and denying it or trying to find a way around it just doesn’t work. The good news is that acting like a man and using a few well-timed surprises and other little things can give her the small but frequent doses of excitement she needs (something so small as finding a Post-It note with a few well-chosen and heart-felt words on it will more than suffice, as an example).

You’ll find all of that and more explained in my book, should you choose to pursue it. Do the math, and I’m sure you’ll quickly realize that your wife does more damage to your checkbook in each outing than my book will do to it once, and the results are not just guaranteed, they’re a foregone conclusion if you use it. My customers have proven that consistently, time and again.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

So how about it, Gents? Is something like this going on in your household? Wives aren’t the only ones that engage in retail therapy; men can be just as guilty of it as women. But where men can fix their boredom with a new hobby, women have the need to see a man, preferably their man, acting like a man, and to be entertained by him to some degree as well. They look to us for leadership (NOT control), and when we fail to provide it, boredom quickly ensues.

Boredom really makes women crazy. And it makes them incredibly vulnerable to attraction.

That’s a double-edged sword, as some of you have found out a little too late in life. If you realize your mistake and create attraction for her to relieve her boredom, she’s swept off her feet and good to go for as long as you keep it up, but if somebody else creates it for her, it is possible for her to turn her back on you completely, especially if she has tried over the years to tell you that the problem exists and your inter-gender communications skills have been lacking enough that you didn’t understand what she was saying, because when that happens, a woman takes it that you don’t care to hear her, not that you can’t do it. Why?

Because she thinks that you speak and listen the same way she does, just as you think that she speaks and listens the same way you do, and no matter how much you want it to be that way, it just isn’t so. Both of you can easily learn the other’s natural communication style and quickly come to terms (you can easily communicate accurately with a woman by following three simple rules), but you do have to learn and then use what you have learned.

That doesn’t take a staggering intellect; just a genuine desire. It’s not rocket science, Gentlemen. It’s women. They make up a little more than half the world’s population, and if it were that difficult, our species would have been extinct long ago. But the knowledge you need has been ignored and even buried for so long that you never got the opportunity to learn it.

Instead, you had a bunch of idiots telling you that to impress a woman you take her to a chick flick and cry with her, and you spend more on clothing and skin care products than she does. And you’re supposed to be nice and let her make all the decisions, like Mom said, right? Oh, and let’s not forget that absurd business about buying their love with expensive jewelry and other gifts, or impressing them with big money and expensive cars. A bunch of pure, unadulterated B.S., or “bovine fecal matter” as we used to say in the service.

So what’s going on at your house? Maybe your wife’s not indulging in senseless shopping sprees, but is she happy? Fun? Engaged in your life and happiness? Or is she acting as bored, frustrated, and confused as you may be right now as you read this? Or would you even know?

Why take the chance? If you were hit with a divorce right now, what do you think it would cost you, in both financial and non-financial terms? Most of the men who write to me to say that they desperately need help because their wife just filed for divorce also say that they didn’t know that there was even a problem, so yes, that’s a fair question that you really need to answer.

Now, for a bigger question: If you could read a book that could mitigate some or all of that cost, putting you back into a happy relationship, or getting you out of one that you never should have entered with some dignity and finesse, not to mention having a friend for an ex-wife instead of someone waiting around every corner to stick a knife in your back, would you read it?

When I had to answer that question, there wasn’t even a book to read. I had to write one! But you can read it; indeed, you can start reading it in the next few minutes. Just go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." You’ll see what I mean, and you can thank me for it when you’re done. For now, just get started! The longest journey ever completed started with a single step, and for you, this is the one.

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

Understanding Our Emotional Scales: Another Key to a Great Relationship and Marriage

MUST READ: Men’s and Women’s emotional scales are calibrated very differently, and understanding how can literally make the difference in being happy and being divorced.

If you've been following me for long, you know how seldom I put the words "MUST READ" in a title or summary, and I promise it will be worth your time to read this time, too.

If I could teach everyone on Earth only one thing above all others to help them get along better, not just in intimate, committed relationships, but in ALL inter-gender relationships, it would be a hard choice between compatibility, our difference in communication skills and protocols, and the difference in the structure of our emotional scales. All are critical to getting along well, and if I had to choose one, I'd feel like I was being asked by King Solomon to cleave and split a child between three mothers, because the three are so indispensable; the absence of any of them spells disaster.

I discuss communication protocols and compatibility frequently, and today I want to focus on these emotional scales. One you your fellow readers contacted me in crisis a few weeks ago and now has his situation under control, thanks mainly to the understanding of these two points. (His attraction skills were already fairly strong and needed only minimal improvement once he realized he had let them slide.) He's agreed to allow me to share excerpts from our discussions to help explain both the concept and how important it is to any relationship.

Here's an excerpt from one of his status reports:

"...It quickly rolled into the 'emotional scale' speech, which she seemed to really listen to - I think it's starting to sink in, and makes sense to her. Taking it slow has allowed her to process that and buy-in piece by piece. Honestly, David, if that were your sole contribution to the world, you should be famous for it. I'm not sure of its origins, but it's absolutely brilliant. Applies to all men and women, and the only trick to applying it is to understand that each woman has different levels of tolerance and varying coping abilities. I was able to give her an awesome example for evidence - a fight we had years ago - that also included a basic communication problem as well, and one where she's always 'fought to win,' [instead of 'fighting to get what's right'] and never admitted her role in the thing. Tonight, her silence told me she's seeing it, or admitting it to herself. There were a few instances of her processing those things and allowing that she was partially at fault. Big step for her lately - she used to do it, but hasn't at all lately."

An excerpt from my response, just for clarity:

"As for the emotional scale thing, that was my own, something I've noticed in working with all these women. I looked for weeks on Google and everywhere else for any mention of it, and never found it."

And here's "the emotional scale speech," as he called it, a suggestion I made to him for explaining to his wife why she had done some things that she was feeling very guilty for and why he had failed to recognize her problem and do something about it:

"I just read a thing about the difference between how men and women build, process, and prioritize emotions, and it sounded weird at first, but after looking back it makes a lot of sense. Our emotional scales are different, at least with regard to what we need to feel to be comfortable. My emotional scale or range runs from extreme negative to extreme positive, with neutral being in the middle of the scale.

"The female scale or range runs from neutral, or emotionless, to extremely emotionally charged, overwhelmed even, with little to no discrimination between positive and negative emotion. Both of us are most comfortable when we are just slightly 'to the right' of the middle of the scale, me feeling a little positive (too much positive makes a man irrational and silly) and you being just a little more emotionally charged than the center of your emotional range (too much emotion, positive or negative, with no way to vent it overloads you as well.)

"What's really interesting is that we act similar when we are at the same place on our scale. Being bored to you feels the same as being scared or angry feels to me: agitated, desperate, ready to do anything, even if it's wrong, to change the situation, and potentially irrational. We're both very comfortable just a little to the opposite side of the center of the scale, and at the far right, we get irrational, overwhelmed, and don't know what to do next, and have a strong tendency to do the wrong thing because our inhibitions and discipline go right out the window.

"One of the points it brought out of that is that men are naturally a bit comfortable with emotional neutrality, at least for a short time, while it is downright torturous for a woman. I never realized it was such an issue until I read that, and now that I know, I'll never let a woman be bored in my presence again, because I won't see someone tortured like that."

A couple of weeks passed since that discussion, and it apparently really produced understanding, some forgiveness, and cooperation where none was possible before. His last comment follows:

"You've really, really got to get that 'emotional scale' idea out there - everyone will steal it, but if you put some marketing behind it, you can retain credit as the source. Maybe there's a visual you could create so it instantly made sense to those who see it."

That's quite an accolade, having a reader see something as so important as to want to protect the author's ownership of a concept that he paid to learn. Think about that for a minute...it would take some pretty significant results to convert a "reader" into a "disciple" in any case, would it not? And by the way, the visual was pretty easy to construct (the comfort zone is at the "+" symbol):




Learn this concept and keep it in the front of your mind at all times. Recognize when the women in your life are bored, and try to do something about it whenever and however it's appropriate. You'll find yourself attaining a sort of hero status among them, and triggering a lot of appreciation, cooperation, and nurturing. A coworker will watch your back and try to help you out, a friend will be more attentive and supportive, and your partner will reward you with the relationship of your dreams, as long as you don't blow it by engaging in wussy, deceitful, or abusive behavior.

How do you do something about it? Sometimes a kind or funny word or two will do it, sometimes a smile, sometimes a surprise or even an adventure. It varies from woman to woman, mood to mood, and setting to setting, and there is no laundry list that will get you through. If you need a rule of thumb that will fit all situations, here it is:

"Attraction is any and every woman's ultimate salvation from boredom."

There is nothing bad that can come from just being a confident, fun leader at any time and many great things that can come from it, so if you're doing what you should be doing as a man, no woman will ever be able to be bored while you're around. But your partner deserves more, right? She's the one you share everything with, and the one you're trying to fix things for so you can spend the rest of your life with her. For her, you must learn more about women: what they want, what makes them tick, how to listen to and understand them, how to speak to them, and what flips their attraction switches, among other things.

Are you a guy who likes a single source to fill in a whole lot of gaps? I certainly do; the older I get, the more I try to find ways of simplifying everything. If simplifying your life sounds good to you - and you won't believe how much having a great relationship with your partner will simplify your life until you actually experience it - then you need to jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get up to speed, fast and easy, and start clearing some of the relationship clutter, nuisances, and even disasters out of your life.

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

What Women Need Emotionally from a Man in a Relationship or Marriage

Let’s talk about what women want from a man in a relationship, especially their emotional needs, and how knowing this can save your relationship or marriage.

I’ve been working on an interview that has stirred up a lot of new ways of discussing things we’ve talked about in the past, different ways of approaching and explaining the same problem and solution that may shed more light on the age-old questions of what women want, need, and expect from a man in a relationship.

In my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, you’ll find definitions and ramifications of the four emotions that relationships are most often based upon: love, attraction, need, and lust, all of which are incorrectly thought to be simply love. Please review this article before continuing if you are not familiar with its contents.

Of those four emotions, two of them are both healthy and required in a successful long-term committed relationship, love and attraction. You, as a man, need to be an expert on these two emotions and how they work, if you ever want to be able to be happy in any relationship with any woman, committed or not. You’ll see why very quickly. You may also see very quickly that you don’t have a clue as to what love really is.

Love, being the value and/or importance that you place on someone, is the source of friendship, trust, loyalty, security, respect, etc. It’s the thing that creates the friendship that allows two people to “bond” in any capacity and to any degree. This doesn’t just pertain to your wife, but to all women in your life, and even the men you would call “friend.” It’s not a feeling of duty, or altruistic drive to sacrifice. It’s the source of the feeling of celebration of your next encounter, whether intimate or public, personal or professional, work or pleasure, not the source of fear that it won’t happen.

It’s important to understand this so that you can see both why a woman needs to love and be loved and why it’s not enough. Love provides for a woman feelings of stability and security, and creates the environment in which she can feel safe in letting her natural drive to nurture drive her. If love is lost as partners grow apart, she can become mildly to severely depressed and feel a sense of lack of purpose, and her feelings of loyalty, respect, friendship, etc. for her partner will diminish.

Women can lose their feelings of love and still stay under the same roof with a man, but it becomes a very limited partnership – you’re pretty much just roommates. You can get along, but there’s no trust, no real respect, no friendship, no intimacy, etc., a strained existence at best.

Attraction is an entirely different matter. If you’ve been with me for longer than a few days you’re familiar with the difference in men’s and women’s emotional scales, and how while male emotions run from negative to positive, with crisis being the male emotional nemesis, women’s emotional scale runs from zero to infinity, with little to no discrimination between positive and negative (as far as emotional comfort zone), and their emotional nemesis is not crisis, but boredom. If you never learn another thing from me, learn this:

Attraction is any and every woman’s ultimate salvation from boredom. Boredom is any and every woman’s ultimate torment, the very bane of her existence.

A woman can reach the same feelings of physical and emotional discomfort (desperation!) from being bored that men can reach out of fear, anger, or any other emotion born of crisis. Stop here and think about that and let it burn in to such a depth that you will never forget it, because that one bit of knowledge can do more to save or prevent a troubled relationship than about anything else you can name.

Attraction, that “swept off her feet” feeling is what makes a woman’s life wonderful. There are things that reward her, like seeing that she’s been a good mother, etc., but creating attraction for her is her ultimate reward and the ultimate act of nurturing her, in exchange for all the nurturing that she gives the rest of the family.

So you see, what it all boils down to is that in a committed relationship, women need love to feel secure in giving of themselves, and they need attraction to feel alive and motivated to give their best. If you are going to sit on your duff with a beer and the TV remote control all evening, every evening, don’t expect her to be looking forward to doing anything but sleeping when bedtime arrives, and possibly sleeping with someone else at that.

No kidding. Since attraction and love are two entirely independent emotions and boredom is so utterly devastating to a woman, there may be no amount of love – hers or yours -- that is sufficient to keep a woman from engaging in an affair if you aren’t creating attraction for her. Think about that one for a minute, too…

It’s a double-edged sword. The bad news is that a woman can love you more than anyone else on Earth and still be compelled to engage in an affair to relieve the boredom the same way a man might be compelled to rob a bank to obtain the money to recover his wife or children if they were taken hostage. In extreme cases, it can literally be that overwhelming for a woman.

Yes, there are those who have self-esteem problems and have affairs in rapid succession, just like men do, looking for acceptance, approval, validation, etc., that they will never find, but those women are so consumed with feelings of need that they are not capable of love. I’m talking strictly about a woman who loves you here. And now for the good news…

It’s really the same news: a woman can be driven to have an affair even if she loves you more than anyone else on Earth, meaning that if she does have one and confesses it sincerely, along with a genuine desire to work it out and salvage your relationship, your best bet is most likely to do so. Why?

An affair isn’t a problem; it’s a symptom of a problem. If the problem is a simple deficiency of attraction, you can fix that, easily, and from what I’ve seen from the men who have used "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," pretty quickly, too.

Not so obvious is the fact that a woman who is rational enough and emotionally self-aware enough to realize that the affair was just a tension-breaker, that she loves you enough to discontinue the affair and confess it, and has the strength of character to do so is going to be very vigilant in protecting your relationship from similar problems in the future, so long as you continue to be committed to your marriage with her. Some even say that an affair is like a near-death experience, and those who survive them find they commit to and enjoy their relationships to degrees they never thought possible.

And no, I am absolutely not suggesting that women be given a blank check to have affairs or be categorically forgiven regardless of the reason for the affair, any more than I would suggest that women do the same for a man. I am saying:

1. When a man and a woman have attraction and no love, they have a great relationship in the bedroom, but not anywhere else. These couples fight to make up because sex is all they have together. There relationship is one of those bipolar catastrophes wherein the participants are either having sex or at each others’ throats, no middle ground. If you hear a man saying, “She’s great in the sack, but man, what a bitch!” or a woman saying, “He’s such a jerk, but he gets me off,” they’re in this kind of relationship.

2. When a man and a woman have true love, but have lost attraction, realizing that lost attraction, not lost love, is indeed the problem and addressing that by recreating the attraction creates a stronger relationship and should be pursued if possible. The only time it is unlikely to impossible is if another man has created attraction for the woman; again, attraction is a double-edged sword in the extreme. If you’re not creating it, there are others who can and will, and they’re not far away at any given moment.

3. When a man and woman have both true love and attraction, there’s nothing that can separate or take them down. Their relationship is impervious to outside influence because they will actively protect what they have.

4. When a man and woman have neither, and their relationship is based on need, lust, or anything but the combination of love and attraction, well, I’ll just say that I certainly wouldn’t want to live that life…and way too many couples are stuck in it. Such relationships are doomed to failure before they ever begin.

There you have it, and on the surface, it looks like a mess, but it is in fact a clear roadmap for getting out of a mess and staying out; a roadmap, but not detailed directions…

Those detailed directions, including how to accurately evaluate your relationship, how to accurately communicate with any woman so that you can have the intimate discussions required to overcome hardships and celebrate your life together, and everything you need to know about what makes women tick, what they want, and how to build and kill attraction in your relationship (straight from the mouths of women!), are in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," so go now and download your copy at http://www.makingherhappy.com while there’s still time to save yours, because every day that damage is done makes it just a little harder, and being men, we like to do things the easy way, right?

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

Cheating in Relationships and Marriage, a Symptom, Not a Problem

Part 1 of a 3-part series: Many people think that cheating in a relationship is a major problem. It is in fact NOT a problem at all, but a SYMPTOM of a real and much bigger problem. Fix the problem and the cheating goes away, at least as long as the problem doesn’t come back. The questions are “What’s the problem?” and “How do I fix it?” I will answer both…

I’ve had more than the usual number of e-mails in the last couple of weeks asking about detecting and dealing with affairs, as well as casual “cheating,” in sexual and other forms. It’s time we go through a series of lessons on how to detect, understand, and stop affairs and cheating, and we start today.

I have some readers who really, really make me proud to have them onboard. I’m proud to have anyone onboard who has the sense to realize they have a problem and the guts to look for an answer, but in addition to that, there are a few of you who don’t just blindly grab whatever is said and follow instructions like some sort of robot. Instead these special people take my lessons and advice and think about them, and abstract from them other lessons, some which are parallel, other which are advanced concepts from the basic points I provide, and it’s always delightful when I receive one of them.

For example, ponder this question that came in response to the “What Do You Do When You Know She’s Cheating?” article which we will revisit tomorrow as part of this series:

“Is it cheating when she spends hours every day talking to people on the Internet rather than talking to her husband? It sure feels like it.”

This guy gets a big “high five” for seeing past the end of his nose and making the connection. Why?

It is a form of emotional abandonment, and that’s why it feels like cheating. She’s spending a disproportionate amount of time with other people and unavailable to you. However, this isn’t the problem; it’s only a symptom of the same problem that causes what we think of first when we think of “cheating,” an affair.

She’s bored because he is no longer tripping those biological triggers that make her feel attraction for him and make her want to spend that time with him getting that “swept off her feet” feeling. There’s no longer anything interesting or fun about talking or being with him. The only difference is that for some reason, whether her value system, opportunity, or whatever, she’s seeking intimacy and/or adrenaline rushes in e-mail, a chat room, or on the telephone, or being absorbed in some form of hobby or volunteer work that gives her a reason to be around other people where she thinks she has a better chance of escaping he boredom instead of being caught up in a sexual affair.

This doesn’t mean that she is or is not looking for an affair, or that there is anything wrong with having a hobby, but it does mean that if she is spending a lot of time away from her husband and sees nothing attractive about him, she is vulnerable to an affair, whether she wants it or not. And make no mistake; the answer is NOT to start hammering on her trying to control her time like a dictator or to start whining like a wuss that she spends time with everybody but you. And for crying out loud, DON’T start telling her how much you NEED her. That’s the kiss of death. The dictatorial route might be VERY TEMPORARILY effective, but if it is, it will be VERY short-lived. The correct answer?

He needs to trip her attraction triggers and get on the same wavelength with her in communications so that she’ll be focused more on talking to him and having fun with him and much less (if any at all – some women need more social connectivity than others no matter what is going on at home) on chat room companions or phone buddies. Of all the women in my test panel, every one of them admitted to spending too much time on the phone and in chat rooms before their husbands started applying what they learned from my book, and all found themselves not even being tempted when their husbands got back on track. Indeed, they freely admitted that their time spent outside of their marriage felt like they were “settling for less” in the absence of the man they thought they married.

Her primary reason for being in the chat rooms for inordinately long periods is to combat that terrible boredom that grips women when their man isn’t creating enough attraction for them, which is good news for him, because it means he certainly can fix it, UNLESS SOMEBODY IN A CHAT ROOM HAS CREATED ATTRACTION ALREADY, in which case he will have to compete with the new guy and while not impossible, it is VERY difficult to catch up.

Women will focus on sources of attraction and protect them, even from family and friends. I cannot overstress this. But as I’ve told you before if you’ve been with me for a while, because the chat rooms, excessive phone use, and affairs, both emotional and purely sexual, are all symptoms of the same problem, BOREDOM, solving that problem eliminates ALL of the symptoms that are or may become present.

And yes, she probably did try to tell him about it at some time in the past, but he couldn’t hear her. When she said, “Do you think everything’s okay with us?” he had no idea that she was in fact making the statement, “I have a problem with what’s going on between us and want you to talk with me about it.” He just said, “Yes, it’s fine,” and she thought, “Well you insensitive jerk! Well, if you don’t want to talk to me, I can sure find somebody who does!” Questions are statements and statements are questions; men state, while women negotiate (see my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report or my book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” for more on this).

Let me be perfectly clear on something here, spending a few minutes a few times a week to check in on friends by phone, e-mail, instant messaging or in chat rooms is not cause for alarm; even a little while each day is not excessive. Women are social creatures and if they become cut off from the rest of the world, as is common in new relationships and with young children, she will find a way to maintain a social circle, no matter what.

HOWEVER, if the majority of the day that she has available to spend with you is spent avoiding you and seeking the company of others, it’s a problem, and no different than if she’s disappearing every evening to socialize or even have sex with someone else. Luckily, it’s a problem you can fix, and if you haven’t let it run on to the point that she’s done with you (which WILL happen if some other man creates attraction for her – it’s a double-edged sword, and a powerful one!), she’ll be more than willing to let you -- or even help you – to fix it.

There are exceptions, as always, starting with the chronic/serial cheater who has so little self-esteem that they are constantly seeking approval from any and all available sources and will commit any feat of self-destruction and take any risk to get it. There are also psychopaths and sociopaths, parasites and predators who seek opportunity at any cost, and it doesn’t matter how much you give them, nothing is enough. But don’t be alarmed…

There are some very important things about these people that you can recognize and some more that you must know. First, there is a common thread running through all of them that you can easily spot: an entitlement mentality. They feel it is their right to cheat, and they will get very angry with anyone who would even suggest otherwise. And that sense of entitlement permeates everything they do; you’ll see a lot of situations where they are expecting you to do something for their benefit when there is nothing in it for you, and will often use guilt to make it happen.

What you must know about these people, all of them, is that they are almost always unsalvageable. The mental and emotional defects or damage that make them like this is beyond anything you can help. They don’t WANT to change. They want the rest of the world to suit them. Even those with abysmal self-esteem will often prefer to keep seeking self-esteem through the approval of others rather than its one authentic source, personal achievement, because it is far easier to flirt and drum up anything from a smile to an affair than it is to work and achieve something – they feel entitled to the easy way out.

So should you identify your spouse as one of these people, you may make an effort to wake them up and get them to step up and be a worthy spouse and deserving part of your family, but if they do not do it, DO NOT get it in your head that this is because there is something WRONG WITH YOU. You have made a mistake, but they, their attitude, and their choices are the problem, not YOU, because they have gone somewhere besides you for resolution.

If you get your own self-esteem up to a comfortable level, start enjoying your life, having fun and being fun to be around and she still insists that affairs are necessary, point out that self-esteem repair did wonders for you and could do wonders for them. And if they reject that most self-evident of truths, cut them loose, else they will suck you dry and leave you in a heap while they continue to bounce from jugular to jugular, feeding on the lives and resources of others looking for something that will make them feel good about themselves but requires no effort, no commitment, or anything else on their part. Luckily for the human race, such women – and such men – are a minority, and easily spotted once you know what to look for.

Most women are not hard to live with, but it can sure seem like they are when you don’t understand them and can’t comprehend their needs, which in turn seem complex, but are in fact extremely simple, no matter how dramatic or complex they make it seem. You know from your life’s experience that most things that seem mysterious and complex when you know too little about them are ridiculously simple when you learn what you need to know.

What’s more, when you start understanding women better and communicating better with them, they respond with nurturing, loyalty, and intimacy on a level you cannot imagine until you’ve seen it. This is because of a biological drive to respond on an unconscious level and because they consciously know they’ve got a “one-in-a-million man,” one that every woman dreams of having and few ever find. Keep repeating that: “Biological, not logical…biological, not logical…” It’s not a choice, it’s a million year old biological program. So…

If you want to be the happiest man alive, learn the simple things you need to know about her and communicating with her, put that knowledge to use, and nature will take its course; making her happy will make you happy every time. It seems like forbidden knowledge; Sigmund Freud, the great psychologist, is famous for saying, “The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, "What does a woman want?

Well, I didn’t figure it out either, at least not without some help. I asked a bunch of women, nearly 200 of them, and made them prove to me that what they told me was accurate by putting it in the hands of their own husbands and boyfriends and checking the results. We refined it, retested it, and it is indeed accurate, and is working for everybody who is using it. Unlike everybody else in this business, I don’t get refund requests; I get questions and testimonials.

So now it’s your turn to know what happy men know and most men will never know. This seemingly “forbidden” knowledge awaits you at http://www.makingherhappy.com in an instantly-downloadable and easy-to-read e-book (on screen or on paper!) called “"THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s fully guaranteed to work for you, so now you have a choice: you can let things ride and continue to gradually decay, or you can choose to take charge and make things better than you’d ever hoped they could be. Choose well, because she’s watching…

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

"Can't You Just Let Me Feel Bad for Awhile?" -- Understanding Female Emotions in Relationships and Marriage

Sometimes women say they want to feel bad, and it drives us absolutely nuts, because we don’t. What’s happening, and what can you do about it?

As you might guess, the women in my life (wife, mother, sister, friends, readers, etc.) are usually a great source for material for these newsletters, as are their husbands and boyfriends and my male friends on occasion. One such occasion was one day while my wife was having her lunch and was watching television.

My wife, and a lot of other women, because they are inherently attracted to anything where they can see authority figures, will watch just about anything that has a cop, a lawyer or judge, a pilot, or a doctor in it. (They also like mysteries because they enjoy the anticipation and suspense, so take the hint!)

I walked into our living room to join my wife for lunch (lunch at the coffee table while watching a home improvement show was a favorite pastime at that time) as the end of an old episode of “Judging Amy” was on television, and saw a woman jump off the ledge of a tall building after letting her daughter loose to run to the judge. My wife says that Judge Amy had refused to alter a custody agreement due to lack of evidence, and said that the woman had contrived the “drama of the issue” as part of an ongoing fight. Witnesses has described her as “paranoid,” and “dramatic” during the proceeding.

The scene then changes to Judge Amy sitting in front of a fire in the dark drinking something that looked like Scotch on the rocks and her mother, the social worker, walks in looking concerned and sits down, and starts telling Amy how the woman was unstable, Amy had made the right judicial decision, sounding very much like a man would sound under the circumstances. (There’s nothing masculine about Tyne Daly, even in her “golden years,” but there are times when her character is quite direct and masculine, but in a matronly kind of way.)

Amy interrupts her by saying, “Mom, I feel bad because something bad happened today. Can’t you just let me feel bad for awhile?”

Yes, that sounds crazy because no man would ever say something like that, unless of course he was pretty effeminate, but I would bet the farm that eight out of ten men reading this will have heard a woman say that at one time or another because I’ve heard eight out of ten of the women I’ve ever known well enough to want them to feel better say it. Why?

It’s that same problem of our differing emotional scales. (See this recent archived article for details.) Ours runs from negative to positive, with neutral in the middle, while a woman’s runs from zero to extreme without a lot of discrimination between positive and negative. They would prefer to feel good over bad if handed the choice of two doses of equal intensity, but there are times when a woman has a choice between feeling a little good and really bad that she’ll choose to feel really bad just to feel SOMETHING intensely. Again, why?

We both tend to stay near the middle of our emotional scales, which is our comfort zone. Men don’t like to stray too far from neutral in either direction. Feeling bad creates an urgent need to fix something, while feeling too good makes us irrational (it will be a long time before the world forgets Alan Greenspan’s words, “irrational exuberance” and the fallout from that) or makes us paranoid, wondering so intensely when the good time is going to fall apart that we cause it to fall apart.

Women, on the other hand, have a higher level of emotional involvement and energy at the middle of their scale, and if they go too low, they get bored (and start exhibiting a lot of the same behavior we exhibit when we’re at the low end of our scale – scared, hurt or angry – including in extreme cases nausea, trembling, disorientation, feeling of desperation, etc.), or if they go too high on the scale, they tend to get irrational and get lost in the emotional overload, unable to return to the middle of the scale until they bleed off that excess emotional energy.

So what does this have to do with Amy? She was trying to bleed off that excess emotional energy by just experiencing it and letting it burn her out and make her bored with the issue to sufficient degree that she could get back in balance, recentered, and refocused. So what does this mean to you?

First, that when one of the women in your life is feeling bad, giving her logical, rational reasons why she should feel good isn’t going to do anything but frustrate her. She’s not stupid, and she likely already knows most or all of the reasons available to feel good and has tried thinking about them. Throwing them in her face is the equivalent of telling her she’s too stupid to think of something like that herself. Don’t do it.

Logic and reason can very rarely be used to bring a woman out of a heightened emotional state unless you are a very strong leader, so with a low chance of success and a high risk of insulting her and royally pissing her off, just don’t go there until you have mastered alpha male leadership and can jolt her out of her distress with a strong, alpha male maneuver that will cause a massive and rapid bleed-off of all that emotion. As a novice, there are really only two things you can do.

The first is to do as Amy asked, and just let her get through it. Be supportive if you can without acting like you’re trying to be a father or coddle her; otherwise just let it go. Or, there’s a better option, if you’re a pretty strong leader…

In some circumstances, especially when she’s feeling bad about something that happened to somebody else, such as a friend’s mother dying (as opposed to her own), you can convert that negative energy to positive energy by finding something utterly outrageous to do to distract her, and when she acts pissy and says something like, “Can’t you see I’m upset?” you just turn it up another notch with something like, “Do you think I’d be acting this ridiculous if I couldn’t?” and crack the big naughty grin.

She might smack you a good one, but she’ll be pouting and smiling at the same time, a sign that you’ve won, so keep it up and lead her out. If however, she says something like, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m just going to have to get past this myself,” give her a hug and tell her that you’ll be somewhere doing whatever you’re going to be doing when she’s over it or if she wants to talk.

Be perfectly clear on this point: You can lead her if she wants to be lead, but you cannot force her out of a bad mood or emotional pain, so forget any notions you have to the effect of “I have to save her or die trying.” No, you don’t, and if you try to save her when she doesn’t want to be saved you’ll just make her mad.

Besides, as her partner, your job is protection and nurturing, not salvation. Some would say that’s the job of religion, not men; I say it’s the job of the person needing saved. In any case, give her the respect of assuming that she can save herself when she’s ready and will at most let you help a bit. Women who can’t save themselves from their problems aren’t partners; they’re dependents, just like men who can’t save themselves.

As I’ve been saying, lessons are everywhere if you look for them. Some of us are better at identifying them and organizing them than others, and we tend to be counselors, trainers, consultants, and teachers. I’m all of the above, and an author as well, so you lucked out!

I’ve put a whole lot of these kind of lessons in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," so go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy right now and have the benefit of all the testing and experience that went into it now, while it’s easier to do something with it than after everything blows up in your face. (You can fix it after the blow up, but why do it the hard way when you have an easier choice???)

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

Women Respond to Feminism Destroying Real Men and the Politics of Relationships and Marriage

Some women responded to yesterday’s quote of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s “How Feminism Destroyed Real Men,” and guys, you’d better pay attention!

The responses to yesterday’s newsletter were enlightening and entertaining, to say the least. I’m going to break from tradition and let the ladies do most of the talking today, because what they had to say is both valid and valuable.

Let’s start with Peggy, a divorced mother who made a career change to be near her son who is serving in the military who has written before and always has something brilliant and insightful to add to our discussions:

David,

I couldn't agree more with the article.

There are a couple of stories I would like to share involving my ex-husband. He remains my best friend; but we divorced because of his infidelity. He became extremely depressed over a two-year period after losing his job in Saudi Arabia. His whining about how "unfair" life was caused me to feel nothing but pity for him. He advanced into a more depressed state and became slothful in his appearance. He did little around the house and didn't even venture out to look for work.

There was no way this pathetic creature was getting anywhere near me. His depressed condition caused him problems in the bedroom. I was working one full-time job and two part-time and I totally lost respect for him.

I'm glad to report that he is now working and we remain good friends. The point is the "emotion" of his despair is what turned me off. If he had said, "I don't know how I'll get through this or when; but I will," I would have worked the extra jobs as long as necessary.

Two of my favorite stories concerning my ex. One Saturday I was cleaning the bathroom toilet. He called for me and I answered "I'm cleaning the bathroom". He said, "Something so beautiful should not be bent over cleaning the toilet. From now on, I have toilet duty." That meant more to me than five dozen roses and a hundred boxes of chocolate!

Another cherished memory: One cold winter’s evening, I started the car and heard a loud thump. I got out and to my horror, discovered the neighbor’s kitten had been inside the engine. I'm an animal lover and ran inside crying and told my husband what had happened. He said, "There is no way you could have known, just go tell her." I said, "Please don't make me go." He then went to the neighbor, buried the kitten, and told me the neighbor was fine and understood completely.

That evening the attraction was so strong, I almost attacked him. He said, "If you kill anymore kittens, just come get me!"

I think these stories support the author's point.

Keep up the good work!
Peggy

They do indeed, and they support some things I’ve been telling you gentlemen for a long time. For starters, women know that drama sometimes gets the best of them and they get caught up in the emotion of crisis, and when that happens, they want a man who is strong enough to cut through the drama and lead the charge out of the crisis instead of a man who gets caught up in the drama, wusses out, and wants to turn into a girlfriend, comiserator, or an object of pity.

Also notice that in spite of infidelity and problems, they remained friends. A divorce is a declaration of irreconcilable differences, not a declaration of war, and it can be handled with reason and dignity if those involved simply choose to handle it appropriately.

What do you see in the “toilet duty” story? What was the cause of Peggy’s happiness? Was it flattery? No. Was it being told that she was beautiful? Hell no. Was it the fact that she didn’t have to clean toilets anymore? Hell no, again. It was the fact that he recognized her effort, appreciated it, and found a rather poetic way of announcing that he was going to join in and help out. It was shocking, bigger than life, and delightful, and there’s a word for that: ROMANTIC. And yes, romance is indeed where you find it, even in the toilet. ;-)

What about the kitten story? He could have been afraid to face the neighbor like she was, or could have been a jerk and just said, “you made the mess, you fix it.” But, recognizing that she was genuinely distraught because she was an animal lover, had killed an animal, and didn’t want to be the one to hurt the neighbor with the bad news if they were also an animal lover like she was, he took the heroic leader’s role and just handled it. She could have done it, and would have if she lived alone, but he saved her from a pain that she didn’t want to inflict on someone else. Being heroic is highly attractive, but being sensitive enough to recognize the real reason behind a woman’s emotions and respond to that is a super-aphrodisiac that amplifies the heroism a hundred-fold.

Now let’s hear from Margaret:

Hi David,

I thoroughly enjoyed that article and would like to comment. Cheating on his wife notwithstanding, this young man is wise beyond his years. I rather envy his wife. He may be a pain in the neck sometimes, but she’ll certainly never be bored.

Margaret

Okay guys, remember what I said about boredom after hearing it from several hundred women? Boredom is their worst enemy, and a man who acts like a man is anything but boring. Add to that the sensitivity that comes from good communications skills, compatibility, and a good understanding of women and you’ve got a recipe for a happy relationship that will last a lifetime.

Susan, another regular, had this to say:

Hello David,

Another great newsletter. My husband read this and his only comment was, “Why did she stay with him if he cheated on her?” He’s such a moron sometimes, and I’d give anything if I could get him to read your book. I bought it and he refuses to look at it, and it’s about to cost him dearly, because I’ve about had it. Anyway, it was obvious to me that she stayed with him because he has that one-in-a-million personality that makes a woman feel alive, and she missed having that feeling. There’s no other explanation for the sex they had when he came back. He may think he was in control, but she wanted it more than she wanted to breathe.

If I would have been her, I wouldn’t have kicked him out. I would have gone after her and made sure she didn’t come back around. When I finally find that feeling again I’ll not let anything or anybody get between it and me.

Susan

A cheating husband can be a whale of a dilemma for a woman; on the one hand, he’s cheating, and on the other hand, the fact that another woman wants him constitutes what F.J. Shark describes as “social proof,” or external verification that what she has is valuable and desirable. I do NOT recommend that you sleep with another woman to get your wife’s attention and make her jealous, but don’t act aloof or hen-pecked around other women when your wife’s around, either.

It’s good for her to see them desiring you, as it helps her to see that she has a prize; just don’t make the mistake of letting her see you desiring them enough to think you might see them on the sly. Knowing you still look around can actually make her feel good because then she knows that you are aware of the “social marketplace” and have still chosen her; suspecting that you’re PLAYING around instead of LOOKING around can be disastrous, and usually is.

Are you paying attention here guys? These women are literally handing you the keys to the universe; I hope the message is getting through. If not, here’s Gina with a last attempt to open your eyes and ears:

Hello again, David!

Did this author read your book? I’m kidding, of course. No man who read your book would be cheating on his wife. But he understands a lot about us, in spite of saying that a man shouldn’t try to understand a woman, which is crap. A man doesn’t need to understand us so he can make excuses for us, but he certainly does need to understand us to know when to listen to us and when to tell us to “go tell it to a girlfriend.” As you say, maybe he’ll grow wiser as he grows older. Maybe he will end up reading your book after all! LOL!

Best wishes, and thanks again for all you’ve done for us,
Gina

There’s more, but if you’re not getting the message by now you’re not going to get it. Women aren’t stupid. Whether they were actively involved in Dhaliwal’s alleged “feminist conspiracy” or not, they recognize that they miss the men of old just as much as we miss being the men of old. It’s time to rise from the ashes of wussitude and be the man you were born to be. All it takes is to shed some long-standing bad programming…

…and if you want to kick it up a few notches, you can add inter-gender communications skills and a thorough understanding of women to the mix and be the guy that every woman wants and yours will kill for. Interested?

If so, it’s easier than you’d ever dream. A few hours reading and studying to gain understanding, and a lifetime of applying what you’ve learned, and having fun and reward as you do it. Want me to twist your arm a little harder?

Okay, just go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and get started. Or do you want to stick with what you have now, the unexplained fights, the bedroom boredom, the frustration and isolation, or maybe it’s the confusion when she gives you “that look” and stomps out of the room that you enjoy so much…

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

A Woman Lives Briefly As a Man, and Teaches a BIG Relationship and Marriage Lesson

EXCLUSIVE MUST READ! A female reader gets an accidental overdose of testosterone and spends a couple of weeks feeling what many men feel every day, and there are lessons for all in her experience!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is HUGE. One of your fellow readers, Daphne, whom we’ve heard from before on a couple of occasions, is 40 years old and using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after a total hysterectomy. The strangest thing happened!

For those of you who don’t know a lot about endocrinology, after a hysterectomy or menopause (which are in fact the same ultimate effect, as a hysterectomy causes sudden-onset menopause due to the loss of sex hormones produced by the organs and glands removed), women are often given a cocktail of hormones to try to replace the ones that were produced by the organs that were removed.

Many claims are made about preventing osteoporosis and other things, but the only thing that estrogen HRT has been clinically PROVEN to do is curb hot flashes and some forms of it (especially the one derived from horse urine, called “equione,” which is estimated at 1,000 times the cellular reproductive power of human estrogen) have also been proven to raise a woman’s chance of contracting cancer, especially if her HRT regimen includes synthetic estrogen (like equione) or high doses of natural estrogen.

What is not common knowledge is that testosterone, the male hormone, is also needed and used by women to combat fatigue, heighten libido (it’s the only true aphrodisiac known to science), and actually does help with the formation and repair of bone and tissue. Indeed, estrogen is a metabolite (a by-product of the metabolism of) of testosterone; men metabolize more as DHT and other non-estrogen substances, while women metabolize more as estrogen, which is needed by all for cellular reproduction but in higher doses causes the femininization of the body, including the brain, skin, and other non-sexual organs.

When women have significantly too much testosterone for an extended period, it causes their voice to deepen, facial and other body hair to grow, libido is put into overdrive, and they get more aggressive; a lesser overage will cause minor symptoms like being less creative and more analytical, more calm and less fussy, a more masculine communications protocol (speaking more directly and less in tune to non-verbal messages, among other things), less emotionally-driven, more aggressive, etc.

This woman was given a dose that was determined to be WAAAAY beyond her natural tolerance in an injection, and she describes an experience that you simply must read for yourself. There are multiple lessons, some not so obvious, for both men and women in this letter, but I’m not going to go into those until tomorrow; putting everything in one newsletter or blog post would make it too long for most of you to be comfortable with or have time to read. In the meantime, I challenge you to read this letter and see what lessons you can derive from it yourself, and if you wish to share your observations, simply reply to this newsletter or write to me at tips@makingherhappy.com and don’t forget to indicate whether you want your observations shared with the other readers.

Without further ado, here again is Daphne, with a tale that you really should study, because she has a unique perspective after this experience, possibly the only woman alive who has lived feeling the male drives and testosterone-driven emotions to this degree, and her reaction to them contains the biggest lesson of all:

Dear David,

All my life I have heard people say if you could walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you would not be so fast to judge them. I have to tell you of such an experience that has proven this to me, and this was so serious I felt like I should share part of it with you. I will be giving you only a small portion of what I went through, but I hope it will be enough that you will understand that I really know what it feels like to be a man.

I’m 40 years old, had a hysterectomy twelve years ago, and a few weeks ago I went to see my gynecologist about a problem I was having with my hormone levels. Every time I was tested my hormones were lower than the doctor felt they should be, and he made such a big deal of it that I became concerned and made the choice to let the doctor give me a strong shot to see if this could get me back on the right track. In doing so I was given a very large dose of testosterone, which turned my body totally opposite of what I had ever been before. I started to view life on a whole new level.

It started out with me looking for sex everywhere. I was suddenly looking at every man I saw and some women as possible sex partners, and I had never done this, especially toward women! I thought at first I was going crazy. I would sit and look at them and could play out in my head all the thoughts I was having about them and what I could imagine we could do together.

I was also terribly aggressive and easily angered, wanting to get into fights with people who would piss me off and I never wanted to do that before, ever! For example during all this I was pulled over by a policeman and was given a ticket. Now most of the time I would cry or flirt or do whatever I had to get out of it and for the most part that would work for me, but this time all I wanted to do is punch the cop right in the face for being an ass to me.

There were so many changes in my life I could not possibly describe all of them for you right now. The point I wanted to get across is after I went through days of strange feelings and urges I had never had before I told my best friend about them and he looked at me and smiled and told me that all of what I told him about was what a man went through every day of his life until he got old enough for his testosterone levels to drop severely, which he said was somewhere between the late twenties and early fifties, depending on the man, and could be even later for some men.

I was blown away. I called my gynecologist and told him what my friend said and he confirmed that the dosage may have been too high and that I could be experiencing such side effects for several days, but not to be alarmed because they would stop when the testosterone was used and it returned to a more tolerable level.

Ladies if what I went through just for those few days is what a man goes through every day there is a lot more to being a man than we as women think. All I can say is I hope I never go through anything like this again. If the feeling of gladly passing up food for sex is a small part of how they feel then I say give them sex. I will never again tell my love that I do not feel like it or I have a headache for during that short period of time I got mad at my boyfriend for not giving me all the sex I wanted, and want it I did. With every single breath I took I wanted him, and sometimes not just him. When he did not want to give it to me I would look around and wonder where I could get it from.

Like I said, this is only a small part of what I went through and there is much more I could tell you and I might write it all down and send it to you one day, but I am just now starting to get some of the old me feeling like I should again. The main reason I wanted to write this is so that you woman readers might get a little better understanding of what our men go through all the time. I will promise you this before I ever tell my husband no again I will think about the experience I had and how I felt when he told me that he didn’t feel like it.

Daphne

What a story! I sincerely hope that Daphne chooses to share more of this story with us at sometime in the future, but aside from the drama of spending a few days feeling the urges and emotions that many of us men feel every day, there is a HUGE and significant lesson here for men. As I mentioned above, see if you can spot it, write to me at support@makingherhappy.com about it if you feel like it, and if I get the correct response from five or fewer people, a prize will be awarded, a copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and tomorrow I’ll reveal any winners and the big lesson after you’ve had some time to think about it and possibly win a prize!

Speaking of which, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" is available for download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and if you’ll read it diligently and learn its secrets, you’ll have the same inside-out view of women that Daphne got of men without having to have a large dose of estrogen or experience first-hand any of its side effects – an offer you can’t refuse, right?

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

Sometimes You Have to Be Tough to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

Sometimes a woman quite literally NEEDS you to get a little tough with her. How do you recognize this, and how do you get tough without being abusive? Think “leadership”…

Yesterday was a really odd day. Everyone I know was having what you would call an “off day” of one kind or another. Allergies, colds, arthritis, lousy weather, vendor incompetence, boss incompetence, employee incompetence, customer incompetence, bad food, bad service, monthly cycle – you name it, somebody was going through it. The oddest thing was what happened with one of my best friends, Daphne.

We met over ten years ago, and when we did, she was a mess. Totally submissive, living for the approval of others, and living under the thumb of a wimpy, manipulative, predatory, wife-beating husband and a highly-controlling and manipulative mother. She asked me one day fairly early in our friendship how I had come to be so tough and independent, and how I could live being self-confident and caring absolutely nothing about what others thought of me. I steered her to some targeted reading, especially some of Ayn Rand’s most excellent work, and we talked about different problems and how to solve them.

She became fiercely independent, ultimately “wearing the pants in the family” (not a surprise at all given her husband’s nature; bullies always capitulate when you call their bluff) and presenting such a strong image to her mother that her mother went from being dominating and manipulative to seeking Daphne’s approval at every turn because she was intimidated by Daphne’s independence. That was about nine years ago, and she’s held the line ever since…that is, until yesterday.

There had been a lot of turmoil over the weekend, including a funeral, a couple of family problems, a severe migraine, etc., and by Monday morning she was so mentally fatigued and her testosterone so depleted (it balances the creative and emotionally-driving effects of estrogen, and too much influence from estrogen makes women – and men – uncharacteristically – or more, for some of them -- erratic, unstable, and agitated, a medical condition known as “estrogen dominance”) that her self-esteem became challenged, and she suddenly started acting like she had when we first met, very dramatic, needy, approval-seeking, etc. As the day wore on, it was getting worse instead of better.

To finish putting this in perspective, Daphne is one of the brightest women I know, with an IQ of around 130-140, very emotionally aware, and extremely competent at self-evaluation. She’s one of the top three women on the support staff who helped with the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and who continue to respond to surveys, questions, reader dilemmas, etc., with useful insight because she can “step in and out of herself” at will and remain entirely objective through the whole thing, which is very unusual among women, who tend to get wrapped up in the emotion of an experience and don’t want to quickly shut it down and analyze it, even when it would be to their extreme benefit to do so.

Do you have the picture now? A smart, fiercely independent woman who is quite adept at side-stepping her own emotions to rationally examine them has reverted to behavior not exhibited in nearly a decade, and as the day wore on, as I tried to point out what was happening, it got worse instead of better. I knew what was coming when she said, “I just feel like I need a good cry.” Why?

She’d been to a funeral and yet she needed a good cry? Danger Will Robinson! Danger! That’s a dependable sign of MAJOR emotional energy build-up looking for an outlet; “needing a good cry” is bad enough, but when a woman has been to a tear-jerking event like a funeral and still “needs a good cry,” well, where I grew up they would say something like, “You ain’t seen trouble yet, but it’s comin’!” Emotional energy is like any other kind of mental energy. Thought is the result of chemical reactions in the brain causing electrical impulses at the nerve synapses. This tells you what?

That the stress of all the emotion from the weekend had put her brain chemistry out of balance. Some women have more of a problem with this than others, but the symptoms are the same; they get weaker and more clingy, then needy, then irritable, and finally they sound like they’re spoiling for a fight, and you can hear the stress and anger start building in their voice looking for an outlet. The big question is “what do you do?”

First, you have to avoid the urge to let her engage you in a fight. If you can spot the “I just need a good cry” stage, suggest to her that she sit down for a chick-flick, and invite a girlfriend over to share it with her if she doesn’t want to be alone, not because you don’t care, but because it would be bad for both of you if you step into the “girlfriend role,” even temporarily. If she can “bleed off” during the chick flick, she’ll be fine. But you can’t always catch her in that state because she may pass through it and be in bad shape while you are apart, such as while one or both of you are at work. If that happens, you’re going to have to deal with it; there’s no escaping it, at least not without extreme risk.

If she gets bad enough to need a fight to bleed off, she’ll say something to put you on the defensive and then jump to get you to jump back; a big clue that this is about to happen is that whatever she seems to be upset about would normally be something trivial, or is even something that she obviously contrived, albeit involuntarily. It’s chemistry, and until you’ve been driven by something like this, it’s hard to understand or identify with it, but a woman will have very little to no choice about starting a fight once they reach this point. (Chick flick, anyone?)

Giving her a good fight will reset her brain chemistry, but it will also create a lot of embarrassment, hard feelings, scars and other aftermath that neither of you really want to deal with, and while she might be able to dismiss the things she says to you, even knowing that she’s in a involuntary predicament due to a chemically-altered state, you may never forgive or forget them, as she may never forgive or forget the things you say to her in response to what she said to you SPECIFICALLY TO PROVOKE THE ALTERCATION. We’ve all seen how things, once said, cannot really ever be taken back, no matter how much they weren’t really meant at the time. You need a confrontation, but not a fight. How do you do that?

Remember the many times I’ve mentioned leadership as a biological trigger for attraction? The chemical balance in the brain is a biological matter. When she finally had things built up to try to start the fight and made a snide remark to try to provoke me, I took a stern tone that she had probably never heard me use before, and said, “Just hold it! You are not going there with me!”

That’s leadership (decision-making), and authority (establishing a boundary), but it’s also a confrontation (denying her the fight and doing so in a stern tone). I thought for a second she had dropped the phone until I heard her breathe, and then continued, “This is not about me and you, or even me or you separately. It’s about all the emotional turmoil that you went through over the last few days, and you’re looking for a fight to sort it all out. There’s a better way to handle this.”

I went on to explain what had happened, maintaining the stern tone of a friend who is verbally roughing up another friend for doing something silly, and gradually softening it as I proceeded over the next couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes of silence as she took it all in, she interrupted me in mid sentence with, “Oh my God! I’ve been doing this all day, haven’t I?”

It was like hearing somebody come out of a daze, and Gentlemen, you MUST understand this, for many women, it really is like coming out of a daze. When they get off balance like that, they are truly in an altered mental state, and may not even remember some things that happen or have an accurate sense of the passage of time. This does not in any way make them inferior, weak, flakey, or insane, any other kind of sexist nonsense. It’s just the way they are, and something that we have to be aware of and work around – NOT SUFFER IN SILENCE OVER -- if we are going to have a long-term relationship with them. It comes with the package, and you can help them though it or be made miserable by it. A pretty obvious choice, huh?

Eventually, after talking for a few minutes (and Daphne making several apologies and sounding very embarrassed), we got back to the point in a prior discussion about her saying that she felt like she just needed a good cry. Sometime before we spoke today, she watched some old sad movie, had a good cry, and was herself when I called this morning to share a reader e-mail with her. This brings up the other VERY important point…

When women say they “need a good cry,” they’re not being prissy little wuss-bags. They know that they are off-balance, and have learned over time that it’s going to take some kind of extreme emotional event that is sustained for a fairly long time (as emotional events go) to get things back in balance. It is VERY difficult to create a positive event that can create this intensity and duration of emotion, so they usually use something negative but inert, like a sad movie, to get them started and keep them going, and by the time the movie is over, they’re bled out, stabilized, and generally okay. Are you with me here?

Women don’t like sad movies because they enjoy being sad, they like sad movies because they provide a needed emotional rush and release that rids them of negative energy and sets their body chemistry right without having to engage us in a fight and damage our relationships. A woman’s life is mostly about managing her relationships, thanks to her brain structure and chemistry that give her the signature social nature of womankind, and they really do try to protect their relationships a lot more than many men. Hence, when your partner wants to watch a sad movie, don’t interfere. You don’t have to sit there through the whole thing, and again, should have her invite a girlfriend over to watch it with her, but…

If there is no girlfriend available or she doesn’t want to do that, you don’t want to be cast in the role of girlfriend because it kills attraction over time. Tell her that you don’t like sad movies and don’t play well in the role of girlfriend, and that you’ll be in another room, but if she gets upset and wants to be held a bit you’ll be happy to “pop in” for a few minutes if she asks. Being a strong shoulder to cry on is a far cry from being a girlfriend sharing in a drama festival. Crying at chick-flicks was part of the bad advice in the 1980’s that got us into this mess, so don’t go there, ever. You will indeed be very uncomfortable in the girlfriend role if you have an ounce of masculinity in you, and you’ll kill attraction and respect in her. There’s just no upside for either of you if you try to substitute for a girlfriend for even a minute.

If you do have to spend a few minutes with her while she watches, monitor her as she does, and if you notice tears starting to form sit down with her for a bit and snuggle her up, then a few minutes after the scene changes and she’s dried up for a few minutes excuse yourself for a bit. She doesn’t need a baby sitter, but it will feel good to have you there holding her when the tears come, and it will be endearing to her to have you tolerate a few minutes of that movie to help her get through it. Don’t feed into it, or egg her on, or start crying yourself. Just sit still, pull her close, and do whatever you do when she doesn’t feel good and you snuggle her up, such as hair-stroking, nuzzling, etc.

Incidentally, this is NOT the time to try to make sexual advances, but if she does, even subtly by holding a kiss longer or advancing from a “love” kiss to an aroused kiss, go with it if you can regularly bring her to orgasm, because that will release energy and reset chemistry just like a good cry for most women, according to those who have answered my surveys. If you can't, adding frustration to what's already bothering her is likely a pretty bad idea.

If she has difficulty with orgasm, or if you just don’t know how to get her there, I can point you to some helpful resources (just e-mail me or follow any of the reader-recommended links in the sidebar of this post), and I’d STRONGLY suggest you avail yourself of them, because no matter how much either of you try to downplay the issue, if she suddenly discovers that somebody else can while you can’t, or even suspects that somebody else can when you seldom or never have, you will have one of the worst of all problems on your hands: a bored wife in whom someone else has created attraction. Attraction is like a foot race, whoever gets there first wins.

Women are like us in a lot of ways, but in the ways they differ from us lie the potential for a lot of misunderstanding and lack of appreciation, not to mention good old-fashioned BIG trouble. They try to tell us what they need, but one of those differences is how they communicate with us, which really throws a wrench in the works. But, there’s help if you’re smart enough to know that you need it and man enough to accept it…

I brought a group of nearly 200 women together to find out what they want from men and life, and then worked with the 118 couples made up of the “attached” women in the first group with their men (about one-third of them were unmarried or divorced) and worked them over nine ways from Sunday to find out what went right and wrong in relationships, how men and women differed, how to communicate with them, and how to make or break that wonderful feeling of attraction, that emotion that women so desperately crave and which truly brings out the best in them when they feel it, so much so that they will literally kill to protect that feeling.

That research was compiled into my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which was given back to the couples for testing and fine tuning, and all of them, as well as everyone who has bought it since (unless somebody has failed to complain and get a refund when they felt like it, and can you imagine that happening today???) has improved their life and/or relationship, and I have more unsolicited testimonials to that effect than you could ever imagine. Some relationships can’t be improved because they never should have been formed in the first place, and this book helps you to identify and exit them peacefully as well. And the best news of all is…

That you can have it now! It’s an instant download, 118 pages in PDF format, single-spaced and optimized for printing on standard letter-size paper, so you can read it on your screen or carry it with you and read it on the train, plane, or your favorite easy chair – YOUR CHOICE. Just choose! Go for it now, so you can start replacing boredom, frustration, and fights with happy times and a higher standard of living and self-esteem, because life is too short to spend it just wondering why things aren’t going so well when they could be going great!

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

Pleasure or Pain: More on Horseplay and "Picking" in Relationships and Marriage

One of the women takes issue with being picked on the wrong way, and rightly so. If you’re going to do it, you’d better do it the right way, or you’ll be paying for it later. Understanding our differences makes it easy to get it right…

Happy Independence Day America! Take a minute and remember what bought the liberties you enjoy today, a great many human lives over the course of two centuries, and resolve yourself to start doing a better job of protecting those freedoms before all the special interest groups end up stealing them right out from under your nose. Indeed, take a minute to read this Facebook post about what happened to the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.

It will put things back in perspective for you. And by the way, that’s my Facebook profile, so if you’d rather follow me on Facebook, just do a friend request. My daily lessons are posted there every day, along with MySpace, Twitter, WordPress, and blog.makingherhappy.com. Write to me at support@makingherhappy.com if you can’t find me on one of the above and I’ll hook you up.

And for those of you not in America, whatever freedoms you enjoy were bought with blood, too, and may be disappearing right under your nose, like the frog in the pan of cold water who won’t jump out before being boiled to death because he doesn’t notice the change. So be vigilant, and do what you can to earn more freedom instead of being disinterested, disenfranchised, and disinvolved while the disingenuous usurp control over your life.

Yesterday’s newsletter on picking and playing touched off a barrage of “Amen’s” from the women whose husbands shied away from playing, but there was one that was on a different plane that we need to discuss. Her husband tries to play, but he goes about it all wrong. Meet Gina:

Hi David,

I loved this and all of your e-mails. I wish you could get my husband to understand this. He’s constantly making mean remarks about me, thinking that he’s being funny. He demeans me in front of his friends and family, my friends, family, and coworkers, and he’s embarrassed me to tears more times than I can count. He’s a good man, attractive, very alpha male, and keeps me moving, but when he does this I could just kill him, because it really hurts.

He tells everybody I’m always late everywhere I go; it’s true. We have four kids and I have a hard time getting all of them ready to go anywhere. I have a hard time keeping my weight under control because I tend to eat more when I’m stressed, and I’m always stressed, and he’ll point out to people when I’ve gained weight or my clothes are too tight. He makes fun of me when I make any mistake, and makes it his mission to point it out to everyone for a week or more after.

I can’t get him to understand that this isn’t funny and it hurts badly, and I’ve about had all I can take of it. When I told him that, he made fun of me for being dramatic! I love him with all I have, but I’m starting to feel like a verbal punching bag and to be honest, the main reason I’m always stressed isn’t our four kids, it’s living in fear of what he’s going to say next to mortify me! Can you help?

Thanks so much,
Gina

I handled Gina’s request for help by private correspondence because there were some specific issues and instructions that I don’t want to go into here for several reasons, among them her privacy, but we do need to talk more about this.

I have a good friend who also does this, and his name is Rick. He’s an alpha male from the ground up: retired cop, now consulting in law enforcement, sharp, articulate, and one of us guys who enters a room and everybody just turns and starts moving in that direction because they can sense leadership from across the room.

He loves his “wife” (they never had a wedding, but have been together since dinosaurs roamed the Earth and regard themselves and conduct their lives as if they are married), and she both loves him and is wildly attracted to him, even after years of putting up with his sense of humor, but it is indeed a problem. He sounds just like Gina’s man, making fun of things like her weight that she is really sensitive about, and nobody, myself included, can get him to understand that he’s hurting her. He says she’s as tough as he is and that’s why he loves her.

She’s tough as nails, but she’s also a woman, and even the toughest women have their hot buttons, just like men. She lives in constant torment of loving and being attracted to a man who inadvertently hurts her every other time he opens his mouth, and I really don’t know how much more of it she’s going to be able to take.

Being tough doesn’t mean that nothing hurts; it means you go on with your life in spite of hurting, just like being brave doesn’t mean you’re never scared, it just means you do what you have to do in spite of being scared. And if something hurts too much for too long, most people will remove the cause, or remove themselves from the cause.

What’s escaping Gina’s husband, my friend Rick, and a lot of other men I know is that this is an area where men and women are fundamentally different. Men jab at each other’s vulnerabilities to play and to help each other toughen up, and to challenge each other to do something about our vulnerabilities. We poke each other in the stomach when we notice a few more cheeseburgers and beers collecting around the belt line and make a crack like “Expanding the shed to keep your tool from rusting there, Bob?” There’s no telling how many thousands of years we’ve done it, and it’s a ritual of strengthening, and bonding, a sort of intimacy that only our friends are allowed to engage in with us.

With women, it’s different. The only time you will hear a woman bring up another woman’s vulnerability to her face is if she is on the offensive. They only do it to hurt each other when they are being competitive or vindictive, and it hurts them badly when we do this. They may even try to excuse it as just us being us, but there’s that subconscious link to their communications infrastructure that still eats at them as if we had been a woman when we said something about their weight, or their feet, or a mole, or a gray root on a hair. It’s rejection, or an attack, not a joke, in their book.

In our world, any minor flaw is something to rib your buddy about; in their world, it’s ammunition for the big guns. For us, mentioning our flaws is like a slap on the back and gets a laugh, while in theirs, it’s a slap in the face. That’s why I’ve said in previous newsletter that you can only say something in that kind of play if it’s plainly an exaggeration, like telling her she has a big butt if she has a very skinny butt and knows it, or call her “Bigfoot” when she has tiny feet, something so absurd as to be obviously a joke. Once you’ve established that baseline, you can push the envelope a VERY little at a time and gently find out where her limits are, and then push the envelope a bit, but start in the safe zone so that everybody has fun.

We’re alike in many ways, and it often deceives us into thinking that we are alike in ways that we are entirely different, even opposite. It is these deceptive differences that make us unwittingly hurt each other when hurting each other is among those things that we indeed NEVER want to do.

Not knowing about them – simple ignorance – is very treatable; it takes only a little knowledge. Not caring about our differences and not trying to learn about them and avoid hurting each other with them – apathy – is also treatable, but it takes more drastic measures, like a pitcher of ice water on the crotch, an iron skillet to the head, or in extreme cases, a divorce, or even a bullet or worse; Google “Lorena Bobbitt” if you need an example.

The question you have to ask yourself is which ailment do you have, ignorance or apathy, and how is your ailment going to be treated?

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m going to guess that if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be reading this, so we’re going to treat ignorance. That’s easy, fun, and dirt cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can thank me later… LOL! If you’re here looking for validation of your mistakes instead of a fix for your problems, that’s not going to happen here. There are a bunch of people calling themselves a “support group” somewhere waiting for you with open arms and a big ol’ sob story just like yours if that’s what you’re after. (Yes, I know there are legitimate support groups who really help people, too, and so does everybody else, so hold the hate mail if you’re in one of them.)

For right now, just concern yourself with getting the knowledge to fix this condition, and any others you may have, into your head and into practice, while your problems are still easy to fix. You can do it when they get hard, too, but it takes longer and everybody hurts a lot more in the meantime. Taking care of it NOW is your best bet.

If you’re smart enough to see that, and want to fix your problems before they get any worse, and even go on to make everything better than it’s ever been, start by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you’ll see what those before you have already found: it’s solid, tested, proven knowledge and advice, and if you can put your pants on in the morning instead of offering them to a passer-by, you can do what needs to be done and enjoy it, for the rest of your life.

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

Things She Does When You're Not Around: Understanding Separation Behavior in Relationships and Marriage

Women do things when their men aren’t around that may seem strange, or even annoying, until you realize what they are really doing and why they’re doing it. Here’s a big clue…

Gents (and Dames), I hope you’re having a great day. Have you ever left town to come home and find little weird things around the house, like your pillow on her side of the bed, or one of your shirts tucked under her pillow, your wedding picture album that usually lives in the top of the closet laying out somewhere, etc.? Well, if you lucky, you have, and you’re about to find out why you’re lucky because Troy asked about it. Check him out:

Dear David,

I have been married for several years now and I have to say that last year I was really at a loss for what had gone wrong with our marriage. It seemed like we just were not on the same page anymore and I was not sure if I was to blame or if she had changed her mind about living her life out with me. A close friend suggested to me that I should read your newsletters and see if your book was right for the problems I was going through. I liked what I read so I did purchase your book and seemed to get things right on track in just a few weeks of working things out with my beautiful wife.

However, there is one thing that is driving me totally insane with this woman. My job requires me to travel and the time I am gone varies from job to job. The thing that bugs me is that when I come home from a job I cannot wait to get out of my suit and tie and put on my favorite lounging shirt and jeans. The past few times I have come home instead of my shirt being washed and ready for me to wear I have found it under my wife's pillow or next to her in bed. I am not sure what I should say to her much less if I should mention that the sheets on the bed are the same ones that were on it when I left, sometimes weeks ago. I do not think she is lazy and just lies around when I am not home, but why would she not have the laundry done and things ready for me when I get home?

Please understand that I am in no way saying that I think that she is the only one that should have to do the laundry or anything like that. I am just at a loss as to why my shirt would be under her pillow or the sheets would not have been changed after a few weeks. Could you shed some light on this for me? Asking her about it is maddening. She will just smile and say “oh I will take care of that right now since you are home.” What does she mean by that remark?

Thanks,
Troy

My reply:

Troy, Buddy, what she means is “Shut up and count your blessings.” Actually that’s not what she means, but that’s what I wish she would tell you. You’re a smart guy, you’ve read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” so you know about how women act when they are under the influence of attraction, and about “treasure boxes” and how they hoard things that remind them of you to help them get through missing you or get over being mad at you or suspicious of you. You know that her sense of smell is likely to be four times as strong as your own. Put two and two together!

She has your shirt in the bed and isn’t changing the sheets because they smell like you! Hence, they invoke memories of you! The shirt reminds her of things you do together outside the bedroom, and the smell of you on the sheets and your pillowcase (which she is probably sleeping on while you’re gone if your pillow is similar to hers, or hugging it as she sleeps if it is not) reminds her of the cuddling, snuggling, mumbling in your sleep, copious quantities of gratuitous sex, etc., that happen in your bed. Get over yourself quick, Slick, because the other option is for her to be seeking her attraction thrills with someone else instead of the memory of you!

That’s right! If she’s sleeping on sheets the two of you have sweated on together, on your pillow, with your shirt, looking at your wedding pictures, etc., while you’re gone, she’s helping herself to keep feeling her attraction for you while you’re not there. Don’t drive her nuts asking questions and bitching about it; HELP HER! “Sex her up good” the night or morning before you leave to make sure the sheets are to her liking.

Make sure you wear something soft and comfortable the evening before you leave, like a flannel shirt, soft cotton sweat shirt or T-shirt, etc. – something made of natural fibers and very soft for her face to touch. Make sure that you don’t foul it up by getting motor oil, salad dressing (especially a pungent one like a garlic-flavored vinaigrette or something with bleu cheese), marinara sauce (garlic and onion), etc. – something that would both stain the shirt if not laundered immediately and spoil the smell of you on it if she decided to sacrifice the shirt anyway.

And, most of all, make sure you follow the advice in my book about little “gifts” that can be stored in her treasure box and brought out when you’re not around. (Yes, the rest of you are going to have to read the book to find out what they are!)

Attraction is such a powerful force that you don’t even have to be around for her to be enjoying it, as long as you leave sufficient “triggers” in her possession to help her feel it when you leave. What’s cool is that doing so takes little to no effort, and everything that you do to help bring this about is fun! Of all the things I have learned about creating attraction from all the women who have helped me to learn about it, the one overwhelming truth is that the life a man leads and the things that living that life causes him to do to create attraction for a woman are often as fun as the “rewards” of creating attraction for her. They are things that real men enjoy doing every day of their lives instead of wussing and fretting and worrying like girly-men.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Some day I’d love to throw a big party and have all the couples who have used my work to better their lives share their stories with those of you who have not just to see the awed and amazed looks on your faces as these people describe how much fun they had during the process and how much fun it made their lives outside their relationships as well, because bringing your relationship and marriage up to where it should be changes you, both of you, and your children as well. It makes the whole household get along better, have better communications skills, less stress, more confidence, a more active imagination and sense of humor, and gives you a kind of satisfaction and inner peace that cannot come from any other source but a happy family.

So are you going to jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com/, download your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and start down that path to a truly happy family, or are you going to just sit there on the fence asking stupid questions like “Can I do this?” and “What if it doesn’t work for me?” You can do it (people of less intelligence than yours have been doing it for centuries), and it will work for you, so go ahead, make YOUR day.

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

An Accurate Barometer of Your Relationship or Marriage Status

Did you ever want a really accurate barometer of the nature and status of your relationship and marriage? One so accurate that it could tell you whether you needed to be deepening commitment or bailing out as of this minute? I have one for you, and one of your fellow readers spotted it!

I keep saying that I have the smartest readers on the planet, and I dare anybody to argue with me, because I have some pretty solid proof. Many of you pick things up from my book and newsletters that while sitting there in plain sight, most people would just skim right over and not notice how incredibly useful they are and what an impact they could make on the rest of their life because they’re too busy looking for things like magic bullets or validation for their mistakes.

Such a pearl is displayed here, brought out by Joe, one of my top students, from a recent newsletter, and “Jeff” in Queensland, this one just happened to be something that you need to pay extra attention to, Buddy:

Hey David,

Reading through the entire text of today’s post I found this passage:

“Committed relationships are either synergistic partnerships or they are something that will destroy you; there is no middle ground. If your relationship isn’t fulfilling you and giving you cause for celebration, it’s killing you, either through the slow poison of the erosion of your self-worth and self-respect, or the explosive shockwave of excessive demands and manipulation that continue until you are wiped out, when the fatal blow is delivered, the break-up, accompanied by the news that everything you did just wasn’t quite good enough.”

...to be a revelation and the best barometer I've seen. It's been printed out and will be posted and read every day. Often I feel like a slow learner, but I also know that lessons tend to be repeated until we gain the requisite knowledge.

Joe brings out two VERY important points, and I want all of you to study and reflect on them, because your life and happiness depend on them. Yes, it is that serious!

First, the obvious, that your relationship or marriage is either making your life better or it’s sucking it dry. There is no middle ground. And you may say, “Well, it’s not so bad. I can tolerate it. It’s better than getting out and having to date again, even if I’m not particularly happy.” Masculine bovine feces!!! (B.S.!!!)

If the latter is your response, you’re just killing time, waiting, and enduring. One of the wisest men I ever knew was fond of saying, “Son, you can’t kill time without injuring eternity.” (I wonder if he picked it up from the same church sign that I saw it on!) And it’s true. Every minute you spend in a bad relationship is a minute you can’t spend finding and enjoying a good one, trapped in your “comfortable unhappiness.” And “sucking it up” is the act of a coward in this case; a real man will love himself enough to fix the situation if it can be fixed or find a new situation if his current one can’t. Commitment to a doomed situation isn't commitment to anything except status quo and the easy way out if you're just using it as an excuse to not take necessary action.

The other, less obvious but equally profound thing that Joe points out is that we will make the same mistake over and over until we learn better. It’s sort of a corollary to “He who isn’t familiar with history is doomed to repeat it.” It won’t do you any good to exit a bad relationship if you don’t make the effort to learn how to enter into and maintain a good one, one that is based on love and attraction instead of need, lust, etc., and one in which there is genuine, deep compatibility, open and fulfilling communication, and fun and adventure.

So there are the big questions: How are you getting along? And what are you going to do about it? Is it good, but can be better? Is it salvageable? Is it doomed? Can you kick it up a notch? Notches even? If this one is bad, can you find a wife? Or just the next future ex-wife? If you find a wife, can you hold her love, respect, interest, and attraction? Or will you bore or frustrate her into affairs, or into shutting down so that you have affairs?

That’s a pretty scary list of questions for most people. Are you one of them? If so, would you like some answers?

I have them for you, really! Ask anyone who has ever read and applied my book, "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" to their relationship or marriage. Some have found that they could indeed kick things up, others that they could fix some pretty serious problems and then kick things up, often to better than they had ever been. Others have found that they were in a marriage that was doomed before it ever came together, and found their way out gracefully, peacefully, and with their dignity (and assets!) intact, and went on to find a good partner and a happy life.

So what will you do? Sit and sulk, saying, “Well, it could never work for me?” Or will you go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of this book that has worked for everyone who has used it and start making the kind of changes that make the difference between suffering, merely existing, and living? I STRONGLY suggest you do the latter, because life is too short to do anything else.

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

Boredom: Just How Far Will a Woman Go to Escape It? Far Enough to Wreck Your Relationship and Marriage!

MUST READ! I’ve talked a lot about how much of a problem boredom is for women, and why, but the obvious examples of boredom, affairs and dramatic outbursts, don’t hold a candle to what this woman reveals!

I hope you’re ready to have your world rocked, because it’s about to happen.

Anybody who has been reading this newsletter very long knows that I rarely use the words “MUST READ” in a title or summary, quite simply because I want to maintain credibility for the few times when I really send you a true “MUST READ” issue. This is one of them. Why?

The letter I’m about to show you left me speechless for several minutes, a feat I’m sure many of you may perceive as bordering on impossible. I had heard of such things happening, but never with such destructive and self-destructive force and disregard for the consequences. Meet Hannah:

Dear David,

I have something to share with you and your other readers that I think will shock some and make some say “My wife would never do something like that, “ but it happens and I think its about time that a lot of eyes were opened. After 18 years of marriage I recently was divorced and could not for the life of me figure out why, that is until I looked back at our marriage and what went on year after year. What I found was not pretty, but until I faced it I knew I could never have a successful relationship ever again.

For years I and a group of very close girlfriends had what we always called a book club. We would meet twice a month to discuss what the latest book we were supposed to have read. Key words here are “supposed to have,” because we never turned the first page of any book at all. This was our excuse to get out of the house and have a few drinks and really think of ways to cause major damage to our marriages.

At the time, major damage to our marriages was not at all what we intended, but the truth is we were kidding ourselves. Actually lying is what we were doing, but we were too busy calling it a contest to make it seem as if we were only playing around, not hurting our husbands and dooming our marriages.

We were horribly bored, because our husbands left us alone constantly to keep house and watch the kids while they worked late (whether they really worked or had an affair), played golf, worked on their cars, went fishing together, etc. We got one night every two weeks and they got the other 13, so on our one night, we made up for lost time with too much booze and drama.

We were also immature and honestly, in need of male leadership that wasn’t there, and two of our group ended up being alcoholics from trying to drown their boredom in vodka. One ended up with a “disease” from one of her affairs, and several of us are now divorced.

I guess I need to explain in detail what the contest are and the rules of the game. This way you can better understand what took place and how some of us are now alone and why at 40+ years old we are looking for jobs to put food on the table and clothes to wear.

It really started out that I did not have the ability to keep my big mouth shut when I should have sit quietly. One night after a few drinks I bragged to my friends that I could get my husband to do anything I told him or buy me anything I asked him too. That was all it took for the idea of the contest to be born and as time went by you will see what happened.

The contest, as we called it, was just simply a cruel way to see who could get the biggest and best thing from their husband, money be damned. Each woman in the group took turns thinking of what outcome would make one the winner of the contest. There was no prize to be won except for bragging rights until the next contest.

The first contest was actually pretty mild compared to what was going on when my divorce papers were delivered. We went from seeing who could get their husbands to pay for girl’s nights out to who had the biggest and best house, car and the most expensive jewelry. At first is was so easy to pull off without the worry of the husbands finding out, but as you can guess with each bigger and better thing we wanted it would take endless hours and sometimes days to make sure all the tracks were covered and secret details of the truth hidden.

We lied to ourselves and husbands so much that we actually believed that no harm was being done and it was something they really wanted to do for us. When the truth was we were pulling string that would come back to bite some of us in the very purse we were depending on for our very lives.

I can not remember when the first contest even started. What I can tell you is that after I shot my mouth off bragging it started with a few partially drunk women claiming to have the most control over their husbands. It was simply to have a new credit card with the highest spending limit before the next meeting of the book club. To some that is no big deal, just get the card and just not use it, right? Well, that is what a smart and sane person would do, but we were bored women who were only interested in treating our boredom by seeing what we could get out of a man.

The second contest was not so easy. It was decided at the next meeting that we needed something a little harder to get something that the men would really have to work harder to make happen for us. Mindy thought we should see who could talk their husbands into a new car. Now that did not mean it had to be brand new off the show room floor, just new to us, and with the biggest price tag. On this contest I was not the winner, but I did score a new car only a few months old. The winner of this contest if you are interested scored a brand new Lexus fully loaded with a sunroof. Even at this we still were not satisfied we all wanted to win at least once.

The third was a house if you did not already own one. This contest to some of us was nothing because we already owned homes and I knew that we had already bought the biggest and best house we could afford on his salary and I did not really participate in this one.

The next one was a new set of wedding rings with at least a $4,000 price tag. This one I took with a 4 carrot set of diamond wedding rings that it took my husband maxing out one credit card and taking out another one just to pay for my rings. These rings did not mean anything to me and I later sold them at a loss just to get rid of them. The truth is that I really did not like them from the start they were just something to put me on the top of the game for once.

Over the years there were many other contests and some I won and some I did not and with each loss I worked harder the next time to be the one on top. Soon this was a way of life for the women of the book club. Since our husbands weren’t giving us anything constructive or exciting to think about, all we could think about was the competition, and being women, it was fierce to say the least. For some of us it seemed like the best time of our lives, but it was really the cancer that consumed our marriages.

This is still going on with some of the women. I received an e-mail a few days ago telling me that this year there was to be a Christmas contest and the rules were that it had to be a diamond of at least one karat in a solid gold setting. The winner would be the one with the biggest price tag.

I know what I did was cruel on some level, but I can’t say that I feel bad about it, or that I will take the blame for the divorce. I was ignored to the point of not being able to love or be loved, and I was so bored that I would have done anything for a thrill. I guess we are all lucky that much worse damage wasn’t done. I will tell you this: there are times that a woman can be her own worst enemy. So be careful with the action you take and be smart. Know if you are the one being cast in the part of the fool of your marriage.

I hope that is something you can share with your readers, this was my real life and I hope others can learn from it. I’m having to restart my life at the age of 40, so you figure out who was really the one with control of the marriage in the end and who, if anyone, were the winners of any contest.

Sincerely,
Hannah

Gentlemen, I know that I talk about this a lot, and I do it because this is so much more critical an issue than what we have any frame of reference to understand or empathize with. When we get bored, we just do something goofy, grab our tools, flip on a ball game, or play grab-ass. Women can’t be satisfied with that, because their need for emotional energy is so much higher than ours.

By the time they take radical enough action to alleviate their boredom, they’ve already reached a point where rational thought, self-control, and even compassion are no longer possible, because they are truly desperate for relief. I’m not at all saying that they should never be held accountable for their actions, but I will point out that it is a whole lot easier for you to alleviate their boredom than to clean up the aftermath of them doing it themselves.

What’s really sad is that not only do women give off all kinds of signals that we could read to know when they’re in this kind of trouble but don’t know to look for them, they also tell us, but not in ways we are born to understand. For example, she doesn’t ask you if you think everything is alright to find out what you’re thinking, she asks to try to tell you that she has a problem, but you have to recognize the attempt and invite her to open up, proving that she has your attention and you care enough to listen, before she will spend the time to and effort to try to talk with you about it.

Regardless of who is ultimately responsible for a woman’s actions, there’s no denying that we can do a better job of positively influencing both their actions and our lives together. You tell me, would you rather see your wife smile because you just surprised her with a cute note or a subtle pinch or pat on the behind or see her angry and frustrated, rolling her eyes and walking out of the room? Either one is your choice, possibly even more than her own, and equally easily-achieved.

It’s not that we are responsible for a woman’s happiness, but we can help facilitate it much easier than they can themselves in a lot of ways. We can lead, we can share, we can protect, validate, and help to justify and celebrate their achievements. They are capable of many things, including many of the same things of which we are capable, but being far more social in nature than we are, they need a degree of social reinforcement to feel worthy of their happiness. Men generally look inside themselves for feelings of self-worth, while women are often compelled to look to others for such feelings.

The bottom line is that everything in your life needs attention, preventive maintenance, if you will. If you gas up your car and drive it until it breaks down, it will break down a lot faster, will it not? The same thing goes for your relationship and marriage. There are things you need to know and do that will keep your life together running smoothly, and it will break down quickly if you don’t know and do them.

So, you want me to give you an owner’s manual for your marriage? Sounds weird, but okay, here you go. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and make sure that you’re not the guy going to the poor house and divorce court because you couldn’t recognize the red light on your wife’s dashboard.

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

Why Are You With Her? Know the Right Reasons for a Great Relationship and Marriage

The following is actually chapter two of my free Break-up Busting 101 report; I’ve noticed that many people are not taking advantage of this wealth of information and I want to show you what you’re missing. In this chapter, we’ll talk about the four basic reasons people get into relationships and how to know if you’re there for the right reasons or the wrong ones.

Welcome to Lesson 2 in our Break-up Busting 101 crash course. I’ve noticed, just as you have, that a lot of so-called “free reports” are actually no more than glorified sales letters, but not so with mine, and I want to show you that today so that you will take full advantage of this genuine gift of valuable information. Indeed, I’ve included a condensed version of one of the most important – if not THE most important – chapters in my book, both to help you get a new understanding of how bad things can get when you think you’re doing the right thing and to prove to you beyond any doubt that if you are really interested in making life better, I can and will help you.

By the way, you can download this free report in its entirety and you should do so now, because I don’t know how much longer I’m going to leave it posted. If it goes, you’ll be out of luck.

So let’s talk about the reasons and emotions that cause people to come together in long-term relationships, how to identify them and distinguish between them, and most important of all, how to know if you’re in a relationship for the right or wrong reasons.

I write about this subject frequently because it is so vital to the success of anyone seeking a happy life in a relationship, and I want to write about it every day, because it is indeed the cornerstone of every well-rounded, well-matched, and happy relationship. These emotions, needs, and reasons are love, attraction, need, and lust. What happens if you confuse them? Did you know that they are different?

Unfortunately, most people don’t, and they are indeed not only different, but entirely independent of each other, as you are about to see. Thanks to Hollywood, poets, and poor grammar, among other things, many people use the word “love” in referring to all four of these very different and entirely unrelated conditions. Do you have any idea of the potential impact of such a mistake?

What if you feel as if you can’t live without somebody, which is need, and mistake that for “love,” which simply is “to value”? Will you be valued by someone whom you need, treat with jealousy and fear of losing them, causing you to try to control them and abuse them when they scare you? Hardly.

What if you are addicted to sex, and confuse the gratification it gives you with love, or if your sense of self-worth mistakenly comes from self-medicating your insecurities about your masculinity with frequent sex and marry someone thinking that the feeling you have will make the marriage work, when you don’t value the other person, and worse, don’t share their values? It’s a disaster that you can look around you and see every day, and an all-too-common cause of broken marriages.

Let’s stop with the what-if’s, since many may not see the difference at this point, and define these four conditions:

• To love is to value, to hold in high regard. Over the years, dictionary writers have included the other three conditions in their listed definitions for love, not because it was correct, but because it had become prevalent in our language as everyone sought prudish euphemisms for emotions and conditions they did not want to name because they would then have to face them and their true nature.


• Lust is a purely physical, biologically-caused desire to engage in sexual acts with another person – any person. Lust can even be at least partially satisfied by masturbation because it is just physical. The orgasm (sometimes multiples are required) sets off a cascade of chemical reactions that ends the state of heightened sexual desire. Neither love nor attraction is required to experience lust; it can indeed by induced by oral or injected medication, especially testosterone, the male sex hormone, which is the only true aphrodisiac known to science.


• Attraction is also biologically-triggered, automatically and consistently, but it manifests as emotional excitement and desire for intimacy and sex with a specific person who has triggered it; engaging a person for whom you do not feel attraction will not fulfill the desire it creates, which differentiates it from lust. It is not, however, a feeling or indication of value, because a person can feel attraction for someone they literally despise, such as women who crave the attention of men who beat them and wait for them to come home for prison, telling themselves it will be different this time, or men who try to drink themselves to death or engage in other self-destructive behavior because they can no longer sleep with the wife that just left them and took everything he owned to boot and become reckless, showing a disdain for rules and stability.


• Need is a demand placed upon another person for something they have, usually their life. Where love is characterized by a strong feeling of happiness when with its object, and wanting the object of your love to be happy as well, looking forward to your next meeting, etc., need is characterized by a fear of losing another person, and thoughts center around what will happen if they are no longer in your life, creating an overwhelming concern for not being able to live without them. Where love causes one to do nice things for another and enjoy it, need causes one to either try to “buy off” someone with nice gestures or to overwhelm, manipulate, and/or control them, resenting them and the power they hold over one at some – if not all – times.

The epitome of need is the codependent pair. You’ve seen them, the couple comprise of one who is dedicated to self-destruction and one who is dedicated to saving the self-destructive one. The self-destructive person needs the other to bail them out of jam after jam after jam, and the other does bail them out, because they are driven by guilt to keep saving them, but the price of their salvation is to submit to control. And I know a lot more of these couples than I care to think about. They think they love, and love is more impossible for them than anyone else, because they hate themselves; loving each other is not possible until that hate is corrected, and that often takes a lot of counseling, if it can be done at all.

Not one of these four conditions is in any way related to or dependent upon another; any of the four can be experienced in the total absence of the other three. This blows a lot of poetic notions and language right out of the water, such as “making love,” “in love,” “love child,” etc., but that’s irrelevant. What is supremely relevant is that you must accept these conditions and their differences as they are, understand them, and appropriately create them, enjoy them, or guard against them (as in the case of need, lust, and at times, even attraction) in your own committed relationship or marriage:

Yes, you want to love and be loved. If you’re not valued by the person you value, or don’t value a person who values you, you’re mismatched, and doomed to a life of boredom and resentment at best, and most likely headed for conflict, resentment, affairs and divorce.

If you experience lust and indiscriminately desire sex with people outside your relationship, your partner may resent it tremendously, as you might if the shoe is on the other foot (not all people regard sex as exclusive to a single partner – “open relationships,” etc.). Such hedonistic desire and values can only work in a relationship where both partners share such a value structure and view of sex, and rarely if ever is it enough to support a long-term relationship or marriage; love and attraction are still required.

Attraction for your partner is a wonderful thing, as is having them attracted to you, but attraction outside the partnership can be disastrous in the same way and for the same reasons as lust, except it can be worse because of the emotional element that goes with attraction. A relationship without attraction between the partners is a simple friendship, and usually a boring one. Such a relationship with love but no attraction is the relationship where you hear about partners having affairs, saying, “I love my husband/wife dearly, but I need more.” That “more” is the excitement, fun, etc., that are created by attraction, and if they are missing, trouble’s coming or already upon you. Or worse, you hear the poetic “I love you, but I’m not IN LOVE with you,” as if everyone knows what that bit of euphemistic tripe really means.

Need is bad for everybody. If you or your partner is being needy, the negative emotions described above will be present, especially in a codependent pair. If the symptoms of need are observed, somebody needs to start an intense effort to increase self-esteem to a healthy level. If it can’t be done, the relationship is virtually doomed, and a “defensive exit” must be considered after all other options are exhausted. Partners want partners, not dependents, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard women say, “He was fun when we met, but he turned out to be so needy I just couldn’t stomach him,” or men say, “Well, she waited on me hand and foot, and that was the problem. It wasn’t because she cared that much about me, it was that she was that insecure and just smothered me to death.” Sure, every man enjoys a woman’s natural nurturing, a lot, but smothering and the hovering and constant interrogation that goes with it are enough to drive one to drink, or more appropriately, leave.

Gentlemen (and Ladies!) I know many of you may be thinking that this is a load of crappy opinion and that it doesn’t work that way for you, but it’s not. It works this way for everyone, and unfortunately, many are unable to see it until so much damage has been done that they are forced to drop all pretenses in a last-ditch effort to salvage and redeem their lives. Don’t let this happen to you; arguing with reality is a self-destructive fool’s errand. Accept reality and make the choice to use it to your advantage in fixing and enhancing your relationship instead of fighting it while your relationship continues to come apart. It’s not hard to do when you know how.

I won’t tell you that everything that you could possibly ever want to know is in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” BUT! There is more than enough included to fix issues that can be fixed and help you identify both major and minor issues that can’t be fixed (such as drug addicts, abusers, codependent partners, needy losers, incompatibility, etc.) and deal with them appropriately as well, allowing you to move on and have a life instead of being stuck with someone who simply wants to suck the life out of you.

This information has been tested and worked for everyone that has used it so far, and to this date I have yet to be asked for a refund by anyone who has tried it (and only two refunds for any reason!) – can you imagine how significant that is in an industry where people frequently buy downloadable information with full intention of asking for a refund and keeping the information??? It’s so profound and works so well that even people who may not be intending to pay for it are deciding it’s worth every penny. Read the writing on the wall, make the choice to take responsibility and improve your life and relationship, and take charge by downloading your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com. I know I sound like a broken record, but life really is too short to spending it wishing you had answers when they are this readily available and affordable.

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

Breaking Out of a Rut Can Save Your Relationship or Marriage

Readers frequently talk about “getting into a rut,” whether it’s personal, at work, or in their relationship. What do you do?

I’ve alluded to this problem on occasion, but never really addressed it because the solution has always been so obvious to me, but judging by the number of e-mails I’ve received on the subject, apparently it’s not so obvious for everyone else: How to deal with getting into – and especially OUT OF – a rut.

For men, getting into a rut is just a little too easy. Where women’s emotional scales run from zero to infinity, meaning that boredom is as bad as it gets and both positive and negative emotions will often fit the bill equally, our emotional scale runs from negative to positive, with neutral (boredom) being in the middle. We prefer boredom to problems, and our first priority in any crisis is to return things to that boring norm before trying to move on to great things. Indeed, for a significant number of men, success is as undesirable as failure, because it means shaking things up, deviating from the safe zone around boring, and going to what for them is a stressful extreme.

Fortunately, most of us don’t strive to be bored, but for many of us it does have a way of growing comfortable (see this article on being “comfortably unhappy” and this one for a reader's confession of her own comfortable unhappiness to get up to speed on this crucial concept). We fall into habits, and we hold there, taking a break from all the excitement in case we need extra energy to weather some new crisis that may jump up.

Guys, this is bad. If you want to experiment with peace and quiet and find out what words like “solitude” and “mundane” really feel like, plan on doing that during your retirement; it will most likely happen to you then anyway. While you are young and healthy (and by young, I mean any age under 70), habits that make you just cruise along without incident from day to day make you “dry up on the vine.” If you can look at your life over just the last month or two and see yourself doing the same thing every workday during that time, and spending your weekends the same way, like vegetating on the couch in front of the TV with a beer and snacks, you’re killing yourself, and likely damaging your career and your relationship as well.

How?

Glad you asked. Settling into that kind of routine and creating that kind of comfortable boredom makes you uninteresting, and often will make you unmotivated as well – being bored makes you boring to those around you. If you and three other people are up for a promotion, skills and experience are equal, and you’re boring and the other three are not, who do you think will be the first one dropped from the running just to narrow the focus on the evaluations? You guessed it. And unless you’re brand new to this newsletter, you already know that “boring” is the absolute worst label that a woman can ever put on you, because you are then at the most negative end of her emotion meter. If this is you, what do you do?

Break out! Do something different; not necessarily dangerous, wild, or crazy, but something fun or interesting that you haven’t done recently, or haven’t ever done. I strongly suggest taking on at least one mental and one physical self-improvement project (like taking up Sudoku, logic problems, speed reading or a foreign language to stimulate your brain and losing 5-10 pounds or taking up some kind of exercise regimen or sport) to give you a quick self-esteem boost plus a hobby to keep you away from the television.

It’s a huge bonus if the hobby can be some kind of relationship enhancer, something your partner will see you doing and be stricken with new-found attraction from having seen you exhibiting distinctly male behavior. Flood yourself with new and exciting things to do for a week or two just to see what really grabs your attention and breaks you out of old habits, then stick with the two or three things that really do interest you. That’ll get a personal or even a work slump (with a minor modification) handled, but what about a rut or slump in your relationship?

Same thing! Mix it up! Shake it up! Do something fun. Go to a new restaurant. Do something neither of you have ever done, or at least never done together. Take up something interesting and invite your partner to join you. Even if they are in the rut with you and resistant to breaking out, there isn’t a woman alive who can see a man having fun without her and not want a piece of the action. If you invite her to do something fun and she declines, do it yourself.

She’ll either join in or you’ll know for a fact that she detests whatever it is you’re doing. Women hate feeling left out of anything that might be even marginally fun, interesting, adventurous, or mysterious! Just keep doing fun and interesting stuff, day after day, get good at it, gain the confidence that comes from competence in your new pursuits, and she’ll come around pretty quickly. Like I said, there’s not a woman alive that can stand being left out of the fun for very long.

For most people, a great relationship is one of the most rewarding things in life, and devastating when it goes sour. BUT! Getting into a rut doesn’t have to end your relationship, even though it’s the root cause of more break-ups and divorces than anything else. It takes being fairly well-matched with a good partner, being able to communicate well with each other (which isn’t easy until you learn the differences in how men and women go about it), and keeping it fresh and fun and the sparks flying. That in turn will make the rest of your life improve, because a happy home life is for many of us the foundation for all other happiness; it makes a great career and everything else much easier to achieve because home-front stresses detract from everything else in your life, robbing you of capacity for and motivation to achieve.

You’ll find that if mama’s happy, everybody’s happy, especially YOU! That’s the cornerstone of the “Making Her Happy” philosophy. When your partner is happy, those wonderfully fun and nurturing things that come naturally for virtually all women get stirred up and she goes on auto-pilot doing the things that make you feel just as wonderful as she does. It’s not hard, and doesn’t involve putting on some act or memorizing a bunch of catchy jokes or lines, just learning a few things about her and yourself and putting them to use. Any man that is worth a hoot for anything can do it, and enjoy doing it as well. All you need is the know-how…

It’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” tried, proven, and ready to work for you. Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, because opportunities like this don’t come along often, and they can disappear in the blink of an eye…

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 3, The Dark Side

Is your relationship a good one, or are you just swimming in wishful thinking? My old friend Matt was drowning in it, but he – and YOU – can do better, if you know what the woman in your life really wants…

As we continue to talk about what women want from a man, we’re going to deviate momentarily to the dark side, and call your attention to the calamities that can occur if you don’t know what the woman in your life wants. We’ll start with my old friend Matt:

I ran into him over the holidays, and it really made me realize just how great a life I live; it’s not a perfect life, as any life has room for improvement, lest it get too boring to bear, but I know exactly where I stand on every aspect of my life, and know what’s working, what could be better, and at any given moment, if something isn’t working, I can make a rational decision as to whether to fix the problem or separate myself from the situation because there’s nothing to be gained by making the effort. I know what my wife wants, expects, and responds to at all times, and there are no nasty surprises.

No so for my old friend Matthew…

“Matt” was a pretty mediocre guy in most respects when we were growing up together, but he’s a great communicator, has an eye for detail, and hence has made a very successful career in business-to-business technology sales, but he’s never been able to really accept that success, and has a huge self-esteem deficit. To make matters worse, to try to feed his ego – that nasty stuff that fills the void between a person’s current self-esteem level and their needed self-esteem level – he’s surrounded himself with the trappings of success – big house, expensive cars and jewelry, private aircraft, and unfortunately, a totally unappreciative trophy bride – to try to make himself feel better about himself.

There are a few laws in this universe that cannot, under any circumstances, be broken, no matter how much one wishes to break them; one of these is the law of cause and effect. Unfortunately, this seems to be the one that everybody wants to try to break routinely, and nobody has ever gotten away with it. In the case of success, success causes the attitude and trappings of success; faking a successful attitude and surrounding oneself with the rewards does not create success, nor the genuine attitude or self-esteem of success. In Matt’s case, because he was never really able to see himself as having risen above his mediocrity to excellence, in spite of having been the top salesman in his company since the first year he was there. He’s trying to fool himself into believing what he should already have accepted long ago. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s his trophy bride…

His trophy bride is a gold-digging predator. They’ve been together fourteen years and he catches her in a new affair about every month. She knows just what buttons to push to keep him seeking her approval, and blaming him for her affairs in such a way that he accepts the blame and works harder at his job to try to buy more of her attention! I didn’t get to talk to him long enough to find absolute proof, but at the time we parted, there was a huge body of evidence that she was in fact the sole cause of his total lack of self-esteem and acceptance of his success, because he had never been “good enough” for her to accept him and be happy with him instead of having all of her “toy boys” while managing to keep him on the edge of bankruptcy the entire duration of their sham of a marriage.

As we talked, she would disappear for long periods, show up for a few minutes to push his buttons, and then flutter off again as a social butterfly constantly does. When he finished describing his situation, I asked how he saw their future, he said, “Well, we’ve been together for fourteen years and she’s not left yet, so she must be incredibly patient with me. I’ve just got to work harder to find a way to satisfy her and when I do, I’m sure everything will finally come together.” My jaw about hit the floor.

In fourteen years, she’s had a dozen affairs per year on average (that’s 168!), she’s spent everything he’s made and has them pretty deeply in debt with no retirement savings, despite his million dollar-plus annual income, and he thinks she’s “patient”??? Sure she is! She has a very generous sugar-daddy footing the bill for her “brattitude” and excesses thinking he needs to work even harder to buy her love! There’s no way she’s going to get impatient with him, except to the extent required to keep him in approval-seeking mode!

Of course, when I asked him why he hadn’t ended the relationship long ago because he obviously wasn’t getting anything but an early trip to the grave out of the deal, his reply was, “But she’s such a great person, and she really loves me!” Yeah, she was great alright; she looked like something off the cover of a fashion magazine, indeed, quite a bit like super model Christy Brinkley in her prime, and that was about as far as great went.

She was haughty, aloof, thoroughly abusive to him (she said some things to him while he and I were talking that I would say to somebody to try to start a fight), and was coming on to other men just a few feet away from where we were talking, not just in plain sight from where we were sitting, but she would even look over at him and toss her head with a smug look on her face like he wasn’t good enough to watch her enjoying herself with another man and wasn’t man enough to stop her. It was truly pathetic.

So what’s the point? Matt could have saved himself years of a pretty bad life if he has just accepted the law of cause and effect, especially with regard to his wife. Her actions did not in any way support her – or HIS -- claims of loving him; she said she did, but her affairs and disrespect for him said otherwise. He knew nothing of what she really wanted, even though it was plain as day in front of him the whole time.

Matt’s case is a great example of the more sinister side of female desire, but what about the more benign or even nurturing woman whose needs are not being met? Meet reader and counseling client “Jack,” whose name has been changed to protect the blind and knuckleheaded:

Hi David,

I can’t thank you enough for your help and your insight. After a bitter divorce and custody battle, losing most of what I had in the world and getting saddled with alimony and child support payments that reduce my take home pay to about minimum wage, I finally got her to talk to me, stop treating me like the enemy, and tell me her version of what brought us to where we are. There was a lot of drama, a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of what I would have called rhetorical questions in the past, and a lot of anger and tears, but along the way there emerged two repeating themes. I never listened to her and I never gave her the chance she gave me by helping her to finish college.

You know all about the listening problem from our sessions, and it was just like you said on the phone and in your book. She never uttered a direct word in her life, did the whole questions and statements reversal thing and always assumed that what was obvious to her was obvious to me so she never stated the obvious, but this time I heard her, drew her out with questions to show interest and led the discussion when she stopped talking like you said, and found out along the way that she didn’t quit school because she wanted to have babies, she quit because she was GOING TO HAVE A BABY, and wanted to go back to college when our son entered grade school! In my deafness and arrogance, I thought she wanted to be a stay at home, full time mother and homemaker, because I misunderstood what she said when I asked her about it and didn’t press her for more detail, making her think I’d closed off the discussion and her desire and need for achievement didn’t matter.

We have called a truce, we’re talking daily, and there is a lot of testing going on right now, but she has brought up the subject of getting back together twice, and a discussion of her going back to school and having a career has followed that quickly both times. We’re putting our life and our family back together now, thanks to you. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.

“Jack”

Jack leaves out a few details that we spoke about on the phone later when I called to follow up, such as the motivation behind his wife’s desire to have a college degree and a career. She didn’t want to be a kept woman, resented kept women (which sounds like an issue that she needs to see a therapist about, because resentment is never healthy and she could just ignore them), and wanted the degree and career to make a fair contribution to the household and help facilitate early retirement for both of them.

Do you see what she was upset about? Her husband had so badly misconstrued what he saw and heard that he thought of her and her desires as exactly opposite who she really was and wanted! No wonder she left! And her desires, unlike Matt’s wife, were about as honorable and loving as they could be! It’s not just what all women want, think and respond to that is important to you as a man; what your partner wants, thinks and responds to as an individual is equally important, and if you know what you should know about women in general, especially how to listen to and talk with them, you will have everything you need to know the specifics that make your partner who she is.

What’s going on in your relationship? Do you know where you stand? Do you know what needs to be done to make things as good as they can be? Are your partner’s actions consistent with her proclamations of love? Do you know enough about the emotions of love, attraction, need, and lust to know if it’s really love that she’s professing – that being “in love” has nothing whatsoever to do with love? (And by the way, what exactly are YOU professing and feeling?)

Are your communications skills such that if she were to tell you what she needed that you would hear her and understand what she wants, or are you one of those men who thinks that his relationship is going great when he finds his wife in his bed with another man or opens the envelope and finds divorce papers? If you don’t know whether you do or not, or if you know that you don’t know, you don’t know enough, and I can help.

“THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” was developed to serve precisely this purpose, to help you assess your relationship, see what might be lacking, determine whether or not it’s worth fixing, and either get out gracefully or go for the gold with determination and confidence. It teaches you what is known about all women so that you can probe for and discover these fine points about your partner, and bring things in line to a degree you’d never dream possible.

Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and see what it can do for you. Download it. Put it to work. Make your relationship everything it can be if it’s a good one or get out and start over if it’s not, because life is too short to spend it bored, frustrated, scared, cheating (or with a cheater), or celibate.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 2A, Reader Response on Drama of the Day

This topic of what women want is really waking some people up. Check out what this reader has to say about “sharing the drama of the day,” and how the situation is easier to handle than his experience has led him to believe…

I’m downright proud of the responses I’m getting from readers on this subject, even when they don’t get the whole message, because they’re taking the time to really look at their life and situation and taking the time to discuss it, looking for solutions instead of just ignoring a bad situation and letting it fester and finally erupt.

This reader didn’t include his name, so I’m just going to refer to him as “Steve.” Check him out:

OK. I understand that women do not operate by logic. However, it is beyond me as to why in this scenario Alyson can't take a step back, reflect and say to herself "Gee, he's doing everything else right - all other areas of the relationship are great - I'll just leave him alone on this one." The guy is batting at least .900 by her very own words!!!!! I know it is a "logical" statement to say "you're getting everything else you want, so give the guy a break" - especially since he's not necessarily doing anything "wrong" even in her complaint.

I know in the real world things aren't fair, but having been the guy at the dinner table, I have felt the heat from "Alyson's" complaint and I have always felt it was extremely unfair to be accused of doing something wrong just because I had no dialogue about the day. At least now I know the thought process that has driven me at the dinner table. I now realize that if there were no significant achievements in the day, the day had no value or meaning to me by the time I would get home and I would feel like there's nothing to share. So I guess you could say my "male filter" translates questions like "How was your day" into "Did you have a major victory today?" If my logical search engine doesn't find anything to match that query, then my response is "It was ok". I have returned the search results and that's the end of the story about my day. Then her "female filter" translates "It was ok." into a marriage crime punishable by nagging, poking, accusations and the most tortuous punishment of all - forgetting all of the other really important good things that the male has done.

So why can't "Alyson" just step back and leave well enough alone considering how great everything else is? Is the argument for emotional connectedness that heavy or is there some selfishness included which doesn't allow "Alyson" to look at the situation and ask herself "What is it that HE needs at the dinner table rather than focusing on what HER need is - again considering the fact that most if not all of her other needs are being met??????????????????

My reply:

Good morning, Steve,

This isn’t so much because women don’t operate by logic as because they are wired to do things differently than we are, and don’t realize that we have different emotional scales, different communications methods and protocols, etc., any more than men realize it. Until a woman is aware of how differently we think and communicate, she takes everything that you say as having meant the same thing and been said for the same reason that a woman would say it. In “man-world,” a succinct terse reply of “status quo, nothing to report” is a favor, where in “woman-world,” a terse answer without details says, “I don’t like you and don’t want to share with you because you’re not worth enough to me for me to allow you into the intimate details of my life, so go away.” It’s hurtful at best, and insulting at worst.

Alyson can step back and leave well enough alone if she understands that you are not closing her off and that there was really nothing to discuss, or that you find rehashing a bad day irritating. Women want to nurture the man they love, not torment the life out of him. Women generally don’t find rehashing a bad day irritating; for them it’s like a bonding ritual and a show of support to sit and listen to another’s problems with no expectation of getting involved in a solution; most women are offended by the offering of a solution before all the sharing and dramatizing is complete. You’ll notice that Alyson did acknowledge that the problem may be on her end when she said, “What can I do to make him talk or am I going about it the wrong way, the nagging wife syndrome?”

Remember, our emotional scale runs from extreme negative to extreme positive, while theirs runs from no emotion to extreme emotion without much discrimination between positive and negative. That’s not to say that they enjoy disaster; they simply find the “rush” from crisis to be as “emotionally relieving” as success and celebration.

Women accumulate emotional energy, and if they don’t have some outlet for it, they will create one, and here’s a big hint to chew on: It’s a lot faster and easier to create negative emotional energy than positive. Achievement and success take a lot of time to arrange, at least a lot more time than negative. Next time you’re having a fight over what seems to be absolutely nothing, it’s possible that it’s a real issue that the two of you are not able to communicate effectively about, but it’s more likely that she got so bored that the emotional energy boiling up in her erupted over something insignificant, because a fight over something insignificant is very easy to start and very easy to end when she gets all that pent-up energy out of her system; She can simply say, “I’m sorry, that was silly. It just struck me the wrong way and I exploded,” and proceed to making up.

I know all too well how frustrating this scenario is from personal experience. It was one of the things that put me on the road to doing the research for "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and the women in the test group were quite surprised to find out what I just explained, and when they understood that sharing the details of a bad day was different for a man than a woman, they had no problem with being satisfied with a few minor details and a declaration that the rest of the day was something the man didn’t want to discuss as long as there was nothing that threatened the man, his job, or the household, and that he wasn’t trying to hide some on-going problem that they should know about, like his life, health, job, financial security or happiness being threatened.

If you can grasp the significance of 118 women agreeing on something, you’ll understand how important this distinction is: the entire group agreed that women want to know that if trouble comes, the man can deal with it and involve them if they can help, and DO NOT want to be shielded from news of a potential credible threat. They don’t like being blind-sided any more than we do, and most of them are a whole lot tougher than you might think when things get tough as long as you take the lead and keep them informed and involved to whatever extent they can help.

As I wrote that paragraph it immediately put me in mind of a scene from “The Rookie,” the story of Tampa Bay Devil Rays pitcher Jimmy Morris who found that after an injury and surgery that had taken him out of professional baseball for over a decade, he had a 98 MPH fastball and went back into Major League Baseball for 2 years. In the scene, Jimmy is telling his wife that if he takes the offer to enter the minor league team in preparation for the major league performance, it will put too much of a squeeze on the family finances and too much strain on her, and she says, “Jimmy Morris, I’m a Texas woman, and that means I don’t need no man around to keep things running. This is your dream shot, and you go on and take it. We’ll be fine.”

That's paraphrased because I can't remember the exact quote, but the point is obvious. He was assuming she couldn't cut it or didn't want her to have to, and she stepped right up. Mentioning that “some bozo squirted ink all over himself and somebody else got caught being naughty in the supply closet, but otherwise the day was a waste of time,” is a small price to pay for that kind of support, any good woman will gladly give that and more once you tune in and connect with her.

I hope this clears things up a bit for you. I’m not suggesting that you just give in and talk about everything you don’t want to talk about at all. I’m saying that if you and your wife understand each other’s priorities, preferences, communications styles and needs, etc., there is an easy and very agreeable solution to this most common and frustrating problem.

Take care,
David

There’s not a lot I can add to that, except to say that readers of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" know all of this and much more about how to understand and connect with the women in their life and how to navigate and negotiate these sticky situations so that all this stress and frustration are not an issue for them, and you have the same opportunity for a better life that they have. All it takes is a quick trip to http://www.makingherhappy.com and a few mouse clicks to download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and a little time and effort. It really doesn’t get any easier or any better, so go ahead and be good to yourself and your family and get it now. Everybody involved will thank you for it, and you’ll be glad you did.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 2, Sharing the Drama of the Day

Continuing the series, to help you understand what women want from a man, this issue is another must-read. It addresses a specific issue and scenario that is addressed more generally in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," the issue of “How was your day, Dear?” and how women want to share in the bad as well as the good like they do with their girlfriends, while men don’t want to relive a bad day by going through it, and prefer to skip it and move on to something positive. A real eye-opener!

I hope you’re having a great week. I’m having a blast with reader e-mail. Lots of good questions with good lessons for all to learn, so keep them coming. I’ve had some questions about women wanting to share drama with their men, a topic from my free “What Women REALLY Want” report, and since many of you have apparently assumed that free report was worthless because it was free and chose not to download it, we’re going to go through that chapter today and then handle the reader questions and comments concerning it tomorrow. It’s good, so hang with me and stay tuned.

I’ve promised you statements directly from women about what they want, and here you go: This one, which demonstrates the difference in the emotional make-up of men and women, that a woman’s emotional scale goes from zero to infinity, without much regard for positive and negative, where a man’s scale goes from negative to none to positive, and the emotional upheaval that can come as a result of not understanding those differences and that both scales tend to run in the middle.

What exactly does that mean? What’s in the middle of a woman’s scale? A significant amount of emotional energy being absorbed and expended. What’s in the middle of a man’s emotional scale? Neutrality! Women need to have something going on pretty much all the time or they get bored stiff (their “emotionometer” goes to the far left, at zero emotion), where men don’t mind deviating from the middle a bit on an on-going basis, but the farther we stray and the longer, the more we’ll try to push things back toward that calm and simple state somewhere near the middle, where everyone is fed and protected.

Note that on the “left” side of our emotionometer is the most negative, and to a large degree, both men and women exhibit a lot of the same symptoms when the needle moves to the left; extreme boredom makes a woman as agitated and physically uncomfortable as fear, anger, and pain to a man. See my “Emotional Scales” article to see a graphic representation of the scale and a lot more information about it and how it works.

Without further ado, meet Alyson:

Dear David:

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!! I need some help. I am totally frustrated! My husband and I have been married for a year now. We are happy and communicate wonderfully except in one area. When we sit down to dinner, that is our time to talk. I ask him how his day was and get the standard [one-word] answers, fine, ok, good, rotten...etc. That's it, except when he is having an incredible day and tells me of the rewards. I want to know the good and the bad, but he won't talk about them. If he did tell me it would be great, I would continue to get to know him and how he functions and solves problems.

All other aspects of our marriage are great, he is kind, courteous and an incredible Alpha male but that one area drives me nuts. I have tried to prod and probe and he just says "leave it alone, I don't want to talk about it". What can I do to make him talk or am I going about it the wrong way, the nagging wife syndrome?

Can you help me?

Alyson

My response:

Hi Alyson!

I’m going to give you the answer that you need to hear, probably won’t like too much, but will have to accept because this is just how it is in the real world.

Men of action, achievers, the strong alpha male that women respond to with overwhelming and magical-feeling attraction, don’t like to dwell on problems, they like to fix them and get them out of the way. We learn whatever lessons these problems and solutions present and put the events behind us, taking only the lessons forward with us. This is part of what makes us who and what we are, because it is a huge influence on self-esteem and self-confidence, things which you and all women admire and want in a man.

We don’t like living through these events the first time, and to discuss them as women do, as an accounting of the day and exploration of the emotions, as you no-doubt go through with your female friends, is like living through the problem a second time, dwelling on it, and having that negative influence of that frustration and aggravation eating at us all over again.

It’s not that we don’t want you to know about the day or how we handle problems or anything else. We simply don’t want to relive a bad day and unnecessarily expose ourselves to those negative influences all over again, which can erode confidence and expends time and effort that could be spent in spending quality time with you or doing something else we enjoy, building achievements that we can celebrate with you, etc.

You’ll also notice that your husband does share his triumphs with you. This isn’t to brag and pound his chest; it’s an act of intimacy. When a man of action relives a victory with you, he’s inviting you to share in and celebrate something that is special to him: ACHIEVEMENT.

This celebration reinforces his feelings of strength and independence, and makes him better prepared to face the next day’s challenges. Bear in mind that being an alpha male and loner by nature, a genuine male achiever doesn’t need anyone else’s recognition or approval of his achievements; telling you about it is purely an act of sharing, of trust, and of intimacy, and not to be confused with the bragging of a man who one-upped someone by some trick of cunning or stroke of luck instead of through competently performing whatever tasks were at hand.

All of this is in stark contrast to the female social practice of sharing and even dramatizing everything that happens, indiscriminately reliving everything that has happened and trying to milk every last drop of emotional energy from it, regardless of whether it was a positive or negative event, and hence, whether they are bombarding themselves with positive or negative emotions.

(Gentlemen, you need to understand that they are not being nosey or trying to rub your nose in a bad day; this sharing is a reaching out for intimacy and when you just stomp on them for asking it’s a severe rejection, which we’ll discuss further in a minute, and it’s just as natural and automatic a drive as your own drive to bury negative things once they’ve been resolved and move forward.)

Women are frighteningly effective and efficient at this, and I must wonder how damaging this practice must be to women, and how much better their lives could be if they didn’t spend so much time and energy digging into negative emotions and drama and milking the emotion from it the way they do.

Take care,
David

I’ve never seen this in print, or heard anyone discuss it in any venue or forum, but it is statistically ridiculous that nobody in the 10,000 years of recent history has ever noticed this, so I can’t help but also wonder if it’s never been mentioned in public because those who noticed feared the outrage that women might voice at the mere suggestion that negative emotions and negative drama could be bad for their psyche, self-esteem, and by virtue of the chemical impact of stress on the body, their health in general.

Nonetheless, I’m saying it now; I wonder if women acted as men do in filtering out negative influences like those encountered in the ritual sharing of problems, especially those marathon drama-fests where the same problem is iterated over and over until everyone in the conversation gets bored with the repetition and moves on, this would leave them with time and energy to spend planning, achieving, celebrating and reaping the benefits of much more positive energy and influence on their psyche, emotional balance, and physical well-being, not to mention the boost in self-esteem and confidence and proportional drop in insecurities this would create.

This hypothesis is based on observation of a limited number of women, under 300, and of those, the ones who do not get bogged down in negative emotion are indeed much more happy, motivated, and successful than those who do. The evidence says that negative emotion creates physical stress in both males and females. I’m still looking for a way to test this hypothesis on a very wide scale, and if anyone hears of an existing study, I’d like to know about it immediately.

A word for the ladies reading this: Please think about this, Ladies. I realize that the concept sounds like suggesting you cut off your arm, more accurately, like you cut out a piece of your heart, emotionally speaking, but look at your own life and assess how much time you have spent in the last day, week, month, year, etc., indulging in negative emotions to milk the rush from them before setting to the task of solving and eliminating the problem. Then try to get some feel for how much time you spent that you could have spent doing other more positive and productive things, and what your life might be like right now if you had spared yourself all that negative influence and had those extra achievements and decreased stress from less time pressure. If you feel comfortable talking about it, I’d love to hear from you, and would love to eventually do a formal study of a large group of women, but this is strictly for your benefit, and I’m sure that if you are objective in your assessment, you’ll find that you could have done a lot with that time and positive energy.

Now that everyone hopefully understands where everyone else stands on the issue, and the origin and nature of the behavior, let’s talk about what can be done to bring everybody closer together. Ladies, don’t feel like a man is being closed off or rejecting you when he doesn’t want to relive a bad day. Be glad that you have a partner who is an achiever and is strong enough to do this instead of doing what many men do: whining and acting weak and pissy, and sometimes getting caught up in the frustration and abusing you to release the frustration that something or somebody else caused. That makes him look like a girlfriend instead of a man, and kills your attraction for him.

Gentlemen, be aware that any time a woman is asking you questions about yourself in any non-accusatory, non-confrontational context, she’s trying to learn about you, trying to be closer to you and connect with you, so don’t just stomp on her if she’s asking about something you don’t want to talk about. Give her the gift of a little understanding and dignity by telling her that it was one of those days that was bad enough the first time you lived through it, and rather than going through it all over again and reliving all that negative emotion, you would rather put that part of the day behind you and give her the best part of your day, the enjoyable part, and rather than rehash bad memories it would be far better for both of you to use the time to make some new, positive memories.

When you do tell her about things, tell her as much as you can about the emotional aspects of it, the details that let her feel what you felt, and while it is still not good to rehash the really bad stuff, you could share the neutral to positive things with her to give her some part of the day. It may not have been something you thought worth celebrating, but it’s still something that she can examine to get to know you better, and it helps eliminate that illusion that you are trying to shut her out. And if it was a bad situation that you resolved and the day had a successful ending, by all means tell her, because women love to hear how anyone, especially their man, saved the day.

This was the best solution found by our test group, but is by no means the only possible solution. If you can find something that works better for you, write about it, and we can possibly discuss it here. If readers were more active, it might inspire me to set up some blog or discussion forum software on the website to allow you interact and exchange ideas and success stories directly, but I won’t be going through that trouble and expense without seeing that those resources, if provided, would be used for the benefit of a significant group of people, so if you want it, get involved by e-mail and let’s see where it goes.

There you have it, the answer to one of the toughest problems in any good relationship. In my men’s book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” men are instructed about women’s social mechanisms and their need to share, and encouraged to be sensitive to those needs to whatever degree possible, as well as many other critical topics and skills in the areas of relationship evaluation and understanding, communications with women, and a wealth of knowledge about attraction, that magical feeling poets refer to as “being in love,” including how it works, how to create it, and how to kill it (like making your partner feel shut out!), which is the beginning of trouble of paradise and the end of more relationships than you can imagine. In case it’s not obvious, these are all the very things that women REALLY want from a man!

Relationships can survive without a lot of things, even without love to a large degree, but they seldom survive without effective communication and attraction, so don’t let it happen to you. Jump on over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy today, because life is too short to spend it bored, fighting, or worst of all, lonely.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 1

This is another multi-part series, the purpose of which is to help you understand some very critical issues in getting along with women instead of competing with them. It will include some revealing comments by some women about what they want from a man, as well as some examples of things that women think they want that they respond to quite negatively when they actually get them.

This lesson is part of my “What Women REALLY Want” free report, but the web stats say that many of you have not downloaded it, and I understand that, because I’ve been there. I’ve seen “free reports” that were just a sales letter; not even a thinly-veiled sales letter, but rather a blatant pitch that had no information in it and raised more questions than I already had.

It ticked me off, and I’m posting this for two reasons: first, that you see that this free report actually is a report and has something valuable enough for you to take the time to read it (yes, there is an invitation to buy a book in one sentence near the end, but wait until you see what I’ve provided for you in the 50 or so pages between here and there, because this report alone has changed more lives than you’d imagine!) and second, because I want to see your feedback and hear your stories in the form of reader letters and blog comments, so let’s get on with it.

I don’t know about yours, but my weekend was great! I don’t normally look forward to weekends because I try to live every day as if it were my last, so my weekdays are very full and rewarding, but the weather was great for outdoor chores and recreation (a short thunderstorm notwithstanding), and there was a stockpile of charcoal in my garage begging to be reduced and a beef rib roll crying out “cut me into steaks and sear me over hot coals!” You know I had no choice but to listen! (And there are still leftover ribs in the refrigerator!)

Obviously, this triggered a testosterone rush of the first order, and I never fight the urge to be a manly man who does manly things. We’re pretty simple, right guys? It just really doesn’t take a whole lot to make us happy.

But what about our women?

That’s the kicker, isn’t it? They have all that networking going on all the time, all that drama, all those nasty little rituals to go through. And trying to get a straight answer out of one of them is like pulling dragon’s teeth, isn’t it?

Are you ready for some good news? Women really aren’t as complex as they appear, and they really aren’t difficult to understand at all, IF you learn a little about them and learn their language, or maybe more to the point, their customs and protocols…

What’s that? Sounds like something a travel agent told you once? Maybe, but while women really aren’t from another planet, they have evolved to do some things differently than us. Some of these differences work to their advantage, some to their disadvantage, but the same thing can be said of us.

Most women don’t do well with spatial issues like reading maps or knowing how parts will fit together, while most men are fairly adept at it. Most men are very bad at detecting and correctly interpreting hints, while women could effectively converse all day without ever directly addressing anything. Indeed, they can tell a whole story with a glance, or as you’ve noticed, a roll of their eyes! And unfortunately, they often think we can do the same thing.

This can affect us in our relationships in one of two ways. We can identify and understand these differences, and use them to our mutual advantage, or we can fail to understand them, and get sucked into a competition over whose way is better and who is going to be in control of things.

Let’s take buying a car, for example. Most men know more about the mechanical workings of a car than most women, and are more excited by and interested in automotive performance, cost and difficulty of upkeep, etc. Most women are naturally much more sensitive to non-verbal communication, hints, innuendo, etc., than most men could ever hope to be, and they are also more likely to appreciate the aesthetics and comforts a car offers.

I’m not going to go into all the ways in which buying a vehicle can cause a couple to start a series of bitter fights; we’ve all been through the friction of the male trying to take too much control of the process, being too aggressive or controlling on the issues of selection of vehicle and dealer, etc. But think about the possibilities that a little understanding and cooperation could offer! And I'm not talking about compromise, either.

If a man understands more about the ownership issues of vehicles, what he knows can be invaluable to a woman who doesn’t necessarily care what brand the vehicle is as long as it has a certain look, or certain features that she needs or wants to enjoy. But, for that value to be realized, he must LISTEN to her to find out what is important. When she says, “I liked the pink car the best,” it’s highly unlikely that she is saying that the fact that the car was pink was THE deciding factor. She’s waiting for him to ask what it was about the pink car that she liked so she can tell him about the comfortable seats with built-in heaters, the accessibility of controls without taking her eyes off the road, or whatever it was that she won’t get into until he shows that he’s interested in hearing it by asking about it.

A woman’s natural sensitivity to unspoken communications can make her invaluable during the negotiations over the purchase. Men are much easier to lie to or lead on than women because we don’t notice the nuances that declare deceit that nearly every woman alive readily sees without even watching for them. But again, he must LISTEN to her when she spots something amiss during the sales presentation or the purchase negotiation in order for them to derive any benefit.

That’s just the beginning of the revelations you’re going to have over the next few days, so brace yourself.

To give you something to ponder, here’s what one of the test group said she wanted in a man:

“I want a man to listen to me and take me seriously when I’m trying to be serious, to laugh with me when I’m happy, and let me get problems sorted out and fixed without distracting me or trying to take over my problem when I’m not happy.”

Sound familiar? As I said, women are NOT that hard to understand, and they’re really not that different from us in a lot of ways. They just DO things differently from us that makes them appear too complex to understand, when in fact, our problem is that we simply don’t know enough about them, their “culture” (what it’s like to live as a woman) and their language. We’re going to work together to fix that.

I’m no travel agent, but no woman who knows me will tell you they wish I knew more about women; a lot of them come to me to help them understand themselves! They send me e-mail asking questions, they call me on the phone, and they even buy my book, which is written for men, and the comments from those who have concur: it’s “spot on” accurate.

It should be. It’s the result of working closely with a large group of women to learn how to listen and speak “girly-ese” (or “feminese” if you prefer!) to learn what it’s like to live and experience life as a woman, to learn what makes them do the things they do the way they do them, and to learn what they think turns them on and off and how that differs in some cases from what REALLY turns them on and off.

My job was to translate what I learned from them into “man-speak” and give it to you, straight and to the point, without cluttering it up with theory and opinions. I did that job well, according to those I’ve served, both as a counselor and in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com if you’d like to join the ranks of rare men who really do know what women want and how to enjoy giving it to them.

We’ll take this up again tomorrow, with more from women about what women want. Don’t miss it! Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychologist wouldn’t have. One of the most significant things he ever said was, “The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, ‘What does a woman want?’”

I know; would you like to? Then join me!

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

Understanding Our Emotional Scales: Another Key to a Great Relationship and Marriage

MUST READ: Men’s and Women’s emotional scales are calibrated very differently, and understanding how can literally make the difference in being happy and being divorced.

If you’ve been following me for long, you know how seldom I put the words “MUST READ” in a title or summary, and I promise it will be worth your time to read this time, too.

If I could teach everyone on Earth only one thing above all others to help them get along better, not just in intimate, committed relationships, but in ALL inter-gender relationships, it would be a hard choice between compatibility, our difference in communication skills and protocols, and the difference in the structure of our emotional scales. All are critical to getting along well, and if I had to choose one, I’d feel like I was being asked by King Solomon to cleave and split a child between three mothers, because the three are so indispensable; the absence of any of them spells disaster.

I discuss communication protocols and compatibility frequently, and today I want to focus on these emotional scales. One you your fellow readers contacted me in crisis a few weeks ago and now has his situation under control, thanks mainly to the understanding of these two points. (His attraction skills were already fairly strong and needed only minimal improvement once he realized he had let them slide.) He’s agreed to allow me to share excerpts from our discussions to help explain both the concept and how important it is to any relationship.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his status reports:

“...It quickly rolled into the ‘emotional scale’ speech, which she seemed to really listen to - I think it's starting to sink in, and makes sense to her. Taking it slow has allowed her to process that and buy-in piece by piece. Honestly, David, if that were your sole contribution to the world, you should be famous for it. I'm not sure of its origins, but it's absolutely brilliant. Applies to all men and women, and the only trick to applying it is to understand that each woman has different levels of tolerance and varying coping abilities. I was able to give her an awesome example for evidence - a fight we had years ago - that also included a basic communication problem as well, and one where she's always ‘fought to win,’ [instead of ‘fighting to get what’s right’] and never admitted her role in the thing. Tonight, her silence told me she's seeing it, or admitting it to herself. There were a few instances of her processing those things and allowing that she was partially at fault. Big step for her lately - she used to do it, but hasn't at all lately.”

An excerpt from my response, just for clarity:

“As for the emotional scale thing, that was my own, something I've noticed in working with all these women. I looked for weeks on Google and everywhere else for any mention of it, and never found it.”

And here’s “the emotional scale speech,” as he called it, a suggestion I made to him for explaining to his wife why she had done some things that she was feeling very guilty for and why he had failed to recognize her problem and do something about it:

"I just read a thing about the difference between how men and women build, process, and prioritize emotions, and it sounded weird at first, but after looking back it makes a lot of sense. Our emotional scales are different, at least with regard to what we need to feel to be comfortable. My emotional scale or range runs from extreme negative to extreme positive, with neutral being in the middle of the scale.

“The female scale or range runs from neutral, or emotionless, to extremely emotionally charged, overwhelmed even, with little to no discrimination between positive and negative emotion. Both of us are most comfortable when we are just slightly 'to the right' of the middle of the scale, me feeling a little positive (too much positive makes a man irrational and silly) and you being just a little more emotionally charged than the center of your emotional range (too much emotion, positive or negative, with no way to vent it overloads you as well.)

“What's really interesting is that we act similar when we are at the same place on our scale. Being bored to you feels the same as being scared or angry feels to me: agitated, desperate, ready to do anything, even if it's wrong, to change the situation, and potentially irrational. We’re both very comfortable just a little to the opposite side of the center of the scale, and at the far right, we get irrational, overwhelmed, and don't know what to do next, and have a strong tendency to do the wrong thing because our inhibitions and discipline go right out the window.

“One of the points it brought out of that is that men are naturally a bit comfortable with emotional neutrality, at least for a short time, while it is downright torturous for a woman. I never realized it was such an issue until I read that, and now that I know, I'll never let a woman be bored in my presence again, because I won't see someone tortured like that."

A couple of weeks passed since that discussion, and it apparently really produced understanding, some forgiveness, and cooperation where none was possible before. His last comment follows:

“You've really, really got to get that ‘emotional scale’ idea out there - everyone will steal it, but if you put some marketing behind it, you can retain credit as the source. Maybe there's a visual you could create so it instantly made sense to those who see it.”

That’s quite an accolade, having a reader see something as so important as to want to protect the author’s ownership of a concept that he paid to learn. Think about that for a minute…it would take some pretty significant results to convert a “reader” into a “disciple” in any case, would it not? And by the way, the visual was pretty easy to construct (the comfort zone is at the "+" symbol):

Learn this concept and keep it in the front of your mind at all times. Recognize when the women in your life are bored, and try to do something about it whenever and however it’s appropriate. You’ll find yourself attaining a sort of hero status among them, and triggering a lot of appreciation, cooperation, and nurturing. A coworker will watch your back and try to help you out, a friend will be more attentive and supportive, and your partner will reward you with the relationship of your dreams, as long as you don’t blow it by engaging in wussy, deceitful, or abusive behavior.

How do you do something about it? Sometimes a kind or funny word or two will do it, sometimes a smile, sometimes a surprise or even an adventure. It varies from woman to woman, mood to mood, and setting to setting, and there is no laundry list that will get you through. If you need a rule of thumb that will fit all situations, here it is:

“Attraction is any and every woman's ultimate salvation from boredom.”

There is nothing bad that can come from just being a confident, fun leader at any time and many great things that can come from it, so if you’re doing what you should be doing as a man, no woman will ever be able to be bored while you’re around. But your partner deserves more, right? She’s the one you share everything with, and the one you’re trying to fix things for so you can spend the rest of your life with her. For her, you must learn more about women: what they want, what makes them tick, how to listen to and understand them, how to speak to them, and what flips their attraction switches, among other things.

Are you a guy who likes a single source to fill in a whole lot of gaps? I certainly do; the older I get, the more I try to find ways of simplifying everything. If simplifying your life sounds good to you – and you won’t believe how much having a great relationship with your partner will simplify your life until you actually experience it – then you need to jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get up to speed, fast and easy, and start clearing some of the relationship clutter, nuisances, and even disasters out of your life.

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 this has 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 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 with the male, typically limited communications structure we are born with, 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 merely a very revealing 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 a little 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. We’re biologically wired to seek status quo, situation normal, a stable, threat-free environment because we’ve evolved as protectors for a hundred thousand years or more.

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 emotional energy 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, their sharing of our need to have a calm, stable environment; wrong answer! They cooperate because they are social, and are expecting something in exchange for their cooperation, not because they enjoy being bored.

They are also, intentionally or not, following your lead, waiting for you to get around to the fun and exciting part. 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. And when men do it and it doesn’t work out, they think, “Well, that ungrateful bitch! I gave her unlimited supply of her favorite thing and this is the thanks I get?!” No, Dude. You’re not getting thanks at all. And after ruining her enjoyment of one of her favorite things, be it a food, an activity, a sexual position, or whatever, you shouldn’t be expecting thanks, either.

That’s right. 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. Contrary to popular belief, most women (and all the good ones) like a challenge, and like to earn the reward of meeting that challenge, even and especially when the challenge is seducing their husband.

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. Just ask one. Indeed, ask several. And listen to the stories they tell you of what happens when they get bored. You can search my blogs (http://blog.makingherhappy.com is the oldest and has the most content) or my newsletter archive for some of those stories, too. Some of their stories will scare the mortal hell out of you when you see what some desperately bored women did to their husbands and even themselves, just because they were bored.

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

How to Program Your Very Own Wuss and Ruin a Great Relationship and Marriage

Wusses are made, not born (with rare genetic exceptions, of course), and the only kind of women who like them are sadly their own mothers and the parasites and predators who can take something from them. How are they made? That’s easy…

I caught something on television recently that I can’t get out of my head, partially because it’s offensive to me and partially because there is a lesson in it for all of you. And it’s not one that is easy to teach, so I’m going to ask you to bear with me.

First of all, some of the examples I’m going to have to use have potential political implications, and we’re not here to discuss politics. There could also be controversy over whether what I’m about to show you is coincidental, accidental, or deliberate.

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m going to ask you to ignore all of that and look strictly at the mechanics and psychology of what is really happening so that you can learn this universal process and not only protect yourself from its dark side, but use it to better yourself. So turn off the emotions, political bias, conspiracy theory machine, etc., and put on your thinking cap for a few minutes, because you need to be as cold and ruthlessly logical as I am to get through it with maximum benefit.

Sometimes it’s late in the day before I find inspiration for the content of this newsletter; I prefer to do it as the very first thing after responding to whatever reader e-mails are in my Inbox when I first sit down at my computer in the morning, but the world doesn’t always work the way I want it to. Sometimes I can receive as many as 400 e-mails from readers in a day and not be able to use anything out of them for a newsletter, either because of the appropriateness of the content or not being able to obtain permission to reprint their letter in time (I’m a stickler for reader privacy).

When that happens and I end up not being able to compose a newsletter until late evening, my wife likes to watch some flavor of the CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) series on television while I work, and I hear it in the background but pretty much ignore it. A few nights ago I heard something that caught my attention.

The investigative team was standing in a metal building with about a hundred bullet holes scattered all over the walls, and one of the guys had looked it over and was reporting to his colleagues that it was a 9 mm, and then tagged onto the end of the sentence, “probably semi-automatic.”

For those of you who don’t know anything about firearms, that means that you pull the trigger, one shot is fired, and the next round is chambered and the weapon cocked and ready to fire, but it does not fire until the trigger is released and pulled again. A firearm that will keep rapidly shooting round after round for as long as you hold the trigger pulled is fully automatic, also called a “sub-machine gun” or simply “machine gun.”

A few minutes later in the show, they had finally figured out how all the bullet holes were put in the wall. Some boys had held up a very long bamboo cane, about 30 feet tall, run the cane through the trigger guard of a fully automatic sub-machine pistol, and pulled the trigger back with a wire tie just before giving it a spin and letting it spiral its way down the cane pole. Yes, stupid, and one of the kids got shot through the chest.

Now here’s the important part. For everyone who didn’t know the difference between a “semi-automatic” and “fully automatic” firearm, they thought that the fully automatic sub-machine pistol shown spraying bullets all over the building was semi-automatic, which is simply the pistol that most police officers carry in their holsters (and those I’ve asked about their preference for semi-automatics over the old-style revolver said they preferred the extra ammunition capacity, not its ability to fire faster), because the CSI officer erroneously said that's what it was. And now those who don’t know any better will hear the mention of “semi-automatic weapons” on the news and think it’s a special menace to be feared and actively combated and that anyone who owns one must be a criminal.

Intentional or not, that is what’s called “disinformation.” Someone shows you something that is incorrect or misleads you to assume something incorrect and you have a tendency to accept it as correct because of the source, or because you see it a lot, and the message, although wrong, is consistent.

A lie or error told often enough becomes the perceived truth (but not the truth). The Earth is at the center of the universe and it’s flat and you’ll sail off the edge of it if you go too far in any direction. Bleeding someone with leeches will cure any ailment. Governments love and serve their people faithfully and flawlessly. And women like nice guys. Remember?

Yes, that lie has been told for decades. Look at what you see on television today. Stunningly beautiful women running around with hopeless wusses and acting like they’re “Studly Do-Right,” totally ignoring the fact that the guys are dressed sloppily, don’t project an ounce of intelligence, sense of humor, social skills, leadership skills, or most importantly, self-respect.

Men are consistently shown as being sub-average, bumbling jackasses who can’t make a decision to save their life, and yet they still get the girl at the end of the show, and to beat it all, they cry for joy and thank her for the privilege of being seen with her. (I’m so sick of those commercials for Sonic restaurants making men look like idiots that I joined John Alanis long ago in boycotting Sonic, and wrote them a letter telling them so.)

When you see that all the time, there’s something that happens in your subconscious mind that tells you that you should be acting as those guys do. They have what you want, and if you do what they do, you’ll have what they have. But your subconscious mind doesn’t know that it’s only television fantasy; it can’t discriminate like that.

So the lie that is told over and over becomes perceived reality – accepted as truth by those who don’t know or seek the facts, but not really true.

However! Awareness can override this negative programming, and better still, you can use this same principle to lift yourself up! Instead of watching wusses give all men a bad name on television, hang out with successful friends who are happy with their lives and have the alpha male tendencies that women enjoy! Since your environment can program you, let it program you for success instead of failure!

But that means doing something really smart: You have to acknowledge your betters as potential mentors and positive influences instead of envying their success and resenting them. Can you handle that? Can you handle hanging around with one or more guys who have a strong personality that women love and are successful at what they pursue?

No, they don’t have to be “filthy stinking rich” to be successful. Wealth-building is a skill like any other and comes with a lot of stress, particularly the stress of protecting earned wealth, and building wealth is not every man’s goal. Some men prefer to succeed at fishing, hunting, wood or metal working, rebuilding cars, throwing darts, collecting stamps – you name it. But a man who succeeds at one thing will generally succeed at many things, because he has the formula – and he can demonstrate it to you simply by you being around him.

This isn’t rocket science, Gentlemen. Not by a long shot. Do you recall hearing an axiom called “Occam’s Razor” when you were a student? “The simplest explanation is most often the correct one.” By the same token, the simplest paths to success are most often the best. And what can be simpler than exposing yourself to people who are what you want to be and just letting it all soak in?

If you hear hooves beating behind you, do you think “horse” or “zebra”? There’s a reason clichés become clichés: they’re so universally true and therefore so frequently quoted that people get tired of hearing them. At least in most cases.

Some would have you believe that you can never understand what a woman says or what she really wants. I believed it for a long time, as did many who came before you, until it came down to a do-or-die situation and I had to learn. How do you think I learned? Did I go to Tibet and ask the Dali Lama, or to Rome to ask the Pope? Did I consult ancient mystical texts like the Bible, Quran, or Cabbala? Did I seek the counsel of alien races? Or contact the dead through a crystal ball? Did I ask all my buddies who were as unhappy and stressed out as I was??? Hardly…

I asked a bunch of women!

I had to learn to speak “girly-ese” (some of my readers are calling it “feminese” and I rather like that one, too) before I could make sense of a lot of what they wanted to tell me, but believe me, they wanted me and every man alive to know. All this time that we’ve been shaking our heads in frustration because we can’t understand them, they’ve been angry and frustrated because they didn’t know we didn’t understand and thought we were choosing to ignore them. Imagine that!

In the end, they are neither complex, weak nor stupid. They’re just enough like us to make us think that they’re entirely like us and just different enough to drive us crazy sometimes, but they are simple, strong, smart, and one hell of a lot of fun to be around once you tune in and gain their trust – they’re mostly emotionally driven, and want more than anything to feel safe in feeling anything for you, lest their emotions be used against them as they have many times in the past, like when date after date said, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” or “Sure, I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

What you need to know is how we’re alike and how we’re different, and in plain language, not an encyclopedia full of psycho-babble. You need to learn to speak girly-ese, which sounds a whole lot like whatever language you speak, but the protocols are different. You need to know things about a woman’s emotional make-up, like the fact that being bored is as detrimental to her health and ability to think rationally and make good choices as being terrified is to you. And you need to know how to flip her switches and ignite that spark that will never let her feel bored again and make her fight – indeed, to kick the crap out of a running saw mill if necessary – to protect her relationship with you.

If you’re interested, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" -- it’s ALL in there, just as I described, in plain language that a child could understand (and a few smart-ass remarks just to keep you entertained as well!). And if you’re not interested? Well, I hear you can get used to being in the dog house, getting yelled at all the time, and even getting divorced and losing everything you have in the process, but that’s one challenge I’d just as soon skip.

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

How Many "I Love You's" Are Good for a Relationship or Marriage?

Some women keep writing about wanting to hear the words “I love you” more often. Others write complaining they hear it too much! Just how much is enough?

There are times when women’s emotionally-driven drama and antics really get on our nerves as men. There are also some things that appear to be dramatic because they are so irrational, but are in fact not dramatic at all, and things that you need to be aware of and address when necessary. This is some of the most important information ever presented in this newsletter, contains advice for both men and women, and if you miss part of it you can absolutely wreck your relationship with what you skipped over, so read this carefully and in its entirety and make sure you understand it. First, meet Tasha:

Hi David,

Can you tell me how to get my husband to stop being a needy little twerp? Every time his mouth opens, he says, “I love you.” It’s like a compulsion. He can’t end a discussion, enter or leave a room, or hang up the phone without saying it. It’s more like a greeting than a declaration of any kind of feeling. He’s coming across to me as saying it just to get me to say it back to him. It’s been happening for a month now, constantly since we went to my high school reunion (20 years) and I saw my high school boyfriend there (and his wife and pictures of their five children) and we talked for about 20 minutes and had a dance. He’s making me nuts!

Please help,
Tasha

Tasha’s problem was handled privately by a counseling session with her husband, in which I helped him realize that a 20 minutes of conversation to catch up on 20 years of absence and a dance, which didn’t even turn out to be a slow, intimate dance, was nothing to worry about, but do you see her primary complaint? Too many “I love you’s” equated to habit and insecurity, not an expression of love. Now for the other side of the coin, meet Carol:

Dear David,

I have read every newsletter you have ever written, and I have read your book as well and loved it. I had to learn to do many of the things in your book since I was taught a totally different way to handle relationships. I am sorry to say that I was one of these women that would let a man into her life and then totally turn it over to him to run because I wanted to be led. I learned that I was not letting them lead me, but was letting them run over me.
Now I see just how wrong and how dangerous it was to me and to my future to let men run my life.

The reason I am written this letter is because I want to know something and I felt like you would be the one to help me answer this one.

I know that my boyfriend loves and wants to be with me and that I am the only one in his life, but I still like to hear it from time to time. I know that sounds like I may be needy or insecure, but I’m sure you know all women like to know that both parties in the relationship they are in have the same feelings. I am sorry if that is wrong but that is how I feel.

Thank you for you time,
Carol

My reply:

Hi Carol, and thanks for writing. I’m going to point out something to you here, something that I know you’ve read in past editions but may have missed the significance of, and then I’m going to clue you and everyone else in on why this is the way that it is and how men should handle it.

First, I want to caution you and all women, for reasons you will fully understand in a moment, that while the words “I love you” are good for an emotional rush, they should never be trusted in and of themselves, period. Your knowledge of whether a man or any other person loves you should come from their actions; a man, especially a predator, could put a bullet or a cudgel right between your eyes or open your throat from ear to ear while saying “I love you,” but no man can keep up the act that creates the illusion of love for very long at all if it is indeed just an act. It doesn’t take a lot of testing and there’s no need for suspicion; simply check that his normal actions say that he loves you before accepting the words. For instance…

Does he beat the hell out of you and then say, “I’m sorry, Sweetheart! I really love you!” If he does, he’s a lying sack of crap.

Does he drink up his paycheck, and when he tells you there’s no money for groceries that week, say, “but I love you and everything will be okay”? No, he doesn’t. He loves his bottle, not himself or you.

Does he work at his job, come home, and spend quality time with you (and the kids if you have them)? Does he make decisions that consider how they will affect you as a couple? Does he treat you with respect, as if he values your company and your input, instead of putting you down or even worse, whining about how he can’t live without you? If so, listen when this guy says he loves you, because he does. His actions prove it.

Take care and keep in touch,
David

Now to the hard part: Why is it that even the most secure women, those who live in a relationship in which it is blatantly self-evident from a man’s actions that he loves her deeply, might constantly complain that they don’t hear “I love you” enough?

Guys, I have to admit that this evaded me for a long time, and it wasn’t until I learned how women communicate and about their socially-oriented nature that it made sense to me, and most of them are unaware of it as well. You should have seen their faces when I asked them about it; it was like a light coming on when it struck home for them. Ready?

Women need to hear this because they are biologically-driven to need to hear it, just like they need to hear a verbal commitment to a relationship after a couple of months of dating or they walk out on a perfectly good thing. It’s part of the emotionally-driving biological mechanism that distinguishes their behavior, especially their socially-oriented nature and their communications methods and infrastructure, from ours.

They need to hear the words when they already know we love them because they need that little romantic/dramatic lift that it creates when it “seals the deal,” and they also need to see that we can say it frequently enough without blurting it out every few minutes like some needy wuss who spouts it like a litany to hypnotize her into staying around. It's like their need to share and emotionally milk their problems with their girlfriends; irrational, involuntary, and potentially self-destructive, but nonetheless a fact of life and a need that must be fulfilled, one way or another, by somebody.

Now, how much is enough? Or too much?

That depends on the woman, but generally speaking, no woman I’ve interviewed, when asked how she felt about the frequency with which her man said he loved her, who was satisfied said any more than once or twice a day (once every day or two was average), and for those who were dissatisfied, their men were at the extremes, either pestering or boring them to death with it every time they spoke or going many days or even weeks without saying it at all.

Take heed here: You can say it too often, as well as not enough. Women bore easily, and with most things, less is more, but there has to be some, because none is unacceptable. If you have a healthy love relationship, there should be some intimate moment come along every day or two, or even twice a day sometimes, that makes you realize how much you love this woman. When that happens, that’s when it’s good to tell her, because during those intimate moments is when she’d really like to hear it. It helps feed the emotions that she’s feeling, and if it’s honest, it’s right. No act, no routine, no pressure – simply letting it come out when it’s genuinely on your mind is likely to be just right.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, let “I love you” become a habit. We all hear so many people closing telephone conversations with it, as if it is some ritual greeting, and that’s not a good thing because it makes the experience so mundane and boring. If you’re with somebody who has to hear it every time your mouth is open, that’s a HUGE red flag, because it’s not the emotion of love that she (or he) is feeling; it’s that really ugly one: NEED, the kind that breeds and feeds dependence and insecurity, the leper’s bell of a scarcity mentality at work and a high-maintenance dependent looking for someone to depend on. If that’s where you are, you’re in big trouble, and you need to do a serious evaluation of your relationship.

Relationships are only complicated when you don’t know enough about how they work, and/or about each other. Learning about them and each other doesn’t have to be a matter of reading an encyclopedia of dry, technical, academically-oriented psychological theories and then trying to apply it without knowing whether the theories even hold water. I’ve seen those books, and if you’ve been looking for answers for your relationship, you’ve likely seen them as well.

They didn’t work for me, and indeed made things so much worse that I had to research and find literally enough answers to write a book to have the improvement I needed. If those books worked for you, you wouldn’t be looking here, either, would you?

There’s a better answer, written in plain conversational English, that contains solid, tested explanations of how relationships really work, how women really think and speak, and what they really want, with examples and advice, and the best part is two-fold: you can afford it, and you can do what you find within it. Interested?

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and you can download it at http://www.makingherhappy.com and be reading it in the next few minutes. Go head, do it now, because while all the achievers are reading this book, getting answers and putting them to work to better their life, the losers are sitting around questioning whether it will work for them and going further and further down that unhappiest of all roads, relationship boredom and crisis.

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

Be Her Man, Not Her Girlfriend, for a Great Relationship and Marriage

A guy writes with a common complaint, that his girlfriend has begun treating him like a girlfriend, and as usual, it’s happened so insidiously that he doesn’t even realize what has happened. There is a way to fix it, and a way to keep it from happening as well.

Today’s newsletter is longer than usual, because it’s a common and often catastrophic subject, so please read carefully at a time when you are able to concentrate, because there’s information here that you will not want to miss. I’d like to introduce you to a man who needs no introduction, because we’ve all seen him, and many of us have even been him at least once in our life. Today, his name is Ted:

Dear David,

I wanted to get another guy’s opinion on something that is going on with me and my girlfriend lately. I only get to see her a couple of times a week because of our class and work schedules and when we are together all she wants to do is go shopping. I do not feel like her boyfriend anymore. I feel like the gay best friend or girlfriend and I am not liking this, to say the least.

I want to take her out for a nice dinner and come back to my place and spend some quality time alone. We used to go out and then come back to my place, have some wine and spend the rest of the night talking and having the greatest sex. Now something has changed and I am not sure if it’s me or she has found someone else. I do not want to risk losing her if I can in any way fix this problem. Do you have any ideas as to what might save my relationship at this point? If something does not change soon I will be calling off the wedding for the coming summer.

I need advice,

Ted

Greetings, Ted; thanks for writing, welcome to the club, and my condolences for your loss. If your description is accurate, your relationship is dead. However, you can resurrect a dead relationship if you understand what has happened and are willing to fix what is broken. As things are right now, I’m quite surprised that your girlfriend hasn’t called off the wedding and found someone else to excite her. This problem is covered in depth in my book, but I’ll explain because I’m feeling generous today…

There are basically two main components of the kind of relationship we’re talking about here if it’s healthy: love and attraction. Love is the value you place on the partner, and is the category under which friendship, respect, trust, loyalty, etc., all fall. The other part, attraction, is what people have mistakenly referred to with such poetic but erroneous phrases as “in love” over the centuries. It has nothing whatsoever to do with love, and can in fact be experienced toward someone you absolutely hate (such as spouse abusers, which we’ll talk about a little more later); it’s a biologically-triggered state of intense excitement and desire for intimacy of many kinds, including and especially sexual, with another person.

For men, attraction is triggered mostly by visual characteristics of women’s appearance, and actions to a lesser extent; for women, it’s the reverse. A man’s appearance doesn’t count for much except to the extent that it projects self-respect, confidence, authority and personal strength, as must his personality, and he must project intelligence and a good sense of humor as well. Consequently, attraction can be built in seconds to minutes for men, while it usually takes hours, days, or even weeks to start seeing attraction build up in a woman to the point of sexual engagement being an option.

(There are two other states, “need” and “lust,” that have nothing to do with a healthy relationship; indeed, “need” and “love” are mutually exclusive, and “need” kills relationships with the dependency, fear and resentment it creates. Lust has no specific person as its object, and can also be very detrimental to an otherwise healthy relationship if the participants aren’t mentally prepared to accept lustful behavior as a condition of the relationship’s continuance. See my book or my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report for full explanations.)

What has happened in your relationship is the love is apparently still there, because there is still friendship, but the attraction is gone because the intimate behavior, everything from intimate discussions to exciting playfulness and sex, have fallen by the wayside. You feel like a girlfriend because that is how you allow yourself to be treated. You’re not doing guy things – alpha male things – that awaken her inner drives and trigger attraction. You’re doing exactly what she would be doing with a girlfriend for fun because you are allowing her to make the decisions on how the two of you spend your time together – a huge mistake in any male-female relationship if it is to last.

Women enjoy being led – NOT DOMINATED, BULLIED, AND ABUSED – by strong, confident men. It’s not because they are weak, can’t make decisions, or any such reasons that chauvinists (chau·vin·ism n. 1. Militant devotion to and glorification of one's country; fanatical patriotism. 2. Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind.) have used to demean and oppress women for centuries. It’s simply what they are biologically wired to appreciate it and respond to it, just as men are biologically wired to enjoy the sight of a woman’s natural “feminine curves.” Dumping all the decisions in her lap, about where to go, what to do, where to eat, what movie to see, how to spend your time, etc., isn’t just failing to give her something attractive to experience, it’s annoying for her to some degree (and you will have to read my book to find out why and how to properly handle decision-making, because while she wants you to lead, she still wants, needs, and in many cases demands input, and that’s too long an explanation for this newsletter), and you are killing attraction instead of building it for her.

There are some people who try to deny human existence and claim that attraction isn’t required for a relationship to last (they try to replace attraction with “faith,” or some kind of “Zen,” instead of accepting attraction as the reality it is). But if you gain a thorough understanding of attraction, and then look at every relationship you’ve ever seen enough of to know the facts concerning how it formed and what broke it up, it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that committed male-female relationships rarely, if ever, form without attraction and rarely, if ever, end as long as it is present. Some relationships do survive without it, but nearly all of those to which I have been personally exposed and those which readers have discussed with me have been between people who were self-evidently bored, resentful, and often codependent, their relationship being based upon “need” instead of a combination of love and attraction.

In a nutshell, love and everything that comes with it makes a relationship friendly, safe and pleasant (attraction in the absence of love, often coupled with need, is what you find in abusive relationships where a man violently abuses a woman and she keeps coming back for more because she craves the feeling of attraction and he creates it for her), while attraction is that “spice of life” that keeps the relationship, fresh, fun, exciting, romantic, etc.

So there you go, Ted. That’s what happened. As for fixing it, it takes little more than being a real man, which after the girly-man nonsense of the 1980’s and 1990’s could be reasonably deemed “nearly a lost art.” However, “nearly lost” is not the same as “lost.” There are still a few of us around who understand what being a real man is about, and of the few of us who are left, a very few of us are able to identify it for you, and tell you how to do it.

Fewer still can also explain to you how to evaluate a relationship to see if you should be in it at all, and teach you the great secrets of communicating with women, the most highly-evolved communicators on this planet, which is tough for a man in any case. We have spent our evolutionary energy on things like engineering skills and spatial awareness while they have learned to speak in ways that only they understand and become so adept at and dependent upon sending and receiving non-verbal communication that they can smile at us while demeaning us to a group of girlfriends and we think we’re being complimented.

Even worse, they can tell us precisely what they want from us and the entire message be lost in the translation. (Warning: Beware a woman with a mathematical mind, because she will kick your ass all the way to the poor-house playing poker! She’ll be reading your cards from your body language while all you’ll see of her are her pretty eyes, inviting smile, and cleavage!)

Even fewer are those who know and can tell you all this and train you to do it naturally, as a part of your own personality, by putting it in a highly-readable and fun book. I’m one of those guys, and if you were in the dating world instead of a committed relationship and wanting to know how to meet and impress women, I could give you the names of about four more, because that’s where most of this attention is being focused. It’s a big and desperate market and those men are single and dating themselves, and they have to stick with their area of expertise.

The rules for creating and maintaining attraction are somewhat different in committed relationships than they are for getting phone numbers or “macking” (trying to score a one-night stand) at a local bar, especially the timeframe. You have seconds to create interest, minutes to create intrigue, and a couple of hours at most in the bar situation, and if you blow it with a single gesture or wrong word, you’re done because she can walk away to scope out a hundred other options.

Not so in the committed relationship. She has a vested interest in continuation of the relationship, and so do you, and it’s to everyone’s advantage to bring it back to life. The point?

This information is rare, some of it unique (I’ve not found anything like it, and I looked hard because I didn’t want to waste time trying to reinvent the wheel when I had problems, before all this began), at least to a large degree, specifically developed for and presented to people in a committed relationship, and most importantly, it works.

It was tested by 118 couples during the writing of the book and many more since then, and in four years I’ve now given three refunds under a full year unconditional guarantee. The first was to a “library reader,” someone who buys and then immediately asks for a refund to steal a product. The second one was to a gentleman who missed an announcement that I was changing the title of my book to more accurately reflect its true scope and purpose and bought a second copy. The third thought he might find dating advice in it, which I don’t claim or advertise; although all of what’s in it is useful if you’re dating to find a long-term relationship, I don’t include anything on how to get dates or pick up women. Most information marketers say they’re doing good with a 10% refund rate and average 16%; and mine is less than 0.000002%. That’s because it works for those who use it. No other conclusion is possible.

And YOU should join those who use it and succeed like they do! Do so by jumping over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and getting your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” right now, because you can make your relationship better, a lot better, and the time to start is now, while it’s easier to regain lost ground, not after the affairs or divorce proceedings have started or a break-up has occurred and you have to do it the long, hard way. Be the achiever, not the guy who sat on the fence wondering if it could be done, because looking back with regret kills the part of you that loves to live the most.

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

More About Getting the Right Mix in Relationships and Marriage: Get Your "Guy" On, and Let's Have Some Fun!

Let’s talk some more about “getting the right mix,” with a great example from a TV advertisement…

Today’s lesson was going to be about the proper use of the telephone in “getting the right mix” to build attraction in a woman instead of destroying it, but, I have to tell you about a television commercial that should have a newsletter dedicated to it, and I’m doing that instead for today.

The Stanley Tool Company has a commercial about it’s “Fat Max” retractable tape measures, and it is not only hilarious, it’s a perfect example of guys just being guys and having fun doing it, one of those very necessary components of creating attraction for a woman.

In the commercial, the scene is on the ground at a high-rise building construction site, everybody in hard hats and tool belts, testosterone so thick you could probably drown in it. Two guys face off, extending their tapes out about ten feet in front of them, and one is leaned back on an appliance cart while the other is scooped up in a wheelbarrow, and their coworkers wheel them toward each other at high speed in a joust! You can view it here if the embedded frame below is not playing for you.


Joust Tournament - Stanley FatMax Xtreme Tape

Stanley’s point is that their wider tape will stand out under more gravity and stress than the other guy’s, but what struck me the most about that commercial was what the guys were doing. They were having fun, just being guys! Being creative, having a friendly competition, taking full advantage of their environment, tools, etc.

Some women might see a thing like that and “get it” and join in the fun, either actively or as cheerleaders, while others think “Oh, how stupid!” BUT, very few of them could resist the urge to want to somehow join in the fun, because they hate being left out of anything, especially something that is obviously creating an emotional rush. Why? Remember that “boredom” thing we’ve been talking about, their worst enemy of all and definitely the archenemy of your relationship? Living vicariously through our emotions is just as good to them as their own, because it ignites their emotions quickly.

So what exactly can we extract from this hilarious TV commercial that will help you in your quest to light a fire under your wife and get her deeply and aggressively involved in having a great relationship with you? I’ll bet it’s more than you think at first glance…

First, take a lesson from the guys about having fun. Don’t apologize for being a man, CELEBRATE IT! And make sure you don’t fall prey to that ancient maneuver where a woman induces you to give up your guy friends, your favorite hobby items (“boy toys”) like hot rods or motorcycles, etc., because she feels as if she’s competing with them.

BOOM! That was the sound of you or a man somewhere close to you reading that paragraph and stepping on a land mine. I did NOT just say that you have license to be financially irresponsible and go out and buy a bunch of “boy toys” you can’t afford, nor did I say that the only reason a woman might ask you to give up something is because she doesn’t like the competition. We have to keep things in balance, remember?

If you still have your “toys,” and they pose no imminent threat to your family, then by all means you should keep them, but if you’re into drag racing, crash your car once a year, and your wife announces she’s pregnant with your first child and it’s time to limit the dangers in your life for the sake of your child’s future, then you need to talk about finding a new outlet for your drag racing passion.

If you already gave up your “toys,” you should bring them back into your life if and as you are able to afford them. Creating a financial strain is bad enough when it’s for survival items, and you may induce her to leave by adding a strain just for toys.

And what about her? Using the pregnancy scenario again, if she suggests selling a hot rod to finance the building of a nursery because money will be too tight if you don’t, then you have to look at that idea with due respect and run some honest and accurate numbers, but if she wants you to sell your hot rod to finance her upgrade from a perfectly good, late model Toyota Camry to a Lexus instead of her getting a job or kicking in something of her own, that’s a trap, and a test, and giving in establishes you as a wuss at best and a jugular vein to hang on and suck dry at worst.

As far as your guy friends, I’m talking about real friends, not just people who hang around because they don’t have anything better to do. If somebody you’re calling a friend has a bad attitude, doesn’t respect himself or you, has substance abuse issues, etc., and your wife suggests to you that you fire him and find a better friend to hang out with, you should take the advice, but if he’s really a friend and a positive influence on your life and she’s just jealous of the time you spend with him and the “guy fun” the two of you have together that in no way has a bona fide negative impact on your family, then you should not give in to pressures to cut him out of your life…

…BUT! Don’t let the time you spend with him leave your wife so terminally bored that she starts creating drama to get your attention or resorts to an affair, either! That’s cutting your nose off to spite your face. Invite her to join in the fun, and tell her about all the cool stuff she’ll be missing out on if she doesn’t join in. Women can’t stand to feel left out of anything if they have even a remote chance of facing boredom. Again, they can live vicariously through us and get juiced up on our emotional energy because they have incredible capacity for exploring emotions and using that exploration to invoke their own emotions. But beware…

If you’re going to promise her fun, you have to make good. If you’re promising fun at some gathering where the lot of you is going to sit around stony-faced watching a TV tube, that’s not going to cut it. “Fun” for her is going to have to be something with visible excitement, laughter, and emotional energy, such as yelling and cheering. It also helps if it’s something you can coax her into trying after you get her there. The more involved she is, the less likely she can be bored and the more likely she’ll be glad she’s with you.

You can draw all that, and more that I can’t get into today, from a simple 15-second TV commercial. Good lessons and examples are where you find them. However, as you can see, tuning the mixture and getting everything “dialed in” (I’m not a NASCAR fan, but the National Hot Rod Association and I go WAY back!), can be a little complicated, unless…

…you’re tuned in! You need to know how to listen to and read a woman to find your way through this jungle and make these decisions. You need to know which issues are legitimate in your specific circumstances and which ones are tests to check your manhood or ploys to rob you of it.

That’s where a lot of my fellow gurus fall short. They give you great information about the creation of attraction, which when you’re dating and trying to get into a relationship is indeed your primary concern, but they don’t give you what you need with regard to evaluating the relationship or communicating with a woman accurately to make sure you can maintain and escalate the relationship in a pattern of sustainable growth that will make it work for a lifetime.

(A notable exception is Shelley McMurtry, who does get into more than attraction, and while she currently is not married or in a long-term relationship, she does try to keep men focused on more than just getting to their next date or sexual encounter. She is linked elsewhere on this page and I strongly recommend that you at least sign up for her newsletter because she is very emotionally aware and good at describing female issues and emotions to men without getting lost in the drama as some do.)

A man can walk through a mine field with a smile on his face if he knows where the mines are; otherwise, you pick your way through, step on one, and pay the price for a long time, if not for the rest of your life. If you’re in a relationship, you are in the mine field. It’s just that simple. What you need is the map!

Your map to a great relationship is in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ with just a few mouse clicks. Get yours right now, and put it to work. Make your life fun again, and put an end to your daily routine of walking around on eggshells because you know the mines are there but don’t know where they are.

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

Getting the Mix Right for a Great Relationship and Marriage

Building a great relationship isn’t a matter of an abundance of any one big thing; there is no “magic spell” or “magic bullet” that’s going to instantly put you over the top. But that’s a good thing, because the alternative is creating a mixture of more common, attainable things, and any man can do that, IF he knows what goes into the mix!

Before we get started, check out this news article on the current state of divorces, counseling, etc., as influenced by current economic conditions. It’s downright scary to see how many people are unhappily stuck together because they think they can’t afford divorce or even counseling!

One thing that caught my eye in the article was how these people who seek counseling because of the expense of divorce are looking at $1,000 or more for 10 or more sessions. Most of my readers never need counseling, and the few who opt for it have never required more than a session or two, usually only a half-hour. Un-freaking-believable. I got flamed on the Divorce Busters’ web site by some guy who said that he was a counselor and was appalled because I gave specific advice. If it takes others ten sessions to get things on track and it takes me one, I can see why that might upset him. ;-)

By the way, in the end he ignored my advice to leave a woman who obviously had no love or respect for him, as evidenced by the way she chronically abused and demeaned him, because he found that by deceiving her, his situation became tolerable, and that in his estimation, deceit was the key to a happy relationship. I didn’t bother responding out of respect for the owner of the web site, Michelle Weiner-Davis, PhD. She tries to help people, while this guy was just looking for validation of his mistakes instead of a solution.

Getting into today’s lesson, as many of you already know, one of my acquired talents and favorite achievements is that of being a chef. The fact is I’m a “very alpha male” and therefore not only a leader, but also a consummate do-it-yourselfer, the most secure route to the independence that every alpha male demands, and a man who loves good food as much as I do needs to be able to create it at will, because unless you live in New York City, there are more places to get an average or bad meal than there are to get a good one.

(As a quick aside, New Yorkers are probably the only people on this planet that I envy as a whole, because in my experience, you just can’t find a bad meal in New York City. I’ve literally had better food from a NYC street vendor’s cart than I’ve had at restaurants in other places. A bad restaurant isn’t going to survive very long in a densely populated city with commercial real estate prices and rental rates as high as they are there. If you love good food, a vacation there is worth the stay just for the food!)

Getting back on topic, I was making omelets for breakfast this morning (“guy omelets,” loaded with pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni, mushrooms, etc. – use your favorite pizza toppings!), and it hit me how much has to be just right for the eggs to set right, and how that equated to a relationship.

If you add too much water or milk, they don’t hold together and you’ll end up with runny scrambled eggs. If you let the mixture reach too high a temperature by leaving it in the pan too long, the proteins “spasm” and force all the water out of the eggs, giving you rubbery lumps sitting in water. Too much heat quickly will cause them to scorch and burn. Like baking anything that turns into a set foam (omelet, cake, biscuits, etc.), it’s a matter of chemistry and physics, and you have to have the right amount of everything to make it perfect, and getting close will get you something very good.

It’s the same way with relationships. Think about the things required to keep a woman happy:

You need to be sensitive to a woman’s emotional condition and have good communications skills, but if you over apply either you end up being treated like a girlfriend.

You need to project a strong leader-like personality, but if you cross the line and come off as controlling, you’re toast!

You need to have a good sense of humor and know how to have fun and make her laugh, but if you do it too often, you’re an over-aged adolescent clown, not “her dream guy who can be so much fun and makes her laugh when she feels bad.” (She really will get bored with too much comedy.)

You need to project self-respect and groom and dress in a manner that does so, but if you go too far with that, especially if you go “metrosexual,” you become conceited, fussy, spend more on skin and hair care products than she does, and you’re fun to shop with but nothing else (GIRLFRIEND AGAIN!), not to mention getting all the attention that she wants when the two of you go out.

You need to be a friend and companion, but if you take that too far, you become “just friends,” and a “nice guy,” somebody she wants to watch a chick-flick with, not somebody she wants to have come into the house, sweep her off her feet, and ravish her. Just another relationship for her to have to manage, and women manage a lot of relationships, actively. And, regrettably, you’ll also be someone who can’t stand up to her, and hence, in her eyes, someone who can’t stand up FOR her.

There are a lot of people touting a lot of ways to instantly get results, and as men, we tend to try to make each thing we hear about be that one magic thing we’ve been missing to make everything wonderful again. We heard women wanted a man to be “nice” and “sensitive” back in the 1980’s. We gave up on being the men that our fathers taught us to be and started being wimps who cried in front of their women while watching a movie.

What they wanted was for us to be real men, treat them as someone we liked (nice) instead of taking all their money and beating them up and then leaving them for one a little younger, and to be emotionally aware enough know that there would be times when they would be upset for no apparent reason, and other times when they needed to talk to somebody, and that busting through the door yelling “I’m home! Where’s my damned dinner?” wasn’t going to work out very well for anyone involved.

You don’t need to know every little thing there is to know about women, but there are some things that you do need to know if you ever want to be happy with one or more of them. And there again, it’s not just one thing you’ll need to know about, but a mix of things: compatibility, communications, emotions, mentality, needs, wants, and reactions, just to name the big ones. And then you need to throw into that mix everything that makes the women in your life (wife, daughters, sisters, friends, wives of friends, coworkers, wives of coworkers – there are probably a lot more women in your life than you realize) individuals, their idiosyncrasies that will endear you to them if you notice and appreciate.

With all these “mixes” going on, it sounds like you need a HUGE cookbook, doesn’t it?

Well, no, you don’t, and no, I’m not going to drop that “recipe for a happy marriage” cliché on you. However, you do need to learn a few things because there are several aspects of your relationship that you need to master and manage.

But! That’s not to say that you need a dozen books on psychology, several on communication, a few on seduction, a bunch on female physiology and sexual technique, one on women’s history, etc. Yeah, that’s a mixture, too, but it’s a whole lot of overkill, and quite frankly, since a lot of women think they want things that they really respond to quite negatively, it’s also going to be pretty confusing.

There is an answer for you, though. It’s not a freebie, but you can easily afford it, no matter what you’re situation. It’s not a magic pill, but it’s a regimen you can easily swallow. It’s not likely to turn your life upside down overnight, but some of my readers have stopped their divorces cold within less than a week of receiving it, and over the course of several weeks after that put things back on track and then went on to make them better than they’ve ever been.

Some are going more slowly, taking a few months, because sudden change just isn’t in them (you know, the detail-oriented sort who take the time to check and double-check and study everything before taking action), but even if you are one of those people, what’s two or three months compared to extending your marriage as much as thirty or forty years, and making it a great marriage instead of a trap that sucks the life out of you?

Or worse, what’s two or three months compared to the years you might continue to be unhappy and/or alone, or stuck with the wrong person, if things continue the way they’re going? Not much, not much at all. Let’s see, three months study and self-improvement for 30 years of happiness. That’s a 12,000% return, and unlike the stock market, you’re in total control of whether that investment pays off, because it’s based on choices you make and actions you take, not the choices and actions of others.

Your answer is at http://www.makingherhappy.com/. It’s called "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and from what my readers and I have seen, it has that which will cure what ails your relationship, if you do nothing more than read and apply it. Don’t tell anybody I told you so, but just between us, it’s a whole lot of fun, so get to it now, before you do another thing!

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

Signs That She’s About to Erupt, and a Miracle Cure for Tension and Drama in Relationships and Marriage

A guy asks if there are any tell-tale signs of a woman needing a drama fix. A few do come to mind… (WINK!!!)

This is one of my favorite topics, and it’s something fun and useful. To start the ball rolling, meet Zane:

Hey David,

I’ve been following you for a while and I see the things you talk about in my home every day, especially the testing and the drama. I got pretty good at handing the testing within a couple of days of reading about it in your book, but the drama thing has me stumped. I know she does it, I even know when she’s doing it and not expressing a genuine problem, but I can’t quite catch the knack of seeing it coming so I can head it off before it gets ridiculous. What am I missing?

Thanks,
Zane

Hey, Zane! Always good to hear from a fellow Southerner. (For all non-Southerners, “Hey” is Southern for “Hello and how are you?” We’re not lazy, just efficient.) You are indeed missing something, but it’s not hard to spot.

In "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," when I describe why women create drama (emotional boredom) and how they nearly always use negative pressure to create it because it’s both faster and easier to get a drama fix by stirring up a fight than by achieving something exciting, you missed the description of the progression of the problem in her and how it works up into an explosion.

Remember that in a woman’s emotional make-up, it’s boredom, not crisis, that is the biggest enemy. (See this article on our differing emotional scales for more details.) If she doesn’t get relief from the boredom, she gets anxious, and then irritable, and you’ll watch her getting more and more uneasy and unreasonable as the tension within her builds. By the time she gets to the point of nearing an explosion, you’ll notice that her attitude has become very sour…

Let’s say your car broke down on your wedding anniversary and you jogged three miles to your house because she didn’t answer the phone when you called to tell her you were in trouble (okay, she was in the shower getting ready to go), and you hit the door late, sweaty, smelly, and tired. A woman in a normal state of mind would see that as heroic and be thrilled, where a woman in need of a drama fix would ignore the fact that you ran home to her and fight with you because you were late getting home. Get it?

Fights that break out over legitimate issues usually have some identifiable logic in them somewhere (although you may have to look hard to find it if you haven’t yet read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and become well-versed in what women want and what makes them tick). On the other hand, drama-induced fights are in a word, absurd. These are the fights in which she seems to be raising the roof over nothing, brings up things that happened 20 years ago, and plays dirty, and your warning signs are pretty much toned down versions of that absurd behavior – being abnormally bothered by more and more insignificant things, preoccupation situations and details that she’d normally ignore, etc. Why?

She’s trying to milk enough emotion from those things to get her fix, and getting more and more frustrated by the hour because it’s not working any better as she deviates more and more from her normal behavior. That’s what you watch for. If on a normal day she’s fairly laid back, then she’s acting depressed and tense, then fussy, then negative about everything she speaks of, trouble’s coming.

There are two things you can do. Let her pick the fight, which you will both regret, or you can buck up and admit that you failed to give her some positive emotion that she needed and make up for it with some sort of surprise act of leadership, mystery, and fun, but be advised, if she’s too far gone, your efforts may end up being the very thing she uses to start the fight, and all you can do is hang tough. What exactly does that mean?

It does not mean you should be abusive, or play dirty like she is apt to do. It means that when tension and voices start to rise, you must step immediately into that leadership role and exercise some stern – and maybe even tough – love, by calling her on whatever bratty behavior she’s committing. For instance…

She says, “That’s it! I’ve had it! I’m so sick of you ALWAYS buttoning the button in the middle of your shirt first and then bouncing up and down from bottom to top! Why can’t you just start at the top and work your way down like everybody else?!”

To which you reply, “Because that’s how I’m comfortable buttoning it, and I don’t really care what you or anybody else thinks about it. It’s ridiculous that you should even bring something like that up, and the only reason you’re doing it is because you’re bored to death and need the a rush. Now settle down, stop being a brat and conduct yourself with a little dignity, and let’s find a more productive way of giving you what you need without the two of us saying and doing something that we’ll both regret later.”

She may try to further escalate the situation after that to test your resolve, and if she does, there’s an answer to that as well, one that involves getting a bit cocky and having some fun with her, but rather than spell it out in detail I’m going to employ it now and tell you that if you want to know what it is, you’re going to have to read it in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" – LOL!

Face it, Guys; it’s not and has never been a secret that the simple act of wishing your wife a good morning and making it out the door to go to work in the morning can be like walking through a mine field. You need to know how to listen to her and how to talk to her to get along with her. You need to know when to be tough and when to be gentle and reassuring, when to indulge and when to reject, when to make her laugh and when to stand tall and get serious. If things have slowed down in your bedroom, that’s not old age setting in, it’s one of the first symptoms of real relationship problems, the kind that lead to affairs – a symptom of advanced relationship decay – and divorce.

You can let things continue to decay and try to make a heroic save at the last minute, which can indeed be done, or you can take the easier path and employ the same tools now, when you are not under so much pressure and have far less damage to correct, to fix everything that’s broken and keep your relationship running like a precision machine. The cost is the same (at best – it can be MUCH worse if you wait!), and it takes less time and effort to do it now before everything goes critical.

The big question is whether you are the kind of man who puts everything off and unnecessarily risks the future of his family by letting it fall into crisis before doing anything about it or if you are the kind of man who steps up and does what is necessary to keep his family – and himself – happy. So what kind of man are YOU?

If you’re the kind who sees the wisdom of fixing the little problems to keep them from getting big, or if you’re the kind who likes to fix them early but have been unable to find answers before things got bad, then you need to click over to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and put things on the right track. If you’re the kind who puts things off until the last minute because you just don’t want to deal with them until you’re forced to, then I’ll be seeing you later, or if not me, your wife’s boyfriend, and probably her attorney. It’s your call; make it a good one!

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

Rules of Great Relationships and Marriage: Why Making HER Happy Makes EVERYBODY Happy

The explanation of yesterday’s promised “thunderbolt” – Why making her happy makes everybody happy, and what you can easily do to make it happen, automatically and consistently so that BOTH OF YOU enjoy it.

For those who had the bad fortune to miss yesterday’s edition, go back and read it, because it was good and because it sets up today’s edition. We’ve all heard “If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,” (unless some of us have been living under a rock), and we’re all pretty well convinced that it’s a universal truth that will never be disproved. However, have you ever thought about the converse?

If mama is happy, everybody’s happy!

Why would I suggest such a thing? It’s the core of everything I’ve been talking about for a very good reason: it’s incontrovertible reality. Right now, I’m going to help you accept and understand this by explaining why.

It can be quite shocking when you realize how much of how we relate depends upon or is derived from this model (discussed in yesterday’s edition, so once again, if you’ve not read it, go back and do so before continuing here) of “men are hunters, women are gatherers.”

In case you’re not familiar with basic anthropology, here’s the super-short summary: in the earliest days of human existence, before agriculture and for some time after the development of agriculture, men hunted for meat and women gathered fruits, nuts, roots, etc. and raised the children; later, women most likely developed agriculture to have a more convenient food supply. One must remember that during this time, 90% or more of a person’s time was spent in securing a food supply.

We’re talking about a long, long time here, during which women were together, gathering and later farming in groups and learning to communicate, while men were out hunting alone or in small groups that kept very quiet to keep from scaring the game. These activities caused women to evolve to be genetically “wired” to be more social and nurturing, and have more sophisticated communications skills due to their activities causing the more rapid and full development of the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, called the “corpus callosum,” and the right hemisphere of the brain to develop more densely than in men.

They also developed a system of safeguards against nurturing the wrong kind of man. There are biological triggers that turn on this behavior when a woman sees strong alpha male behavior, which causes her to nurture in a manner appropriate to a mate, and in the presence of children; for many women, child-like behavior, such as a “middle-aged adolescent,” causes them to nurture and protect the man as would be appropriate for a mother, taking charge of the man’s life and affairs and attempting to save him in a codependent relationship. So since the process is biological and not logical, it is very difficult for a woman to resist and unfortunately, not foolproof; she can end up nurturing a man who is bad for her, like an alpha male with psychopathic tendencies who beats her, or a middle-aged adolescent with sociopathic tendencies who sucks her dry and moves on to his next host.

Whether you accept evolution as the cause of this difference or not, the difference is there, it’s consistent, and the behavior it creates is consistent; it’s what creates the feminine and masculine aspects of personality and communication skills and style.

Now, the big question: what does this mean to your relationship or marriage?

Generally speaking, women are naturally social, nurturing, and sensitive; men are not so much nurturing as protective. We are naturally loners; even when we’re in groups we tend to act competitively instead of socially and cooperatively. We are combatants; we tend to deal with problems by trying to overpower them or through other competitive means, not through any nurturing means, often even when it would mean converting an enemy to a friend. And let’s face it, a lot of men are finding out the hard way that women’s natural skill in non-verbal communication makes them superior negotiators and poker players in a great many male-female match-ups.

So how can you put this to work for you?

This is the great secret of relationships that is really no secret at all. If a man will make the effort to create attraction for his female partner, her response will automatically be to respond with excitement, sensitivity, wife-like (as opposed to mother-like) nurturing, and attractive behavior toward him. She won’t have to put any effort into it, because it will all be triggered by her attraction. It’s biological, and therefore not only automatic, but unavoidable (which is what gets women in trouble with predatory users, abusers, and losers who have mastered attraction tactics and use it mercilessly to attract and hold their victims.) Why?

To fully understand and accept this, you must understand the intensity of attraction. The only good way I can explain this to men is to call your attention to what happens when you start feeling intense attraction, when you reach that point where you MUST have sex with a woman and then MUST experience orgasm with her. It is different for women in that attraction for us is mostly (but not entirely) a matter of visual perception and happens very quickly while for women it is actuated by a combination of a lot of triggers that confirm your status as an alpha male.

It is therefore built much more slowly, but if you can recall the thrill and urgency of that attraction and your desire to maintain access to the woman who creates it, you can then have at least a partially accurate frame of reference for the intensity of what women feel; for them, it is even more intense because those feelings build more slowly and have time to create more excitement. Also note that while our excitement creates an intense urgency that is satisfied after the orgasm, theirs creates less urgency but more emotional intensity, making for a longer-lasting effect.

One other thing that you should note is the effect of the hormone oxytocin (do not confuse this with the pain medication, oxycontin). Oxytocin is called “the cuddle hormone,” and it facilitates a mother bonding with her children and her husband. It is released in small amounts during physical touching, especially stroking the skin, and is released in large amounts after orgasm. It therefore follows that taking the time to build attraction for a woman to ultimately increase her excitement, desire, and arousal to the point where she can then experience orgasm (simple physical stimulation is seldom if ever enough for a woman – attraction must happen first) on a regular basis, she will be more apt to remain happily married.

So yes, in spite of what the politically correct would have you believe, sex is indeed a very important part of marriage and of a mentally, physically and emotionally healthy woman’s life (trauma, hormonal issues, chronic pain, etc., can interfere, but this is the exception, not the rule, so never assume this is the problem), and if it slows down or even stops, trouble is coming, if it’s not already upon you.

The bottom line? Make the effort to become the confident, attractive alpha male that will light her fire and keep it lit and you will start a largely self-sustaining chain reaction that will keep the two of you intimate, excited, and happy for years to come. The choice is of whether to have or lose this happiness is yours, so make the obviously good choice, and follow through. Everything you need to know to make it happen is in the pages of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com and get started, because the journey is fun, and the destination is one to live for.

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

What the Great Poet Virgil Knew About Saving Relationships and Marriage

“The wisdom of the ages” is so named because it is indeed timeless, and even if it is thousands of years old, still proves effective today. Over 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Virgil knew a lot more about fixing a failing relationship than you might guess…

I can’t describe to you how much I love this job. Everywhere I turn, I see something that holds a lesson for you, even in my old e-mail! LOL!

I was looking through the e-mail I’ve received from readers in past months to see who I needed to check in on (I try to follow up on everybody who writes to me with a problem to make sure they get it resolved and are still moving forward every day of their lives), and I noticed something about them: those who had the greatest success are the ones who took the most decisive action swiftly.

The great Roman poet Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC) wrote a lot about bold actions and bold men, not to mention a lot of other things that a man, especially a man in trouble, should keep at the forefront of his thoughts.

First those on boldness and bravery:

“Look with favor upon a bold beginning.”

“Fortune favors the brave.”

Those who see opportunity and act not only succeed, they draw the favorable attention of others, especially women, and most especially the woman with whom they are in a committed relationship. After all, bold, well-planned and well-executed action is one of the hallmarks of leadership and alpha male behavior.

But what makes some men bolder than others? Virgil had a few words to say about that, too:

“They can conquer who believe they can.”

“They can do all because they think they can.”

If you expect success, you make it happen, plain and simple. It’s not a mind game, just common sense. When you don’t expect success, you hold back, not wanting to commit everything to the win, holding your options open to such a degree that you never fully exercise any of them, and eventually your options expire and you fail miserably. Henry Ford is often quoted, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, your right.”

Ask anybody who has succeeded why they succeeded. They won’t tell you it was blind luck. That’s somebody who won the lottery, not somebody who has succeeded. Someone who has succeeded at anything will say that they thought things through, and then followed through (legendary U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager’s formula for success). They may not use those words, but that’s the message you’ll get, that they were committed to success, and did what it took to make it happen.

The million dollar question is, what gave them what they needed to commit? What say you, Virgil?

“Trust one who has gone through it.”

“Believe one who has proved it. Believe an expert.“

No man is born knowing how to handle every situation, good, bad, or indifferent. We learn as we go, some of us more than others. Those who succeed can commit to success because one way or another, they have come up with the knowledge that it takes to plot their path into the future, anticipating situations and making appropriate choices, thereby having a reasonable expectation of success because they have seen it. They then proceed, knowing that if their own learning and experience don’t cover everything that comes up, there will be others who can provide experience and knowledge that can bridge the gap for them, but one way or another, they will find or create everything that is needed.

But success can be fleeting, you say? Sure it can, if you let it! Virgil knew something about that, too:

“It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.”

Many a success, many a fortune, and many a life has been pissed away because someone wasn’t vigilant and started letting things slide, like paying attention to their business, their children, or their wife. But instead of taking action, they thought, “Well, maybe it will just turn around on its own if I’m patient.”

Yeah, right. I’ve had a lot of problems fix themselves, haven’t you? I think the last time I had a problem fix itself I was in high school, had dislocated a shoulder falling down a flight of stairs, and tripped on the way to the ground floor to go to the hospital and relocated it. That was over 30 years ago. Yep, happens all the time, right Sparky?

So what should you do? Virgil, another pearl if you please?

"Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly.”

When things start to slide in your marriage, one of the very first things that happens is your sex life goes to hell in a handbasket. Boredom and frustrations build and you become part of that deplorable statistic wherein married couples who have been together longer than two years average having sex six times per year.

That sucks, doesn’t it? And it’s so easy to just go out and have a fling, while you wait for her to wake up and do something, because it’s all her fault, with the headaches, the complaints, right? After all, she’s the one who’s saying “no,” not you.

Don’t be a moron. She’s not saying “no” because everything is the way she wants it to be. She wants to be excited. She wants to desire you. She wants you to sweep her off her feet, as you must have done to some degree on some level for her to marry you unless she was totally desperate and feared being alone, in which case she still wants it and wants it to be you, but doesn’t expect it from you, so it’s even easier for her to be looking elsewhere, too. Isn’t it odd how the pendulum swings both ways?

One of the worst-kept secrets in all of existence is that there are actually VERY FEW headaches that are bad enough to interfere with sex. Ask anyone who has a healthy libido and satisfying sex life. It’s when you don’t mix it up with naughty behavior and alpha male leadership to create attraction for a woman, don’t pay attention to her and learn to communicate with her, and frustrate and bore her to death that it becomes easier for her to just fake a headache or fatigue than to try to explain to you that you’re not “doing it for her” for the one thousandth time knowing that you won’t get it any better this time than the previous 999.

That’s when you have to dig deep within yourself and ask yourself how important this woman and your marriage is to you. Virgil even wrote something about that:

“O tyrant Love, to what do you not drive the hearts of men?”

That rhetoric can be placed in a whole lot of different contexts, both good and bad, but think about it. When you really love a woman, when you VALUE her, and share her values, should you not be willing to do whatever it takes to protect and maintain your relationship with her, short of sacrificing yourself? (Self-love must exist before genuine love of another can.) And if you do not, should you not acknowledge that a mistake that has been made, that you are so mismatched that neither of you can ever be happy with the other, and seek a graceful, equitable exit instead of wallowing in misery or starting some kind of war?

That’s when you summon your expert, learn what you need to know, and commit to making a successful change. You can dread it, or you can revel in the opportunity to start over with better information in hand and do it right this time. Virgil had some pretty good advice about that, too:

“Let us go singing as far as we go: the road will be less tedious.”

There is nothing that can diffuse a bad time, lighten a load, or elicit cooperation like the combination of leadership and humor, and that goes double for any situation that involves a woman, because they are biologically wired to respond to it. They have a choice to a degree and up to a point, but attraction can become just as overwhelming for them as boredom.

Think about that for a minute…

You can create attraction for a woman, and have her nurture you and stay with you for life, or you can fail to create attraction for her, and have her so bored and frustrated that she makes your life hell and BOTH OF YOU end up risking or having affairs while waiting for each other to do something to put off the impending divorce. If he had had such language in his day, Virgil may have said something like:

“Hmmm….a no-brainer!”

So there you have it. Be bold, be brave, find an expert, trust those who have been there before you, and have fun fixing things. Wisdom of the ages.

I’m your expert. I’ve been there, along with the 118 couples that helped in the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and the hundreds that followed them to keep providing you with the wisdom of those who have been there so that you can be bold and brave, and get back to having fun in your marriage or other committed relationship. Download your copy right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com because it’s not just history that favors the bold and the brave; women do too, including yours!

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

An Attitude and Mistake That Can Kill ANY Relationship or Marriage

A reader’s comment on ending a newsletter subscription demonstrates an attitude and a mistake that will kill not just attraction, but any relationship, faster than you can snap your finger and say “Buh-bye!”

Occasionally readers end their subscription to this newsletter, and I invite them to provide a reason or any other commentary on the exit form. I have an on-going interest in trying to find any reasonable means to improve the scope, content, delivery, convenience, etc.

Once in awhile I get a comment that sparks positive change, sometimes a simple thank you for helping someone to become their own relationship expert, and a few benign comments like they were looking for a different kind of publication, are leaving on vacation and don’t want their e-mail inbox to fill up in their absence, are changing addresses, etc. No problem…

But then there are those few comments that proclaim such a level of “megalithic moronitude” that I have to disclose them here, because they invariably disclose something that the rest of this group, the part with a functioning brain looking for self-improvement and help, can learn from. The following is such a comment:

This lead has unsubscribed by following the link at the bottom of one of your AWeber messages, and decided to provide comments. Why did I receive this email? http://www.aweber.com/faq_messages.htm#messages6b

Name: zxxxxr
Email: xxxxxxxx@yahoo.com (e-mail address suppressed to protect the idiotic)
Signup Date: XX/XX/XX 06:18 AM EST

Comments:
all messages should be in a form of points and alittle comment coz its boring coz itz too long

Ignoring the lack of capitalization and punctuation, grammar and spelling that you couldn’t slip past a kindergarten teacher, and the obvious utter lack of self-respect that this person projects, look at the message:

“I don’t want to read this newsletter because there’s too much information and I get bored. How dare you expect me to listen and think about what you are saying???”

This kind of comment doesn’t make me angry; it makes me pity the poor sap who wrote it. Yes, I’m a bit verbose at times, because I’m writing for a very diverse audience. Some people need a bit more of an explanation than others and a writer has to communicate at the lowest level present in his or her target audience. Others just need a little more help because their situation is worse; emotionally-charged situations make it hard-to-impossible to think rationally and I’m quite literally “talking them down” from their emotionally-charged state so they can get a grip and begin fixing their problems. I freely admit that I could make some of these newsletters half as long as they are, but then they would only make sense and be valuable to half as many people or only half as valuable to others.

So in a nutshell, this guy is complaining because I'm making an extra effort to convey information to people, at no cost to them other than the time to read it, the value of which exceeds that of many for-fee products. Go figure. What can you learn from this?

This is the second such comment I’ve had that expressed this sentiment out of tens of thousands of e-mails and just over one thousand cancelled subscriptions. That means that most people read until they understand, skim the material that appears redundant to them, and start reading thoroughly again when they find a new idea being broached. Why? Because they are motivated to listen and learn!

But what happens when it’s not my newsletter that you’re reading, but instead, it’s your wife, talking round and round, seemingly in an endless circle comprising more laps than a NASCAR event? Do you tune her out until she comes to something new because you don’t care enough about what she’s trying to communicate to listen intently and not be bored?

NO! Hell NO! Because that’s what has put most of us in the dog house more times than we can count! And think about that for a minute; this woman cared enough about you to marry you and you pay more attention to something printed in an e-mail than something that she wants you to know? If this is the case, we can project with astonishing accuracy where your relationship’s problems started!

Guys, I cannot overstress this, even if I talked non-stop about it for a thousand pages or a thousand hours. Listening to a woman talk and hearing what she is trying to make you hear is not like listening to a man, and if you make the mistake of listening to a woman as if she were a man you will live to regret it every time, unless she has a markedly masculine communication style, in which case you most likely would not be reading this newsletter because you’d be getting along quite well. Indeed, many of you have written to me acknowledging that improving communications is the doorway to all other relationship success, including attraction and a return to “normal intimate relations.”

When we men speak to each other and use as few words as possible, we’re doing each other a favor and we know it, because we’re all about results, resolution, keeping things safe, etc., and efficiency is how we get the most things achieved in everything we do. It’s not so with women…

They only rarely, if ever, speak directly about anything. They often use repetition as a way of expressing emotional involvement. We’ve all heard the dramatic litany, “I thought I would die! I mean I thought I would die!” The more it’s repeated, the higher the emotional intensity they’re trying to convey. And yes, it bugs the crap out of me just like it does you, because it’s inefficient, dramatic, and annoying, just like it annoys them that we don’t repeat ourselves to indicate our emotional involvement like they do, being the closed-off, terse, Neanderthals that we are (in their minds, of course).

They use questions to make statements and make statements to ask questions. “Are you hungry?” really means, “I’m hungry and want to talk about what we’re going to eat and where we’re going to get it.” “Are you wearing that?” means, “Don’t wear that. You look stupid.” “I saw Jenny at the market today,” means “I saw somebody and talked to them and would like to tell you about it. Are you going to let me or are you going to cut me off like you usually do?”

They seldom if ever succinctly report anything except the details of their itinerary, and even then they’re waiting for you to act interested by asking them questions about what they’re saying, thereby giving them to green light to get into the emotions and social impact of their itinerary. Refer to the previous paragraph because it’s the same principle.

Everything with them is a negotiation of one form or another, and if you’re not hearing something that you can interpret and respond to and just tune her out until she gets around to something that you can, you just paid her a HUGE, HURTFUL INSULT (in her mind because she expects you to communicate like a woman), because you ignored her instead of engaging her to get the message right. Well, jump back two paragraphs to the example of being hungry. Pretty simple, universal stuff, right?

What she hears when you “cut her off” like that is that you don’t care enough about her or anything regarding her to try to listen. Why? Because she doesn’t realize that you don’t speak and listen in the same manner as women! (Women cut each other short or don’t ask engaging questions as a demeaning way of cutting someone off.) Remember all the times that she screamed at you, “You NEVER listen to me!” even though you were trying to listen and maybe even thought you were doing a pretty good job? Now you know why she pitched that fit.

Now the hook...

You need to listen to her whenever she’s saying anything important, yet you cannot let her inundate you with girl-talk and end up treating you like a girlfriend. This demotes you from attractive partner to just another node on her social network, the same effect on her as not listening to her, but far more annoying for you. You have to draw the line, but do you know where? Just one more of the many problems that men face when trying to live with a woman that I can help you with.

That’s right. There is a fix, and it’s not that difficult; indeed, there are more experts being born every day after reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and learning the mechanics and protocols that men and women use to communicate. As men learn to be better listeners and speakers when speaking with women, they’re also teaching the women in their life how to listen and speak more directly and effectively with men, resulting in women who are amused by men’s quaint shortcomings in communications skills instead of feeling ignored, discounted, and disrespected. Imagine how that alone is improving their self-esteem and trust of their men, and how that is in turn impacting their relationship and the men in their life!

And you’re going to love this: those who go through it verify that it is indeed fun! It’s like opening this huge box of new tools and toys and being overwhelmed with delight and discovery. Want to join in the fun and kick your relationship up to notches previously unknown to mankind?

It’s easy to do. Just hop over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and your complimentary copy of my “Break-Up Busting 101” and “What Women REALLY Want” series reports. It’s an instant download, guaranteed to improve your life, no matter what condition it’s in. Do yourself a favor and go for it, before you end up spending yet another night in the doghouse and have no idea why.

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

Lying in Relationships and Marriage, Part 2, A Reader’s Confession About Lying Nearly Ending Her Marriage

A reader tells of her own experience with lying to the one she loves. It’s not pretty, and is a perfect example of what I warned you about in yesterday’s newsletter.

--Yesterday’s newsletter on lying to your partner got some pretty predictable responses. If you missed it, see the archived copy because it’s one you will definitely want to read.

Those who don’t lie to their partners wrote in agreement, while the vast majority of those who do wrote in defense of their actions, saying ridiculous things like, “Good relationships are based on lies,” “It’s only a problem if you get caught,” etc. I feel sorry for those people, because they will never experience the wonderful feelings that true love, trust, loyalty and respect generate, which I’m glad to say that many of you, based on your responses, do seem to appreciate.

There was one letter in particular that I wanted to share with you, from a woman who got caught in a lie and almost destroyed her relationship with someone who seems to be a really good man. Meet Darla:

Dear David,

I wanted to share with you what really can happen when you tell a lie to the one you love. My story I guess is simple to many people, but it is hard for me to tell because I have to face something horrible to me. I come from a long line of people with addictive personalities. By addictive I mean to drugs and drinking. My mother was and is addicted to pain medication among other things and my brother has spent time in jail for his addictions. As for me I had started down the same road with prescription medications. Every day I thought I had to have one kind or the other, uppers in the morning and downers at night and had lived this way for awhile. I was in a marriage that was the worst of nightmares and two kids who could care less if I were living or dead.

I met this wonderful man, one that loves me and God only knows how much I love him. He noticed right off I could have a problem if I did not control myself. We have had long talks about it and I really had made the choice to give up the drugs. I wanted to be with him and I wanted to love him and to be sober to enjoy what I had finally been given.

Yesterday morning I awoke with a migraine. I have them from time to time and it was bad enough for me to try a new medication my doctor had given me. I took the pill and a short time later he called me to say good morning and I was spaced out on the pills. He asked me about it and in a panic I lied to him and told him I had not taken any medication. It was the worst choice I have ever made. I should have been honest and told him what was going on, but I lied.

He was so upset by what I had done that he would not hardly talk to me and when he did I felt like the lowest life form on the planet, not because he was abusive or belittled me, but because he pointed out to me that there was nothing in our history that gave me a reason to lie to him, and I was mimicking my mother’s behavior, and we both knew that the idea of me turning into my mother was not going to work for either of us.

He has no problem with me taking a pain medication for pain, and has told me so on several occasions. It is just the issue of me abusing pain killers for things other than pain that he has a problem with. We did talk it over and after many tears on my part we decided that since I had not lied to him in the past that the migraine medication may have been responsible for my choice to lie this time, and he forgave me on the condition that I never lied to him again, especially about drug use.

I will never lie to him again ever, because no matter what you think you are getting away with you are not. If you want to lose the man of your dreams because you want to be a dumb ass then you deserve what happens to you. I’m just thankful that my John loves me enough to work it out with me not throw me and nine years away because I was worried about the truth where if I had just said to him I was not feeling well and had taken the pills and since it was the first time and I was not sure what they would do to me it could have been avoided.

What I am saying is tell the truth not matter what. It hurts worse to lie to the one you love and you are not a good person if you can lie to the one you claim you love in the first place. Thank you so much John for loving me and letting me still love you and you still love me.

Darla

My response:

Hi Darla,

That’s quite a confession Darla; thank you for sharing it with us. I’ve studied people a lot over the years, and I’ve seen a few things that I’d like to point out here. Chemicals notwithstanding (a lot of medications can alter your personality, adherence to your value system, inhibitions, etc.), you would be hard-pressed to prove to me how anyone who truly loves and respects another could lie to them, especially to cover their own ass. That’s an act of cowardice and need, not of love and respect. If your partner is claiming to love you but lying to you frequently (or vice versa), you and they need to take a look at the meaning of love, need, attraction, etc. (see the article in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report), and get a fix on reality, because you’re not in it.

Another thing I’ve noticed, in my marriage, in the world around me and in the hundreds of couples who have been involved in the development, testing, and tweaking of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," is that there is nothing that two rational people who truly love and respect each other can’t discuss, no matter how bad it is. Of all the things that come together to make a good relationship work, unfettered, respectful, honest, and factual communication is the most important tool in the tool chest, because through it, all the other things are achieved.

Take care,
David

Do you know what kind of a relationship you’re in? Do you know if your partner really loves you, or if they’re just clinging on because they’re afraid to be alone? Do you communicate effectively across the gender gap? Has the honeymoon ended and left you as part of that ugly statistic wherein the average couple who has been together longer than two years has sex once every two months?

If you’ve become part of that statistic, it may seem like a problem, but you’ll soon see that it’s merely a symptom of a MUCH bigger problem. In any case, it’s logical to expect that you have or are anticipating at least one of these problems or you wouldn’t be spending the time to read these newsletters, so why keep putting off the solution?

Yes, what you need to know is in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s not going to get into your head where you can use it until you go to http://www.makingherhappy.com, download it, and then read it. What you need to know is in there, laid out point by point and step by step, and people are using it every day to make their relationships better and better, some even snatching their marriage from the jaws of the divorce monster in as little as a week after receiving it. Do yourself and your partner a favor; get it and get busy, because life’s too short to spend it unhappy, bored, frustrated, scared, cheating, or celibate.

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