Women Test Men Constantly, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

Let’s get a little deeper into why women test men, and what you should do when they do, and tomorrow, we’re going to talk about how and why we can test THEM, so stay tuned…

I like to write about testing from time to time because it’s an inexorable part of life with virtually any woman. To give you an example of how automatic and literally unavoidable it is, look at how women interact with me.

I’m an expert and published author on the subject, have proved it to nearly all the women I know during the course of writing “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” as I researched and tested the material and constantly since then, and they’ve all acknowledged it, yet all of them test me nearly every time we talk! Some get embarrassed about it, some just laugh, but they know that I know, many want to avoid it because they know they’ll get busted and I’ll give them a hard time over it (in a naughty, mischievous way, not hateful or demeaning!), yet they still do it, often without even realizing it.

Think about what this means to the average guy living with the average woman. She’s not trying to avoid it, because she’s not the least bit worried about getting caught at it. Indeed, she’d probably be happy to get caught at it and have something said because in most cases, in her world that would be an improvement. Why?

I’m going to give you the short version, because this is a complex subject, it took several pages in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” (and even more in the still-untitled book I’m writing for the women) to cover it and I don’t want to overload you with “homework.” Besides, I think we both know that I’d prefer you buy my book! (Wink!)

Women are constantly testing men from the time they meet to the last day of their relationship because they are wired to look to the long term and protect their offspring and ability to produce them (whether they have any or not), and avoid getting stuck with a bad man. We can tell them we’re real men, we’re tough, we work hard, we never lie, we’re good in bed, we’ll stand our ground and fight the good fight, but it could be a lie, or could become a lie at any point, so their only option is to test us to see if what we say is consistent with what we do, and stays that way.

You’ve seen both men and women change the instant they figure out they have somebody hooked; most men just aren’t secure enough and smart enough to do something about it. We’re biologically wired to be nomads, father children through multiple mothers, etc., so our biological purpose is to secure food and lodging and make women pregnant. We’re also biologically wired to protect the women before the kids, because we can make more kids in minutes, where women are wired to protect the kids first, since their investment in making a baby is over nine months. And no, that’s not all we’re good for, but the biological mechanisms that cause and support behavior can’t be completely ignored, either.

Yes, it’s a mess. But getting back to the point, they have to test, can’t stop testing, no matter how good things are, and if you don’t know how to respond to a test, you’re toast, especially as far as attraction goes – they’ll test you to see if you continue to tell the truth, remain committed and loyal, etc., and the only way to deal with that is honestly; right now, we’re here to talk about attraction.

You’ll be tested to see if you’re a real man or a wuss, and even if you’re a real man, a weak moment can cause you to do wuss things and kill attraction, so you need to be ever-vigilant. Again, this is a very complex subject with near-infinite possibilities, and I’ve only got room to cover a small part of it here, so you’ll have to consult "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," starting on page 45, for a much clearer picture of how to detect and pass this kind of testing, but let’s hit some of the really common stuff…

First, keep in mind the characteristics of the alpha male: strength, self-esteem, authoritative, confident, playful, intelligent, comfortable, etc. You were born this way, and the programming of the years since tampered with it, hampered it, buried it, or convinced you it was somehow wrong or insensitive. Mothers and other well-meaning women, school personnel, the media and others have tried to beat it out of you, or back so deep inside you that you deny your true nature, and in doing so, your ability to enjoy your life.

You must strip yourself of all the wussification programming that you’ve received since birth and allow the real man within you to emerge; you can’t “fake it until you make it” when being tested. The tests that you face will be tests that challenge these traits and try to get you to expose a hidden weakness, especially in a weak moment, to make sure you’re not just a wuss PLAYING THE PART OF a real man, the alpha male. She wants to know that you can lead her and enjoy life, not just go through the motions for awhile and end up her dependent instead of her partner.

It can come very overtly, such as pitching a fit over something inconsequential to see if you will remain calm and negotiate your way back to reality, remain both calm and strong and tell her that when she gets done pitching a fit and is ready for a rational discussion that you’ll be available if she still wants to talk about it, or go the wrong direction by allowing her to get you upset and yelling or even worse, immediately apologizing for something that you haven’t done. In the former case, you’re allowing her to define authority by dragging you into a bad discussion and setting the tone for it, while in the latter, you’re just caving in to a totally unreasonable situation like a coward.

It can also come very subtly. My favorite example is in one of Jeff Foxworthy’s jokes, where his wife says she’s cold and without a word, he gets up and changes the setting on the climate control for the room. In his joke, he says he’s being trained, and his wife calls her mother and says that the training is working, but in real life, she’d be quite disappointed if this were a test (she’d appreciate it if she were really tired or ill and he was simply being considerate), because he just wussed out and took a non-verbal order to get up out of bed and change the temperature (or turn on the ceiling fan – it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the show).

There are two ways that I know of to pass this particular test (Ladies, you’re invited to write if you have thoughts on this – guys, always leave a communications channel open, even when you are the authority figure), depending on your relationship. One is to ask her, with a very naughty, mischievous grin, if her legs or fingers are broken, unless she’s in a wheelchair or can’t get up, which is just mean.

(Also, do NOT challenge her intellect by asking if she doesn’t know how to operate the one moving part of the switch unless she is extremely bright and you know she’s secure about it. Many women have a hot button about intelligence if they’ve been around an abusive man in the past, one who would say things like, “What do you know? You’re just a woman!” or “Stupid broad!” etc., and you don’t want to be identified with that guy and catch whatever she needs to vent about him when you touch that hot button.)

Or if you want to be considerate and take care of it for her, you can say, again with a bit of a sly tone and facial expression, “I’ll change it for you, but it’s going to cost you…” and then negotiate a kiss, backrub, favorite dinner, sexual favor, or whatever you’re comfortable with, but turn it into something fun and intimate for both of you.

Unfortunately, many women also use testing as a way to communicate to men things they aren’t comfortable discussing, like feeling ignored or unimportant, and they do this by pulling nasty little stunts like filing for divorce, emptying the family checking account or incurring a huge debt, or picking up a substance abuse habit or a boyfriend. It’s not because they want any of these things, but because they want you to see that they are vulnerable to these things because of your lack of allure, responsibility, leadership, or whatever, and can’t think of any other way to express it than to show you the worst-case scenario. This doesn’t usually come until you’ve failed to interpret their other communications efforts, so it would behoove you to learn how to listen when they speak.

Yes, that sounds really screwed up, and it is, but that’s reality, and you really are going to have to read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” to get the rest of that story, especially the tips on how to handle the situation. It’s far too complex and the stakes too high to try to address it in the limited space of an e-mail or a blog post. I can’t over-stress that testing is among the most complicated, misunderstood and potentially dangerous of all male-female issues, and if you don’t give it due consideration, you will be punished when you keep failing tests.

The action plan? Get the book, get the details, learn the alpha male behavior that women love in their men and keep it up while “deleting your wuss program,” learn to spot and respond appropriately to the testing that you will endure, no matter who you have married or are dating, and watch how quickly you start wearing out bedding and beds, not to mention how much more intimate, fun, and rewarding the rest of your life together with your partner will become. Jump on over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, before you have to face some catastrophe just to find out that your partner would like to have you home for dinner or have a date night once a week.

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

Why Bother Fixing a Troubled or Failing Relationship or Marriage?

Why should you want and expect to make an effort to fix a strained or distant relationship? The answer is obvious to some, but many really don’t know, and actually think that it’s easier to put up with pain, frustration, boredom, etc., or the stress of extramarital affairs. Wrong! Here for you are the facts and the truth…

I want to share with you the most ridiculous e-mail I may have ever received. I have always maintained a policy of keeping all comments about reader mail positive, but occasionally I get one that is just so downright idiotic that it makes me want to grab the sender and shake them really hard to try to wake them up. I’m not going release this reader’s name, and I want to make it clear that I am in no way saying that this reader is an idiot; I am however, stating emphatically that what he says is something I would expect from either a moron or somebody really emotionally damaged, not from someone intelligent enough to be able to write a letter like this one.

Dear David,

I’ve been reading your newsletter for several weeks now, and I really can’t see why I should have to go through all this trouble to please my wife. We’ve been married for 8 years, and have followed the same routine pretty much since we got married. I work, she keeps the house and takes care of the kids. In the evening, I watch TV or go to the bar while she helps the kids with their homework. If I fall asleep on the couch she doesn’t bother me, and if I come home late from the bar she’s asleep in the bed and doesn’t say anything. We don’t talk much, don’t go anywhere, and everything’s fine. What’s the deal?

Bob

My reply:

Well, “Bob,” (the name has been changed to protect the monumentally daft), let’s look at a few things from a logical point-of-view:

1. You’ve been reading my newsletter for several weeks, but you say there’s no problem? You’re letter doesn’t paint a picture of you being a proactive achiever, so I’m not buying that, and I hope you’re not either.

2. Doing the same thing, day in and day out for 8 years, and there’s no problem? Ladies, you are cordially invited to write with your comments on this one! (Please feel free to comment on anything at any time, but I’m asking you specifically for your reactions here to help this guy see that unless he’s married to “Rain Man” he has and is oblivious to a serious problem with a bored wife.)

3. You frequently go to the bar while she stays home with the kids, and sit in front of the TV on “non-bar” nights? Why aren’t you doing something with the wife and kids at least a couple of nights a week? No problem, you say?

4. You fall asleep on the couch and she doesn’t wake you up and tell you to come to bed, or throw a blanket over you, or say something about it the next day? Can you say “bored and disinterested”? But I guess that’s not a problem, either, even though that’s a recipe for your wife to be seeing other men while you’re at work and the kids are in school and chatting on the Internet or on the phone with other men while you are at the bar.

5. Don’t talk much? Don’t go anywhere? And you call that fine? And you think that she thinks that’s fine? At this point, I’m wondering if you’ve beaten her to the point that she sees “no beatings” as being the same as “happy marriage.” If you don’t interact with your wife and children, why do you have them???

In a nutshell, your letter describes a plea for validation, not education or improvement. I don’t know what you’re situation or problem really is, and until you come clean about all the contradictions and omissions in your letter, there’s not a thing I can do to help you, except possibly to point out a few universal truths that might motivate you to take a realistic look at your situation.

Let’s start with the old adage, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Even if you or somebody else has damaged your wife to the point that she really would rather live the life she’s living than to see positive change, is this what YOU really want? A robot that cleans the house, cooks, and keeps the laundry and house clean and the kids out of your way? I suppose next you’re going to tell us that they based several episodes of “The Sopranos” on your life.

I’m also curious as to what value you are getting for all the money it takes to feed, house, clothe, medicate, educate, and entertain those other people in your house. Do you have even an inkling that interaction with them could be far more interesting and rewarding than anything you find on television, and far less destructive than anything you’d find in a bar? Or are you too depressed and comfortably unhappy to notice?

And how about “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”? If your letter paints an accurate picture of your home life, you’ve completely turned your back on your family except for giving them whatever part of your paycheck they receive. Contrary to what many think, the average woman is interested in a lot more than her husband’s paycheck.

Do you really think they, especially your wife and the mother of your kids, are going to go on accepting being ignored indefinitely? Women and kids both do things to get attention, even the wrong kind of attention, when you don’t give it to them freely and willingly. The longer you ignore them, the more radical the actions they will take. Do you relish the thought of coming home and finding your wife in your bed with another man? Or going to a local jail to bail one or more of your kids out for shoplifting, drug possession, or worse, some kind of violent, gang-related mishap? Get a clue, because it’s coming.

Bob, the best thing I can tell you right now is “wake up and smell the coffee.” You deserve and can have better than the life you describe, and so does your family, and the choice is entirely yours. If your job is sufficient to pay the bills and provide you several bar nights per week without your wife working, then you’re doing well enough to do some things with your family.

You’re in a rut, and you’re not going to come out of it by just holding the wheel loosely and letting things just go where they want to go. Turn the wheel and get out of the rut. "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" will motivate you to help you feel deserving of such a life, but you should already be feeling some sort of longing for it or you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter and writing such a letter as you wrote, so what’s your real story? C’mon, lay it on me. I can take it. Can you?

Or are you afraid that the truth will hurt too much? You sound like you are one of those “comfortably unhappy” people that I help the most. I don’t know, but together, we can find out.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Folks, there’s no reason to continue living a life that you aren’t loving to live. The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging, isn’t it? Whatever has put you in trouble must be stopped immediately or inertia (that physics principle that says that an object in motion will tend to remain in motion and an object at rest will tend to remain at rest until some external force acts upon them, remember?) will just keep right on digging you in deeper.

Stop digging. If you don’t know what you’ve done to make your relationship a mess, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage;” I’ll guarantee you that the answer is in there. Together, we can get you where you need and want to be, if you’ll just take this first step in the right direction, and life is indeed too short to spend it digging yourself a deeper hole, is it not?

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

Can Naughty Be Nice? It Can Certainly Help Your Relationship and Marriage!

Women have a naughty side just like men; indeed, there is much more about them that is similar to us than different when you can see the whole woman without the blinders that Hollywood, traditions (especially religious), outdated ideas of etiquette, etc., can impose. The thing you have to know is what to do to bring it out…

I hate to say this, but I’ve got some male newsletter readers in whom I’m getting really disappointed, not because they’re not succeeding, but because they’re not trying to succeed. I have talked and even preached ad nauseam about the value of intermittent doses of “the naughty boy” in making men interesting to women and giving women a way to open up and both be and have fun, and huge numbers of people are doing this and succeeding with it. Look at this letter I just received:

What's up David,

Your book is excellent and a must read to any guy that calls himself seriously being in a relationship with a woman. I have read other books on attraction and I've gotten great results, but things are different in a long term committed relationship. Recently (before reading your book) I noticed that something was missing, so I began to search on the internet and I found your product.

I want to thank you because since reading your book I've brought the life back into our relationship. I began using your sexual tension methods and they work like a charm. By not being so easy, making her wait, and anticipate, then withdrawing only to start up again has reversed what had been happening.

Realizing that she is supposed to be the predator and I'm supposed to be the prey has opened up an unknown world of possibilities. She went from acting like she was sleepy all the time to being overtly sexually interested (ready to attack me). She even says that she can't understand why she's always horny while she's around me.

After reading your book I just played around with turning her on and then backing off (not just jumping in and going for the gusto). After doing that a few times I wish you could've seen the look on her face (priceless). I was only playing around but based on her response sexual tension is more powerful than I could've imagined. I am practicing this art to perfection, because once you understand what's going on it's EASY and FUN for me and for her. We both can feel the tingles again when we are together.

Thanks. And keep up the good work.
C.

A very typical letter, really, and it came the day after his purchase. Thousands of men and women have written such letters to me confirming that everything I teach works, and some of the couples that helped with the research and testing of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” commented that the naughty behavior was the most enjoyable part of the research. But get this…

In spite of all that, these jokers, instead of just trying it and seeing for themselves that it does indeed work wonders, write me e-mails and even call and pay my consulting fee to sit and tell me that they don’t see how this could possibly work, or even worse, that it can’t possibly work, because “I just don’t understand” their situation or their wife.

Folks, I’m about to let you in on one of life’s very few “great truths,” here and now: the words “but you don’t understand” and “but you’ve got to understand” are almost always the leper’s bell of a pragmatist – a person who cannot accept reality and will fight tooth and nail to try to get you to concede that whatever fantasies and contradictions are in their head compose a valid, if alternate, reality, which it never does. There’s one reality, and we’re all living in it together, like it or not, for better for worse, ‘til death do us part, etc. These people are looking for validation of their mistakes, not improvement of their situation.

As a general rule, I fire pragmatists immediately upon contact because they are a usually a waste of time, but before firing these guys, I’m going to present the scoop on naughtiness one more time, and I’m going to invite all of you, who are welcome to send me comments, questions, etc., at any time, to write to me with comments about this specific material to be reprinted for these guys in a final attempt to jerk their butts into this reality in which we all live. Maybe then they can stop looking for rationalization and validation of their mistakes and lack of action and start taking action and getting results.

Women have a naughty streak, just like men, and from what I’ve seen, it runs just as deep and wide as any man’s and might be just a tad more devious because women are generally a bit more emotionally-driven and creative than men. However, many of them won’t show their naughty side until a man does first, thereby inviting her to show hers!

While working as a corporate consultant, I often overheard conversations between small groups of women in offices when they didn’t know a man was around that if transcribed into text without names would often be indistinguishable from men’s, to include bizarre sex stories, gas-passing contests and stories (including “pull my finger” games and trapping someone beneath the bedclothes with an “eruption”), tales of marauding sexual exploits, etc., using language that might embarrass the proverbial sailor.

These same women, when men were around, were very prim and professional, not to mention poised and well-mannered when we met at a lounge somewhere after working hours.

The key to unlocking this fun, very naughty behavior, especially the sexual side of it, is to be naughty in their presence, deploying the “naughty boy grin” after making some teasing remark or action that invites them to retaliate with naughtiness of their own. The naughtier you are, the naughtier they will be; very few women have the self-confidence to just let their naughtiness hang out, and we can’t blame them for it, either.

Some of their earliest memories might be of being told that little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice” while little boys are made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails” and being told that various things are “simply unladylike” and that “good little girls don’t do that.” Whether it was male oppression or mother’s trying to program their daughters to try to look better than a normal woman is irrelevant. And once you get them going, it’s a blast!

Add to that childhood programming the time-honored high school Monday morning ritual where all the guys come in and tell all the sex stories from their dates over the weekend, most of which didn’t really happen, and for the rest of the week the guys who had a good story about getting laid were the heroes and the girls they slept with were the hussies, jezebels, floozies, sluts, whores, or whatever nasty nametag was in vogue at the time. You can bet they hated that, and while we’re all older now and most of us understand that women enjoy and seek out sex as much as men and it’s a really, REALLY good thing that they do, those idiotic high school games, which were traumatic at the time, left scars that are buried deep but still having an impact today, even though the events that caused the impact may be long forgotten.

As an aside, Parents, talk to your children about this double standard and encourage them to not engage in it. Our generations haven’t dealt too well with the problems it causes, but future generations might be able to avoid them if we tell them how. The feelings of guilt many parents try to threaten their daughters with to try to make them avoid sexual situations doesn’t help them avoid anything but talking to you about sex and their problems, and the only thing it helps them to do other than that is feel guilty about having slept with a boy and feeling like they now need to marry him when he’s not good for her.

Obviously, this is in conflict with religious teachings, and you’ll have to find your own balance between religious satisfaction and addressing these purely biological, psychological and emotional issues as a parent; I’m merely trying to call your attention to the psychological impact of things that parents and teenagers do to teenagers that continue to hurt them into adulthood so that you can try to raise them to act responsibly, in a way that doesn’t leave deep-seated emotional scars from repeated guilt trips.

Getting back to our main subject, women love to play and have fun as much as men, in many of the same ways, especially those that include challenge and naughtiness. Once you clear the way for that behavior by leading her into it by example, she’ll not likely go any farther than you do, so gradually in the same manner of stair-stepping that you would use to slowly let sexual tension build for orgasms that would make the darkest chapter of her sexual diary (also covered in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage”!), lead her into naughtiness, two steps forward, one step back, and watch her reactions. As long as she’s laughing or smiling, you’ve not gone too far. If you say or do something that causes her demeanor to change to anything that doesn’t look like she’s having fun, other than feeling sexy, especially if it looks blank or negative, you went too far (or too fast), and need to immediately back up to the last known point of pleasure without dwelling on whatever it was that crossed the line.

At some point, the naughtiness builds so much excitement and fun that it starts creating sexual tension, and as you see her transition, go with it! Let it get sexy, and then see how sexually naughty she wants to be as well! Again, if you go too far, immediately back up to what was working without killing everything by dwelling on the mistake. If she wants you to know anything about it, she’ll tell you later. What she wants now is to get back on track and be having fun again.

One caveat: No woman wants a man who does nothing but act like a brat or a clown. They want a man who can have fun WITH them (NOT at their expense!) when it’s time to have fun, the great man who becomes the naughty boy and gets her worked up, maybe for a few seconds, minutes or hours, and returns to the great alpha male who is strong, heroic, and projects authority and leadership. The switching between the two is very powerful, and keeps you from being tagged as predictable, and worse, irresponsible.

Now, get busy! Keep in mind that having never seen your female partner doing something doesn’t in any way mean she has never done it or never wanted to do it with you. As with all things regarding attraction, you as the male partner must define authority for her by taking the lead; clear the way for her inner prankster and sexual hellion to come out to play, and if you’ve never done it before, well, you’re in for one hell of a surprise!

There are pages and pages of examples of how to understand your female partner and bring out all her best behavior, including all the fun and sexual excitement she’s capable of, as well as how to take her to levels of fun and excitement she’s only dreamed of – maybe even never dreamed of-- in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Women helped develop it, verified that it works, and are buying it all over the world, both to learn about themselves and to teach their men about themselves. Many are also reporting buying it to learn what a great guy looks like, because they’re tired of picking out losers.

That’s a pretty tough accolade to ignore! Meanwhile, men are writing letters of success and thanks daily, and you’re missing out. So download your copy now at http://www.makingherhappy.com and turn up the naughty dial, because life’s just too short to spend it with a frown on your face, no matter what the cause.

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

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

Learn That Questions Are Statements and Statements Are Questions to Get Along with Women in Relationships and Marriage

With us guys, “what you see (or hear!) is what you get,” but with women, often statements are questions and questions are statements, and if you don’t read them right, you’re toast!

(Ladies, print this one and pass it along to your husband!)

From time to time, my wife reminds me of the day I learned that when listening to a woman, statements are questions and questions are statements. I’d like to describe that lesson for you so that you can start listening better and stop being labeled an insensitive jerk who shuts her out when she wants to talk.

My wife is a fiercely independent woman; if I died tonight, it would not be the things I did that she would miss. Early in our relationship, she would occasionally set out to do something and say, “I’m going to go do such-and-such. Are you coming with me?”

It wasn’t often, and when it happened, recognizing her independence being a typical guy who expected a woman to just ask if she needed help, I’d just say, “No, go ahead,” and she’d mutter something under her breath and leave the room with a scowl on her face. I thought she was just focusing on the task at hand and trying to work it out. When she would come in later in a foul mood and we didn’t get along for a day or two after that, I always thought she took her task and/or herself too seriously and wasn’t satisfied with the results.

Wrong answer.

One day she said that she was going out to set out some flowering plants, and asked if I was coming. It was a beautiful day, I had already finished everything I needed to do that day, so being outside sounded like a great idea, and I said, “Sure.” Her face lit up like a child’s at hearing they were on the way to Disney World and she left in a hurry.

When I joined her a minute later, she didn’t know where to put them, and had been puzzling over it for days. I suggested a spot next to the house, and you could see the stress melt from her expression as she said, “I was thinking about that spot, too. That will work.” A bell went off in my head, because something had just happened, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Then there was a voice, “Full power to sensors, maximum sensitivity!” (Yes, I was once a Star Trek fan.)

She grabbed a small shovel and headed for the spot. I knew the soil there to be very heavy with dense clay because we’d dug it up once before and found there to be no topsoil there, so I went into the tool shed and came out with a mattock, long-handled shovel, and a garden rake. She was furiously chopping away with the hoe trying to make a hole for the bulbs and getting nowhere fast, and said, “This is why I hate gardening around this place. The dirt is just too hard and sticky.”

Ever on the lookout for an excuse to inject some naughty play, I said, “Well, I can think of at least one thing that hard and sticky works well for, but your garden isn’t it,” and started chopping up the clay with the mattock, which only took a couple of minutes because it’s a much heavier tool and designed for such work. She was looking a bit shocked, but pleasantly so, and said, “I knew you’d know what to do. What’s next?”

That bell started ringing louder, and I thought, “Is this why she asked if I was coming out here with her? Surely not! Why didn’t she just ask me to come out if she needed help?” But the idea stuck. I said, “You can’t set those bulbs in that clay or they’ll just rot. It’s too wet and doesn’t breathe, and there are no nutrients in it because the worms don’t go there. We need to mix in some rich top soil and mulch to feed the plants and aerate the ground, and then the worms will keep it going. I’ll carry the bags (we had some left over from another project) and you mix it in with the dirt I just turned up.” And I went off to get the topsoil from the shed.

I returned with two bags, emptied them into the clay, and said, “It’s going to take two more. You go ahead and mix these while I get the other two.” I came back, and she was just standing there. I said, “What’s wrong?”

She said, “I don’t know how to mix this stuff together and get the big lumps out of it. I’ve needed you to show me how to do all this since we moved here.” BOOM!

It was true! Her question, “Are you coming with me?” was indeed a statement: “I need you to come with me.” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me before now that you needed help?”

She said, “Every time I tried to get you to come out here and show me, you refused.” BOOM! Another revelation!

I said, “You mean that when you asked me if I was coming with you, you expected me to know that you meant that you needed for me to come with you? Do you want to tell me how I was supposed to know that???”

She said, “Well, everybody else does!”

I said, “Define ‘everybody else.”

She said, “Rose, Mary, Miss Sue, Nancy, my mother, my sisters, my daughter – everybody!”

I said, “Do you realize that in your definition of ‘everybody” there is not one male?”

She said, “Well, I just assumed that you knew too, and you just didn’t want to help me.”

I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation, but you can see where it was going. I had no idea, until that moment, that her question was a statement, and she had no idea that I didn’t know everything about talking with her that all the women in her life knew. After all, she was one of four sisters. I assumed she would ask any questions she had, and she assumed I was disinterested because I didn’t take the hint. Here are some other common examples:

“Are you wearing that?” is actually a statement: “You should not wear that.”

“Are you hungry?” actually means “I’m hungry. Can we talk about where and what we’re going to eat?” (Refer to my free reports, “Break-Up Busting 101” and “What Women REALLY Want,” which you can download via the links at the bottom of this newsletter for relevant lessons from back issues of this newsletter, especially the excerpt, “Men State, Women Negotiate” from my book, for vital details on this scenario.)

“I’m bored,” actually means “Will you please do something to give me an emotional or adrenaline boost before I take matters into my own hands and make life hell for you for a few minutes because I can create drama faster and easier than I can create fun and excitement?”

Women seldom speak the obvious, or directly, about anything. If she makes a statement, it’s to ask a question, usually to enter into a negotiation about remedying or celebrating whatever she has just stated. If she asks a question, it’s to declare that a condition exists that needs your attention, and rest assured, there is no monosyllable answer that will suffice for whatever her question is.

This is one of the many, many pitfalls in any relationship with any woman, and you must prepare for it and the rest of them to the best of your ability, because if you do something wrong, women have a nasty tendency to assume you did it for the worst possible reason. It’s not a fault, flaw, or anything else. It’s just how they tend to be, and if you’re going to be around one or more of them every day, you simply have to accept it and work around it. That’s our job as men. It’s never been easy, because there’s never been a really effective operator’s manual for women in committed relationships, until now…

It’s called "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and it’s waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com, ready to be sucked up with a few mouse clicks and a few bucks and put to use to kick your relationship up to levels previously unknown to exist. I get letters every day telling me how great it works, and it will work for you too, if you’ll just use it, so do it now! Never put off until tomorrow the happiness and success you can enjoy today!

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

Preparing for Valentine's Day to Kick Things Up in Your Relationship or Marriage

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and you need to be thinking about it now, not on your way home from work on February 14. Here’s some help in the area of choosing the right gift.

Before we get into how to get prepared for Valentine’s Day, I want you to read an excerpt from a letter I got from one of my female readers who “felt” that I wasn’t aggressive enough in trying to make sure that you understand the idea of “mutual consent”:

...A man can create attraction and a woman can respond physically but not really want to do anything with this man. I have been in this situation. If I had been asked verbally there is no way that I would have gone through with it. Many women, especially younger women, feel great expectations to be sexual; our society promotes the idea that a man's way goes. Many women have been raped in this way but because they did not say no verbally they feel like they cannot complain or acknowledge the pain men have caused them. While having non-verbal consent is fine especially in an established relationship. I especially like the quote you had a while back where the man (I can’t remember his name) said “I lean in 90% for the kiss and she comes in the last 10%.”

Also while I am a fan of the rough hasty sex described the other day, I have a warning for the men who do this: if she is saying something do not assume it is positive. Having to say stop 3 times with the last a yell is a very frightening experience.

Men pay attention to your partners. 1 in 4 women and 1 in 8 men have been sexually abused. Many things may be frightening for you partner. This is why consent is so important you do not want to damage your partner and as the statistic shows it is very likely that one of your partners has been abused. I also believe if more young men and women were taught about the importance of consent verbal or non-verbal many accidental rapes could be prevented.

Regards

If our society really promoted the idea that a man’s way goes, I and the entire marital and dating advice industries would be out of a job. The biggest problem women voice to me and the other gurus is that men are wusses who won’t engage properly in sex play (this reader might be quite young and dealing with horny teenagers who have boundary issues instead of men). But that aside, Her concerns for men (and women) respecting boundaries is legitimate. So once again, Guys, “no” means “no;” don’t ask for sex, but don’t push it on a protesting woman either; and the straightest path to the bedroom is playing and teasing her so that she gets all amped up and takes YOU to the bedroom. (And read my book so you’ll know the right way to go about that! LOL!)

So let’s get to the Valentine’s Day fun!

I got a question from a reader that reminded me that it’s time to prepare for St. Valentine’s Day. Those of you who are historically-inclined know that this day was originally instituted as a day for old flames to get back in touch with each other, back in the days when very long courtships were the rule and women didn’t approach men; it was acceptable on this day for women to contact a former suitor and invite him to resume his pursuit, although a proper lady would never do so in so many words, of course! The mere announcement that she was widowed, or her engagement was broken for some reason, was “understood” as the invitation. ;-)

It has since evolved into an occasion upon which women expect “romantic” gifts, and one of the biggest mistakes you can make with many of them is the traditional, boring, and very impersonal dozen roses and box of chocolates. A woman wants a gift to be very personal, regardless of cost, so that she knows it was carefully chosen – or even constructed, if you are good at creating gifts of any kind – just for her. One of your fellow readers has seen the light, and asked for help. Meet John:

Hi David,

I have read your book and have seen the light. After 12 years of marriage I have slipped into pre-packaged holiday gift mode. I am having trouble coming up with new ideas for this Valentine's Day. Could you recommend some new ideas? My birthday is a few days before the 14th and my wife has planned a short trip out of town for us that weekend. Last February we were talking divorce, this year after reading your book and actually seeing that I had become foolishly predictable and boring, I've turned OUR life back on. I am now running out of ideas to keep her on her toes. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank You
John

My reply:

Hi John!

Congratulations on getting things turned around! If you're like most men, you're not running out of ideas, you've run out of inspiration and need a quick refresher course on the art of choosing gifts for a woman to remind you of where to look in your life with your wife for ideas. I could name off a hundred things that somebody else’s wife would love that your wife may have no interest in at all, and would in fact be insulted by, because they aren't something very personal and obviously chosen specifically for her. This must come from within you, because you are the guy who lives with her.

Start by going back to the gift section in "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which is short and to the point, and then I'm going to give a list of a few newsletters that expand on the subject. As you read these things, plug you and your wife, your upcoming plans, your history, etc., into the processes and examples and you'll most likely be flooded with very good ideas.

(Those of you who have not yet downloaded your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" can find that same gift advice in my free “What Women Want” report, which you can download at your convenience.)

After you do this, whether you come up with ideas or not, write back and we'll do a quick double-check and either make sure you've made some good choices or figure out what got in the way of you making a good choice and get you moving on the right road. This is one of those "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats for life" kind of things, and luckily, what you need to read to review doesn't amount to more than probably 3-4 pages at most, because the subject really isn't that difficult once you recapture that "groove" that you know you're going to get back into when you start reading; you'll knock her socks off for sure!

Here are the issues you need to read:

Buying the Perfect Gift (11/27/08 - This is the book excerpt on gifts, in case it's easier than finding your copy of the book, and you can skip it if you have your book or my free “What Women Want” report handy).

A Female Reader Writes About Gifts (11/13/05 - Probably the best newsletter on the subject after the excerpt from the book)

How Much Is Too Much? (01/09/09 - Defining the rules about excessive gift-giving, expectations, buying love, etc.)

Ballroom Dancing (10/09/05 - Ballroom dancing lessons are still a huge romance and attraction-builder, especially if your wife likes to dance!)

Girls and Their Toys (11/22/08 - about women and adult toys, in case your wife likes naughty things)

(For those of you who have never visited my newsletter archive, the address for the archive index is http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?mhh_tips and it's just plain HTML web pages. You scroll through the directory to find each article and just click on the link to get it on your screen, then hit the "back" button on the screen or press the backspace key on your keyboard to return to the directory. Very simple, no cookies or spyware.)

And by the way, double congratulations for having the forethought to deal with this now instead of on February 14, like 99.8% of other men will do. That's the mark of an achiever, and you get bonus points for that!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David Cunningham

Gentlemen, this really isn’t that much reading to do if you don’t remember the material, so don’t let the fact that it’s five articles deter you from doing this right. There are few things that you can do for a woman that endear you to her like selecting a truly great gift for her, not because she’s some kind of materialistic gold-digging “ho,” but because choosing a great gift for a woman requires that you pay attention to her, know intimate details about her, and consider those things when buying or making something for her.

Most women would melt over a carefully-selected bunch of wildflowers, that contained scents and colors she liked, and only perfect flowers, maybe matched her eyes or something like that, and possibly were accompanied by a brief handwritten note that said something like “You’re my favorite thing, of ALL things…” than a dozen roses or orchids with a piece of jewelry hidden in them and a $10 super-card from Hallmark.

Every woman can receive roses, thousands of women can receive that same piece of jewelry, and who knows how many people receive that same card? BUT! There will never be a bunch of flowers like the one you picked ever again, and if what you wrote on the paper was something she’s never heard, doesn’t sound “canned” (so don’t be an idiot and copy something cute from a card, because many women spend a lot of time browsing card verses in stores looking for good cards and emotional rushes), and is something that she would expect you to mean when you say it, it’s just for her too, and devastatingly special. And let’s not forget the bonus of including something small and durable that can go into her “treasure box” to remind her of her favorite times with you when she feels lonely, down, or really ticked off at you!

Indeed, one of the greatest stories I received from a reader featured a “card” that was a short note written on a sticky note (like 3M “Post-It” notes) and was stuck on a picture of the two of them wrapped in plain brown paper. The paper was from a grocery sack from the grocery they first shopped in together after they got married, and inside was a picture from their honeymoon in a frame that he had made in his shop from magnolia wood, her favorite flowering tree. The total cost was pennies (his neighbor had cut the magnolia tree to get it out of the way and he’d asked for some of the wood), and the impact was maximum romance because he had thought it through and put in some personal effort.

Caution: Don’t just run out and try to find wildflowers in February because I mentioned them, either! Spend some time getting to know your partner or thinking about what you know about her, and think about how you could combine some things she likes into some unique gift that leaves no doubt in her mind as to why she received it. She might be one of the few women who never get tired of roses, and all she really needs is a rose of an unusual color like lavender or something (or in her favorite color) to know that you know what she likes and made the effort to produce it.

Indeed, there will be no doubt in her mind why she received anything! If it’s the wrong thing, there will be no doubt that you’re in insensitive idiot, and if it’s the right thing, well, take your vitamin E and make sure your medical insurance is paid up in case she injures you when she pounces on you later, because giving the right gift is some pretty hot stuff!

Gift-giving is one of the many areas where men fly blind when trying to get along with women because we’re not trained to know how they think and what they like as we grow up. Our mothers train us to be “nice” and to defer all decisions to women to be “considerate” and to buy extravagant gifts for women to impress them, and bless their hearts (as we say in the South), they have no idea that they’re setting us up for disaster, but they are. They should be teaching us how to choose a good woman, how to communicate with women, and how to keep a woman interested and excited enough to enjoy our company for years and years. They don’t, but I will!

All you need is a copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and you can download it at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ with a few mouse-clicks. Do it now, because you never know when she might decide she’s had enough and you’ll be another one who’s been thinking everything is just fine until she hands you the divorce papers, and when you ask in that shocked voice, “What’s this about???” she says those immortal, bone-chilling words that sends shock and confusion into the very soul of every man who hears them: “See! You NEVER LISTEN TO ME!”

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

Female Insights on Fantasies, Romance Novels, and Feminists Affecting Your Relationship and Marriage

One of the brightest of my female readers weighs in with some valuable insights on rape fantasies, romance novels, and feminists that every man needs to know!

I continue to be impressed and appreciative of the intelligence of my readers. In case you missed them, a few days ago we covered women’s fantasies, especially the rape fantasy, and how men should understand and handle them, and there was a special edition yesterdaywith some enlightening historical commentary by one of you who seems to be well-versed in the literary and cultural aspects of the subject.

Today, I got this from Stella, a close friend and client who is one to whom everyone should listen when she speaks, because she’s sharp as a tack and is quite adept at cutting through the crap and isolating the facts and the truth they indicate.

Hi there!

I really enjoyed your special edition. As you know, I'm an avid romance reader and have been since 1980ish. I can emphatically tell you, without a doubt, that rape is the one thing the alpha male heroes of these novels DON'T do...ever. They are the archetype of the alpha male you write about in your columns. They know how to build attraction, they know how to capitalize on that attraction and they eventually get the girl. These heroes know how to take no for an answer and usually say no to themselves if the situation warrants. In my humble opinion, this is what makes these men gentlemen, no matter what their social standing in the novels.

At any rate, I believe the reason romance novels are a $2 billion industry is because they are great reads: easy, often humorous, and they have happy endings, unlike 90% of what passes for "good" fiction these days. I was once told by my literature teacher that "romance" stories are fairy tales and "literature" speaks to the human condition. I asked her what kind of sorry, bitter, miserable world she lived in. In my world, people aspire to be the best they can be, act with honor and integrity, and try to build loving relationships. That's what I learned from romance novels. If that means I'm living in a fairy tale, I invite the rest of the world to join me. It's a nice place to be!

Why do the feminists hate romance novels so much? That's easy. Because romance novels promote the idea that men and women complement each other and can live together in a mutually satisfactory relationship that works to the strengths of each person. I think they hate the fact that romance novels celebrate the fact that it's ok to want to have a special man in your life, that your life might be the richer for it. What these folks fail to accept is that while the heroines of these novels know they can live on their own and be fine, they make the conscious choice to include a man in their lives.

Every now and again, if you have a talented author, you can pick up a few interesting bedroom tricks to share with your special someone. But, between you, me and the fencepost, a great romance novel doesn't even need sex. It's all about attraction and anticipation, something a lot of women doesn’t get enough of, for whatever reason.

When I was 12 or 13 and my mom gave me my first romance novel to read (other than Gone with the Wind, of course), she told me that I'd never find a man as great as the hero, no man would ever treat me as great as the hero treated his woman, and sex will never be as great as it was in the book. You know me well, and by extension, Warren (and all his flaws ). We've been together 22.5 years now and I still say that my mom was wrong on all three counts!

Bottom line, would you rather date Rhett Butler or Hugh Grant? 'Nuff said.

Hope all is well with you,
Stella :)

Well Gents, I’d suggest you go back and read that letter two or three more times, and pay attention, especially to what Stella says about anticipation and attraction. I cannot overstress how important this is. Lack of compatibility will kill a marriage that never should have happened to start with, but lost attraction can kill even the best of marriages.

You really need to do everything you can to keep it going, and keep her on edge with exercises in anticipation. Those are the things that keep her imagination and sense of fun and adventure alive, which protect her from the boredom that causes women to either get crazy or have an affair, two outcomes you don’t want to deal with, and shouldn’t have to if you’re behaving like even half a man.

And get this, the more you shed all that feminist programming and let your real man core take over, the more you will achieve, the more fun you will have, the more your wife will enjoy and nurture you, and yes, you guessed it, the hotter things will get in the bedroom, and a lot of other places, too, if you have any imagination at all. ;-)

So how about it? Are you ready to “man up”? Do you have any clue as to how to go about it? Or how easy it is? Once you get that done, do you know how to listen to what a woman is saying and really know what she’s trying to tell you? Or even that it’s possible? Yeah, I know. Twenty years ago I would have thought such knowledge was like the Holy Grail, stuff of legend that men just weren’t supposed to find. Even Sigmund Freud, the renowned neuropsychologist who founded the method and practice of psychoanalysis, is famous for saying, “The Great Question, which I have not answered, is ‘What does a woman want?’”

Well, I do know. I asked a lot of women, got what they thought was the truth, compiled it all and turned their men loose with it to test it. We found that there were some things that women thought they wanted that they really didn’t like at all after they got them, so we refined it and tested some more. When we finally got down to something that worked for everyone, I published it. It’s all that, women have approved it and couples have proven it, and it can be yours in the next few minutes…

So now you have a choice. You can keep doing what you’re doing and watch everything continue to swirl the drain. You can keep ignoring what works while you search for something that validates your mistakes and doesn’t do a single thing to help your situation. Or…

You can jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and start enjoying your life and fixing your marriage right now. Let’s see, put up with more fighting, more insanity, and more celibacy, and possibly lose most or all of what you own, or spend a couple hours reading some solid research and how-to and have your life suddenly be the envy of everyone you know? Seems pretty clear, huh? So get moving, Mister, and move like you have a purpose! ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Careful What You Wish for in Your Relationship and Mariage, Part 3: Romance

I’ve run into another of those “Be careful what you wish for” scenarios, and it’s yet another perfect example of how women will say they want something because it makes for a bit of an emotional rush, but it never quite works out the same way in the real world, especially on the subject of ROMANCE.

I got an e-mail from an Australian friend, one who’s pretty bright when her brain is engaged, but who seems to have been living alone and bored just a little too long, because she’s pretty bad about getting caught up in “sweet” e-mails when she’s lonely. Check this out:

RE: Awwww

A girl asked a guy if he thought she was pretty.

He said, “No.”

She asked him if he would want to be with her forever...and he said, “No.”

She then asked him if she were to leave would he cry, and once again he said, “No.”

She had heard enough. As she walked away, tears streaming down her face the boy grabbed her arm and said...

“You're not pretty, you're beautiful.

“I don't want to be with you forever, I NEED to be with you forever.

“And I wouldn't cry if you walked away...I'd die...”

I sent this out to two groups of women for their response. The first group was a group of 16-25 year old single women who had responded to a survey I ran last year. Their archetypical responses were:

“Awww…that’s sweet.”

“I wish I had a guy like that.”

“That’s so romantic.”

The other group was ages 30-60 who are married or in a committed relationship of two years or longer:

“’Awwww’ my ass! I’d say ‘EWWWWW!!!'”

“Yuck! What a wuss!”

“Yeah, right. Like anybody would fall for that crap.”

“Can I just shoot him and get it over with?”

“Yeah, sure. I can just see Humphrey Bogart or Dirty Harry saying something like that.”

Are you getting the drift? When it comes to romance, young women and teenage girls are pretty silly, and don’t yet have a clue that there are things they respond to differently than how they imagine, while more mature women, while still prone to do that at times, can be expected to be more in touch with their feelings by virtue of having been burned by them in the past, so their reaction in this case is the one that tells you what you need to know.

There’s nothing romantic about acting like a needy wuss. Yet when we are in our teens and early twenties and are making our first efforts to learning about women, we’re inundated with all this silly crap we hear (or more likely, OVERHEAR, out of context) from girls, NOT women, mind you, and those wrong answers hang with us into adulthood until somebody pulls the wool from over our eyes and shows us the truth. One of the worst of these is the girlish tendency to confuse “sweet” with “romantic.”

So while you can’t necessarily be blamed for not having anything better to work with in the past, now that you know there is something better, you have a responsibility to yourself to seek it out, learn it and use it. So what is “romance”? And what is “romantic”?

Romantic, more than anything else, is that which is larger than life and sparks excitement and attraction, in a word, “heroic.” There’s nothing romantic about blowing a month’s salary to take a woman to Paris for lunch when you live in North America. That’s done for extravagance, and is wasteful. A young girl who has never had to work for what she has might mistakenly see that as romantic, but the average adult woman, while she might fantasize about something like that with a stranger, would see the actual act as wasteful and stupid if performed by the man she’s been with for awhile...

…and more to the point, a man who is so frivolous that he would blow money he didn’t have like that would not be seen by a woman in or considering a committed relationship as being able to make responsible decisions and be a good partner. He could be a plaything, but nothing more – another one of those things that might get someone’s attention in the dating world but has no place in a committed relationship, unless you’re so wealthy that going to Paris for lunch is something that you could afford to do for fun and would do by yourself. Otherwise it's just a desperate act of attention-getting and approval-seeking, a sign of a man who’s good for buying drinks, expensive dinners and vacations, and then leaving when she grows bored of it.

That’s not to say that a trip to Paris isn’t romantic. But it has to be a real trip. There has to be time to see the city, experience the city and build memories that she can relive, and time to gather mementos to put in her treasure box. There has to be time and opportunity for intimacy to take advantage of being in an exotic place and using it to build excitement, attraction, and all those memories as well. Just being there long enough to say you were there isn’t enough.

Think not? Think about it for a minute. You hopped a plane, went there, had lunch, and flew back. What memories will she have? Being rushed to café, eating, and being rushed back to the airport. And what happens when she tries to share it with her girlfriends? She will be barraged by “Did you see such-and-such? Did you go to such-and-such? Did you try such-and-such?” To which she can only answer, “No,” and then will hear, “Well, when WE went, we did all that, and it was great!” or “Then why did you go?” Instead of an adventure to remember, you gave her a disappointment and embarrassment in front of her friends. That’s not romance, is it?

To be romantic, she needs to remember more than the sights of the city; she needs to remember you and herself immersed in the emotion of being in the city.

And you need to know the difference! You need to know how to look at the situation through her eyes to know if it will be something wonderful that labels you a wonderful man who gets it or a desperate, approval-seeking jackass.

Do you?

Would you know how to use a trip, a dinner, a bouquet of flowers, or more appropriately, a live plant, or even a “sticky note” to create a romantic occasion for your partner? If you don’t, I’ll give you three guesses as to at least one of the reasons that she’s bored and unhappy and you’re reading this newsletter…

…and in truth, should be reading my book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and getting your knowledgebase in order. You need to purge all the lore, urban legends, bad programming and other utter crap you’ve heard about women that’s swimming around in your head and screwing up your relationship and marriage and get with the real program, the one that lets you enjoy being and feeling like a man and lets her feel like she’s truly living with the man of her dreams.

It’s your choice, and your responsibility, to yourself and to her, so choose well, and choose quickly. The clock is running…

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

Switching Gears: Coping with the Expected and Unexpected in Relationships and Marriage

What women want, they get more often than not; the only question is from whom or with whom will they get it…

I hope you're having a great day! The following reader comment blew me away when it first came in, and these many months later, it still does. Of all the letters I ever expected to get from readers, this one would have never been on the list. Meet Dawn:

Dear David,

I have been putting off writing you because I did not want to sound crazy. My boyfriend David and I bought your book so that we could see if we should really get married or not. He wanted to get married before now, but I kept putting him off because I felt there was something missing in our relationship. The thing is that I started finding his roommate attractive. I ended up spending the night with Eric (his roommate) while he was out of town. That night I found out that Eric had been reading your book the whole time and my David had not. I just wanted to say thanks, because Eric and I will be getting married in a few weeks and David is last week’s trash.

I hope your book helps everyone as much as it helped me find the man I always dreamed of calling my husband.

Sincerely,
Dawn T.

I didn’t originally write “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” to help anyone FIND a mate (although enough has been added to it that it will certainly do that quite well now), and to tell you the truth, I wrote it for GUYS (with a few BIG HINTS for women included). BUT, I’ve found through e-mails from readers that a lot of my sales have been to single women who are apparently smarter than us guys because they are reading material for guys to see what to prepare themselves for. I had expected sales to women to be for their men, not for themselves. Women are taking initiative and going for it! After all, a huge part of their life is managing relationships, and we could learn quite a bit from them about relationships if we'd take the time to do so -- I sure did!

However, Gentlemen, there are a couple of huge lessons here for all of us to learn, aside from the fact that what’s in this book works. Women pay attention to what’s going on around them, and they are extremely sensitive to not only behavior, but CHANGES in behavior. That’s why I recommend in the first part of the book that if a man evaluates his relationship and finds out that it is one that should be kept and improved that he have the woman in his life read it as well.

This is to help her understand that she and your marriage are to be the beneficiaries (along with yourself, of course!) of the changes she’s about to see, not a new girlfriend. A new girlfriend would often be a woman’s first thought when she sees positive change in a man, and unfortunately, most of the time she’d be right. Let’s face it Gentlemen, one of the things that get men caught having an affair is its effect as a confidence booster, which does change his behavior toward most, if not all, the people around him.

Another lesson is that women recognize when you’re committed by the effort you make, and if you’re caught slacking, you will be punished for it on some level, usually by having them withhold some part of themselves from you, whether it be time, consideration, support, favor, intimacy, sex, or whatever, and even by giving that part of themselves they withhold from you to another man. Being assertive and taking the lead in achievement, even the achievement of a better relationship, is sexy; being lazy or timid is anti-sexy. Take the hint, and get on the ball.

Make a hobby and a habit of taking responsibility for your life and doing constructive things to improve yourself and your environment, and encourage others to do the same thing, a strong sign of leadership that no woman can resist. There is no person or group that can save the world, but if we all start taking better care of ourselves and the part of the world we live and work in, there won’t be much room left for problems.

We all have a bit of a tendency to slow down and let things slide a little as we get older, and the more we let slide, the more the momentum builds, and the faster we and our situations decay, so fix everything before it becomes broken, and I’m talking about every aspect of your life – marriage, job, hobbies, physical and mental condition, EVERYTHING! There’s no need to be an OVER-achiever, but be a “doer” and take care of yourself and your situation.

Start by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com and downloading your copy of my book “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and get your love life (and sex life) in order, and then keep right on going, with the job, friends, physique, etc., using the confidence gained by a happy home life to build your momentum. Do it now, because life’s too short to do anything less than LIVE it.

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

The Biology of Happy Relationships and Marriages

If you make her happy, she can’t help herself but to make you happy, as this most wonderful joke demonstrates.

I very seldom use jokes as the focal point of instruction, but this one, while hilarious, also has a ring of truth that a man will ignore only at his own peril. Observe:

Jack wakes up with a huge hangover after attending his company's Christmas Party. Jack is not normally a drinker, but the drinks didn't taste like alcohol at all. He didn't even remember how he got home from the party. As bad as he was feeling, he wondered if he did something wrong.

Jack had to force himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table. And, next to them, a single red rose!

Jack sits up and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed. He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotlessly clean. So is the rest of the house. He takes the aspirins, cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror. Then he notices a note hanging on the corner of the mirror written in red with little hearts on it and a kiss mark from his wife in lipstick: "Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to get groceries to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you, darling! Love, Jillian"

He stumbles to the kitchen and sure enough, there is hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating. Jack asks, "Son, what happened last night?"

"Well, you came home after 3 A.M., drunk and out of your mind. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, and then you puked in the hallway, and got that black eye when you ran into the door."

Confused he asked his son, "So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean, I have a rose, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me??"

His son replies, "Oh THAT! Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed, "Leave me alone, lady, I'm married!"

Broken Coffee Table $139.99
Hot Breakfast $4.20
Two Aspirins $.38
Saying the right thing, at the right time. PRICELESS!

Stop and think for a minute about why this is funny. It’s because it is so universally true! It’s something that you don’t think about, but when called to your attention, you can see virtually every woman you’ve ever known having the same response! Why?

As humans, we are the only species of life on this planet that lives by the power of volitional choice. Our mind is our primary tool of survival. Every other species simply reacts to its environment with regard to any issue of survival. There is even room for debate on the question of whether if you put a piece of steak and a piece of cheese in front of a dog if he chooses one over the other because he has a personal preference or whether something the dog smells triggers a response that is based on a nutritional need within the dog’s body.

However, contrary to what many academians have been saying for decades, the scientists who are mapping brain activity are showing conclusively that we do still have some instinctive responses to stimuli. Some of us may be strong enough to consciously over-ride these responses, but few can, and in practice, few want to!

For instance, they’ve shown that when men are shown sexy pictures of women, activity in the area of the brain that controls sex drive, the fight-or-flight response, and several other things, called the “limbic system” or “lizard brain” since it’s the oldest part of the human brain, lights up with activity. In most men, there is a greater response to ample breasts, rounder hips, good skin, etc. Why?

This isn’t because men are pigs, it’s because these are characteristics consistent with a physical structure of a woman who could survive childbirth and bear strong children. Being in the limbic system, the response is entirely biological, not logical, just the same as if a hungry bear charged you, you would automatically run like hell or try to kill it before it killed you.

In women, when shown pictures of sexy, naked men, there is only a mild stimulation of these same areas. HOWEVER, when alpha male behavior is demonstrated, their limbic system lights up just like ours do over the sexy photos. This isn’t because women are weak and worthless; it’s because these are the traits exhibited by a man who could contribute good genes, creating a strong fetus, and be able to provide for and protect the family unit, formed thousands upon thousands of years ago through the process of natural selection – evolution was kind to those bloodlines who had good survival skills and who made the best contributions to the gene pool, while the rest became food for dinosaurs, bears, etc.

Just as a woman responds biologically to alpha male behavior with sexual attraction, she responds to the feeling of loyalty, commitment, and emotional protection with nurturing. Women are smart, too. While they like and need to hear that you love them and are committed to them, they are ultimately watching for proof of it in your actions, and testing you for it, too. You might fool them for a little while, but if your commitment isn’t genuine, they will find out, and pretty quickly, so don’t think that a “fake it until you make it” ploy is going to work.

To engage her natural nurturing behavior, lead and appreciate her! If she’s not doing sweet, nurturing things for you now, remember the things that you and she did in the past that brought you together. Get back to that fun, adventurous behavior that caught her attention at first. Play with her. Stand up TO her (when appropriate, of course!), so that she knows you can stand up FOR her. But don’t be a bully in an argument, especially if you know you’re in the wrong. That’s not standing up to her; it’s just being an ass, and she knows the difference even if you don’t! Nearly all communications with a woman are a negotiation, so negotiate.

Look at the things she does for you and appreciate them instead of just taking them for granted. Respond to them with loyalty, commitment, and love, in word and deed. Listen when she talks with you. Learn how to listen better by learning how she speaks, using questions to make statements and vice versa. Prove to her that she is the woman you love above all others by showing her real love, not in the form of senseless sacrifice, but consideration, which proves to her that you do indeed love her and think her worth the investment of your time and life’s energy. She will see this commitment and – unless she is the most unscrupulous of parasites or predators – respond by nurturing you in ways that will make you want to come home from work instead of stopping off for happy hour.

Biologically, a woman responds to being protected from boredom, and she responds to that protection with sexual attraction. Then, being protected from rejection and other forms of fragmentation of her nest and household, she responds with nurturing. If you can find a better trade than that anywhere on this planet, you’ll have to prove it, because I’ve never seen one.

All you need to know to evaluate your relationship, find out what kind of woman your partner is, and how to make both your lives as great as they can be is in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," derived from working with hundreds of couples and tested to make sure it will work for everyone who tries it. So far it has; I don’t get refund requests; what I do get are a great many success stories and other compliments that occasionally even show up in these newsletters and on my blog, with their permission, of course. You can join them by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now, and downloading your copy. Never put off until tomorrow the happiness and success you can enjoy today, because life is short, but failure feels like eternity!

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

Sex As a Weapon in Relationships and Marriage, Part 2: The Tail Swings Both Ways

A woman writes to remind us that women aren’t the only ones who use sex as a weapon, and that it’s just as catastrophic when a man makes this mistake.

Before we get into today’s lesson, I have a few announcements. First, I am attending a reunion of my military unit this weekend, and may not be able to post a newsletter edition or two. So don’t worry if you miss one; it’s me, not you.

Second, after a false start with inadequately-appointed software, the forum is coming along nicely. It is going to become the new center of activity for all of us, although I will continue to distribute my newsletter and echo it through blog posts. The envisioned purpose and operation of the forum is still evolving, so if you have suggestions, please write. There will be both free and premium features and areas, and there should be something for everyone.

Ladies, you will have free access to all features and areas, in exchange for your participation in helping the men to understand the female perspective, communications issues, etc. You will find it both educational and entertaining, and it will be worth your while to participate. And now for today’s lesson…

Gentlemen, I hope you realize how privileged you are to have access to the experience and input of the women on my mailing list. They frequently provide extremely valuable insight anonymously, to you as a stranger, that you can bet you would not hear from a woman you know. Take full advantage of this and use it to make your life and relationship better, because their knowledge and experience has been paid for with pain, embarrassment, frustration, etc., and you can bet that they don’t have an easy time reliving bad times to help you out.

I can certainly vouch for that in this case. This reader is a close friend of many years, single after two bad marriages to two bad men who on the outside would appear to be good men, or at least “the average Joe.” Meet my friend Elizabeth:

Dear David,

I read your newsletter today about women holding out in order to get something from their men. I wanted to tell you that the converse is equally true and just as revolting.

When I was married to a fairly wealthy doctor, I distinctly remember one Christmas party event (we had a buffet party for 45 persons each Christmas) where my husband gave me $500 to go to the mall and pick out a couple of new dresses for the party. He said that I had been working so hard preparing for the party (I did all the cooking) that I deserved something nice to wear to it.

I came home with two beautiful dresses and did wear one to the party that evening and received several nice comments on it, to which I told the story about my wonderful husband giving me money to buy the dress because of my hard work for the party, etc., etc. Everyone thought he was so great.
That night, after cleaning up the kitchen and house, I collapsed in bed, exhausted, and he wanted to start messing around. I told him that I was totally bushed and wanted to just get some sleep to which he replied, "didn't I get you two really nice dresses today?"

It has been twenty four years and I still remember how small and insignificant that question made me feel. I called him on it saying that I didn't realize that I had to repay him for my dresses with my body, to which he immediately backed down, but the comment stuck, and it was hurtful and demeaning.

Here I thought that I was making love when, in fact, I was repaying with sex any nice things my husband did for me. The marriage ended about two years after that incident and after many more similar situations, but please tell your readers that we don't want to pay for things that you give us with our bodies any more than you want us to withhold from you until we get what we want!

The tail swings both ways.

Sincerely,
Thanks, but no thanks

Think about that long and hard, guys. The way to make a woman love you and feel attraction for you is not to make her feel like a common prostitute who should trade her body for whatever it is that you have – or think you have – given her. It’s true that every exchange in a good relationship should be in trade, not in sacrifice, but trades should be “like kind swaps,” as the Internal Revenue Service likes to call it; love for love, nurturing for nurturing, trust for trust, respect for respect, good sex for good sex, etc., not lopsided arrangements that cheapen the traders as well as whatever is being traded.

Sex is the strangest weapon in existence. It’s devastating, yet no real victory can ever be won by using it; in any contest where it is deployed, everybody loses. Used properly, sex is not a weapon at all, but a celebration of life, living, love, and achievement. Used as a weapon, everybody loses.

Besides, if you’re doing what you should be doing and firing those automatic attraction triggers with leadership, authority, humor, mystery, adventure, etc., you don’t need any kind of “weapon” to have all the sex you want, and have your girlfriend or wife jumping on you to have it. And when every man is born to behave that way, why in the world would you use such a self-destructive tactic in the first place? All it takes is knowing a few things about women and yourself that you don’t know yet.

You may recall my favorite quote of Sigmund Freud, “The great question, which I have not been able to answer, is, ‘What does a woman want?’” It is a great question, maybe the greatest of all, and with the help of a few hundred women, I’ve answered it, and that answer can be yours in a few mouse clicks and keystrokes for little more than the asking.

So get ready to know what Freud never figured out and live the life you always thought being married should be about! Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started.

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

Sex As a Weapon in Relationships and Marriage

So you think you’ve never paid for sex just because you haven’t visited a prostitute? If you’ve ever let a woman become even a little bored with you, you certainly have. Indeed, sex has been the weapon of choice for many women since the dawn of humankind because they can wield it so effectively, IF we let them…

You might remember Hannah, whose “ladies’ book club” had thecontest to see who could entice their husbands to buy the most extravagant gifts for them just because they were bored, and I would strongly suggest that you review it, because it was a “must read” issue. Hannah, a real “whistle-blower,” wrote with another account of something that many women have been known to do that men never suspect, and this one is a real “zinger”!

David,

You might remember my group of friends that meet a couple of time a month for time away from the family and husbands, our book club, but there were time that we did invite the men to join us. At one of the dinners we had, one of the men stated that he had never nor would he ever pay for sex. Of course all the women at the table laughed and the men for the most part could not figure out why we though it was so funny. I think that they just thought we believed he was lying to us. The truth was we know all men pay for sex if they are in a relationship, or in his case married for 12 years to one of us. LOL!

His own wife, Carol, had just snookered him out of a pair of Chanel sunglasses that cost a couple hundred bucks. She liked to shop only in the best places. No Walmart for her, only specialty shops where they cater to you every need, in spite of the fact that she didn’t work and her husband was working two jobs most of the time to keep up.

She called her husband to tell him she was shopping and wanted those sunglasses and he told her that to spend that kind of money on sunglasses was crazy and this was one time he was going to say NO. Well you know how that went over and that night Carol did what most of the girls I ran with did when we really wanted something and were denied.

That evening after her shower she dressed herself up in her best and sexiest nightie and made sure he saw her every time she walked past him. That night she told him to go on up to bed that she was not really that tired and thought she would watch some TV and would be up later on. Later that night she crawled into bed next to him and made sure he knew she was there, but wouldn’t let him get close, teasing and tormenting him to death.

A couple of hours passed of her brushing against his leg in bed and she stated how hot the room was and takes off her clothes and climbs back into bed under the sheet once again making sure to wake him just enough to know what was going on. This time he made sure she knew he was there and as he started making advance toward her for some early morning naughtiness she did what some of us women do best. She reminded him of the sunglasses she had wanted and how much more she would be in the mood if only she could have those sunglasses so she could look good for him all the time.

As they lie together in what she described as “the after glow of getting her way,” she told him, “Now wouldn’t it have been much easier to let me have the glasses yesterday and you could have had me all you wanted last night.” As I listened to her tell her story and then show all of us her new shades, I could not help to remind all of my friends that this was the same man that only a few nights before had bragged to all of us he never paid for sex and never would.

I would like to state for the record I am no longer a part of that group and have since learned what it is like to take pride in earning what I get, and am so grateful I have a wonderful man now that took years out of his own life to teach me a very valuable lesson on such craziness. We have sex when we want it, which is often more than once each day, because we have both earned the right to have each other at anytime.

I wanted to share this with you because I thought you might get a kick out of it.

Take good care,
Hannah

When I read that, I was thinking, “not just ‘damn’ but ‘DAY-UM!” (That’s “damn!” with the diphthong of a strong southern U.S. accent, about two steps beyond “hot damn!” for those of you unfamiliar with the dialect!) There might be a lot of ticked-off men around when this hits the press!

But wait a minute. I don’t like to talk about “fault” because it’s usually pointless, but an issue of RESPONSIBILITY we can address is what really brought these two to where they are? He’s doing all the work, she’s spending all the money, and since she has no real interest in or appreciation of their sex life, feels free and apparently justified in using sex to get her way and put undo strain on the family finances. That can only be because he’s a pushover – WUSS! – and she’s bored with him and using retail therapy to get her kicks.

Yes, we can divine that from the situation, because even if she had childhood issues with material deprivation, if she were feeling the attraction that a woman should be feeling in a healthy relationship, she’d be finding other ways to arrange fulfillment of her material desires. So guys, brace yourself for a terrible truth:

If you have let your wife or girlfriend get bored, you are paying for sex. If you’re having any, that is. As in the case of so many toxic wives, you may be paying for the HOPE of sex that never happens. There’s no other conclusion that can logically be drawn.

Yes, that sucks. Out loud. Through a straw. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you were trying to get a woman’s phone number or a date with her and blew the attraction, you’d be done, but if you’ve been together for awhile or have married, there’s a level of emotional investment there, for both of you. And that buys you some time to reignite the attraction and some motivation on her part to let you, and even help you! (Unless, of course, another man has unleashed the awesome power of attraction in her, rendering you pretty much a non-contender – it’s a double-edged sword.)

But you’re not going to reignite her attraction for you by letting her lead you around by the nose and trade you sex for expensive sunglasses – or anything else, of course. You’re going to have to take a good look at your life, figure out where the attraction was lost, figure out how to get it back, and learn enough about women in general and your woman in particular that you don’t ever screw it up again. Can you do that right now?

Not likely. If you could you would have already. Most of us simply aren’t born with what we need to get the job done. But there are a few of us who have the kind of personality that makes women like to talk with us and teach us things about themselves, and unlike most of the others, I chose to write a book for you about what literally hundreds of women have taught me so you wouldn’t have to try to figure it all out on your own.

They taught me about how to really evaluate a relationship, how to talk with and listen to a woman (which is a lot more science and a lot less art than we have been led to believe), and how women think and act, according to both what is important to them and their involuntary reactions to biological “triggers,” such as leadership, authority, mystery, humor, adventure, etc. They also showed me how their emotional scales are entirely different from ours, and how they can get in such bad emotional shape that they can internally justify any thought or action, no matter how strange or destructive, to get themselves back into their comfort zone.

That’s a lot, and it’s a big book, too. But get this: It’s working for everyone who is using it. That’s because it’s not just a bunch of theory and opinion. It’s a collection of facts that have been put together and tested, refined, retested, and ultimately proven. And among the many testimonials for its effectiveness that readers have sent me are some that I can’t even reprint because they’re too steamy for some adults to want to read and for any to want their children to see. That’s success, because that kind of intimacy doesn't happen in mature relationships that aren't working!

So whether you just realized that you’ve been paying for sex, you’re tired of fighting all the time, you’re sick of fearing – or seeing – affairs, or things have just cooled off a bit and you’re ready to kick them back up and save yourself the pain and aggravation of problems, this book is for you. So go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started. The longer you put it off, the worse it’s going to be, so the sooner you start, the easier and better it will be.

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

How Much Is Too Much? Gifts, Rings, Appreciation, and Predators in Relationships and Marriage

Where do you cross the line from an appropriate gift to a red flag? Where does she cross the line from a woman of taste to a gold-digging abuser? It’s not hard to tell if you know what to look for…do YOU?

And welcome to all who just arrived by way of Shelley McMurtry’s newsletter. Shelley is about as sharp as they come, and especially good at being self-aware and reporting an honest and accurate look at female perspective. She’s a dating guru, but I encourage all who have not yet at least read a month of her newsletters to do so, because there’s always something to learn about women when a woman like her is speaking.

By the way, for all newbies, here are a couple of free reports for you that you will absolutely want to read. They are called “Break-Up Busting 101” and “What Women REALLY Want,” are about 50 pages or so each, and while they have a plug for my book at the end, are not just glorified sales letters, but real reports made up of specially-chosen newsletter lessons on these subjects, the two I get the most questions about.

I get a lot of questions about specific gifts, how to choose them, what is appropriate, etc., but most aren’t really questions that make for good copy for this newsletter (because the topic has already been covered pretty thoroughly in previous editions) and are therefore answered privately, but there is one issue that comes up frequently that is pretty sticky, that of engagement rings. And for those of you with marriage problems who are thinking about trying to buy a gift to get out of trouble or revive the fire in your marriage, there are even bigger lessons for you here, too, so stick with me.

One of my friends has been dating a woman for nearly two years, and finally decided it was time to pop the question, and she said, “No!” – immediately, emphatically, and with conviction. Why?

Because he had made two mistakes. The first was in buying and presenting the ring before she answered, a blatant wussy maneuver if ever there was one, and unfortunately a very common mistake. Guys, think for a minute: If you have to buy a woman’s acceptance of your marriage proposal with a piece of jewelry, what does that say about each of you?

First, it says that you don’t think you’re worth marrying and are trying to buy your way into her life. It also says that you think that she can be bought, which is one whale of an insult to any woman of character; a woman who could be swayed by the presentation of the ring at that moment isn’t worth having. However, in this case, making this mistake probably saved my buddy’s life, because she rejected him due to his second mistake, which in truth was no mistake at all…

She rejected him because the ring wasn’t expensive enough! She flatly told him that if he couldn’t present her with at least a two-carat stone he could forget it. He was heartbroken when he called, thinking he’d been a fool and had blown the best thing that could ever happen to him.

It was actually the greatest thing he could have done, because she proved in that one simple statement that she could be bought, wanted to be bought, and was high-priced and high-maintenance. I asked him to describe their history to me and it was just as you would expect.

They met in a bar, he bought all the drinks, the dinner later, paid for everything every time they went out, ended up buying her a car when hers needed a major repair and making all the deposits and down payments on a new apartment when she was evicted for not paying her rent, refused to talk to him days and even weeks at a time if he showed up without a satisfactory gift, etc. He was calling me to find out how big a ring to try to buy to salvage the situation. Can you guess what I told him?

I told him to not bother, because she was a gold-digging parasite who had bled him for two years already, and that if he didn’t believe me, she would gladly prove it to him. Just don’t call her, and when she calls, tell her that he didn’t want to talk to her because he had realized that she was just asking for too much. Her response would be one of the following:

1. Indignation, to try to press his buttons and guilt-trip him into reversing himself,

2. Abuse, to try to shift him into approval-seeking mode and get him to try to buy her approval,

3. Complete capitulation without discussion, as she realized that she pushed too hard and scrambled to try to regain control of her meal ticket.

He agreed after considerable discussion, and she didn’t make him wait long. She called two days later wanting to know why he hadn’t called. He responded as instructed, and she went berserk, first yelling at him about how he didn’t appreciate all she’d done for him in the last two years, which pretty much came down to being late every time he was to pick her up and giving him something other than his retirement account to stuff money into, as there had been no sex in months and it turned out he’d asked her to marry him in hopes of reigniting their sex life. (If I had known this was happening I could have helped long ago, but most guys don’t talk about these problems with other guys.)

He pointed out to her that the relationship had been terribly one-sided and that in fact he had done a whole lot more for her than she had for him, and she shifted gears and went into the pity ploy, talking about all her hard times and how if he really loved her like he said he did he would have tried to make it up to her with a bigger ring. (Guilt trip!) He responded that those problems had been the result of her own choices, many of those choices against his advice, and that he was tired of paying for her to have the luxury of making bad choices.

Right on cue, she burst into tears, started begging, promising that she’d change, there’d be sex every day, and it would be better than it ever was, and all that nonsense. Just too predictable for words.

Now understand, most bad women will not go into a melt-down like that. She was betting large holding a trash hand and he called her bluff. Most bad women would only go through one of those three little dances, not all three, but apparently she was an amateur. Some women actually hate men so badly that they want nothing but to control them and bleed them dry. Others are just losers who drift from bank account to bank account…er…I mean, man to man, draining them dry along the way.

Fortunately, these are a minority (and there is absolutely NO reason to settle for one of them when there are so many good women around), and as you can see, or are about to see, pretty easily spotted. Good women want a good man, and want to share love, life, victories, celebrations, tender moments, sex, and even bad moments, not as a parasite or predator, but as a real partner. Thankfully, they greatly outnumber the bad ones.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while or have your own copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you’ve seen me post quite a few red flags, especially in the book. Here’s a list of the biggies:

1. A woman who makes demands about gifts, especially if she isn’t contributing to the household income, and doubly especially if she insists on choosing her own gifts, especially her own engagement ring, or makes sure that you get a message through one of her friends about anything except the ring’s size (not the size of the diamond, but the diameter of the ring, i.e., size 7)

2. A woman who is frequently in trouble, and expecting you to bail her out

3. A substance abuser who defends their substance abuse in any way

4. A woman who seems to always be having problems but never doing anything about them

5. A woman who has all the trappings of wealth but no visible means of support, i.e., expensive clothes, car, etc., but expecting you to pay for everything (Women of means generally insist at least on going Dutch-treat and often prefer to pick up the check themselves.)

6. A woman who constantly acts helpless, especially if she is also overly-flirtatious with everyone at all times, obviously seeking attention and assistance.

7. A woman who left a well-paying career to have kids so that she could be a "stay-at-home-mom," but baby-sitters and daycare providers see much more of the kids than she does and she’s not gone back to work.

As I said, this list is not comprehensive, it’s just the biggies; there are a lot more in my book and in past issues of this newsletter, available in the archive (see the link below) or past posts on my blog. If you’re currently in a relationship with one of these women, face it, you’ve screwed the pooch, and you need to face reality: she’s not going to get any better, and you’re going to continue to foot the bill, financially, emotionally, etc., for her indiscretions.

Sad, but true. And it’s not too hard to tell, either. Aside from the above list, if you’ve tried giving gifts to get out of trouble and it’s taking larger and larger gifts to get you out of the doghouse, bad news, Brother. You’re performing according to program. You may think that she’s eating out of your hand for at least the few days following that gift, but the truth is that she’s had you eating out of hers all along. Your solution is the same (dumping her hard and fast). It will just cost you more to get out of a marriage than an engagement.

If you’re still having a hard time grasping the facts that such women exist and that you may be dating or married to one of them, don’t take my word for it. Go to Google or Bing! and search for “toxic wife” and you’ll get the picture -- and the proof -- fast.

There are a lot of good women in the world, luckily far more good ones than bad ones. Identifying them isn’t that hard when you know what to look for, and getting along with them is really pretty easy when you understand how to communicate with them and what they want, out of life and out of you. Luckily for you, there is a single source where you can learn everything you need to know to do exactly that, to have a great relationship with a great woman, even if you have to get a bad one out of the way first. Best of all, you can afford it!

It’s called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It costs less than dinner for two at a good restaurant (and tens of thousands less than a divorce or life with a gold-digger!), and is guaranteed to work. Download it now and start putting your life back on track, because life’s too short to live it doing anything less than enjoying it.

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

Sweeping Her Off Her Feet, One of the Greatest Gifts for the Woman in Your Relationship or Marriage

Do you know what it takes to really sweep a woman off her feet? Unlikely. Legend has it that it takes a mansion, cars, money, jet-setting, etc., but that is unmitigated “bovine feces” (B.S.!). Sweeping her off her feet requires nothing more than creating a special feeling – one that she will kill to keep once you create it for her – through entirely natural and fun means!

I keep getting mail from men and women that refer to “sweeping her off her feet.” It would be comical to go through what most of the men think that sweeping her off her feet entails, if it weren’t so pathetic. I’m not going to print letters from the men because I don’t want anybody being embarrassed by seeing their effort used as an example of what to avoid doing or thinking on this most sensitive of issues, but we are going to talk about it, in detail, from both sides of the issue.

In a nutshell, the guys keep asking the question, “How do I sweep her off her feet when [I’m not/I can’t/I don’t have/etc.]”

What they aren’t, but maybe could become to some degree, is dashingly sexy and handsome, rich beefcakes.

What they can’t do, at least today, is be dashing, charming, traveling with their women all day every day, shopping like there’s no tomorrow without a care for where the money comes from.

What they don’t have, at least not yet, is a few million bucks, a mansion, an island retreat, exotic car, private jet, country club membership, huge male organ (which, by the way guys, is grossly unpopular with many women because while it’s fun to look at, a 10-inch long “member“ being forced into a 4”-6” long vagina hurts like hell according to the women, at least those who have not yet had a hysterectomy to make room for it!), etc.

You know what? Not one bit of this matters!!! At least not to any woman worth having. Yes, many of these things CAN be used, because some women do respond to some degree to some of these things, but when women talk about being swept off their feet, these things aren’t what come up on their wish lists.

When women talk about being swept off their feet, they consistently mention self-confidence and sense of humor (especially a naughty – but not trashy and especially not demeaning or disrespectful -- sense of humor) more than anything else. They mention “having him know what I’m thinking,” but when questioned on this point, will eventually explain that they don’t really expect a man to be psychic, but they want a man who listens and picks up on all their signals (non-verbal stuff, like body language, as well as hints, etc.) to the extent that they can tune in to what the woman wants and even anticipate it.

They also mention a man who acts with and even defines and exercises authority by making decisions, being intelligent – even an expert on something – and leading conversations, not to mention knowing how to lead a negotiation with them (yes, most conversations with women involve some sort of negotiation!) without trying to dictatorially control (bully) the conversation and outcome.

And more than half of them, believe this or not, said that they liked being grabbed, pressed up against a wall, and aggressively kissed and ravished. But there was a deviation amongst those that responded this way that means you must be very careful. A few said this scared them, some said they liked this, but liked for it to go on for a minute or two and then be left hanging so they could anticipate the finish later in the evening, while others just wanted to go for broke.

I noticed in two polls that I did early in this project that women who said this kind of sudden action scared them had also been abused or forced into sex, and described themselves as chronically insecure. The most secure of the respondents said they liked to be “pounced upon” and then left hanging, to be ravished fully later in the day or evening. (You may recall that I’ve told you that women often enjoy the anticipation of an event more than the event itself, and this is one of the things they enjoy anticipating most!!!)

You might be shocked at just how much a woman will tell you if you just ask her in a way that says that you’re genuinely interested in hearing what she has to say. And feel free to discuss this with your wife, and I do mean DISCUSS; DO NOT ask her permission. Tell her that you’ve heard about this and are curious as to what she thinks about it.

She’ll tell you how SHE’D react, because that is the question behind the question and that’s how women speak. But beware: if she says she would like or love it, use it sparingly, else you’ll spoil it for her by burning her out on it so that it bores her instead of giving her an adrenaline rush. Indeed, wait several days before doing it the first time, as she will be expecting you to do it immediately, and will love the anticipation and suspense of waiting and the adrenaline rush when it finally comes after she’s stopped thinking it’s going to happen.

This sudden ravishing is alpha male behavior that flips attraction switches like mad, causing undamaged women to go nuts with excitement and desire – the FEELING of being swept off their feet, walking on clouds being overwhelmed with anticipation of the next meeting with a man, his next smile, next touch, next authoritative statement or naughty remark, etc. Mature women who are the picture of sense and sensibility can be observed giggling like school girls when under the influence of this feeling, because it is that rare and delightful for them. It makes them feel alive like nothing else can; not just alive, but excited about being alive. It’s the extreme opposite of that dreaded curse of curses to women everywhere, “boredom.”

No matter whose advice you read or follow, read a romance novel or two to see the examples of the scenarios women fantasize about and the details these fantasies are built upon – and be smart about it by picking them off the best-seller list or asking a couple of really “girly” girls for their favorites – and tune in to the descriptions of this feeling in the characters in the books, and also pay some attention to what goes on to create that.

If this sounds like a stupid idea, think about this: If you are not invoking attraction in a woman, you are at least boring her, if not annoying the living hell out of her. Being able to sweep a woman off her feet is the second “Holy Grail” of a lasting relationship, only infinitesimally less important than a high degree of compatibility. It’s magic if you can pull it off, and guaranteed hard times if you can’t, because you will be failing to fulfill one of her most basic needs.

When you’re boring a woman you are in an inferior and adversarial position, trying to gain or regain her favor. If you were commanding an army against another army, and could read their Standard Operating Procedures manual and high-level stratagem papers to find out how they could be expected to behave in a given situation and how they could be expected to respond to a given maneuver, wouldn’t you? Sure you would! So what’s the difference, other than the obvious difference that a woman can be turned from adversary to ally much easier than a soldier?

For that matter, why do you think there are so many women subscribed to this newsletter and buying my book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage”? They want to know what you are being told, to know what to expect of you, if you’re smart enough to follow good advice! They also want to understand their own attraction mechanisms better, and want to identify the core of what makes some men so exciting so they might get a good one, possibly instead of the incredibly attractive losers, users, and abusers they’ve been dating in the past. Take a cue from them and get with the program! They’re a lot better at playing the relationship game than most of us are, so learn from them, especially their diligence in learning about and actively managing their relationships.

What else can I say, Gentlemen? Women are buying and reading this book, writing daily saying that it’s “spot on” and they wish their men would read it, or that they have their men reading it and it’s working for them. I have their letters to prove it. You can see a few of their testimonials in the archive at the address below and at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, and download your own copy while you’re there. Several hundred of them have provided the information to create and maintain this book (can you imagine several hundred women agreeing on anything???), and their men put it to the test and confirmed it before the first copy of the book was ever sold, so if you want to sweep your partner off her feet, get your copy today, not later, because life is too short to waste it living less of a life than you could live. Never put off until tomorrow the improvements you can make today in any part of your life.

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

Whom Did You Marry, a Wife or a Mother? Roles and Perceptions in Relationships and Marriage

A reader asks how I can expect him to act naughty around women when they are so “pure and virtuous and never have naughty thoughts.” No, he’s not from another planet; he’s been programmed to think that way, as a great many men have. Let’s fix this…

I sometimes get letters from men who just can’t believe that getting naughty with a woman will be well-received. They have a misconception that women are somehow “too pure and virtuous” to do things like tell dirty jokes, pass gas, or most ridiculous of all, think about or enjoy sex! Meet Juan:

Hello David.

Thank you for your e-mails. I like to read them every day. I am having a hard time with your idea that I should be “naughty” with my wife. She is a good and pure woman, just like my mother. She never swears, takes good care of our children, and goes to mass every week. How could such a woman be naughty?

Juan.

Juan, Buddy, it’s time to wake up. Going to church, raising children, and keeping her language “G-rated” has nothing whatsoever to do with how she wants to act or be treated in the bedroom, nor did it have anything to do with your mother. You’ve made the same two mistakes that almost every man alive makes:

1. You put your mother on a pedestal, not allowing her to be human,

2. You put your wife on the same pedestal when you allowed your skewed perception of your mother to define your perception of all women, especially your wife.

Think with me here for a minute, all of you. There was very little that you could get away with as teenagers, right? I mean, even if you managed to sneak out of the house without getting caught sometimes, or went somewhere other than where you told your parents, or dated somebody for awhile that you weren’t supposed to, you got questioned about all those things at some point if not all the time. Why do you think that is?

For the same reason that you do it to your own kids! You’ve “been there and done that,” and it’s high time that you realize that your parents have been there and done that too! For many people it’s difficult to accept that your parents enjoy having sex, because you don’t want to envision them having sex, but you know that you enjoy it, so why would you think that they – BOTH OF THEM – didn’t? Or don’t???

Now, take that concept a step further and a bit sideways. Unless they have been traumatically abused or have a serious hormonal problem or physical damage to their genital area, women like sex as much as men, possibly more so, because they don’t need to “recharge” between orgasms, and many don't even need the orgasm to enjoy sex. Indeed, for most women, while they enjoy orgasms, it is the intimacy of sex they really need, so while the orgasm is the point of sex for the man, it is merely the end of sex for most women.

They also have the same naughty streak that we have, the one that makes us like dirty jokes, talk about sex with friends, fantasize about it, masturbate, etc. If you’re treating your wife as if sex is some kind of chore or duty for her instead of something she enjoys, it’s going to be just that, a chore, or even worse, an embarrassment that she feels because she doesn’t feel that you can accept her sexuality. That’s just wrong on so many levels…

You think not? Think again. In my own life, the dirtiest jokes I’ve ever heard have been told by women; not just trashy, rough women in some dive of a bar, but classy women that you’d think were Fortune 100 executives after spending a few minutes with them. When working as a business consultant, I often overheard conversations between women that rivaled anything you’d ever see in an adult sex film, not to mention tales of gas-passing that peeled the paint from the walls and other bodily functions, and about any other “coarse” behavior you would typically think to be distinctly male until you’d seen otherwise.

Women don’t just “let it all hang out” around men for reasons that make for too long a discussion to get into here (anticipated criticism, low self-esteem, survival instinct, to name a few); most women have to be lead into naughtiness by a man to feel comfortable being naughty around him, the way many men wait to hear a woman swearing before swearing in front of her or waits for her to make the first move in sex, which are obviously bad ideas since women prefer to being lead over leading in nearly all cases.

There are differences between men and women, such as our communications methods and sophistication, that are readily recognized and overcome, but sexuality and naughtiness are not among them. We all enjoy both; the exceptions are very, VERY rare, and usually the result of some form of trauma or abuse, or some kind of sick religious or sexually bigoted oppression. Accept it, celebrate it, and you’ll both be a whole lot happier. It’s always easier to be yourself than what you think someone else wants you to be.

There’s a lot that you may not know about your partner, or women in general for that matter, that they want you to know and have probably been trying to tell you, but you’ve been either unable or unwilling to hear them. In either case, the result of such an error are fear, frustration, boredom, growing apart, fighting, wanting affairs, having affairs, getting caught in affairs, nasty divorces resulting from getting caught in affairs, celibacy, etc. Why put yourself through any of that? If you’re going through it now, there is a great way to stop it, and if you haven’t arrived there yet but realize that there is a reasonable chance that it could happen somewhere down the road, you’re far better off learning how to prevent it now than having to fix it later, right?

So what do you want to do? Are you one who prays, hopes and waits? Or one who takes action and makes things happen? If you’re one who takes action, here’s the action to take: learn how to assess yourself, your partner, and you relationship to know what needs to be done (even if exiting the relationship is the only thing you can do), how to communicate across the gender gap, and how to do that incredibly fun and sexy alpha male stuff that makes women, especially your partner, want to eat you alive. All you have to do is learn and then do what comes natural as a result of knowing; no acting, no stressing, no worrying about getting caught trying to pull something.

Life’s too short to spend it feeling and doing all those nasty things listed above that happen when a relationship starts cooling off, so don’t go through that. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now and start getting your relationship back on track – back in honeymoon mode – right now!

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

And Why Does She Erupt? How to Stop Drama from Killing Your Relationship and Marriage

Why do otherwise stable and level-headed women sometimes pitch a fit for no apparent reason? And what’s the best way to handle it?

We talked yesterday about how to tell when a woman is getting ready to erupt for no apparent reason, and there was a cursory explanation of how to handle it, but I really wanted to give you more on understanding the cause and handling the situation. To do so, I’ll provide something from my own experience that details the build-up, explosion, and diffusing of the situation to help you relate this lesson to events in your own past so that you can be better prepared next time it comes up, and IT WILL come up. It’s a topic that I frequently need to address, and the following reader question makes for an excellent lead-in for the discussion. Meet Joel:

Hi David,

I bought your book and I'm progressing through the relationship evaluation and it looks like we're good, but I've got to ask you about something that may already be in the book because it's driving me nuts. Donna, my wife, is usually pretty stable and understanding, and seldom raises her voice. In fact, sometimes we don't talk much at all. Occasionally she'll get really antsy and next thing I know she's exploding on me for no apparent reason, literally! Whatever she picks to explode about is usually trivial at best, and really ridiculous most of the time. I've watched the calendar, if you know what I mean, and it's not "cyclic." The only thing I've noticed is that it always seems to happen when I'm traveling or busy a lot. She'll explode, I'll explode back, and then she'll go away and come back in a few minutes cheerful and acting like nothing has happened. Can you shed any light on this?

Joel

Well, Joel, congratulations on taking the first step to making some serious improvements in your life, and thanks for writing. As for your question, yes, it is covered in detail in my book, but I'm going to give you the short version now to help keep you out of trouble until you read that part, and for the benefit of your fellow readers, because every man who keeps the company of a woman goes through this phenomenon at some point in his life, if not with every woman he spends any time around, and it may not even be with a wife or girlfriend. It could be with a "platonic" female friend, or even a coworker, but it will be with someone with whom you have regular interaction.

What's happening is she's feeling ignored (or possibly testing to see if you'll wuss out when she acts like a brat, but they usually use other tests for that), and missing the feeling of having you define or exercise authority for her, which gives her a little rush of adrenaline and attraction and gets the planets back in alignment. Actually, this is a good sign, because if she had already lost all attraction for you, she wouldn't be doing this at all, so congratulations on taking action before your relationship deteriorated to critical status as well!

Here's the deal. If you don't pay enough attention to her in ways that let her see you being the alpha male, especially in projecting authority and leading, whether it’s in critical decision-making or just having fun, she'll find something trivial and pitch a fit over it, just to get you to call her on it and tell her to straighten up. Mentally and emotionally healthy women will respect you when you establish a “no brat zone.”

This doesn't mean that you turn her across your knee and spank her, unless you can do it without hurting her and in such a way that it's entirely plain that you're playing with her and you're both laughing all the way through it. Remember, women love to have gutsy, strong men show their sense of humor in naughty ways, but they hate being painfully man-handled, bullied, controlled and abused, again if they are mentally and emotionally healthy. A show of strength when everybody is smiling and having fun is one thing, a show of control or cruelty is something else entirely, and something you never want the women in your life to see if you want them to stay around.

What it does mean is that you must take one of several approaches to call her on it, and it may entail raising your voice a little if that's all she'll respond to, but it mostly requires a show of strength, not of volume; a show of leadership, not abuse.

My wife did this to me once. I'd been neglecting her a bit as I worked overtime on my next book. Read the following paragraphs carefully and make sure you pick up on the details - no yelling, the only physical force was non-violent and smiling naughtily, etc., the very things she was looking for.

She wanted me to verify the quality of a piece of office furniture she wanted to buy and to pick up a pair of eyeglasses before 5:00PM, and it was 3:30PM. We live ten minutes from the eyeglass store, and had 90 minutes to get there. I said that I wanted to stop and pick up something on the way home and it would work best if we stopped to look at her office furniture first. Boom! That's all it took to open the door - I had set myself up.

I could see the change the instant she realized the opportunity she had. In the space of less than a second, she went from excited about getting a piece of office furniture and new eyeglasses to stormy. Then she said, "No, I don't want to go check on the office furniture, I want to go get my eyeglasses before they close. We've got to go there first." I thought, "Oh, hell, here we go!" and said, "We have 90 minutes to make the ten minute trip to get your glasses. We can afford the extra five minutes to stop on the way to check out the office piece."

To this, she went totally ballistic. "You know what? I don't even want you to go. I'm going by myself. I've got to get my glasses and I don't have time to go running around all over the place." Do you see how the level of absurdity is rapidly escalating, as well as the sudden reversal of both her desire to see the furniture and desire to be driven? (She doesn't see well enough to drive safely without glasses.)

Then I said, "You can't see well enough to drive without the glasses we're going to pick up, we have 90 minutes to get there, it's a ten minute trip, and we can certainly afford the five extra minutes to check out the furniture. Explain to me why you have a problem with this."

Her response was, "No, I'm not explaining anything. You always want to change my plans, so I'm going by myself." (Big hint: when you "always" do something that you've never done, or "never" do something that you've frequently done, it's said to make you call her on it and you're in this same situation.) At this point she has crawled across the seat of the car and is sticking her keys in the ignition, literally begging for an authoritative intervention.

I reached in, grabbed the keys, and snickered a bit as I said, "Excuse me, but you're not going anywhere unless somebody else drives because you're blind without your glasses. Now, it was your plan to stop and look at the furniture, and your plan to go to the eyeglass store. I suggested stopping one place to pick up one thing on the way home, and that hardly constitutes a change in your plans. You're pushing a bad position in an illogical argument, and until you tell me what's really going on here, I'm not driving your blind ass anywhere."

She went for her spare keys in her purse cursing and I climbed over top of her and grabbed them, and then playfully held her pinned to the seat with my body while she struggled and I said, "Say Uncle!" with a big grin on my face and that was all she could take. She busted out laughing and by the time she was done, she was about too weak to move.

She finally scooted over, we went to check out the office furniture, get the glasses, stopped and ran my errand, and just to put the icing on the authority cake, I announced a change in plans for supper (I'm the household chef) and stopped at a grocery store and lingered just a little longer than necessary in the produce aisle, cracking jokes the entire time about how good the cool air felt and "nature's thermometers" (guys if you don’t get this, ask a woman – I’d never get a more verbose description past the spam filters), exiting as soon as the smile began to fade the slightest bit, indicating that she was on the verge of boredom and starting to feel the cold, and therefore about to stop having fun. (NEVER let the fun come to a complete stop before changing course. Remember the old show biz cliché: “Always leave them wanting more!”)

So do you see what really happened? She was trying to goad me into taking an authoritative action, and may not have even been aware of it because it's such automatic behavior. If you respond to this the first time, you can get away with doing it with a humorous flavor as I did above and not having it get too ugly. However, if you just ignore her, or act bewildered and walk out of the room without doing anything, forcing her to find another excuse and launch a bigger attack, you may push it to the point where you have to yell a bit, physically restrain her from running out the door by standing between her and the door, etc.

Please note that one small change in the scenario, especially the failure to grin naughtily as I said, "Say Uncle," could have changed the event from one of fun to one of control and abuse; she would have been scared stiff instead of amused. Always mind your bearing when in this situation and make sure that it's fun for everyone or it WILL explode in your face. You've been warned...

Understand fully that unless she has been severely physically abused she will not be pushing you to strike her in any way (unless the two of you have a history of playfully spanking and slapping each other on the butt or something), and if she has ever in the past kept screaming and maybe even struck you until you slapped or shoved her, it's a strong sign that she has been beaten, still has issues, and really needs professional help to face those issues and begin healing. NEVER, EVER, for any reason physically strike her with the intent of hurting her, even if she begs you to do it or tries to force you. Use no more physical force than it takes to restrain her from hurting either of you, and if she's crying and hysterical, call a counselor and try to get her some help, because she needs it, badly.

There you have it. Again, it took more to explain that than I had hoped, but I wanted you to see a real-world example so you would have something more than just a rule to try to apply - a real episode with distinct characteristics that you could compare with what you have seen in your own life.

Women are constantly communicating things to us, but as you will learn in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," much of that communication goes right over our heads, while they are thinking it just goes in one ear and out the other because we don't care to listen, when in fact we're simply unable to hear it because we don’t know what we’re hearing or what to listen for.

The problem isn't that we ignore it; it's that we don't have the natural tendency to pick up all the non-verbal and verbally indirect ways they use to try to tell us things. They really don't know that we are that under-evolved with respect to communications infrastructure and skill any more than we are born knowing that they are that highly-evolved and sophisticated when it comes to communications without someone pointing it out. It's just not obvious when you don't have a frame of reference. (I'm explaining it to them in their own book, so hopefully, when everybody knows how everybody else does things, life will go a bit smoother for everybody.)

If you want to learn what you need to know to deal with this problem and others, and get your relationship and marriage (not to mention your “bedroom life”) working at full pleasure and intimacy capacity, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" now, before you do another thing. Recognize that life is too short to spend it unhappy and work daily on making it better until it gets there.

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 handling 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, 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 not be able 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 you notice 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 the joy of your day or like walking through a mine field. You need to know how to listen to her and how to talk with 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 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. There are pills that can help with physical deficiencies, but not with lack of engagement, lack of attraction, lack of desire, etc.

And if you doubt it, I have readers and clients in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that have been together 20-50+ years and are still “whooping it up” 3-4 times per week or more, while the national average for couples who have been together for two years or more is six times per year. Yep, that’s once every two months. Talk about decay…it’s a wonder their “organs” don’t rot due to lack of contact.

You can let things continue to decay and try to make a heroic save at the last minute, which can indeed be done under the right circumstances and with the right help, 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. 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 and maintaining a happy status quo, 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

Reader Responses to Asking for Intimacy in Relationships and Marriage

Some female readers respond to yesterday’s lesson on not asking for sex. Pay attention, Gentlemen, because this is the real deal, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak…

I love the women who subscribe to this newsletter. They’re smart, funny, and I can always count on them to keep my horizons broadening and help set the things I teach in stone by demonstrating to you gentlemen that I’m giving you the facts, not just some hyped-up theory or opinion. I received a bunch of letters from the women on yesterday’s “Don’t Ask for Nookie” lesson, all of which contained a resounding “Amen!” in one form or another, and I’m going to share a few of them with you right now.

First, meet Teresa:

Hi David,

All I can say about being asked for sex is “EWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!” It creeps me out.

Teresa

For those who don’t speak girly-ese, raise “yuck!” “sick!” or “gross!” to about the 23rd power, and you’ll be getting close to the meaning of “creeps me out.”

Now meet Rhonda,

Hi David,

Men just don’t understand how repulsive it is to be asked for permission to do something that they should be doing. If you want to kiss a woman, you should already know whether you can by whether she lets you get close enough to kiss her. And for God’s sake, don’t make an announcement like, “I’m going to kiss you now,” because that comes across as asking. For me, I like the way Will Smith said to do it in that movie Hitch. Come 90% of the way and make me come the other 10% to kiss you. If I don’t come the other 10%, either I’m not interested or you’re going too fast.

Love your stuff. Get these guys into shape for me, will ya? I want a real guy so bad I could just die, and there’s none to be found around here, so hurry!

Rhonda

Hitch was a pretty good movie if you ignore the part where Will Smith wussed out at the end. Rhonda has a great point: if you’re moving into a woman’s space bubble too quickly she’ll back off immediately, and if you’re being so aggressive as to creep her out she’ll break off contact, so talking about kissing or sex or anything else is pretty silly. And besides, if you are generating attraction as you should be, she’s often going to be the one invading YOUR space bubble to get a kiss. Just ask Barb, who includes a LOT of great detail:

David,

I completely agree with your response to "asking" for sex. I can't think of a bigger turn-off than a man asking me if he can hold my hand or kiss me or asking me if we can have sex now. It's like a child asking permission to do something. It's a sign of weakness and insecurity to have to beg for sex.

It's a lose/lose situation. If she says yes, she's doing you some huge favor/chore. If she says no, you're going to feel rejected. Either way, you're setting yourself up for disaster because you're handing her your power on a silver platter.

My suggestion to Marcus is that he needs to do some serious inner work on his attitude and beliefs. Then at some point, take a leap of faith, believe in yourself and your power and trust that this stuff really works. Real men don't have to "ask", they just "do it". I think you'll be shocked and very pleasantly surprised to find that a woman just can't stop herself from responding positively to strength, leadership and personal authority in a man. I am a strong woman, but I want a man who is stronger than I am. I want to be able to surrender to his will. That's what gives me butterflies in my stomach and makes me weak in the knees.

A man may be aroused instantly, but that doesn't mean a woman is. We take longer since we don't have an on/off switch. For us, sex starts in the head, when
we begin thinking about the feelings. The anticipation. The suspense. The stimulation of not just my body, but ALSO my mind.

David's book has an entire section called "Great in Bed" to help build confidence in your lovemaking skills. And it is a skill we have to learn since we're not born knowing how.

I wish I'd had this book when I was still in my 25 year marriage, we could have either salvaged our marriage or I'd have known to move on much sooner.

Barb

I couldn’t have said it better myself! And note that Barb confirms that achieving attraction and arousal is not a near-instantaneous thing like it often is for men. We are largely visually stimulated, where a woman’s mind must be engaged to some degree with mystery, adventure, fun, etc. The alpha male attitude gets you noticed and ultimately cranks up the heat, but that “fun” element common to all men with self-confidence has to bridge the gap to get you there.

Notice that Barb says that she “wants to be able to surrender to his will. That takes trust, and if you don’t trust yourself enough to be confident, how the hell is she supposed to trust you at all??? I keep telling you gentlemen this isn’t rocket science…and there’s a pretty obvious reason for that…

Also note that she points out that “making whoopee” (the things I have to do to hide from the spam filters! LOL!) is a skill that we are not born with. We are born with an instinctive capacity for the raw act of procreation, but not for the pleasure that surrounds it if it’s done right. That requires knowing one of those things that Sigmund Freud was talking about when he said he didn’t know what women want. (And yes, I DO, because women tell me these things!)

So that’s it, the women have spoken, and have confirmed for you that I gave you the facts. And I have a lot more of them for you too, including the whole scoop on what women want, so if you want to get your marriage and relationship back in gear and get one up on Sigmund Freud in the process, come see me at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ right now.

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

Trick Question: How Do You Ask for Intimacy in Your Relationship and Marriage?

A reader asks about the proper way to ask for physical intimacy. The short answer is, you don’t!

I hope this day is going as well for you as it is for me. As I write this, it’s a typical Saturday at my house. The air is thick with the smell of testosterone as project after project, the kind that require a quick mind, strong back, and power tools, has been completed and celebrated with a satisfied grunt and a wipe of the brow before changing tools to start the next project.

Being a guy is easy for me, because I’ve learned that it’s something to aspire to, not something to apologize for, just like being human. There is very little that annoys me any more than to hear someone try to cover a mistake by saying, “But I’m ONLY human.”

We are the most highly-evolved species on the planet, the only one capable of sophisticated engineering, fabrication, and decision-making, not to mention art, cooking, music and dance, etc. We have the power of volitional choice, and hence can develop and raise our standard of living well beyond what is required for mere survival, unlike any other species on Earth.

In spite of this status, some of us just don’t get it. We shy away from doing what comes natural, as if there’s something wrong with being human, or with being a man or a woman. Meet Marcus:

Hi David,

I’ve been following your newsletters for several months now, and haven’t yet seen you speak of the proper way to ask a woman for intimacy (sex). Is this something that you cover in your book and just don’t want to discuss in your newsletter or what?

Regards,
Marcus

Marcus, Buddy, if the truth were a snake it would have bitten you. You’ve not seen me speak of it because YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO IT! If you were to ask any woman – WOMAN, mind you, not some high school girl who still has a head full of poetic mush from reading too many fairy tales – how she liked to be asked for sex, she’d most likely laugh at you and walk off without an answer. The question is truly that pathetic to women, as it marks you as an “un-man,” a loser.

You should have noticed that what I DO talk about, frequently, is how to flip a woman’s attraction switches on by acting like a man, being a leader, the alpha male who, instead of being wussy and boring and hiding from the world in his easy chair channel surfing with a beer all evening and then asking for sex at bed time, projects an image of confidence because he’s good at the things he does and enjoys being a man leading an active life, who has a fun, playful, flirtatious sense of humor, and can put a smile on a woman’s face by jumping in and out of “leadership” mode to crack a naughty grin and playfully tease and create enjoyable sexual tension for her.

This is what women want (Pay attention here, Sigmund Freud -- he's famous for saying, "The Great Question, which I have not answered, is ‘What does a woman want?'"): They want to be excited. They want to be surprised from time to time. They want to feel safe in investing their emotions. They want to have fun. They want to dance that “two steps forward, one step back” dance with you as the naughty fun and flirting ramps up tension, eases a bit momentarily, and then shoots to new highs, until such a high is reached that they pounce on you, wanting to be “taken.” THAT’S why you’ve never heard me describing the proper way to ASK for sex. It doesn’t exist.

And before somebody jumps to a really stupid conclusion and sends me a nasty-gram saying I’m promoting rape, no, I absolutely am not. “No” means “no” and your desire or need is not a rightful demand on another’s life or person. What I’m telling you is that if you do what you should do in flipping the biological switches to create attraction and excitement, you’ll never hear “no” because she will be coming after YOU, or waiting with bated breath and quickened pulse to be taken by you and making it plain that she wants you. “No” is only an issue when you’re either not creating attraction for her or being insensitive and pushing her for sex when she has other problems.

Whether or not she wants to have sex with you is her right to choose, but if you do what you should be doing as a man, which is creating attraction for her by simply being a man and knowing how to communicate with her, she will be consistently choosing to unless she’s in pretty bad shape, because she’ll be biologically driven to it and you will in fact be holding her off a bit to heighten the tension and excitement!

Attraction is biological, not logical, and there is no request or argument that you can make that will excite her enough to do anything more than tolerate you. Flip those switches off, and you will hear “No” every time. Flip them on, and you’ll not only hear “yes;” you’ll see it and feel it as she pounces on you.

And how do you go about learning and evolving into a man who does this naturally, without the stress of trying to “fake it until you make it?” Come to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and find out, like many before you have!

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

Holiday Parties: How They Can Make or Break a Relationship or Marriage

Have you ever thought about what might be appropriate or desirable post-party behavior when you’re in a marriage or committed relationship? Gentlemen, lend me your ears, because there is indeed more to it than you might expect…

I wish I could gather all my “students” in one room for a day for a caucus. The ideas and observations that some of them e-mail me explaining what they have learned and especially what they have figured out on their own after reading my book are stunningly brilliant. Get this:

Hi David,

Here's a newsletter idea for you: It occurred to me recently how different men and women communicate when it comes to classifying their experiences. A man and woman can spend the day, the weekend, or a lifetime together, and at the "end" (of whatever), the man will know that he had fun, think it's obvious [because it IS], but a woman will ABSOLUTELY need to review the experience and HEAR him say: "I really enjoyed myself with you today". KEY communication issue, particularly with those in a troubled or "young" relationship, but still important at any stage. It might be partly because men are less talkative about their emotions, but there's something more basic to it than that. So there's your newsletter:

"Guys: on the way home from the Christmas party, tell her how much fun you had with her, how nice she looked, and then listen while she relives the best parts. Then go home and have sex, because you've done the prework. Oh, and don't forget to flirt with her while you're there."

There might be a whole "Christmas Party Newsletter"
needed, since I'll bet about half of them (family or otherwise) end up in fights. Maybe you could make it a New Year’s Eve Party newsletter.

Johnson

This is the kind of thing that happens when a man tunes in after reading "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." He no longer has to sit around wondering what the right thing to do or say is because it all just becomes naturally obvious. I’m proud of every one of them, too.

So let’s look at Johnson’s observation. He’s spot on. It’s not good enough for a woman to see you enjoying anything with her; her social nature demands that it be verbalized, just as she still needs to hear that you love her and are committed to her to believe it, no matter what she sees. And yes, that’s why all those relationships from your youth that you thought were going great for two or three months suddenly ended without you having a clue as to why. You didn’t verbalize the love and commitment you felt and she didn’t believe it was there.

When it comes to parties, especially the kind where she puts on the little black dress, she takes extra pains to look good. Granted, part of that is because she wants to compete with all the other women there, but she still wants to know that you noticed and that you appreciate the effort, because part of what she is competing for is your attention. She also wants to feel like you were glad to be there – WITH HER. That’s the important part.

Yes, really. She wants to share your fun by hearing the accounts of the fun you had with other people, but the icing on the cake for her will be the feeling that going with her was better than just going. A girl likes to hear that if you hadn’t taken her to the party you’d have damned sure picked her up if you’d found her there, if you know what I mean.

And she wants to share her good time, her conversations, etc., to relive them and feel the rush again. Believe it or not, this is a privilege of sorts; remember that women snub and shut out people they don’t like. Most of the time their accounts will be fun to listen to, but if they stray into uncomfortable territory like telling you about so-and-so’s menstrual problems or some gossip that you really don’t want any part of, don’t be afraid to encourage her to save that part for her girlfriends because you’re not stepping out of the husband role to indulge in it. Just make sure you say it with a smile and try to be fun about it; that’s not a maneuver that can be aided with whining or irritation. For example:

“Hey! Hey! Hey! The gossip window is closed! (Laughing) Save that for when you’re talking to Charlotte tomorrow and tell me about So-And-So-I-Saw-You-Talking-To-By-The-Fireplace.”

A diversion, a laugh, and leadership into some other topic, got it? Fun, not cranky or whiney. And that’s not hard if you allow yourself to be amused by her excitement over some juicy piece of gossip or the drama of something that you couldn’t possibly be interested in because it’s just too girly for words.

Now tell me something. Why am I telling you all of this? Why aren’t you part of this army of men that I’m building who “get it”? Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychiatrist/psychologist, is famous for saying (among other things) “The great question, which I have not been able to answer, is ‘What does a woman want?’” I know, my students know, but Sigmund Freud didn’t. Fancy that!

So how about it? Why don’t you cast in with us? It takes a very few dollars and a very few hours; I’ve had meals that lasted longer and cost far more than what it takes you to read this book. The bragging rights alone are worth more than that, for crying out loud! You’ll be able to prove that you know what women REALLY want, how to communicate with them instead of getting the eye-rolling and “whatever!” There’s also a return to honeymoon activity, in the bedroom and out, and you get to say you know something that Sigmund Freud couldn’t figure out in a lifetime! Can you beat that deal with a stick? LOL!

Seriously, you really should join us. Just make it a holiday gift to yourself that your wife will benefit from as well. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now, and before New Year’s you’ll be turning things around and kicking them up to notches unknown to humankind.

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

Hobbies That Work FOR Your Relationship or Marriage

It’s all too common for men and women to take up hobbies to have time away from their spouse. That’s understandable if you don’t know how to improve things, but not excusable. Besides, you should see what can happen when you invite your spouse to enjoy your hobby with you!

Any of you who have been with me for awhile know that woodworking is one of my hobbies, and I was somewhat amused when I got the following letter:

Mr. Cunningham,

My wife and I have been married for 32 years, and we are okay, I guess, as long as we do not spend too much time together. But I have a problem and I hope you can help me with it. It is with my woodworking hobby and my wife.

I have been building furniture and cabinets all my life, literally since childhood. I love wood. The smell of it when it is being cut or shaped. The way it changes as I shape it. The way the grain can be made to look like a hundred different things depending on what I put on it. The sheer fact that I can take a piece of a tree and turn it into something useful and beautiful.

And my wife apparently resents the hell out of it.

I love going to my shop and making things, as you probably guess from my description of how I love wood, and every time I go out there it puts me in a good mood, which my wife manages to spoil very quickly as soon as I come back into the house, if she can wait that long. Half the time she finds some excuse to come out and interrupt me. And it is always when I am not in a good position to stop.

Stupid stuff, you know? Like killing a spider in the hallway, or to taste something she is cooking, or hold up something she is puttering with while she does something to it. Or she will want me to come in the house to talk about the movies playing at the cinema or something like that. I never interrupt her when she is doing any of her hobby things, and the hypocrisy of this double standard is driving me nuts. Can you tell me how I might get her to leave me alone and let me enjoy my woodworking without invoking any more punishment?

Thank you,
James

My reply:

Hello, James,

No, I can’t tell you how to get her to leave you alone. But I can tell you how to get her to let you enjoy your hobby: Invite her to join you in it!

No joke, that’s what her interruptions are most likely expressing. She wants to do something with you. She wants your company.

Women hate to feel like they’re being left out of anything, because they have such a huge problem managing boredom, and if you’re going out to a space that seems “off limits” to her, and you come in the house in a better mood, that smells to her like she’s missing out on something fun, in addition to missing out on YOU.

Yeah, I know. You can’t see your wife in your woodshop. But hang with me here for a minute or two and you will.

Women absolutely love to see a man doing just about anything with competence. It’s a huge turn-on. And that especially includes making things from wood. Women “nest,” remember? Your hobby could actually BOOST your bedroom life. And when was the last time that you made something for your wife to put in the house?

You may recall from one of my newsletters about choosing the perfect gift for a woman that one of the most important things about the gift be that it is something special, just for her; mass-produced gifts only point out that you can spend money, not that you have paid attention to her. Making something for her in your shop could end up being a more-prized possession than even her wedding ring. And that’s not even the best part!

We men love to make things out of wood, but we hate finishing. There’s a really good reason for that. Building things satisfies a primal drive we have to create and provide for our family. But finishing (sanding, applying stain or protective finishes, etc., for you non-woodworkers), at least for most of us, is a lot of tedious, repetitive work that has extreme potential to take that thing we just built and make it both aggravating and ugly (if something goes wrong during finishing, again for you non-woodworkers). Now, brace yourself…

Finishing is a “nesting” type activity! Many women actually love doing it. To them, it’s like painting a room in the house, or any other kind of decoration, something that takes the plain and utilitarian and makes it both beautiful and personal. It’s intimate to them. And most of them are, quite frankly, a lot better at it than we are. For most of them, their brains are wired more to the creative side than ours are, so they are more likely to have artistic talent that we don’t have, and that may well be undiscovered and therefore untapped!

So instead of trying to keep your wife out of your shop, invite her to join you. Don’t expect her to want to be ripping sheets of plywood for cabinets or running rough wood over your jointer, at least not until she indicates that she’d like to learn how, but she may well be very good at and enjoy helping you keep things organized, stacking pieces and marking them off your cut lists as you mill them, sanding and checking for defects while you’re milling the next piece, and ultimately doing most if not all of the finish work that so many of us really don’t like to do.

This will put you in a position of authority, which is exciting to her, put your woodworking competence on display, which will also be exciting to her, give you a chance to be a leader in her presence, which will be greatly exciting to her, will give her access to that “man sanctum” in a way she never expected, also exciting, and will replace the interruptions and aggravation of which you complain with help and support. And when she sees all the wonderful things that can be made with all those tools, she won’t mind hearing how much you REALLY paid for them, either. LOL!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

What about the rest of you? Do you have some sort of hobby that your wife interrupts that she could be joining in? Frankly, I’m shocked at how many women I’ve met that actually enjoy watching baseball, football, hockey, etc., with their men or even by themselves once invited to do so. I’m also amazed at how many literally are enthralled by the shooting sports, many of whom talk about “getting wet” while doing it. Can you imagine? You should see the women I’ve seen at gun shows, and you’d know they weren’t kidding. Indeed, seeing a very attractive woman fondling a pistol as if it were some sort of adult toy was what called this to my attention. My wife is great at handing me tools when I’m working on a car, too, and I’ve seen some take to tune-ups, brakes jobs, etc., as if they were born to it, and then clean up and look like a professional model.

So no, it doesn’t have to be woodworking, although it’s probably the best of all of them, because it’s the one that creates a special one-of-a-kind gift for her or your home or solves some problem (like storage problems or displaying some cool new vase she just found at a yard sale or boutique), which enhances her nesting ability, and entails a lot of things that she’s naturally good at. Just take what I’ve taught you, or will teach you if you read my book and newsletters, and look at what you do for fun.

You’ll find that there’s probably more than one thing you’ve excluded your wife or girlfriend from that she’ll not only enjoy doing with you, but can bring you closer together in other areas of your relationship or marriage, including the bedroom.
All you have to do is learn a few things about women and keep your eyes and ears open for opportunity. Once you spot the behavior that says she thinks she’s being left out of something fun, BOOM! Invite her in, and see what happens.

You can pick up a few things out of my newsletters, but if you really want to make life great, literally returning to honeymoon status even if you’re currently contemplating (or defending against) divorce, you need "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you need it now. So go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy and get started. Or keep putting up with the nagging and all the parts of your hobby that takes all the fun out of it. It’s your choice. Make it a good one.

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

Preparation, Key to Easy Success in Relationships and Marriage

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

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

Hey David,

How's it going!

Well I'm doing pretty good indeed!

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

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

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

I've got to keep doing the things that attracted her to me at first.
I've got to display an alpha male personality in her presence.

I've got to improve my life in every way possible.

Finally, I've got to make her FEEL great about herself

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

Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a Good Listener: Yet Another Key to a Great Relationship and Marriage

Women are social creatures and want to be heard. Being a good listener is highly attractive to a woman, but don’t let yourself become a girlfriend. Learn where to draw the line!

I got a letter that really got under my skin, because it shows just how simple some of women’s needs are and just how little effort it can take for a man to do incredibly attractive things. Meet Angie:

Hi, David! I’m so glad to see somebody addressing our [women’s] needs like this. There does not seem to be too many men who speak “female,” and your services as a translator are truly appreciated.

I bought your book for my husband, and getting through the first part was an education for us both, but we made it. We’ve been together since early grade school, and have always felt that we were right for each other, but after getting through your instructions on how to evaluate our relationship, we now KNOW that we’re not just star-crossed or the product of long-standing habit, we really belong together. But that’s not what I’m writing about.

My husband is going through the second part of your book now, and he’s catching on fairly fast and I can’t thank you enough for that. I always thought he was a bit short on attention span when we’d talk, but it turns out that I am probably worse than the average woman about using non-verbal communication and expecting everyone around me to pick up on everything, and we didn’t have long conversations because Jay (my husband) would get frustrated or bored with not knowing what I was saying most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, we talk all the time, but never for long enough to have a really deep conversation, and this has always bothered both of us, but we kept hoping that sooner or later we’d just grow together and it would work out. Well, we’re growing together as we go through your book, and it’s like being with a new and much better man, because he now knows how important communication is to me as a woman, and is quickly learning how to engage on a level that we are both more comfortable with. I’m also learning to be a little more direct with him than with my girlfriends, and that’s helping him to feel better as well.

We (women) don’t really want that much, do we? We want a man who is a man, not a girlfriend. We want you to listen to us. We want your attention. We want you to focus on us when you are with us, not other things around us. We want you to look at us, preferably at our eyes instead of our breasts, when we or you are talking, and really listen to what we are saying, because we know when you are not paying attention. We want you to be interested enough in us to ask us questions, about us, our day, our feelings, our friends, or whatever – just something to show that you are there because you are still interested in us, not because it’s a habit. And yes, when we’re being a brat, we really do want you to call us on it. You don’t have to be mean about it, but we definitely don’t want you being a wuss about it either. Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, your book is helping a lot, and while we are in our 30’s and have been together for almost 30 years (yes you read that right) we are getting closer, and I’m starting regularly to feel intimate desires for Jay that I haven’t felt for him but sporadically in years. A lot of it is just the lower stress level in our home and being able to have longer, more intimate conversations, but he’s also starting to be really fun again, like when we were teenagers and really started “discovering” each other (which is kind of awkward because our two teenage girls are starting to date), and the passion is really coming back. Thanks so much!

Love ya,
Angie

Wow! In their thirties and together for thirty years! The original “childhood sweethearts.” They’ve had thirty years to get bored with each other, and are still young enough to have very healthy libido’s, not to mention another 30-50 years together! Incredible! Well, let’s focus on attraction for a minute.

Angie made it plain that she had needs, and was pretty verbose about what they are. Obviously, she has a lot of other needs, but people take the time to express those that are most important to them, and she expressed wanting a manly man who could be genuinely interested in her and engage her in meaningful conversation, and that the more that need was fulfilled, the more they were rewarded with intimacy and passion. Guys, it doesn’t get any simpler or more basic than that, and this woman is saying that this is what’s most important to her, at least in regard to what she wants from Jay. She could be every woman alive today, too. Those needs and wants are universal amongst women.

Also note what she says she doesn’t want, and because of this, she’s a lot smarter than the average bear: She wants “a man who is a man, not a girlfriend.” I don’t know if she fully realized the wisdom in that statement, or if it’s obvious, so I’m going to explain it. Do not indulge your female partner’s “drama-fests.” If she wants to tell you about a problem, listen, but if she’s in that drama mode where she wants to keep repeating every detail of the problem to you over and over to milk every last drop of emotional energy out of it before becoming bored with it and moving on to the solution-finding stage, don’t go there.

Allowing her to treat you like her girlfriend is an attraction-killer, and often is even a form, possibly a subconscious form, of testing to see what you will tolerate. If you detect that a woman is starting to talk to you as if you were a girlfriend, just tell her that you’re not comfortable in the girlfriend role and that’s where it feels like she’s taking you, and that it would be better for both of you if she continued that part of the conversation with a girlfriend and came back to you to either tell you about the resolution to her problem or to secure your help if she found that she wanted it.

The one place where a little compromise might be in order is in eye contact. Women need it, and are grossly uncomfortable without it. It’s part of how they “connect” when they converse. We men, being results-driven, tend to multi-task and speak while we are doing something else, such as working or scanning the room for threats while in that primal mode of “protector,” which they will often interpret as lack of interest, attention, and respect with regard to both what they are saying and them in general. It’s no longer a realistic possibility that a dinosaur, lion, or bear is going to eat your family, so try to be a little more deliberate and aware of your actions when talking with a woman.

It’s very helpful if you do indeed make an effort to maintain eye contact when both speaking and listening, but if you are in the middle of something that you can’t put down, point that out, saying something like, “Look, I have to finish this. We can either talk while I work (or whatever you’re doing) or you can give me a few minutes to get to a place where I can stop, and then we can talk. Which are you more comfortable with?” Notice that you’re not dumping the choice in her lap, you’re asking for her preference; the difference is subtle, but significant. You will then “decide” to grant her preference. This is both leadership and consideration of her needs, not to mention the kind of diplomacy women tend to engage in, and she will appreciate it without you looking like girlfriend.

Getting back to drama-fests for a moment, when you start hearing the details a second time, you’re getting into girlfriend territory. After making the announcement about not being comfortable in the girlfriend role mentioned above, point out to her, politely and respectfully, that you already understand the problem from her first run through describing it, and if she wants your input or assistance later when she’s ready to do something about fixing the problem you’ll be there for her, but until then she needs to share this problem with her girlfriends until she gets it out of her system and is “over it” and ready to move on. She may pout a bit at having her “emotional inertia” interrupted, but if you handled it right that’s a test, too, so don’t worry about it.

This is one of those areas where you need to define and exercise authority, and you need to gently but firmly make it clear that you’re willing to listen the first time, but the second through “however-many-times-it-takes,” she needs to share with her girlfriends, because they are wired for it and enjoy it and you are wired to fix problems, not relish and explore them. She may not understand this at first (many women really think that we’re all wired the same, just as many men do!), but you must be steadfast if you want to remain her manly man and not evolve into another girlfriend she has to keep up with.

Gentlemen, women seem a little more complicated than we are at times, but their true needs really aren’t. They want the same things we want: self-esteem, productive work (at least the good ones do!), a meaningful relationship with an attractive and interesting partner, and intimacy -- passionate intimacy when the kids aren’t around. And to beat it all, all we have to do to give it to them is act like real men (“manly men who do manly things,” as the saying goes) and pay attention to them enough for them to know we’re interested in them and to know what they’re saying to us.

They find that sexy and attractive, and reward us for it by giving us what we want, which is pretty much the same thing much of the time. It’s just not that hard when you know how, is it? And as Angie points out, it’s easier with my book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” so download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because life’s too short to spend it any other way than happy.

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

Learning from Our Ancestors: The Immense Value of Anticipation in Relationships and Marriage

Time and again, we hear men are basically hunters, and women gatherers, or at least descended from them and still are “wired” like them, but what does this really mean in terms of how we view and enjoy life, and especially our lives together? More than you think; indeed, it permeates the entire relationship, including the bedroom, and can make the difference in whether your relationship lives or dies.

Today I want to discuss something that women have been trying to get men to understand for centuries: this thing they have with savoring anticipation, building excitement, and something that most men just simply can’t abide, at least not much: teasing, sexual and otherwise.

I hope we’re all long past the point of trying to adhere to this idiotic politically correct concept that there are no genetic differences between men and women other than the presentation of sex organs. Those of you who aren’t, if there are any of you left, either wake up and realize that we have a lot of differences, some of which can make one gender or the other generally – but not universally – better-suited to some things and not so well-suited to others, or stop wasting your time reading anything I send you.

Now hear this: We have unmistakable and easily identifiable differences, and while they do not make one gender or the other ultimately superior or inferior, we must recognize them and use them to understand each other better so we can enjoy our lives together as much as possible; else, they become a wedge that drives us further and further apart.

Among these differences is the way we treat goal attainment. Men, having evolved from hunters, generally enjoy the thrill of the chase to a degree, but the kill is the only reason for doing most things. Think of hunters or fishermen. There are “outdoorsmen” who love being in the country, outdoors, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, for whom hunting and fishing are good ways to keep busy while enjoying nature, then there are the “sportsmen” for whom fishing and hunting are no fun if they come home with an empty stringer or creel, don’t have something strapped to the hood or bed of their vehicle, etc.

The sportsman characterizes most men’s attitude and approach to most things. We’re providers, protectors, problem-solvers, and repairmen, and we’re results-driven, so anticipation for us is stressful, and teasing gets old really fast; getting close and not going the rest of the way quickly can be utter damnation for us, so we tend to close the deal, no matter what it is, so we can move on to the next challenge or opportunity, and ultimately, the next result.

Gentlemen, women aren’t like us in this regard; indeed, for the most part, they are completely and utterly opposite! Think of the stereotypical image of a woman shopping as opposed to a stereotypical image of a man. When we want something, most of us just run in wherever we think is a good place to grab it and do so, quickly, and rush home with our spoils to share them with family, friends, etc. Women enjoy the shopping – the process of acquisition – as much as or even more than the acquisition itself. They delight in walking around looking at everything, comparing, imagining themselves wearing it, tasting it, sharing it, or whatever – anticipating the ownership and use and relishing it. How does this apply to our relationships?

It’s exactly the same story, especially when it comes to creating attraction. We see them, we think about them momentarily (or don’t), we become aroused, we want them, and it’s urgent. If you want to screw up an evening with a woman, a really good way to do it (most of the time – I describe the exceptions to this in my book) is to fast-forward to the romance scene early in the evening, or rush her into a sexual encounter without it having been part of the rest of the day.

Women need that feeling of anticipation, that teasing and waiting that we hate, to get amped up to where they need to be to enjoy it. Ask any woman about her most incredible sexual encounter, and you’ll find that the vast majority say nothing about having a man “in the saddle” for hours – it’s having a man hinting and teasing them for hours before the foreplay, then stair-stepping the foreplay, two steps forward and one step back, teasing and building that anticipation until they are ready to explode that they will describe as their greatest sexual encounter, because that’s how attraction and excitement is built for them.

Do NOT read past this point until you have full ownership of this concept, Gentlemen: for us, orgasm is the whole purpose of sex. For women, it’s merely the end of it. They like and need orgasm (the effect of orgasm on female brain and body chemistry is extremely beneficial!) but they are in no hurry to get there, and many could care less whether it is you or they who cause the orgasm as long as they get the anticipation and intimacy. Give her that, and she’ll be quite happy to “finish herself” or have you “finish her” by some other means if she needs an orgasm after you “finish.” (It’s really hard to keep this kind of discussion in such terms that wouldn’t make an adult cringe if their child walked up behind them as they read it without making it sterile and boring as some medical school text. LOL!)

I cannot overstress how important to your sex life it is, and will remain, for you to prolong the pre-orgasmic activities of sex for your partner to enjoy, because if you don’t, you’ll be done quite literally before she gets started, and it doesn’t take too many unfulfilling and frustrating episodes of that before she shuts down entirely; such sex is nothing more than a chore for a woman. It would be the same frustration and lack of fulfillment as a woman leading you up to the point of orgasm and then stopping, time after time. You would be missing what you see as the whole point of the encounter, just as she does if you move through it too quickly. And you know what happens when such an itch goes unscratched; sooner or later, somebody has to scratch it.

Never make the mistake of assuming that a woman enjoys the same things you do, especially in the same ways that you do, nor that she doesn’t. And whatever you do, don’t think that you know more about what she likes having done to her than she does. (Yes, men have written to me puzzled at how their wife didn’t respond to something they just KNEW she SHOULD like because some friend had said so, they’d read it somewhere, some other woman had responded to it, etc.)

They like being naughty like we do, and they like sex as much as we do, but in general they go about it in a very different way for maximum pleasure. For the umpteenth time, communicate, experiment, and find out what works with your partner! Prepare yourself for the greatest revelation you will ever have, a proverbial thunderbolt, and you’ve heard it a million times before:

If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy.

No, that’s not the thunderbolt. That’s to set you up for the thunderbolt:

If mama is happy, EVERYBODY’S happy!

I’m going to be explaining this in tomorrow’s newsletter. It is at the same time a so ridiculously cliché and yet revolutionary way of looking at relationships that it will make you laugh at its delightful simplicity and curse your failure to recognize it at the same time.

Meanwhile, you could already be getting the explanation of that and everything else we discuss here in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s an instant-download, an e-Book in Adobe’s PDF format, at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Go ahead and download it now, because while some good things come to he who waits, others get away, and you need to know the difference. Life’s too short to spend it ignorant, especially if ignorance keeps you from living happily with your partner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely
Tom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

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

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

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

The REAL Dangers of an Affair Ending Your Relationship or Marriage

Nearly every heterosexual man thinks about an affair at least once in his life, if for no other reason than because women are so available and so alluring when there’s trouble at home. But before you consider an affair as even momentary relief from a troubled or stale marriage, you’d better read this, because it’s really not worth the risk, especially when fixing things at home can be so easy…

I don’t know if there’s something in the water, if it’s the change of seasons, or just the subject matter of the last couple of days, but the women reading this newsletters are really getting active again, and mostly with confessions! Meet Maggie:

Dear David,

My husband showed me your newsletter about the women having their contest and I have a similar story of ruthlessness and recklessness that I think you’ll find interesting if not useful. I have a best friend, Carol, that I have known since I was old enough to have a friend and we grew up together. All through school she and I were joined at the hip. What one did the other did as well and there seemed to always be some kind of competition between us even though we were best friends. After high school went our separate ways, but later on we became close again.

It was at this time that I found out some of the things that she did while we were not talking. She is what you describe as a predator and a real drama queen and will do what it takes to get what she wants and really does not care who it hurts. The lengths she will go to are nothing short of amazing. There have been times she has even scared me, and that is not easy to do.

At this point I will add we did not stay friends again very long. I have changed a lot and I hope became a better person and that the people who knew me before can see the difference. I am no longer so competitive or one of the biggest drama queens and I have no need to look for men everywhere I go. I’m married to the most amazing man I have ever known, thanks to you.

Ok back to my story. One night Carol had gone out with friends for a drink after work. She met a guy at the club and they seemed to hit it off really well. I have nothing against meeting in a bar, but with all the drinking that is going on and all the crazy people it’s not my idea of a great place to meet a man. Anyway, he asks her if she would like to leave with him and she did. After a little while she found out that he was not that great, but she did keep seeing him for short time. Sometime during their affair he told her he was married and she really got mad and decided she was going to teach him a really hard lesson about cheating.

She talked him into taking her back to his house when his wife was out of town. So like an ass he took her there, had s’ex with her in their bed and that just set him up. She had what she needed to totally wreck his life. She waited until she knew his wife was home and told his wife that not only was he having an affair with her, but they had sex in her bed.

Now to me that is really vicious and sickening!! The only reason she wanted in his house was to wreck his life by making sure his wife knew they has sex in her bed. The very bed in which he “made love” to his wife.

I guess you can see why we are no longer friends. I can not allow that kind of drama and destruction in my life and I refuse to lower myself to her level.

I hope this will be of some help. Maybe you could share this with your readers and let the men and woman know that there are people who only live to hurt others.

Sincerely,
Maggie

Yikes! That’s a great story about a whole lot of mistakes that didn’t need to be made. The guy in that story had several choices, and he made the wrong one at every turn. The affair was a bad idea from a lot of different angles, and bringing a woman he barely knew to his wife’s home was insane! While all of this was happening, he could have been fixing his relationship with his wife so that there was no allure in an affair, or at least safely getting out of the marriage without the additional “combat stress” of having been busted in an affair giving her a lot of pisstivity and legal leverage, but instead he was setting himself up not just for a permanent end to his marriage, but a punishing end at that!

I’ll be the first to admit that his marriage may have been one that never should have happened in the first place; indeed, the hardest message I ever have to get across to anyone is that some marriages are doomed before they begin and the best thing you can do when you find out you are in such a marriage is to get out of it, hopefully with cooperation and some dignity, and move on. But this guy didn’t even look at his relationship to see what could be fixed, if anything, before setting himself up to be slaughtered.

And that’s the real rub, Gentlemen. Affairs are a loaded gun pointed at your head. If you’re having trouble, do what men do in times of crisis: find out if it can be fixed, and fix it. If it can’t be fixed, talk to your partner and agree that it can’t be fixed, and move on like friends, or at least civil adults, before getting entangled in another relationship. You owe that to yourself, to your wife or girlfriend, and to any woman that you might have a relationship with instead of your current partner.

The only way to look clean is to be clean, and it’s mighty hard to look clean when you have an angry concubine giving the sordid details of your affair to your wife. You must admit that she’d also be a lot more likely to forgive the mistake of marrying her when you shouldn’t have than to forgive the mistake of you taking up with another woman while she still has a claim on you established by the vow you took to be her husband.

And only a fool would think that something like this could never happen to him. I’ve heard stories of girlfriends calling wives out that made me wonder how the guy even survived, including more than one where the girlfriend and the wife got together to get revenge on the husband. They’re social in nature, remember? Think about this…

You enter into an affair with a woman for some stress relief, and she decides she wants you to leave your wife, which you don’t want to do for whatever reason. The girlfriend tells the wife about the affair, and the wife wants to hurt you because you cheated and the girlfriend wants to hurt you because you wouldn’t leave your wife for her. Do the words “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” or “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” ring any bells?

Yes, I am indeed trying to scare the living crap out of you. I’ve seen this with my own eyes as friends went through it and heard stories from people that had every reason to be telling me the truth that made me wonder how, with such stories floating around, anyone would ever get married. And I don’t want any of you gentlemen writing to me with a story such as these later because I failed to sufficiently warn you of what kind of trouble you might work your way into. I’ve got your back, so to speak.

So here’s the deal. Affairs will get you bankrupt, maimed or killed, if you’re lucky. They can lead to a lifetime of slow and painful torture if you’re not so lucky, and only a fool depends on luck for his outcomes. Your outcomes are largely the result of your choices, so choose well…

So how do you fix it? Glad you asked! Everything you need to know is waiting for you in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you should download it right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and get started. Life is short, and windows of opportunity fleeting; every minute you fail to make a good choice is a minute you leave someone else to make a bad choice on your behalf, or that will impact you badly, so make your own choices, good choices, at your first opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When She Gains a Few Pounds: Walking Through a Minefield in Relationships and Marriage

Cold weather and "the holidays" are here, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and many of us tend to over-feast and are about to develop that inconvenient layer of winter fat and we’re already wondering how many extra trips to the gym it will take to get rid of it. And it’s not just winter fat, either. Stress, pregnancy, etc., can put a major whammy on women, who are especially troubled in the Southern Hemisphere right now because bikini season is here! What do you do when she gains a few pounds? Inquiring minds want to know, at least if they ever hope enjoy being married again…


The holidays are here, and that means good food and parties. It also means a lot of scrambling around trying to do holiday shopping and eating out for lack of time, not to mention family gatherings, etc. That means that unless your wife is extremely disciplined or has an extremely high metabolism, she’s going to pick up a few pounds, and like it or not, you’re going to have to deal with it.


Sounds like a no-win situation, huh? It’s tricky for sure, but not impossible. Here’s a typical letter about this most common problem, and a very sticky one to say the least. Meet Tia:


Dear David,


I need your help. The past few months I have put on a few extra pounds due to a medication that I have to take for my asthma. Everybody tells me that they don’t notice it and I look good, but to me I feel like the Goodyear blimp and have no desire to be intimate with my husband at all because I’m embarrassed over having curves in places that were flat. The more he tries to tell me I look sexy the more his advances just make me feel pressured, and I hate feeling under pressure this way. It has nothing to do with not loving him or not wanting to enjoy each other the way we always have. We have always been very in touch with each other and being together in the bed was always one of the best parts.


I was hoping you could give me some advice as to how I could bring this up with him. I want him to understand just how awful I feel I look and how it has nothing to do with him at this point.


Thank you,
Tia


Tia, I’m going to make this really easy for you, because it’s such a great question. Just print this and let him read it, because I’m going to tell him and all the other men about this. He won’t know it’s you unless you tell him because I’ve changed the name to protect your privacy.


Get ready guys! Pay close attention, take notes, and make sure you fully understand what you’re about to read. This is some of the most critical information to ever appear in this newsletter and you need to get this down pat and cold, right now, because sooner or later, EVERY woman will experience a bit of weight gain that makes her uncomfortable with her appearance, and consequently, with YOU. There is both medical and emotional/psychological/relationship information and advice here, and I promise you it will be worth your while to spend a couple extra minutes reading it. It may not only help save your marriage, it may help save your or your spouse’s life.


If you’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," you know about the difference in the male and female brain structure. Aside from making our communications styles and methods grossly different, it also makes women visualize and dramatize to the extreme compared to males.


You also must remember that nearly all of the advertising in the fashion and beauty industries is designed to prey upon a woman’s sense of competitiveness to make her feel insecure about her appearance so she’ll buy their products even if she doesn’t need them. Women are literally bombarded with this crap everywhere they look, and while you or I probably wouldn’t even notice a little weight gain until we had to loosen our belt a notch or sew a button back on our trousers that had popped off, to them a pound or two can be nearly or entirely traumatic, especially if they’ve taken pride in a flat stomach for a long time.


We often respond to this by telling them that they look “fine,” “sexy,” “hot,” etc., and that is precisely the wrong thing to do. Why?


She knows what she sees in the mirror, and thinks that you see what she sees in the mirror. If she thinks she looks fat and you say she looks sexy, all that says to her is that either you’re lying to suck up to her or your standards are really, really low. Don’t go there, even if you really think she looks better with a couple of extra pounds because you like the curves, and whatever you do, DON’T tell her you like the new curves! That can get you killed, because in her ears, that’s, “But honey, I like you better when you’re fat like this.” (Ladies, you are cordially invited to write and tell the men just that – I’ll reprint your letters so the men will know just how serious an issue this is.)


And this is getting to be a more and more pervasive problem, especially in the United States. In the 1980’s some moron at the FDA decided that Americans might get too much iodine in their diet, and told manufacturers to replace the potassium iodide that was added to flour and other things as an anti-caking agent with potassium bromide, which attaches to the same receptors in the thyroid as iodine but does not create thyroid hormones, the chemicals that keep your metabolism up to a healthy level, because they are based on iodine. They also advised against the iodizing of salt. This resulted in slowed metabolism and "brominated thyroid," a condition wherein the thyroid is inundated with bromine, which renders it dysfunctional or even non-functional.


Concurrently, women started trying to add career aspirations to motherhood and running a household, which added stress. Stress causes the over-production of hydrocortisone, a.k.a., “cortisol,” by the adrenal glands, which causes your body to store fat for hard times (in normal amounts it actually helps you keep weight off because it is what transports the T3 thyroid hormone that regulates your metabolism into the cells where it causes your mitochondria to burn glucose to do whatever each cell is designed to do, the core of the human metabolism).


Then we have another idiot at the FDA who determined that a high-carbohydrate, low-fat or fat-free diet was healthy, overloading all of us with carbohydrates and making us insulin-resistant and consequently further slowing our thyroids (high blood glucose level impedes the conversion of T4, a thyroid hormone that is mostly inert and used to store iodine to T3), making us fatter and often diabetic.


Incidentally, prolonged stress causes fatigue of the adrenal glands, and when this happens, sufficient hydrocortisone to get the T3 hormone into the cells is not produced. This creates many of the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but obviously treating adrenal fatigue with thyroid hormone doesn’t fix the problem; indeed, it makes it worse, because the adrenal glands have to convert the excess T4 hormone into something else (called “reverse T3”) to get it out of the bloodstream, further stressing the adrenal glands. Thank you “modern medicine.”


Yes, I have a bone to pick with these incompetent jerks, and the pharmaceutical companies that are behind them, but my axe-grinding here is to show you why you see so many people around you becoming more and more overweight and to hopefully open your eyes to the facts that 1) it’s likely to happen to you and/or your partner, 2) you’ll have to deal with both the physical and emotional/psychological impact of it, and 3) there are things that you can do to fix it before it gets terribly broken and you and/or your partner end up on medication for the rest of your significantly-shortened life.


Incidentally, if you are even marginally overweight or there is any possibility that you could have a lower-than-normal (98.6° F. or 37.0° C., anything more than 0.2° F. or 0.1° C. is suspect) basal body temperature, slowed metabolism, dry skin, brittle nails, sleep disturbances, the outer third of your eyebrows thinning, thinning hair, dark circles around you eyes, allergies, weight gain, or any type of autoimmune problem, whether or not you are already on thyroid medication, go to http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/ and order the author’s very thorough, 100% factually-based book on the thyroid and how it is inadequately and inappropriately all over the world using the wrong lab tests (TSH, total T3 and total T4) and the wrong medication (synthetic T4 hormone, a.k.a., “Synthroid,” Levothyroxin, et al). It is also available at a slight discount at some of the bigger bookstores and online retailers. (I receive no commissions or other consideration for this recommendation. I make it because you need these facts to live a healthy and happy life.)


I stress this because I had to become an expert on this subject for my own health. I have a thyroid deficiency, went through pure hell for several years while being told by several physicians that I was “adequately treated” while remaining 50 pounds overweight in spite of diet and exercise in excess of US Military fitness specifications and having 18 symptoms of hypothyroidism (that have been known and used to diagnose hypothyroidism for over 100 years before the infamous TSH lab test was made popular) remaining after several years of treatment, just because a lab result that reports irrelevant information was in “the normal range,” which some rather sharp doctors have found is preposterous. The StopTheThyroidMadness.com web site also has a link to another site that will help you find a local physician who will properly diagnose and treat this condition.


So getting back to your relationship, what are you supposed to do with regard to your partner?


You’d already know this, too, if you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” because you wouldn’t be making those kinds of advances and doing really stupid things like asking her to have sex with you. You’d be tripping her attraction triggers with alpha male behavior, naughty talk and gestures, and making her have fun and get so hot that she didn’t concern herself with her additional weight because she’d still feel sexy and desirable, and she’d be coming after YOU! (See Jay’s letter for an example, because he’s got it down cold.)


When you know what a woman wants, what makes her tick, how to both listen and talk to her, and how to lead her and have fun with her, she doesn’t feel like a middle-aged housewife that can’t compete with the 20-somethings anymore. She feels like a real queen who rules the world at your side by day and a red hot vixen by night, keeping that naughty little secret for you and you alone because you create it for her. There's a time and place, not to mention a right way and a wrong way, for everything, and that includes delivering genuine, honest compliments, and giving them because they have been earned, not because you’re trying to get something in return. That’s called “flattery,” and it will get you absolutely nowhere with anyone who is worth getting anywhere with.


That, Gentlemen, is how a real man makes a real woman feel, and that is what you learn when you read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” So how many more times are you going to have to stick your foot in your mouth and spend the night in the doghouse before you go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy? Go now, and get it done, because there are far better things to do with your feet (and your mouth!).


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

Is She Faking Orgasms? "Performance Monitoring" in Relationships and Marriage

How can you tell if she’s faking “the big O”? Does it matter? The truth may indeed surprise you!

Before I get into today’s lesson, I have a favor for you if you’re in the continental United States. One of my publisher’s brothers has a VOIP telephone company offering the same quality service as the large cable companies (I’ve seen Vonage and Magic Jack in action before using this, so I know you may have just cringed when you saw the letters “VOIP”), and they are having a holiday season special, their employees and family rate to all subscribers for life.

I use the service, and it rocks. $16 per month plus taxes, includes unlimited free calling to continental US, voice mail, 6-way conference calling, and a lot of other bells and whistles I haven’t used yet, and works with my fax machine; I have a second line for the fax, only $12 plus taxes. I was paying more than that for a single line, and don’t have to mess with “distinctive ring” to get the fax to work.

By the way, I’m not an affiliate marketer or getting a penny out of it. It’s inexpensive and works well, and they are making the offer to get word-of-mouth customer advertising, which makes sense to me since that’s were most of my business comes from as well and a lot of people have a bad impression of VOIP. Check it out at http://usnationwide.net/FriendsAndFamily/ and see what you think.

Now let’s get into today’s lesson. I’ve been going over this issue in my head on and off all day, and still can’t believe I’m writing it, but I keep getting hammered with the question, so I’m going to answer, and then I’m going to tell you something a lot more important…

The question is simple. Meet Todd, one of the many people who asked the question, and who did so in the fewest words while sounding intelligent:

Hi David,

How do I tell if and when my partner is faking her climax?

Thanks,
Todd

Todd’s a man of few but well-chosen words, isn’t he? To answer, there is no way to always tell with 100% certainty, at least not without medical monitoring equipment, but here are a couple pretty dependable bits that can help you figure it out.

First, if she appears to be screaming during the contractions (not between the contractions, but through them), she’s either faking or grossly exaggerating. Physiologically, that’s as near an impossibility as being able to hold your eyes open when you sneeze, and for the same reason. It’s in the “wiring” of her nervous system. The problem is that trying to exhale to scream during the contractions doesn’t work, so any noises of pleasure should be broken up by the contractions.

There are rare – and I do mean RARE – exceptions to this, according to what I have read in medically- and therapeutically-oriented books and studies on the subject, but the exceptions are mentioned in the context of nerve damage, birth defects, and anomalies so rare as, for example, having all your internal organs on the wrong side of your body (juxtaposition of organs is unrelated – the rarity is the point). Like I said, RARE.

Along the same lines is another very telling sign, but in the opposite way. It is reported by medical authorities on the subject to be near-impossible for a woman to experience any significant level of climax without her toes curling. No kidding. Note that if she knows about this, she can fake curling her toes, but if she’s bucking and thrusting and making all kinds of steamy animal noises and her toes aren’t curling, either she’s faking or she’s one of those RARE cases mentioned earlier. I’ll say only that I have never personally observed one of those RARE cases.

Now, don’t even think about asking me how you’re supposed to keep an eye on her toes while in the act. If I even try to answer that question the spam filters (annoying pieces of crap!) will be trapping 99% of this edition and few will ever see it. (Don’t get me going about spam filters. I finally found spam protection that works better than anything that uses content filters – see http://www.mailvice.com/ if you have your own domain name and you’re interested.) Just use your imagination, get into a position, like “canine”-style or “rodeo” style that lets you see her feet without being obvious, and don’t obsess over it. If she’s hot enough to have you in such a predicament, she surely has assets that are much more interesting than her feet. You shouldn’t be worried about it anyway. Why?

Because you ought to be doing it right and know it by the fact that your partner is acting like you are the “King Daddy Pleasure God” by giving you sexy looks, being playful with you, inviting YOU to the bedroom, etc. If you’re being the alpha male (not alpha dog! – see my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report for the distinction! A download link is at the bottom of this newsletter) and engaging in naughty play as you should be, especially in the way of slowly ramping up the action through the day as described in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” using her anticipation for maximum impact, you’re going to know, in no uncertain terms. A woman who’s happy in her bedroom makes it so wonderfully obvious by showing you that she wants to be there, and often! And she’s also a whole lot more open with coaching and feedback when she knows you’re listening to her, so getting those communications skills honed will help take a lot of the mystery (and consequent insecurity about whether you are pleasing her!) out of the equation.

If you’re having to worry about whether she’s faking, you have bigger problems than your sex life, and you’d better be getting your butt over to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and downloading your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” before she gets bored and frustrated and you end up either celibate or cuckold (that’s what we old farts were taught to call it when your wife sleeps with another man). You know as well as I do that if Mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy, and if Mama IS happy, EVERYBODY’S HAPPY, and this is proven daily to be your best shot at making that happen, so get busy!

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, often only a half-hour. Un-freaking-believable. I was 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 are 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. And I don’t even want to try to compute the percentage gain if you only have to spend the two to four hours required to read the book and hit the ground running!

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

The Science of Stress in Relationships and Marriage: Women Do It Differently, and Men Need to Know How

Scientists have discovered the chemical cascades that occur when a woman is under stress, and who would have guessed that it’s very different from men and make them respond differently? LOL! And you can bet that it has an impact on your relationship and marriage.

There is an author by name of Gale Berkowitz whose work I keep running across in researching women and their behavior. She impresses me tremendously because she is thorough in her research and doesn’t interject a lot of opinion in her writing; she presents a lot of facts and when something is hypothetical she’s labels it as such, something I insist upon in this work because the stakes are too high in a troubled or failing relationship or marriage to consign anything to guesswork, theory, opinion, or anything else except solid logic based on the hard facts of vast and relevant experience.

(You can find a listing of a lot of her articles here on Google if you want to follow up).

In >an article in Melissa Kaplan’s “Chronic Neuroimmune Diseases” newsletter, Gale Berkowitz discusses research that confirms that women’s chemistry causes them to respond to stress in a very different way than we men do. She and other researchers refer to it as a “tend and befriend” response, as opposed to the more masculine “fight or flight” response.

You can refer to the original article for the full details on the chemistry, but the short version is that they have isolated a hormone called “oxytocin” that buffers the fight or flight response and causes her to tend to children and gather with other women instead.

It’s interesting to note that estrogen enhances the effects of oxytocin and testosterone diminishes it. Both genders have both estrogens and testosterone (estrogen is in fact a whole family of hormones, all of which are “metabolites,” or by-products, of the metabolization of testosterone – yes, fact is sometimes stranger than fiction!), but the balance is different. Men have more testosterone than estrogens, while women have more estrogens than testosterone.

This lays waste to a common misconception about stress-handling, and it is one that you need to be VERY aware of in your interaction with women. When a crisis arises, stress is created, and in men, the fight-or-flight response engages, and we move very quickly to eradicate the threat and neutralize the crisis. We’re biologically driven to do so.

Not so with women. They don’t just choose to sit and talk about problems instead of correcting them. They are as biologically driven to pull the kids up under their wing and have what appears to us to be a “drama fest” as we are driven to tell everybody to hide and lock the doors while we deal with the threat.

Not all threats can be immediately dispatched. You can kill a barbarian or wild bear crashing through your door, but other problems can take time, such as health or financial problems. Our method of dealing with the barbarian doesn’t work with a wife who has just found out she has breast cancer any more than calling a dozen girlfriends and talking for hours would deter a barbarian or a bear.

Consequently, fight-or-flight works best for immediate threats, while tend-and-befriend works better for long-term problems, especially with regard to stress relief. We can stress ourselves to death while feeling helpless as weeks and months of cancer treatment lag on, just as women can be stressed to death by being thrown into a situation requiring immediate action. We need closure, they need familiarity, social interaction, emotional build-up, and emotional release, THEN action if there is still any call for it.

This is another wonderful example of how understanding our differences and using them to compliment each other instead of competing with each other works to make a stronger and more intimate relationship. If you’re faced with a long-term problem, try to take it more at your wife’s pace than your own; don’t indulge in dramatizing and such, but ease up a bit on the push, handling things as they can be effectively handled instead of trying to bully everything into submission. If you’re faced with an immediate threat, don’t waste time trying to goad your wife to action.

Give her a brief period for input if she wants to give you some and then move on and eliminate the threat. Tell her that there will be time to talk after the threat is no longer bearing down on you, but for right now, since the window of opportunity to deal with the threat is so narrow, you just have to go with the best you can do at the moment and you can talk about emotions or further corrective actions later.

Cooperation, not competition, is the single most distinguishing characteristic of a successful long-term relationship of any kind, and it’s especially true in a marriage or other live-in arrangement. You’re right there in each other’s faces, and you need things to share and draw you together, not constant points of contention to tear you apart.

There are many differences that we can treat as complimentary, and others, such as opposing values, which cannot be resolved. Hence, some great relationships have problems that make them look bad, and other, utterly terrible relationships have a few redeeming features that make them look more attractive than starting over – the comfortably unhappy crowd that I talk about from time to time who will eventually split or torment each other into a wasted lifetime of misery. The difference is not always obvious, but if you’re ever going to be happy with another person, you must know it and recognize it when it confronts you. There is no other way.

To know this and everything else you need to know to fix, maintain, and enhance a good relationship with problems or end a bad relationship with dignity and as friends, go to >http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Life is short, so don’t spend it guessing…

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

So She Says She Has a Headache: The Oldest Lie in Relationships and Marriage

A reader asks about the age-old lie, “Not tonight; I have a headache,” and its other iterations. He may not like the answer, but if he’ll accept it he can fix the problem, which is not her; it’s him.

I’ve wondered for a long time why I seldom receive a letter on this subject, because in the research phase of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” it was one of the first things to come up: the ages-old lie, “Not tonight, Dear. I have a headache.” It has other iterations, such as cramping, nausea, too tired (an extremely common one and easy to fake), menstrual discomfort, etc. Sometimes these complaints might be legitimate issues; at others they won’t. There is a pretty good way to know the difference, and a fool-proof way to eliminate the bogus ones. We’ll discuss all that in a minute, but first, meet Randy:

Hey David,

I have run into a stone wall with my wife and was hoping you might be able to shed some light onto a problem that is driving me straight to the sofa. It has to do with what else, sex. I know women think that is all a man thinks of, but how can you not when you never get it!

Every time lately I want to have sex with my wife she always has a reason that we can not do it. I have heard them all at this point, I am on my period, I have a yeast infection or bladder infection, I am too tired I have had the kids all day. Hey I am not a heartless SOB, but enough is enough how can a woman have a problem all of the time? I need some help here, how do I get her back in the bed with me and have sex instead of fighting for half an hour and ending up on the sofa every night?

Randy

My reply:

Randy, Buddy, let’s talk. There are two possible reasons for your wife’s behavior, those being that she’s really having that much trouble and that she’s not having that much trouble but it’s easier to fake something than to argue and fight about sex. It’s simple logic. She’s complaining of a problem, so the problem either does or does not exist. If the problem exists, there should be some signs of attempted remedy, and if not, she was bound to slip up sometime.

When she claims she has a headache, is her behavior consistent with having a headache? Taking some form of pain reliever, wanting you to rub her neck if it’s tension or taking antihistamines or decongestants if it’s sinus or avoiding bright lights and loud noises if it’s a migraine?

Incidentally, last I heard, the AMA was still saying that the average person has 6 headaches a year. That’s really ironic because that’s also the number of times the average couple who has been together longer than two years has sex in a year. (That is, of course, if they’ve not discovered "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage", in which case they’re having sex several times per week to several times per day!)

Is she saying she’s too tired for sex and then going to sleep? Or is she claiming she’s too tired and then sitting on the phone with a friend, sitting at her computer, or watching TV for another two hours? Are there wrappers from feminine hygiene products in the trash can when she claims to be having her period?

Is she going to the doctor and/or drugstore and bringing home prescription or over-the-counter treatments for bladder infections or yeast infection when she claims she has one?

The point is that there is behavior that can be logically expected if someone has a genuine ailment, especially if it’s frequent. If their actions are contradictory to their words, they’re faking it to avoid sex. There is no other explanation.

Now the big question, why would she want to be avoiding sex?

There are very few people who don’t enjoy it, and their problems are pretty severe. If she has enjoyed sex with you in the past, it’s unlikely that she would have developed one of these major problems (like being raped) without you knowing about it. That leaves only one conclusion.

She’s no longer feeling attracted to you! Get this:

The slow-down of sexual activity a year or two after your marriage may seem normal because everybody complains about it and there’s a chemical change that stops forcing you to want it constantly, but it’s actually the first major symptom in the slow decay of a relationship. It doesn’t mean the relationship is over, but it’s now, not when you or she gets busted in an affair or somebody gets served divorce papers, that is the best time (other than before trouble starts, as a preventive measure) to start learning what you’ve needed to know all along and doing what you should have been doing all along to set things right while it’s still easy to do so. At this point, her feelings are still mostly positive, right?

Loves you? Maybe, even probably.

Loyal to you? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether someone else has created attraction for her and she’s responding to them. A woman will have sex with a man to whom she is attracted, and will not with a man to whom she is not attracted, at least not without resentment. It’s just that simple. There is also a strange tendency for people having an affair to refuse to have sex at home because they’re having feelings of fidelity for the person they’re involved with. So what do you do?

First, you forget about trying to find out if she’s sleeping with another man or who he is. That is irrelevant, and nothing good can come from finding out. She’s living with you, and that’s all that matters. Any woman would rather feel attraction for a man she’s living with, especially if she loves him, than any other man on the planet. It makes for a nice, tidy, secure, and enjoyable environment that is not possible under any other scenario. That is your edge. Don’t blow it by making accusations and digging around to find out something that you won’t want to know afterwards anyway. And finding the other guy to tell him to back off is the biggest wuss move of all, because you’re acknowledging his presence and even his superiority. If you handle this right and your wife has any character at all, she’ll end up confessing sometime in the future anyway, or else her past will come back to haunt her. Forget about it.

Second, start creating attraction for her. You apparently did it for her at one time, or she wouldn’t have married you (even if she married you because she was pregnant, she slept with you – drunken daze notwithstanding – because you created attraction for her), so you have to bring it back, which is nowhere near as hard as creating it for a stranger, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here, but are fully explained in the book that will tell you how to create attraction for her, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” She lives for it, yearns for it, and wants you to be the one creating for her, of all the men on the planet. Give her what she wants!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Gentlemen, that feeling you get that you would describe as “I’ve just got to have her,” is the same feeling women get when in the presence of an alpha male who creates sexual tension for her by flipping switches and withdrawing in a “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” dance that can go on for minutes to days. They’re not visually stimulated like we are with the human physique; it’s alpha behavior that gets them fired up more than anything, the confident, cocky, almost swaggering arrogance of a man who knows he can do anything balanced with the intellect to do what he chooses (it doesn’t matter whether you can do everything, only that you can do what you aspire to and need to do), the authority to pull it off, and the sense of humor to make it all enjoyable.

Putting on the act won’t do it, at least not for long. You might get away with it for a date or two with a stranger, but with your committed partner, it’s got to be you, the REAL you, not just an act you can put on and constantly be stressed out over the possibility of having her see through it. Help is instantly available if you’re ready to be the man you can be.

“THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” teaches you, as it has taught thousands of men, what you need to know and helps you to incorporate it into the real you, making you that confident alpha male you takes care of business and has fun in ways that drives women wild with desire.

It also teaches you the difference in how you communicate and how women communicate so that when she tries to tell you what she wants you’ll be able to hear and understand it. Believe it or not, many women have reported having affairs and getting caught in them so that their husband will see the example that “the other man” sets, because she’s tried to tell him and the message didn’t get through! The boyfriend wasn’t a boyfriend, he was the illustration in a “how-to” manual she tried to give him!

And, since women need love for security and attraction to feel alive, it teaches you what attractive behavior is, and the personality that causes it to happen naturally, the alpha male personality, and how to develop it so that you can enjoy the confidence that it brings you in all walks of life, not just in your relationship. It’s not just about relationship improvement, it’s about MALE improvement, about being a real man, and doing the manly things that real men do, and loving every minute of it.

The coolest part is that the manly things that manly men do and women love to see them do are fun! They’re things that men just naturally do, but in that idiotic fiasco of the 1980’s when women said they’d like for men to be more sensitive and men took that to mean sensitive INSTEAD OF manly and not sensitive IN ADDITION TO being manly, as the women wanted (they never state “the obvious”), men have just stopped doing and turned into a bunch of wusses.

Kill that inner wuss and let your inner manly man and inner naughty boy come back out to stay. I’ll teach you how. Click over to http://www.makingherhappy.com, download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and let’s get started, because life is just too short to spend it being a wuss, not to mention celibate and on the couch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Most Important Skills in Building, Maintaining, or Saving a Relationship or Marriage, Part 2

A reader writes more about his success and discoveries in reviving his marriage in the post-affair situation that many of you have written me about. He’s already identified playful behavior and a positive attitude as necessary, and we get to the really big issues today, the ones that must come before all others. Do yourself a big favor and learn from him…

We started yesterday with Mark’s first letter to me and my response, in which he demonstrated how a playful attitude went a long way toward reestablishing trust and intimacy in his marriage as he and his wife work to recover from a crisis, one resulting from the slow decay of a good marriage inducing the wife to have an affair.

(If you missed yesterday’s edition, you can see it in the archive at your convenience.)

Today we continue with a partial transcript of several e-mails that have passed back and forth between Mark and me. Today he gets into the real meat of his discoveries, or rather confirmations of my own discoveries with his own experience. Let’s continue…

David,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response.

Yes, I did catch that email about the guy who pulled his wife's pants down; in fact that's part of what convinced me to try the pillow fight. And I did try the pulling the pants down thing, too. It worked as well, I think my wife is starting to realize that she has no idea what I'm going to do next - and it’s exciting to her.

I also wanted to tell you about a great conversation I had with my wife.

You see one of the most beneficial aspects of what you teach is showing us men how women communicate. Throughout our marriage I was always frustrated and upset because my wife never would just come out and ask me a question about a topic. It always seemed she would just make a statement and expect me to realize that it was a question. Or she would ask a question and stupid me thought it was really a question. This led to all kinds of fights because I wanted her to communicate the "right" way - namely my way or a man's way.

Anyway, the other night my wife is telling me that she really needs to just express herself more directly to me. Smart me realizes that this statement is a question or at least a request to open a dialog. So I didn't just agree, I started a conversation with her. I told her that sure there were times that I wish she were more direct, but the one thing I realized through this learning process (yes I told her that I bought your book) was that I had learned a lot about her communication style in the past few months. I told her I no longer felt the need to change her behavior to suit me because I had been taught (by you) about her communication style. I tell you it was a beautiful sight to see the sparkle in her eye when she realized that I got it - finally.

I think the best thing that's happened in our marriage recently is that we've both opened up because we realize that we are free to be ourselves instead of what someone else or society thinks we should be. I am free to be the fun-loving, strong, confident and naughty boy husband I was meant to be and she's free to be the drama queen (I mean that not in any negative way) she was meant to be.

Boy is life fun, when you really start to get these things figured out.

Thank you so much for all your help.

Mark

Powerful stuff, huh? We’ll discuss this in detail in a minute, but when I told Mark that I wanted to share this with all of you and why, he came back with more very insightful commentary that we also need to talk about. So here’s the brief reply that opened him up further:

Hi again!

This is great, and it would make a great newsletter, too. I have a hard time getting "non-believers" to accept that communications is more important than anything else in such crises because it's the tool for solving problems and creates trust and intimacy, which in turn buys you the time to work on attraction. Do you mind if I use this anonymously? I'll call you "Mark" or something like that in the newsletter.

Thanks, and take care,
David

To which he replied:

I just thought that I would add a little in case you wanted more to use.

I remember many instances in our past where I would absolutely know that she was trying to hint around at something. I always called it circling around the issue. I mean I knew exactly what she wanted to talk about from the first statement or question. But because I wanted her to communicate "my way" I would ignore it or answer in short one word responses in a vain attempt to infuriate her enough to finally get to the point. I mean it was incredible. Here I was hearing the message and understanding it but because it wasn't delivered in the manner I wanted to hear it I would play a game of ignoring it until my wife finally was mad enough to just say it - or usually scream it!

So in a way I won the battle, but lost the war. I finally got her to communicate "my way" but I did it in a way that destroyed any intimacy or attraction. You know she had to be thinking that I was the biggest jerk in the world for doing this - and in reality she was exactly right - I was being a complete jerk.

And the really weird part is she knew it too! She wanted me to communicate "her way" and wouldn't try to hear me either. So we had in effect painted ourselves into a corner where we were convinced that everything would be fine if the other person would just change.

Mark

So how much of this soaked in?

Let’s start with something that Mark touched on and I elaborated only slightly on. Of all the things that you can do to improve a relationship or marriage, communication is second only to being in a highly compatible relationship in terms of reasons that relationships and marriages last or disintegrate. Compatibility gives us common ground upon which to act, discuss, and have fun, and communication is the tool with which trust and intimacy are built. All of these things are components or constituents of the primary relationship emotion, love.

When love is elevated through heightened trust and intimacy, the protective walls come down and women will then not try to fight off the attraction they feel for a playful, confident man. Feeling safe, especially in terms of her emotional well-being, is such a huge issue to most women that I don’t know if the average guy even has sufficient frame of reference to understand it, let alone empathize. Suffice it to say that if she has trust issues, everything else will be moot, because women know just how easy it is for them to go overboard and get lost in an emotional storm.

Then we get to another HUGE issue: Competition. Doing it “his way” or “her way.” Focusing on WHO is right instead of WHAT is right. The tendency to compete or cooperate is what determines whether she and you are truly “partners” or merely cohabitants of the same residence.

Partners cooperate. They seek out the best solutions to problems for the couple. It’s true that individuals must maintain some level of independence to preserve their identity, but if you find yourself frequently competing with your wife or girlfriend instead of cooperating to act in your mutual best interest, you can take it as a sign of severe compatibility problems, self-esteem issues, or some mixture of the two, and you can be assured that you are in a relationship with the wrong person if love and partnership are you reasons for being in it.

This isn’t rocket science, Guys. You don’t even have to know how to pronounce the phrase “governing dynamics” to understand that there are real-world constraints, tendencies, and issues that are common to men and women, know what they are and understand how to make the best of them instead of constantly fighting against them.

Do you remember yesterday’s remark about the genie who thought it would be easier to build a bridge from California to Hawaii than to tell a man what makes women tick or what women really want? That story is hilarious when you first hear the punch line, but then comes the “double-take,” that sudden realization that it’s funny because it seems so true, and then that sense of futility sets in as you acknowledge that the genie is probably right. But he’s wrong!

And what’s more, if you think about it, right now you ARE the genie. With what you know right now you’d have a better chance of being able to build that bridge than to solve the many riddles and mysteries of womanhood. They’re simply unsolvable; the answers must be revealed, and the good news for you is that they have been!

I tried to solve them just like every other man, and with an IQ in the top 1% of the whole world’s population, I failed, miserably, so don’t feel bad. There are ways in which we are deceptively different and deceptively alike, and we’re just not equipped to see them. So I did the unthinkable:

I gathered a large group of women and asked them!

That’s right! And they told me everything, because they want us to know! But, being an engineer and scientist at heart, I didn’t just take their word for everything, I collected it, identified everything that was common to virtually all women, and then tested it by turning it all over to their husbands and boyfriends and listening intently to the feedback from both genders.

Sure enough, we found some rather common misconceptions among the women, instances of thinking that they wanted something they had never had, and being grossly dissatisfied when they got it. There were also common instances of instinctively responding negatively to behavior they had previously said they wanted to see in their men.

When all was said and done and we were all on the same page, so to speak, the final draft was formalized and THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” was born, and real men and women have been saving, reviving, and improving marriage and other committed relationships with it ever since. It’s now your turn, so go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy, right now, and be the guy who knows all about women instead of the genie looking to build a bridge half-way across the Pacific.

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

Great Free Report, "What Women Really Want" Released!

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

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

But I don’t care!

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

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

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

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

What to Do When She's "Mean" to You: Horseplay and "Picking" in Relationships and Marriage

Men frequently write to me complaining that their wives pick at them, needle them, push them to do things they don’t want to do, etc. How are you supposed to handle this? The answer might surprise you…

I get a lot of letters like the following, and I’ve addressed the issue in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," but the frequency of these letters is scary. There are too many men who don’t recognize what this issue really is and how to deal with it, and families are literally coming apart at the seams because of this simple misunderstanding. Meet Jeff:

Hello David,

I need help. I haven’t yet read your book but I’ve been reading your newsletters for awhile and I think you can tell me this. My wife has picked up a bad habit of picking on me, making fun of me, being a smart-ass in front of our friends, etc. It’s really abrasive and embarrassing, and getting worse by the day. The more I ask her to stop, the more she does it, like she’s trying to push me into a fight. How can I stop it?

Thanks,
Jeff

Well Jeff, you slacking cheapskate, if you’d read my book you’d know! ;-) Just kidding, of course. LOL! Seriously, she’s not trying to start a fight at all. She’s trying to get you to play with her! You’re boring her to tears, and she’s trying to bring you out of your shell.

Women like challenge, and they like a man to act like he “has a pair.” She’s challenging you to a verbal “joust” to have some fun. What she’s expecting from you is that you pick back at her, not in a mean, nasty, insulting way, but in that fun, naughty, pranksterish way as you probably cut up with your friends, at least at first, escalating it to get into chasing, tickling, playful pinching or spanking – you know, that kid stuff that you used to do when you drove her wild!

What’s happening now is that she’s trying harder and harder to provoke you into showing that you have reproductive glands and a sense of humor, which is, in effect, punishment for not doing so all along. If you don’t do it, you’ll find her losing interest in you pretty soon, so you’d better be finding your sense of humor, fast.

And we are talking about humor here, no matter how pissy you might think she’s being. If she makes a smart crack about your big feet, make a smart crack about something that obviously IS NOT a problem; i.e., only make a remark about her big butt if she DOES NOT have a big butt and doesn’t obsess about having one. Find something to exaggerate to crack wise about so that it’s obvious that you’re playing, else you may strike a nerve and end up starting a fight while trying to play.

I cannot overstress how you need to exercise a little sensitivity here. If she stubs her toe and is limping around but not seriously injured or embarrassed about the accident, then calling her “gimpy” is fair game, but if she is crippled, or if there was something embarrassing about the injury, like she was in a public place, stubbed her toe and ended up dumping a cup of coffee on a white blouse in front of her boss because of it, “gimpy” is off limits, at least until you see that she’s over the embarrassment, which will usually be if and when you see her smile or laugh a bit when talking about it with a girlfriend. The idea is to be obviously fun with your picking to give her a giggle and demonstrate that you are a playful guy, not some wuss who can’t take a joke and is afraid to dish one out for her or a jerk who is retaliating and being a mean bully instead of going along with the joke.

Women don’t really want that much from us, Gents. It’s just that what they want is stuff that almost nobody is teaching these days; they’re politically incorrect for wanting it, and we’re politically incorrect for giving it to them. However, I am teaching it, after learning it from some gurus before me and adapting and expanding that by working with several hundred married women and their husbands, and I’ll teach you if you want to learn. Screw political correctness. It wasn’t in my wedding vows; was it in yours?

So how about it? Are you ready to learn what may turn out to be the most valuable lessons of your life? Remember all those jokes you cracked about nobody ever being able to understand women, or know what they want, or what they’re saying, or how to pass all those damnable tests and traps they’re always laying for us? I could give you the old “be the first kid on your block to own it” spiel, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re first. What matters is that you’re successful, as quickly as you can get there.

The quickest path to lasting success in your relationship is to go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and then just reading it and putting it to work. You’ll not find too many opportunities where you can have so much fun being so successful, if you find any at all like this one, so get busy.

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

Nice Guys Finish Last, Especially in Relationships and Marriage, Part 1

We’ve all heard the old cliché, “Nice Guys Finish Last,” and it seems counter-intuitive, but let’s face it, clichés get to be clichés precisely because they are so universally true and self-evident. Let’s look closer at why this is true and how you can correct any problems it may be causing you…

A friend forwarded me an article asking if men honestly thought that being nice was a drawback when it comes to women. I had to say something…

What difference does it make whether men “think” it or not? It’s a proven fact. Just look at “nice guy” behavior! And most important, it’s something you can easily fix, too!

Before I start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. We’ve been through one major debacle over men failing to realize that women never speak the obvious, so let’s avoid another by speaking what some will consider obvious and most others will have been oblivious to…

Back in the 1980’s, we were told that women wanted a man who could be sensitive. They meant sensitive IN ADDITION TO being a manly man, not INSTEAD OF. And by “sensitive,” they meant “being in touch with our – WOMEN’S - feelings,” not “being overwhelmed by feelings” like they often are. Hence, instead of remaining our normal, rough, rowdy, fun, sexy selves, we started acting like wusses and crying with women at chick flicks. And we’ve all noticed where that got us over the last thirty-plus years, right?

So when women who realize what they’re saying still say they want a nice guy, they don’t mean a guy who is ONLY nice, and has no other positive attributes. They’re talking about a man who is a manly man but not an abusive man, a man who gives them an input channel when decisions need to be made but doesn’t just give in to their whims, and recognizes that when she spends two hours making herself look great to go out with him that he at least make the effort to show a little self-respect by wearing things like real shoes, a belt, clothes that fit, tucking in his shirt, which by the way, has a collar on it and maybe even a neck tie, depending on the occasion, socks that match his pants, etc., in recognition and appreciation of her effort.

And by the way, a genuine compliment like, “You look really well put-together tonight. Thank you for making the effort,” instead of complaining that it took her so long to get ready would be a good idea, too.

So in a nutshell, when a sane, undamaged woman wants a “nice guy,” what she is really wanting is a man who notices and respects her and her efforts to please and nurture him. That’s a far cry from a guy what we’ve been led to believe, isn’t it? It actually sounds like a pretty natural thing for a guy to do if he’s with the right woman and he’s an adult.

Okay, now that we have that straight, let’s look at the things that make a nice guy NOTHING MORE THAN A NICE GUY. What do you always notice about them? Or more to the point, what makes them so boring and wussy that women immediately label them as “just a nice guy”?

First and foremost, they’re a pushover. They make the biggest mistake a man can make: deferring all decisions to everyone else. Any risk of discussion or conflict is too much, and they’ve mistakenly been led to believe that leaving decisions to others to make unilaterally or letting somebody else lead the action by making the first suggestion is somehow considerate or polite. Is it?

Not just no, but hell no! Putting somebody else on the spot or dumping a choice into somebody else’s lap so that they are deciding something for you is shirking your responsibility and putting it on them. Ask someone, especially a woman, who looks uncomfortable about making a unilateral decision that concerns more than herself about what is bothering them and they’ll tell you, quite bluntly, that they don’t want to make the decision for everybody.

So how nice is that, really? Not!

And besides, it’s our job to lead, remember? That doesn’t mean that we make all the decisions in a relationship unilaterally, or even any of them. It means we initiate discussions, lead off with suggestions, invite participation, and actively sift through everything being said to come up with a satisfactory option, then announce it as a decision and prompt everyone to start acting on it. Leadership, not control. Motivating as you take action, not just barking orders and pushing people around.

And keep in mind the first rule of thumb in any relationship with a woman: if you can’t stand up TO her, and WITH her, you definitely can’t stand up FOR her. Ergo, you’re a wuss. And boring. That’s really sexy, right?

I was going to go through this whole thing in one edition, but it’s going to take several, so we’re going to stop here and call this “part one,” because this is already more than enough for you to be chewing on for the next 24 hours and trying to root it out of your life. We’ll be talking about these major mistakes that “nice guys” make (and that make “nice guys”) for the next three or more editions, so grease yourself up, strap yourself in, hide all pets, stow your bags under the seat in front of you and make sure your tray table is in its fully upright and locked position, because it may end up being a pretty wild ride.

Yes, really. You’re more than likely going learn some things that you’ve been doing for a long time with the best of intentions and getting exactly the opposite results that you wanted and expected. That means you’re going to get to stop doing some things that you probably didn’t like to do anyway and start getting better results, not just with your partner, and not just with all women, but with everybody around you.

And yes again, that sounds like a tall order, so don’t miss it. I can’t tell you everything I know in the next three newsletters (it took a whole book just to hit the major points!), but I am going to give you a lot more than enough to see two things: that you do indeed have a lot of room for improvement, and that you can make those improvements easily, especially with my help.

You think not? Take me to task! Put me to the test! Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and see what you find. My guarantee is simple: read it and use it for a whole year, and if you don’t think you got your money’s worth, you keep your money and my book.

Do you think you’ll get the same offer at a brick-and-mortar bookstore for some tome full of theory and opinion? Good luck with that. Meanwhile, you remember Kevin, who, by the way, has been married over twenty years and just learned how to play with his wife, from some past articles? I’ll let him tell you about what works. I got this from him today, and I had to “soften” some of it to get it past the spam filters who would otherwise block it for being “for grown-ups only”:

Hey there David!! Man I hope other guys reading what you shared with them from what has been positive to say the least with me are giving it all their effort. It can work for sure. Further proof my friend....

Guys should give this using "panties" (referring to a remark I made about telling a woman who was being a brat to “put her big girl panties on and get real”) a try in whatever way...panties seems to be something that has rather strong influence in having fun with the wife and maybe any woman. Now, I like panties play myself so it influences me a great deal for fun sex play!! The visual of seeing a woman playfully and sensually pulling down her panties certainly gets my rise going!!

Also, it’s sensually fun for me to pull down the panties! So verbally talking panties play gets us going for sure. Now to where I was going with this.....We went to a Halloween party last night and I attached a picture of us which includes a fun girlfriend....Anyway, my wife I guess decided she was going to take the upper hand this time instead of me doing any playful teasing to start.

Well, while we were dancing, she says to me..."You aren't going to get to pull down my panties tonight because I am not wearing any under my mini skirt"!!! And she takes my hands and puts them on her behind and pulls me into her and grinds her [groin] right into me out on the dance floor and teasingly laughs!!! This, of course gets me amped up even more!!

When we leave the hotel party David, she is pretty much quiet on the ride home. When we pull into the garage she asks me..."did you have a good time?" And I said, “Sure I did.” Get this David....She then says, “You got pretty excited knowing my panties were off in there”.....and she gets over in my lap facing me lifting her skirt above her waist and says...”Now start spanking your bad girl for taking off her panties!!!!”

David we [had sex] right there in the car in the garage and I gave her a good spanking too!!! Literally David she wants to have her panties pulled down and get spanked since I started that with the "scolding panties remarks"!!!! Man, I hope it works for other guys!!! There is something about "panties" and women!!!!

Kevin

Kevin’s complaint when we first met was celibacy. From celibate to getting it on at a party on the dance floor and in the garage with a woman who is now, twenty years after they got married, CHASING HIM! This guy has given me more testimonials than some authors get from their entire customer base, and he only one of many getting these results! You don't see me displaying little disclaimers about results being "atypical" in fine print to cover my butt like everybody else does either, because these results are in fact quite typical amongst those who use what I teach, and they can be YOUR results, too, if you'll just step up and get with the program.

‘Nuff said…and again, it’s waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com, so get moving, and gals, if you’re feeling a little jealous of Kevin’s wife right now, you can get in on this, too!

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

The Tough, Playful Alpha Male: Just How Far Can You Go to Keep the Spice in Your Relationship or Marriage, Part 2

Another reader sounds off with a great display of imagination and new-found skill in heading off testing, drama-seeking and brattiness, and you’re going to love this!

I hope every one of you is having a better day than I’m having so far. Really. It’s not that it’s that bad; it’s just one of those days in which lots of little things keep popping up and getting in the way of doing the things I have planned for the day. Like finding a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink…

There’s a quick but very powerful lesson in that, so I’ll go ahead and point it out while I’m thinking about it – at least this distraction from what I had planned has a productive purpose! LOL! Seriously, after discovering the leak I started shutting off the valves under the sink to stop the expansion of a pool that was forming in my kitchen and living room, and one of the valves broke and water started spewing out from where the valve stem entered the valve. So I cut the water off at the meter and started cleaning up all the water that had escaped before I found it.

That took quite awhile, and as I went to the garage to get the tools to fix the leak and replace the valve, I thought, “Nope, I’ve already lost half my morning fooling around with this. I’ll do my job and pay the plumber to do this because he can do it faster and cheaper than I can.”

Wait! He can do it cheaper than I can? Sure he can! He’ll be in and out of here in half an hour or less, and charge me fifty bucks or so. I can do the work, but it will take me 2-3 times as long as it will take a professional plumber simply because I don’t do it every day and I’m not used to having to work around all the other pipes under the sink to get the job done. Plus, the risk of turning the water back on and finding something still leaking is higher for me than for the guy who does this all day every day; I’m a “do-it-yourselfing” amateur who can do it in a pinch if there’s nothing pressing, nowhere near as skilled as a professional.

So I can give up a couple of hours of income to do something that I really don’t like doing, or I can give up about a half-hour of income to pay the plumber and do something I love doing, which is helping all of you. To me, that’s a no-brainer.

The lesson? Being an alpha male doesn’t mean that you always have to do everything yourself. You should always try to strike the correct balance between the alpha male qualities of independence and assertiveness and the other alpha male qualities of leadership, delegation and making sound decisions for the benefit of your household. Do it yourself only when it makes sense to do it yourself, and be respected for it, because if you go overboard, you’ll just end up being a control freak who can’t get anything important done.

Now on to what I had planned to give you today, a stunning display of male attitude and ingenuity in dealing with feminine testing and pissitude. Meet “Logan,” whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, who writes in response to a lesson on “The Great Female Contradiction” of wussitude being boring but being non-wussy makes you “mean.” Check him out:

David,

Your timing is ironic. It is that time of month for my wife, which usually means some big blow-ups. On Sunday, as my wife was starting to go down that path towards a bad day, instead of tip-toeing around her, I started joking with her. At one point in the middle of her ranting over something silly, I walked up and pulled her pants down, then casually walked away. Within a minute or two the ranting had stopped. She did tell me that I was being mean to her, but she had a bit of a grin on her face, almost shock. Then as we were trying to get on our way to church -- always a challenge to get the three little guys ready and loaded in the van and my wife ready on time, the boys and I waited for her.

Now, during this time of the month, she usually takes even longer to get ready, because nothing fits right, and she is just generally unhappy with the way she looks and feels. So the usual custom is for her to arrive late to the car and be even more upset over the fact we are now going to be late for church. So just to be different, I found a Rolling Stones CD and started blasting the song “Let's Spend the Night Together,” as she finally arrived in the car. By the way, the Stones have a ton of songs that you can use for this type of move (Satisfaction, Wild Horses, You Can't Always Get What You Want, She's So Cold, Crazy Mama). Anyway it seemed to do the trick, as she, in a very frustrated voice, said while stifling a smile, “Stop trying to make me laugh, I'm crabby and I have my period.”

Then, later that night, she takes me and grabs me in the pantry and starts to attack me while my Dad happened to be over and in the next room. I told her that I would continue to be “mean to her.” This time she laughed.

Thanks for the timely articles,
Logan

Priceless! Absolutely, utterly priceless! And how many of you “newbies” would have thought you could go that far and get away with it? The truth is that almost all of you could have; the few who couldn’t would be those whose wife had some sort of trauma in her past (like rape or having her clothes torn off of her in public) and would hence have very bad memories triggered by such an act.

The key to pulling it off is two-fold. First is the attitude. The naughty kid who just threw the huge “spitball” at the blackboard over the teacher’s shoulder and when they turn around, furious, there he sits, looking anywhere but at the teacher, with a big cheesy grin and a “who, me?” look on his face. The guy who will do anything for fun, no matter how irreverent, as long as nobody gets hurt, because mean people “suck.”

The second is knowing when to play naughty boy and when to be serious. You can’t deal with all of a woman’s negative emotion by being a clown. That works for the testing, the drama-seeking, and when she’s just being a pissy little brat who wants to feel bad for awhile and wants you to feel bad with her, but when she has a real problem or a real issue with you, trying to play it off with something like that will get you in the doghouse for awhile, if it doesn’t get you killed. ;-)

In those cases it’s strong character, strong leadership, and a fair hand that she needs to see. If you’ve done something wrong, you need to admit it and show that you have learned from the mistake and won’t be making it again. If she’s having some other kind of trouble, she needs for you to hear her out instead of trying to jump in and “save her” from her problem. If she needs help, she’ll let you know…

But…

You’ll have to listen to hear her when she lets you know. You probably won’t hear a direct request like, “Can you help me?” It will probably start out sounding a lot more like, “This would be a lot easier if somebody would…” Yeah, you’re “somebody.” Remember that…

There is so much about living happily with a woman that we all spend our lives thinking – because we’re being taught! – that it’s all some huge and terrible mystery that women don’t want us to solve, and Gentlemen, that is one big, nasty load of unmitigated crap. I had almost 200 of them volunteer to teach me about the mysteries of womanhood within one hour of posting a request for research subjects in a relatively obscure place on the Internet, and all I had to do was ask and be willing to listen to the answer.

The first thing we found out was something I’d suspected for a long time. We speak with the same words, but we don’t speak the same language! We have different meanings for the same words, and we use entirely different protocols for conveying and gathering information. Once those differences were understood and we all got over the shock of it, learning the rest was fun and easy.

Indeed, we finally found that communicating effectively with a woman and knowing everything she wants you to know at any given time requires doing nothing more than adhering to three simple rules. When this became apparent, I immediately thought of Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychologist, who said, “The Great Question, which I have not answered, is ‘What does a woman want?’” He didn’t know at the end of a distinguished lifetime of studying people. And yet it turned out to be easy.

The next step was to test everything they had told me, and I got 118 of their husbands and boyfriends to take what they had taught me and test it on them. We found a few contradictions along the way, too, things that women only thought they wanted until they got it (and the reason I frequently recirculate that “Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Just Get It” newsletter series). We ultimately found out what women really want, need, and expect from men, and what they really respond to, favorably and unfavorably.

The end result is "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and you can download your copy at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ with a few mouse clicks and be reading and learning the truth behind the great mysteries of womanhood yourself in just a few minutes. So you can be a guy who’s in the dark or a guy who’s “in-the-know.” It’s your choice, so choose well…

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

Feeling Guilty or Apologizing for Being a Man Is Unnatural, and Kills Your Relationship or Marriage

An advertising copywriter’s take on the idea of feeling guilty or apologizing for being a man, and that idea’s impact on both men and women, is both revealing and instructive. Take heed…

Many of you might remember the “King Arthur” contest we did. One of the winners of the contest is an advertising copywriter, someone who writes the copy for direct sales letters like those you get in the mail and the main page on my web site, and we’ve been working together on an overhaul of my web site as something that will help us both in a lot of ways, including improved advertising copy for me and a deeper understanding of both copywriting and women and relationships for him, a true win-win situation.

We were looking at the concept of men, influenced by the politically correct crowd, feeling guilty and apologizing for being men and having our natural, biological tendencies (which incidentally are the very things that trigger curiosity, intrigue, and ultimately attraction in the female subconscious). I told him to look at the use of “feeling guilty for” versus “apologizing for” as a sort of exercise, and what he came back with in his analysis is even more relevant to proper male attitude than it is to the ad copy, and demands sharing with all of you. Meet my good friend and fellow copywriter, Dave:

*********************************************
Okay. Playing this out, I get the following feelings: I think of being guilty as a place I'm in when I've made a mistake. I did something wrong. Whether by accident or intention, I still made the mistake; hence I need to apologize for it. Guilt is about something that's wrong, apologizing is for admitting it and moving on. However, this brought up another, much bigger issue:

Being a man is who we are. Feeling guilty about being a man is an attack on our very nature and according to popular culture, the only way to overcome that is by changing yourself into some kind of metrosexual and being another girlfriend to your wife. It stinks of propaganda on a large scale – "Social Engineering" to diminish the power instincts in men? Why should being what nature or "evolution," whether you agree with it or not, determined to be our absolute best survival skills as a species, be apologized for?

That should be a line or turned into a paragraph in the copy as a supportive and illustrative example of how we are being "engineered" towards something we naturally aren't and it's time we woke up. Even if it doesn’t sell anything, it’s still a congruent, factual and provable message that every man on Earth needs to hear. They should be asking themselves whether the "delicious personal fusion" is being drained from our way of life by a bunch of politically correct, societal pool cleaners, and finding that idea totally unacceptable.

For us to feel guilty about being men, at some point we bought the line that what we feel natural and comfortable doing is not what women want. Being confident, secure about who we are, taking a leadership role because it is instinctual had to be abandoned, even though it went against every fiber of our being, which somebody should have taken as a huge red flag that this was a bad idea, since our species’ population was expanding, not contracting, at the time. Simply, we bought the idea that being a man and acting like a man is somehow wrong, a mistake needing correcting, and if we get too strong, we should be ready to apologize for your error. What utter crap!

I think your newsletter today even hints at this fallacy in a very subtle way because women who have "take me now you hunk" fantasies love and respond to the power and submission aspects because it frees them to really dig into their most basic nature as well, instead of having to play the prim and proper little vessel of purity that they’ve been programmed to be (which is more utter crap).

It’s sort of like throwing off the shackles of conditioning to be free, even if it’s once in awhile, because there are so many ways to explore having fun together otherwise, but usually in fairly defined roles that don't always require letting it all go. Like a vacation from who we "have" to be, to who we have a fantasy about being, which in truth, is who we REALLY are to start with after you flush away all the programming. One of the fantasies my ex had was us running down the beach totally unclothed with no one around and gettin' with it whenever we felt like it. Being free...as men and women were eons ago, after we realized we were men and women and before some demagogue told us that there was something wrong with it.

We grow up as boys with an instinct to tease and play with girls as long we can be the leaders and choosers on how the game is played. It's amazing how easily I got girls to do things for me other boys couldn't because I simply defined the terms of the game and they responded big time. Now that's food for thought! LOL! Even when we did things they knew they shouldn't, because it was a "part of the game," they responded and were happy to do so. Interesting...
*****************************

Interesting, yes, but not magical, not by a long shot. What Dave saw as a kid was the power of defining and exercising authority, something the politically correct would tell us is a barbaric, demeaning insult to women. Really? Excuse me. How about clarifying this for me: Is it barbaric because it makes them involuntarily smile and move closer to us or because it makes them lubricate and think about being taken by us in a public place? Is it demeaning because it excites them and pleasure or because it helps them to feel like a part of something and eliminate the boredom that otherwise torments them? I’m just not clear on that…

I just copied that paragraph to a friend, one of the women on the support staff, through an instant messaging program and she came back with this:

SoccerMom1966a: LOL! If that’s demeaning, all I can say is “Demean me baby! Demean me now!!!” My hubby’s getting pretty good at that!

See what I mean?

You see Guys, this isn’t rocket science. In only a couple of months, and in the midst of working full-time and helping me with this web site overhaul and his own continuing education in copywriting, he became a guru in his own right, and has proven it by making contact with his ex-wife and both gaining and giving her closure on the issues that they had outstanding at the time of their divorce, and they are now good friends instead of bitter, hardened enemies with open wounds. It’s life-changing, world-changing stuff precisely because every man can grasp it and do it if he simply has the desire to improve his life and is able to read on about a fourth grade level.

So what’s holding you up? You’ve been listening to me say this and prove it for days, weeks, even months; I’ve been doing it before many witnesses, many of whom have given me unsolicited testimonials, for years. Indeed, there are a few of you who have been on my mailing list for over a year but still are not on my customer list. Are you waiting for me to reprint the entire book in these newsletters and blog posts? Not gonna happen. Are you waiting for somebody to just pop up on your doorstep and say, “Here, let me do that for you?” Not gonna happen. Are you waiting for somebody else to tell you that all your mistakes are validated and your problems are someone else’s fault? It may happen, but it won’t happen here, and it wouldn’t fix anything if it did. Besides, because you can do this.

I’ll make you a bet. Well, no, I can’t do that. Gambling is still illegal in a lot of places where this newsletter is going. So I’ll issue you a challenge. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and read it. Then just do what it says for a few days and watch what happens. And something WILL happen, by the way. Just ask some of the guys who have stopped divorces cold in less than a week of downloading this book.

Then take your pick, a refund or continuing down the path you’ve begun walking. I have yet to see a man turn from that path once he started down it, and you’ll stay on it too, because it just feels too damned good to be a man and have your life coming together to give it up.

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

Temptation Is All Around, So Don't Push Your Luck If You Value Your Relationship or Marriage

Men often forget that there are just as many temptations laying in wait for women as there are for us. If you let them get bored, they’re vulnerable, so don’t push your luck – or your limits…

I hope you’re having a great week. I’m having a busy one, between counseling/coaching appointments and putting the final touches on some new content for the MakingHerHappy web site, but it’s rewarding to do a good job in helping people through their problems and to close in on goal achievement, so I’m pumped, not complaining.

You may remember this recent edition in which a woman who left me a note while changing her subscription address saying that she had told her husband she was having a problem with marital boredom and had passed on newsletters for him to read saying that they directly addressed their problem, and he ignored them. It was quite a story, and you should read it if you missed it.

You may also remember this article in which a group of women were so bored they were holding an on-going contest to see who could manipulate their husband into buying the biggest gifts (and I’ve been told that there has been a recent development in that story, where somebody got busted, and I’ll be getting you details of that soon, when the story has unfolded and the lessons are obvious!). If you missed that one, you should catch it, too, because it’s a one-of-a-kind learning opportunity.

I mention these because the woman who left the note about her husband ignoring her prompting has written about the follow-up article to the contest, another article you should go back and read if you missed it, because it details a bunch of married women getting bored and hustling drinks and collecting phone numbers in a bar in a different contest that ended up putting one of them in the hospital due to a rape and beating, and her marriage and life are now irreparably damaged. Once again, meet “P.”:

Good Grief......here we go again.......

2 weekends ago I spent a weekend away in a big city with an old neighbor of mine (yes...female). We spent 2 nights there. One of the nights we went to a bar and had a blast. Guys buying us drinks, showing interest, and paying attention. I was really enjoying the attention part of it, particularly since the 2 men who asked me to leave with them were 24 and 32 -- more than 10 years younger than me. That's an ego boost. They knew I was married, I had on my ring and was not out to get laid. But I did have fun and enjoyed the company.

I can see how lonely women can get wrapped up in this kind of thing...it was fun! It made me feel good about myself, knowing SOMEONE was interested. Our husbands need to be that someone though. One thought that went through my mind that night was "maybe I should give this guy my cell phone so he can talk to my husband and tell HIM what he wanted to do to me....."

I do think this is dangerous, and could be playing with fire, just like that lady's friend.

P.

She makes an excellent point, in that men often mistake a woman’s expression of having fun as a “green light” that isn’t there, and things get out of hand and she gets hurt. It’s also not uncommon for a woman to go out for a drink with friends and get swept off her feet by some stranger, and in the throes of attraction does things that both she and you will have a hard time living with once she wakes up and realizes what she’s done (or even the thoughts she has while she is resisting the temptation), and there is no amount of blaming and finger-pointing that can fix such a problem.

She also points out that she (and in truth, every woman) wants her husband to be the one she has fun with and who makes her feel pretty, sexy, appreciated, and special. Think about this, guys…

We marry for life, they marry for life. We are afraid of sexually-transmitted diseases, they are afraid of sexually-transmitted diseases. We are afraid of meeting a psycho on a date, they are afraid of meeting a psycho on a date, not to mention being beaten and raped. The majority of us are uncomfortable meeting and trying to date strangers, and so are they, most of them even more than us. When it comes to fidelity, we may not be identical, but we’re a lot more alike than we are different. And something else you need to realize…

Attraction is a biological drive, not a logical one. It’s difficult to mentally override it, and there is a point where it becomes impossible, where a cascade of neurotransmitters in the brain, your brain and her brain, cause inhibition to fail and logic to be faulty, and hence, rational, responsible choice to be impossible and self-validation, no matter how self-destructive the behavior, to become standard operating procedure.

And again, all the finger-pointing and blaming in the world will not fix what happens if either of you get to this point. It is not a matter of morality, but of chemistry.

Whether you think it’s fair, moral, or anything else is irrelevant. The simple fact is that when you’re in a committed relationship, if you expect fidelity you have to do what is necessary to facilitate it. So does she. If you’re bored, it’s because she’s letting you down, and if she’s bored, it’s because you are letting her down. You can argue about that until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the simple fact that that’s how the world – and the human mind – works, so you’re only choice is to deal with it or try to survive the aftermath.

Would you care to wager on which choice is easier and has the greatest chance of success? I thought not…

And to those of you who are sitting there saying, “He talks too much about boredom, it’s just not that big a deal,” let me be quite blunt: boredom kills. Do you think for one second that people who do things that significantly endanger their life do so because they really enjoy it? Does the man who jumps out of a perfectly good airplane do so because he knows there’s no chance of parachute failure? Does the guy who drives a minivan or a station wagon as fast as it will go do so because he really needs to get somewhere that fast? Does the social drinker who always ends up drunk and in trouble at parties do so because they like the taste of the booze and like waking up in strange places, or in jail?

No, they do it because they’re bored and looking for something, anything, that will give them even a moment’s relief. Just as the man or woman who gets too little attention at home takes a chance on wrecking their marriage and their life by carrying on an affair. Nobody gets away with it. Even those few who don’t get caught still have to deal with the guilt and the fear of getting caught – psychopaths and sociopaths notwithstanding, of course. (People with no moral compass have no fear of getting caught at anything because whatever they got caught at would be somebody else’s fault by default.) So before you’re too quick to say, “It can’t happen to me,” bear in mind that everybody else who has ever been on either end of an affair “knew” that it couldn’t happen to them, too.

So what do you say? Are you ready to step up and make things better? Or are you going to keep your head in the sand and keep telling yourself that what I’m talking about is something OTHER men and women do, and something OTHER men and women have to deal with. Do you realize that you are implying with such nonsense that neither you nor your wife is human?

You are human, the top of the food chain on this entire planet, and that’s something to aspire to, not apologize for. You’re the top of the food chain because you have the power of volitional choice, the ability to think and make a decision that improves your life, making us the only species of life that continues to develop past the point required for bare survival. We don’t have to wait for evolution to raise our standard of living. We can do it ourselves, simply by making good choices and acting upon them!

And more to the point, you can do it yourself.

So start here. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Read it, put it to use, and make the success that those before you are enjoying now your own. Then you’ll know, beyond any doubt, that if your wife leaves the house, she’s going to be in a hurry to get back to you, and you’re going to enjoy having her there.

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

Ignoring the Woman in Your Marriage or Relationship -- We're Not In Dateland Anymore, Toto!

You may have heard it said by a dating guru that ignoring a woman is a good way to create attraction. This is another one of those places where the rules change when you enter a committed relationship – and most certainly when you get married – and you’d better know the rules if you expect to succeed.

I got a response from one of the more active of you, whom I’ll call Kevin to protect his identity, which brings up a HUGE point. His letter, referring to an excerpt from yesterday’s newsletter regarding the “inner child,” discussing whether the display of your inner child makes your wife want to mother you or “mount” you:

Hi David....Just read below:

"We've talked about the "baby talk" thing that couples do. BIG no-no. How about inferior positions during intimacy, like lying your head on her shoulder? This is what a child does when he doesn't feel good, is it not? Don't do it, EVER; being the protector is your role as far as the two of you are concerned, not hers"

How coincidental!! My wife and I were sitting together watching tv last night and here lately she has been initiating this hand holding for about the past 2 weeks whereby she had not been. That’s fine with me because I think she is realizing her intimacy has been non-existent. But for some reason, last night she says to me,”You can lay your head right here and patting her shoulder".....Where did that come from!!! David, I did not lay my head there...I basically ignored the comment.

Kevin

“Kevin” was wise not to put his head on her shoulder, but ignoring her comment was a VERY bad move! My response:

Hey, Kevin!

The hand-holding is likely because you've stepped up the attractive behavior and have her seeking intimacy, which is great. BUT! NEVER ignore a woman. That's a recipe for disaster. When she invites you into an inferior position, it's not likely that she realizes that she's doing something dangerous, and is simply trying to nurture you. Instead, turn it around on her. Invite her to put her head on your shoulder, or to snuggle up under your arm and get closer, or even sit on your lap. That builds the intimacy and bonding without putting you in the position of a child, and doesn't telegraph that most negative of signals that ignoring her telegraphs: "I don't want your love and nurturing."

Take care,
David

Now let’s be clear here, before somebody shoots himself in the foot. What the dating gurus say about getting a woman to approach you for a date and keeping her interested by ignoring her a little after you first meet, being a little slow to return phone calls, and making a show of independence is all correct, IN THE CONTEXT OF TRYING TO GET A DATE AND PLAYING HARD-TO-GET, especially the first few dates after the first one. But we’re not talking about dating here, are we?

Not just no, but “hell no!” We’re talking about a woman you’re at least committed to if not married to, and we’re beyond the stage of trying to create curiosity, intrigue, initial attraction, etc. Love is now involved, her nurturing mechanism has been engaged, and you have to heighten and sustain attraction without damaging that other most crucial part of a happy relationship, love. That’s why the rules change; that love, and the trust, loyalty, friendship, and respect it engenders must be protected.

In the interest of heightening attraction, it is true that you must provide some mystery and fun, as well as maintain a strong, independent attitude, and making yourself scarce from time to time and playing a little “hard-to-get” can do great things to spice things up a bit. But you never, EVER shut out a woman that loves you by ignoring her, especially when she is offering something nurturing. Pardon the religious metaphor, but if “blasphemy” could be committed against a woman, that would be how you do it, and the penalty can be as severe as what is described in the Christian Bible: being utterly forsaken and cast into Hell translates to being divorced and punished mercilessly thereafter here in the world. Hard to get is best accomplished by teasing, not ignoring her when she speaks.

There is nothing wrong with a woman wanting to nurture you; indeed, everything about it is right, if you’ve earned it. But women have no more cause to think about such things as having your head on their shoulder as you do, until their attention has been called to it, at least. They certainly don’t want to kill their own attraction for you. But if you want to see a woman get hurt and angry, try telling her that you’re not going to put your head on her shoulder because it’s infantile one time. One time will be enough to show you that you don’t ever want to do it again.

Instead, do as I told Kevin: take the lead, as a man is supposed to do. Recognize that she is trying to give you the greatest gift she has to give, her nurturing energy, and accept it, but in a more appropriate manner by taking action that triggers attraction instead of maternal drive. Give her the smile she’s always looking for, and a “c’mere, you!” as you pull her up close and snuggle her up as only a manly man can do with his wife.

Remember, as always, that these are biological triggers we are talking about here, not logical decisions. How she sees you triggers involuntary responses. The only logical part is your logical choice to make sure that the triggers that get tripped are the ones who make you the manly man who loves, excites, and protects her, not the ones that trigger the maternal urges to feed you and change your diaper.

I’ll be saying this until I die: It’s not rocket science. Even the biology part of it is simple. You don’t need to know the names of the neurotransmitters and other chemicals that make this happen or the order in which the cascade occurs, or how any of this came to be that way. It’s interesting if you’re into that level of detail, but all you need to know to make it work is just the highest level of cause-and-effect relationships, the level at which you know with 100% certainty that if you display primal male behavior, she will respond with primal female behavior. You just need to know what that behavior is and allow yourself the experience. (And I say “allow” because it is automatic and natural, and in fact must be deliberately suppressed for it to not happen, at least until a whole lot of bad programming gets embedded in your head.)

The same thing goes for communicating with a woman. You don’t have to memorize millions of scripts to get you through untold myriad contingencies. Knowing (and following!) three simple rules that any fourth-grader could follow is all that it takes to do it right, both listening and speaking, so that you never again hear those most frustrating words, “You NEVER listen to me!” when the simple fact is that you listen, but don’t have a clue what she’s saying, and know that she’s just going to roll her eyes and say, “SEE! You should just know!” when you ask her what she means.

So do you know? Even if you “think” you do, why take that chance when somebody’s already proven how to understand, know, and do all of this? Are you a guy who likes to get things right the first time? Or are you the one who ignores the instructions and blames somebody else when the bicycle you bought with “some assembly required” comes out looking a time machine instead of a bicycle, and then blames the manufacturer instead of your own failure to follow instructions? If so, here’s a big hint: blaming somebody else for your failure gets you one thing: a guarantee of repeated failures.

You know what? I was about to close this post, but let’s talk about something I rarely mention anymore: spending money, and a big difference in how the average man and the average woman does it. The average woman is such a bargain hunter that she will drive across town to buy something that she doesn’t need because she can buy it at half-off the regular price, just in case she might need it later. Some men will do this too, especially with tools, but…

The average man, especially a man who gets things done, will pay extra if it will save him time and effort. John Alanis once gave a brilliant example of buying a $150 office chair and spending an extra $10 to get it preassembled, because that $10 would save him hours of dragging out tools, sorting through the little bags of easily lost hardware, bruising or cutting knuckles when wrenches or screwdrivers slipped, etc. The idea being that there are times when spending very little money can give you a huge benefit.

This is one of those times. It took me and a sizable group of people (of both sexes) several man-years to figure out how all this works, and we did figure it out, and proved it by using it ourselves and checking the results and further refining the information. The amount of money we’re talking about wouldn’t buy you a good meal and cocktails for two in any restaurant I’ve ever been in, but it will buy you a lifetime of a relationship and marriage that most people would be thrilled to call a honeymoon.

So do you want to spend months or even years trying to put this together yourself, and ending up with a broken heart and a broken bank account instead of skinned knuckles, or do you want to throw what amounts to “chump change” at it (especially when you consider that the average divorce in the United States costs $27,000 according to recent surveys), get the right information, and go right to work and have your success quickly, and know how you got there so you can sustain it?

It’s up to you, but I can tell you from having been there that I would have much rather read this book and used it than been the one to write it. And I would have, too, if it or anything close to it had been available when I needed it, but it wasn’t. So if you want to take advantage of the easier path, the one I didn’t have, 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. Don’t waste it trying to reinvent the wheel, or just wishing you had the wheel.

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 only 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

Confessions of Bored Women: Everybody Gets Hurt – Stop It from Killing Your Relationship or Marriage!

A woman writes in response to the contest some ladies were having in a previous issue. As she confesses, it’s not just the men that get hurt when women get bored and out of control.

Well Guys, I thought I was going to be able to leave this topic alone for at least a week or two, but when this letter came in, I knew it couldn’t wait. I’ve seen too much of this myself, and I’m sure many of you have seen it, too because it is so common. However, I have to ask how many people ever stop to consider the underlying cause of this scenario or the ultimate impact until it’s pointed out to them. Meet Ursula:

Dear David,

After reading your newsletter from the woman that told you all about the contest her and her friends used to have, I have one of my own. I never thought I would be sharing this with anyone, but I figured if she was able to open up enough to share maybe I should as well.

I had a group of friends that I liked to go out with and we really got crazy at times. We did not call what we did a contest, but we did place bets at the beginning of each night on who would come out on top.

We would go out at night for a few drinks and in the parking lot we would set the rules of the game. The game was to see who at the end of the night had the most phone numbers of the men we met in the clubs.

We’d pick a bar, club or whatever you want to call it and see who could get the attention of the most men in the short time we spent there. We’d have them buy us drinks and pretend to be interested, but in reality we were only after the phone numbers. Once the number was obtained we no longer had any interest in that man and moved on to the next poor sucker.

I know you may be saying “what a terrible thing to do,” but to us it was just something sort of fun to do. Having anything more than watching the kids and cleaning the house or sitting on the couch while our husbands hogged the remote and channel surfed was an improvement. We had no interest in ever using the phone numbers or ever seeing the men again. They were just a tool in the pursuit of attention, relief from the sheer torment of our boredom, and of course winning the bet for the evening. We never gave out our numbers or even fake ones. We would tell them that if they wanted to see us again we would call them and for the most part it worked.

In the beginning I loved the attention and that just fueled the fire to continue, but it was so wrong. The means by which we obtained their number was up to each woman and sometimes it did get into some pretty heavy sex talk. Making them believe that they were going to get something that never was going to happen was common. Men were waiting for a call that was never going to come and the whole time we were laughing and counting the money or whatever the prize was for the night.

When the evening would end we would all meet up and show all the numbers we had collected, laughing the whole time about how stupid most men were to fall for such a trick. The truth is we were the ones that were pathetic, thinking that no one would be getting hurt, it was just a game, right? Wrong. It was people’s lives we were messing with and no one has that right.

The game finally came to an end when my best friend was beaten and raped in a parking lot by man whom she had played earlier. She’d promised him they’d meet later at her place and he waited in the parking lot to follow her home, and got furious when she said she wasn’t going home. She was in the hospital for three days and still isn’t over the trauma. So it’s not just men who get hurt when we get bored and out of control.

As I look back and to tell the truth, not that long ago we were looking for the attention we were not getting from the one that said he loved us. Some had husbands and some boyfriends, but we all had someone. I do not know if any of the other ladies shared this with their loved one or are still living on the thoughts of what we did, but I did come clean with my husband and we have moved on now.

Our relationship is not yet perfect, but we are working on it every day now, thanks to your book, to make it as perfect as it can be, and after just two weeks it’s like I’m living with a different man. I no longer go out with those friends, and we seldom speak except by phone. Now I spend my time with my husband, thankful for each precious moment we share together. With the attention he gives me now I do not have time or desire for games and it was worth everything to me just to have him back and s