Can a Man Work TOO Hard? He Can Certainly Work Hard Enough to Kill His Marriage!

Sometimes a man can do the right things for the right reasons but miss one little detail and have the world of his relationship or marriage come crashing down around him. Learn what REALLY needs to be done for your committed relationship or marriage, and what she REALLY wants, before it’s too late. You don’t want to end up getting punished for trying to do the right thing just because you didn’t know what the “right thing” is…

This lesson is a little longer than usual, but it’s one of those real-world issues that we all encounter sooner or later that never quite work out the way we want them to unless we’re thoroughly prepared, so please indulge the extra text and I’m sure you’ll find it worth the time and effort. I’ve been out of town for a few days, and when I came back, I found a good friend in an absolute crisis that any man can find himself in with no warning whatsoever. I think we’re going to be able to get his problem under control pretty quickly, and I want to share this scenario with you to try to ensure that you never find yourself in this same predicament.

My friend, Danny, is about my age (mid forties), worked in a factory from the time he graduated high school, and really applied himself and was promoted through the ranks to middle management in a large company that bankrupted recently. There wasn’t a position immediately available for him anywhere, and his finances were built around a six-figure income, so he ended up taking two lesser-paying full-time jobs to keep his kids in the private school they were attending and to keep his wife from having to put achievement of her Master’s degree on hold.

One of those jobs requires roughly 45 hours per week running a Quizno’s sub shop franchise, and the other requires another 45 hours per week working as an assistant branch manager for a local bank. That’s a ninety-hour work week; do a little math here. Assuming eight hours sleep per night, there are 112 waking hours in a seven-day week, and he’s working 90 of them, and commuting another eight hours or so, plus about six hours personal time during the week to get ready to go to work. That’s 104 of 112 hours, leaving eight hours per week for meals, chores, paying the bills, bathroom breaks, etc., and time with his wife and kids has to come out of that remaining eight hours as well. What do you think is going on there?

Ladies, tell the guys, all together now, on three…ready?

One…two…three…SHE’S BORED! That’s right, Guys! He’s not there stirring up attraction for her, and she’s getting antsy as hell, and may not even realize it. As you would know if you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” there’s going to be a drama attack coming soon, because if he’s not creating positive drama for her by keeping her amused and her tension bled off, the tension will build until some little insignificant thing is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and she lays into him with something really ridiculous to get him to exhibit the alpha male behavior that excites her by not taking the fit that she’s about to pitch as if he deserves it, which brings us to the crisis…

Again, Danny is in his mid-forties, and there’s a 16-year-old girl there who has his same positive, hard-working, competence- and achievement-oriented attitude, and he’s pretty much taken her under his wing and started grooming her for an assistant management position, much to the chagrin of two other highly competitive but terribly mediocre older coworkers. They retaliate by calling the owner and telling him that his store manager is getting him set up for a sexual harassment lawsuit by flirting with the sixteen-year-old employee, one that he is in fact treating like a daughter, not a girlfriend or “prospect.”

Now, in order to steal a little extra time with each other, Danny’s wife picks him up at his day job and drives him to his evening job at Quizno’s (restaurant managers often take the evening shift because it’s busier and leave the assistant manager to handle the less demanding day shift). Earlier that day, she had gone by Quizno’s to pick up his paycheck to make a deposit on her way home from one of her classes, and guess who is working the counter? Yepper, the two ne’er-do-wells who started the rumor. You couldn’t tempt fate any harder than that!

They told Danny’s wife that the owner had been advised of possible sexual misconduct on her husband’s behalf! (They also conveniently left out the part that they had been the informants.) Now, his wife knows that there is absolutely no time or energy for him to be having an affair, and has seen him working with this girl, and is entirely secure in having him work with her the way he does, and they’ve openly discussed it in the past; it was Danny’s wife that had come up with the idea of grooming her for management. However…

By this time, she’s getting so lonely that her need for excitement and seeing Danny standing tall has put her emotions on auto-pilot, so when she picked him up from the bank, he’s had a bad day and says to her, “Hi Honey! How’s your day been?” to which she replied – while vigorously bobbing her head from side to side – “It was just freaking FINE until I stopped at Quizno’s today to get your damned paycheck!” What the hell are you doing messing around with a sixteen-year old and putting your job and our family at risk???”

Understand, all Danny had to do at this point was calmly but very firmly say, “Look, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, so you’re going to have to back up and fill me in. You know as well as I do that I haven’t been messing around with anybody. Even if I wanted to there’s no time with me working two jobs, and you’ve got nine years of history in our relationship to tell you how I feel about us and about affairs, so calm down and tell me what’s going on so we can figure out what’s really happened and what needs to be done to fix it.” BUT! He didn’t know that, and started acting lost and apologetic – wussy! – which often actually comes off as a confession when a woman hears it. So the drama continued…

She dropped him off at work after giving him a royal earful, and I happened to stop by to see how things were going not too long afterwards. He explained what had happened, and we got the owner off his back with a phone call (I know the owner and had been helping Danny to groom the girl by passing her self-improvement materials, and could vouch for the events), but the big problem was his wife. He was scared to death that they were going to have a serious problem.

I finally got him to understand what was really happening by telling him about “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” the research that went into it, and the experiences of the readers so he’d have confidence in what I was telling him, and then explained about a woman’s need for attraction and how drama is used to fill in the void between the attraction level she needs and the one she has, rather like ego fills in the void between the self-esteem level one needs and the level they have. So when she showed up and was bobbing her head and asking if he’d “gotten his sorry ass fired,” etc., he said, “Look, I told you I had no idea what had happened, and if you had told me what you heard instead of raising Cain in the car on the way here, I could have been better-prepared to deal with this when I got here.

“I’ve talked to the owner, explained what had happened, and David came by and talked with him, too. He was aware of the training and suspected this was a ploy from the beginning because he has full confidence in me, as you should have, so the problem is history. Tomorrow I’m going to fire the two people who started this, and temps from another store will be showing up tomorrow morning to take over their jobs. I’ve called the bank and made the necessary arrangements to come in late so I can handle this, so there is no problem with anyone but you, and you can stop being a problem any moment now.

“I realize that I’ve been spending a lot of time here at your expense, but you and I both know that we need the money, so we’re going to have to work together to get past this. That means you are going to have to tell me when you start feeling the strain so I can spend some time with you to keep things from building up to this point again. The only other choice is for me to quit one of these jobs and you put your classes on hold so we can have more time, and we’ve already decided that was the wrong thing to do, so are you going to work with me on this or are we going to be at each others’ throats until the job I want comes through?”

That was all she needed to see and hear. She was all over him, apologizing, cooing, cuddling, smiling, and just thrilled because that alpha male she loved was in front of her doing that alpha male thing she loves and needs so much. Problem solved.

Danny is now reading “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” to keep this from happening again, and he says his wife is going through it with him. They’ll get through this, not just stronger, but knowing and enjoying each other on a much deeper level. You too can go through this exercise without having to go through an(other) episode like this. Join Danny and the rest in taking charge of your relationship and your life by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com and getting your copy today, because life really is too short to spend it learning from your own mistakes when you could learn from those of others much quicker and easier and spend the extra time to make and learn from successes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this one:

Hi David,

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

I remain your devoted fan,

Cordially,
Ron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When NOT to Apologize to Keep a Relationship and Marriage Going

Have you ever wondered why you can say something that to you seems entirely benign or even complimentary to a woman and she blows up in your face? Have you ever wished you could see it coming and head off the fight that you know is going to follow? Here are the answers you seek…

Women are going to take things you say the wrong way from time to time; it’s a foregone conclusion. They’re also going to verbally test you to see if you’ll buckle under pressure by spitting a little venom to see if you’ll get emotional (and wuss out or start a fight) or whether you’ll keep your head and act like a man. In any case, it doesn’t have to become a fight if you know what to do, and apologizing isn’t it…

It usually starts with something benign, or even complimentary. Most of us have had the following conversation:

Him: “Gee honey, that diet you’re on is really working! You look great!”

Her: “Oh! So I was a fat, disgusting cow before? Thanks, you asshole!”

Then the fight starts…

Him (somewhat apologetically): “Wait, no, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. I was complimenting you because I know that dieting takes a lot of will power and it’s hard, and I’m proud of you for going through all that.”

Her: “Oh, so I’m a fat, disgusting cow because I have no willpower now, huh? I make a little effort to try to look better for you, and you have to put me down! You’re an insensitive creep! I don’t know why I even try to put up with you!”

…And it pretty much goes to Hell in a hand basket from there, right? So what happened, anyway? And what can you do to fix it? Or more importantly, PREVENT it?

Many women are generally insecure about a lot of things. They’ve been hammered for so long to be insecure about their youth and appearance that most today probably don’t even remember why it’s an issue, and most men never knew...

It goes back to the days when women weren’t accepted in the work place and generally only ended up owning businesses if they inherited them, couldn’t get a decent job, and hence, marrying well was their only real means of survival. They had to compete with each other not just for a man, but for a livelihood, and were kept on the defensive. And that’s not been that long ago.

As women began to be more liberated and make their own way in the world, the fashion and beauty industries continued to keep the pressure on them, inundating them with advertising to foster insecurity and feed their competitiveness to the point that even the most successful and fiercely independent women still have attacks of challenged self-esteem far more frequently that what you would expect, or they want to tolerate.

This constant pressure keeps many women, as tough as they are, teetering on the brink of feeling really crappy about themselves, and from time to time, when fatigue, illness, stress, etc., build up and weaken them enough, they fall into a mode where no matter what you say, they are going to take it in the worst way possible. Emotional energy builds up, testosterone falls and inhibition with it, and a blow-off needs to happen, and any thing that triggers an emotional response, like touching a hot button around one of her insecurities, is going to trigger the eruption.

This is another one of those things you’re just going to have to understand and accept about women if you are going to live with one. It doesn’t make them stupid, or inferior, or weak-willed, or anything like that. We as men go through the same thing, except for most of us, it’s less frequent because we normally don’t live in an environment of people trying to make us feel insecure about ourselves.

I say most of the time because sometimes parents, partners, children, or acquaintances can become depressed and try to make themselves feel better by putting us down, and we have a few advertisements for things like E-D drugs and hair restoration digging at our self-esteem, but for the most part, we usually don’t get in this state until we have a string of catastrophes get to us, like losing a loved one, a job, and a home all in a very short period of time. Believe it or not, it takes that kind of pressure to make the average woman do this, it’s just that she’s awash, all day ever day, in things trying to bring her down so the events that end up being the proverbial “last straw” don’t have to be as traumatic for them as what they end up having to be for us.

And as you’ve noticed in some of my other newsletters, this can also be brought on by a need for drama to vent pent-up emotional energy, as well as just be a test to see if you will wuss out and play into the drama or stand up like a man and reel her in. (Multiple causes, same predicament, and luckily for you, the same response is required to get through the predicament in good standing, so pay attention!)

Now that this is hopefully in perspective, how do you handle it? First, early detection is a must. You may have noticed right before one of these explosions that she suddenly becomes quiet or gets a puzzled or stressed look on her face that turns into pain and anger. It may only take seconds for her to explode, or she may put it off for as long as a couple of days before it finally gets the best of her. You cannot wait for the explosion to fix this.

Nor can you invite her to explode in your face with a question like, “What’s wrong?” When she’s in this state, “What’s wrong?” comes across as “What’s wrong with you?” and that’s not a question you want an insecure person responding to, because whoever you are, everything will suddenly become your fault because you have just volunteered to be the outlet for her overload.

So what DO you do? What is the “magic move” that calms the storm before it breaks over your head?

When you see a seemingly inexplicable change for the worse in expression, tone, or demeanor, don’t wait for her say anything about it. Take the initiative – leadership is attractive, remember? – and say something about it right then and there. What do you say?

No, you don’t apologize. Nor do you start a fight to try to back her down because she most likely won’t. Besides, leaders don’t fight. They lead. Take the lead:

“Okay, I see from your [expression/voice/demeanor] that you didn’t take something the way I was intending for you to take it. I was [trying to pay you a compliment/simply making a joke/simply making an observation] that was in no way intended to be disrespectful or hurtful to you. If you have taken what I said to mean anything but that, then you need to back up and ask whatever questions I can answer to clarify it for both of us instead of remaining upset and then getting angry and we end up fighting.”

If you can spot the sign that something came across the wrong way quickly enough and say this with the confidence of a man insisting on being understood instead of fighting or sounding like a wuss trying backtrack and wiggle his way out of a confrontation, she will gladly comply and get things straightened out.

Women like to see a man take the lead in a touchy situation like that and work it out for the best. What they don’t like are men who wuss out and start apologizing without knowing what they are apologizing for or that get really weasely and look apologetic while trying to convince them that they were “just kidding.” They also don’t like men who see things starting to go the wrong way and instead of trying to fix the problem, bristle and growl and try to bully the problem away, using control instead of leadership to get them out of the situation instead of fixing the situation.

All you have to do is speak as if you expect to be heard and understood and you will interrupt the chemical rush that would normally move things in the direction of a fight, and probably help her to feel better about herself as well, because you were indeed sensitive enough to see that she had taken something the wrong way and strong enough to lead her away from an embarrassing and destructive blow-up over something that didn’t happen.

The one thing that will help you the most to pull this off is to be truly attentive when speaking with your partner. Most women don’t multitask the way we do, and they really resent it when we don’t maintain constant (or at least near-constant) eye contact with them when we’re speaking with or listening to them. (Women multitask, but they suspend multitasking when it conflicts with anything that is a social exchange of any kind, prioritizing eye contact and being polite above getting something accomplished, where we will speak to someone while holding our focus on our work or something else we’re doing and think nothing of it.)

The simple act of giving her your undivided attention as you converse will go a long way toward boosting her self-esteem, and will help elevate her mood a bit and keep her from being so quick to think that you are being insensitive, but it also has the added advantage of making sure that you notice as quickly as possible any change in her demeanor, expression, tone, body language, or anything else that can be a clue that she’s having a problem with what she heard.

Not only will she notice and appreciate it when you give her your undivided attention and make the extra effort to maintain eye contact, she’ll also notice that you don’t usually do this with others, and it will make her feel that much more special. Incidentally, the same thing goes for daughters – they’re women in training, right?

Men who truly know how to effectively communicate with their partner can literally go decades without a fight. One couple in our test group has been married since 1944 and claim to have not had a fight since their 20th anniversary in 1964, an argument that came up at their anniversary party over the appearance of an uninvited (and unwanted) guest that got out of hand. That’s 63 years of marriage and 43 years since their last fight. How did they do it? And how do they keep doing it?

They were well-matched and share very similar values (as well as valuing each other more highly than anyone else in their life, including their children) and compatible tastes. They learned over the course of many years how to communicate with each other so they could work things out instead of fighting about them. And Mason, the husband, is a master at creating attraction for his wife, and at 85 years old (and her at 81) they are still having sex at least every other day. Wouldn’t you love to live a life like that with your wife?

You can! Anybody can. Well, maybe not with YOUR wife, but with their own. ;-) Seriously, the secrets of their success and thousands of other couples, not to mention what women really want and what makes them tick, is all contained in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." You don’t have to spend twenty years figuring out whether you’re married to the right woman and learning how to communicate with her, nor a lifetime wondering how to flip her switches and turn her back into that wild woman she was before you married her. A few hours to read and understand this book and start practicing what it teaches you are all it takes, and no, it’s not a lot of work. It’s a lot of FUN!

Got a few hours to spend making the rest of your life a honeymoon? Sure you do! So jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" now, and get started. Or would you rather keep fighting for no apparent reason? Nah, life’s too short for that, right?

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

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

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

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

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

David...I read your lesson about “Comfortably Unhappy” [See this article in the archive to catch up]

and...

Do you realise that was me for a long time before I contacted you, comfortably unhappy? You could use me as a perfect example of how not to do what I did and waste years of your life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather

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

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

They don’t like crises that cause major changes in their life (like divorce!) any more than we do, even though you will see them craving the adrenaline it causes to combat their eternally-tormenting boredom. It is foolish, not to mention catastrophic, to let a little drama convince you that the average woman would destroy her household and her marriage just to get a little adrenaline rush. According to the best information I’ve been able to find, only one in two thousand is that insanely damaged. (But a woman in a foundationless relationship or marriage will, because she's really not risking anything she wants to keep, so a compatibility check is always in order when there's a problem.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Thank You Notes with Great Lessons on Relationships and Marriage

Talk about extreme! There are even some great lessons to be learned in some of the “thank you” notes I got from some of the "King Arthur and the Witch" contest winners! Check them out:

In case you’re curious, here’s a couple of interesting excerpts from “Thank you” notes from the winners of the King Arthur and the Witch contest, in which you’ll notice a common thread:

Hi David,

Thought I'd write and say thanks for my prize. I've started reading your book and it's exactly what I felt was the missing piece in my 'studies' - And It turns out you used about 90% of the same experts as I have been for the last few months.

Much appreciated,

Karl.

Incidentally, after my comment about Karl’s period after his signature being a mark of a confident man, a reader asked me if not putting a period after my name meant that I was not confident. No, it doesn’t. It just means that I adhere rigidly to the rules for formatting correspondence, as everyone should. ;-)

Hi David!

Thanks for the gifts and I am reading "THE Men’s Guide..." now. Boy I should have gotten this some time ago! I have some of David D.'s stuff, John's stuff, Shelley's stuff and get Mary Jo's newsletter. I also have F.J. Shark's Jerk book and have looked at other folk's goodies as well. You could say I'm a lot like you in the sense I have this intense drive to go after things I'm interested in if they catch my attention and fascination.

I have been in 2 marriages of about 8 years each and decided I've got to find out what is really going on before I ever do this again. The pain is just too much. Now I'm learning, observing and watching and yes practicing different things. Yes I have "seen the light" in the sense I was way too much the wussy man trying to please and take care of my little princess.

I guess the big light came on when I finally started understanding, like the story, women want a man who can be the man and be a partner at the same time. Thanks Again BIG TIME!!

Time to get back to reading so I can flush out some more garbage and replace it with pearls.

Take very good care and keep up the truly special "work" you do.

Thanks David,

Dave

Did you notice the recurring theme? They’ve been reading advice from the dating gurus and others, but it didn’t come together until they read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" because the rules are different in committed relationships than when you’re dating. The basic principles are the same, but the definitions and applications change, radically in some regards.

If you’re in a committed relationship, stick with me. If you’ve been in a committed relationship and trying to figure out what happened so you don’t repeat the mistakes, stick with me. If you’ve never been in a committed relationship that worked and you’re dating now, use the dating gurus advice to meet people, and use the evaluation section of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" to help you choose from among the many candidates you’ll be dating. After all, dating is a time of finding and exploring options, not homing in on one option and trying to convince them and yourself that they are “the one.”

Forewarned is forearmed, and as you have seen if you’re past puberty, there are countless pitfalls in a relationship, but you can be ready for every one of them. Whether you are in a committed relationship or wanting to be, you need to know what’s in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you should go to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now and download it. The Boy Scouts have it right: BE PREPARED!

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

Competition and Cooperation: How to Destroy or Build a Great Relationship and Marriage

Committed relationships thrive on cooperation, not competition. Is competition killing your relationship? Would you recognize it if it were? Believe it or not, many don’t, because it’s not always obvious…

I hope you’re enjoying your day. I had to run some errands a while ago, and everywhere I went I noticed couples in heated competition, arguing about purchases, project details, child-rearing issues (one couple was standing in the middle of a shopping mall concourse yelling at each other over whether their 14-year old daughter was going to date a college-age young man!) and it was so painfully obvious that if these couples were focused on WHAT was right instead of WHO was right they’d be living much happier lives.

A committed relationship or marriage requires two people to coexist, preferably in the pursuit of mutual goals, or at least compatible goals that conform to shared values. That’s what being well-matched is all about; and what gives you something to talk about and work together to achieve, without which the relationship eventually falls apart, being unable to withstand the pressure of the vacuum that forms between the two people.

This requires cooperation, which in turn requires that you have compatible values; otherwise, the two of you will be competing to force your values to be the standard by which the whole household conducts its business. Let’s look at an extreme example just because the extreme ones are the easiest to see and take the least explaining:

Imagine a capitalist and an altruist are married. The capitalist will make decisions based upon what promotes his or her well-being and that of their family, while the altruist will make decisions based upon the ideal that he or she is his or her neighbor’s keeper, seeking to give away everything that the capitalist wants to use for the family.

Their value systems are stark opposites, and therefore there can be no cooperation; the directly opposing value systems cause the couple to constantly compete to try to live within the constraints of their value system, which will destroy a relationship every time because there is no win/win scenario for the majority of decisions they have to make, and compromise fulfills nobody. The bottom line is that they never should have entered into the committed relationship because it was doomed before it ever started.

HOWEVER…

Not everything is a question of values. Two people can have common values and be striving toward a common (or again, at least compatible) goal, but have different ideas about how to achieve it, and all too many couples make the mistake that I’m about to describe, especially when one is creative and one is analytical:

THEY COMPETE OVER WHOSE WAY IS THE RIGHT WAY…

…or whose idea is the right idea, etc. The creative person will incorrectly see the analytical personality as a stifling constraint to their artistic liberty instead of a very valuable filter that can keep them out of trouble and from wasting time, life, and other resources in the pursuit of the unattainable or self-destructive. Conversely, the analytical will often incorrectly see the creative as a flakey pain in the buttocks who is too busy going off on absurd tangents to focus on the issue at hand.

Notice that I said that BOTH are incorrect!

If these people were focused on WHAT was right, and the most efficient and rewarding way to achieve whatever was before them (COOPERATING!) instead of being focused on WHO was right, meaning who’s smarter, who’s in control, who’s getting their way this time, etc. (COMPETING!), the creative could see and be thankful for the analytical’s ability to work through the various options and find the one with the least risk and greatest reward, and the analytical could see that the creative was capable of brainstorming and presenting options that may not occur to the analytical, some of which may be far better for their mutual success.

By taking advantage of their functional differences through cooperation, the couple is brought closer together, seeing each other as complimentary and therefore valuable instead of irritating, building trust and intimacy through cooperation instead of frustration and resentment at having to endure and lose frequent arguments.

The former of these scenarios builds self-esteem, love, trust, respect, and loyalty, while the latter destroys them all. While you would be hard-pressed to put a capitalist and an altruist, an atheist and a zealot, a soldier and a pacifist, etc., under the same roof for any length of time and expect anything but misery and a break-up, putting two people together who have different “brain-wiring” but common goals, values, and interests can actually be a very intense and rewarding relationship instead of a recipe for divorce.

It’s all in the choice to focus on what is right or best and cooperate to identify and do it instead of focusing on who is right or best and having to compete to see who is going to win each battle while both ultimately lose the war, a war that shouldn’t be fought in the first place.

I saw at least fifty couples today in a three-hour period for whom this concept would have been one of several “magic pills” that could have made their obviously strained relationships happy and rewarding. Many of these couples looked like they’d been together for several years (to wit, having a fourteen-year old daughter), and had been miserable for most of that time since they had worn down to the point of no longer trying to paint on a smile in public and opening fire on each other like that, at the top of their voices in the middle of a crowded mall.

Would you have been one of them?

Do you see where you could slowly be becoming one of them?

If so, you don’t have to live that way. Cooperation starts with a CHOICE to cooperate, to know, recognize, and value your partner’s differences as something that can benefit the two of you instead of something that rubs you the wrong way. It requires open, deliberate communication, and a healthy amount of self-esteem, trust and respect – all things that you should have had from the start, and unless you have opposing, competing values, can still be developed much quicker than you might imagine.

To learn how, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get your relationship back on track. You and your partner should be and can be cooperating as partners, not hacking at each other as competitors; life’s too short to spend it competing with the people you live with.

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

Distant Early Warnings Can Help Save Your Relationship and Marriage

Let’s talk about some of the most commonly-missed early symptoms of relationship trouble, and what needs to be done about them.

Like many of you, I grew up in the Cold War era (will politicians never figure out that the vast majority of us, in all nations, don’t care about spreading political and economic ideas around the world and just want to try to get along with our families and our neighbors, and that we’re far more interested in the exchange of goods and information with others and raising our standard of living through those activities than exchanging bullets and bombs and destroying the wealth that generations have worked to build, lowering the standard of living for everyone? Sorry…getting off my stump…), and one of the things we learned about in school was a surveillance system called “The D.E.W. line.”

“D.E.W.” stands for “Distant Early Warning,” and iss basically a line of radar “listening posts” along or near the Artic Circle in Northern Canada that would detect an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) coming over the North Pole (the shortest distance from the launch sites in the former Soviet Union) to strike U.S. targets. Thankfully either they never heard anything coming over, or we never heard about it.

The Soviets had their own version of the DEW Line, and frankly, you should, too. You should look around you and determine what is in your life that could prove as an early warning of impending trouble and allow you to take whatever is necessary to fix the problem before it gets out of hand. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to work out a problem or even shoot down a missile than to bury the remains of a million people and treat another five million for burns, injuries, and radiation exposure, then live with nuclear fallout for a few thousand years, right? The same principle applies to your career and your family life.

I’ll let you address your career observation system on your own, but I can help you to identify early warning signs of relationship problems, and you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s also easier to smooth a few ruffled feathers or even better, tie a string around your finger to remind you of your anniversary than it is to work your way out of a break-up or divorce. It just doesn’t make sense to wait for a catastrophe, hence that old adage: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

So what are some early warning signs of relationship trouble? I’ve been alluding to some of them in the closing paragraphs of a lot of these e-mails, but apparently a lot of you aren’t reading the last paragraph because you know there’s a sales pitch in there somewhere (wink!), and you’ve missed some pretty crucial information as a result. Instead of just listing them all, I’m going to lead you through the thought process of identifying them to help you learn how to construct your own “DEW Line.”

First, women like to talk, a lot, right? They like to discuss feelings and events, and many of them have a powerful drive to give an accounting of the events of their day and the people they interact with, even when the parties don’t know each other and really don’t care. For example, I once had a really great secretary who was also a really great friend, and she would tell me about her cat’s activities and what her elderly father had for dinner the night before, knowing full well that I despised cats because of allergies and didn’t like the way her father brow-beat her, and knew I didn’t want to hear about either of them. It’s a drive that is so powerful that I’ve never seen any proof that it could be overcome.

Their biological wiring compels them to be extremely social and share tons of information, and their need to escape boredom causes them to sift through their own and each other’s experiences looking for relief via adrenaline spikes from the emotional reactions to memories. Most of them don’t know or understand that we men don’t do this, and find much of it truly annoying, especially the drama, so they’re driven to give us big doses of it, too, thinking that we do the same thing for the same reason. So what do you think it means if your wife is talking to you less and less, and has devolved from answering “How was your day, Dear?” with a 20-minute account of everything she did, saw, heard, tasted, felt, thought, etc., to simply “Fine”???

It doesn’t mean that she’s learned that drama annoys you. It means that she thinks that you don’t want to listen to her at all and are asking as a formality because you’ve shut her down in so many other conversations. Women who learn that you find the drama annoying will simply filter out some of the drama, not give you curt, monosyllable answers. Communication is one of the primary ways they seek intimacy, and if she’s not communicating, she’s no longer interested in intimacy with you on any level. See how that works?

How about the bedroom? How often in your life have you ever really been too tired for really great sex? Or had a headache so bad that it would prevent it? I grew up on a farm and have worked my butt off frequently since leaving the farm, and have been too tired precisely once, and that was in my military days when I was injured, hadn’t slept in two days, was dehydrated, and my muscles were so fatigued and stiff that I literally couldn’t stand up. People just don’t get that tired but a few times in their entire life, no matter what’s going on, if they’re even of average health and mobility.

The same goes for headaches, unless there is some kind of migraine or brain tumor issue, or possibly a neck injury. The really bad ones just don’t come that often, and if they do, whomever is suffering them is looking for medical help, not just sitting around complaining, right?

By the way, medical studies have shown that what they call “frequent headache sufferers” have a headache once every two months. Not every night or even several times per week. It’s just not that hard to pop a couple of aspirin or something, and there really aren’t that many people around who prefer the attention they get from the martyrdom of drug-free endurance of a headache so much that they’d actually do it. There’s no logic to it.

When you hear hooves beating the ground, expect horses, not zebras, unless of course you happen to live somewhere in Africa where zebras are more common than horses. That’s a very common way of expressing “Occam’s Razor,” which states that the simplest explanation or solution is most often the best. You could call that one of the laws of the universe with regard to troubleshooting, right up there with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s formula for finding truth, as spoken through Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the possible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.”

So if you’re hearing excuses like that, what does it tell you? What MUST it tell you? That you’re not creating attraction and desire, and it’s just easier to tell a common lie than to hurt your feelings with the truth and deal with the confrontation, the pressure, and the guilt that is likely to follow. Hence, if you’re hearing frequent medically-oriented excuses and not seeing medical bills, somebody’s trying to let somebody off easy.

What if there are no excuses, and just no sex? What if you were “throwing down” (as one of my best friends calls it) 4-7 times per week, and now you’re at once per week, or once per month, or have fallen all the way down to that nasty statistic of once every two months, the average frequency for couples world-wide who have been together more than two years? This one is going to scare the pants off of you, because it’s two-fold…

Why? Because it’s a symptom of a big problem, and in the bigger picture, it’s also a cause of a bigger problem. Decreasing frequency is a symptom of lack of attraction and increasing boredom, and it’s also a cause of non-sexual marital boredom and affairs, the lack of intimacy that destroys solid relationships, and ultimately causes break-ups and divorces. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Marriages seldom break up solely because of sexual infrequency, but they nearly always break up because of the things that cause sexual infrequency and lack of interest, so it’s yet another early warning sign of current problems with bigger ones to come.

By the way, I’m talking about a change in behavior here, not somebody who has had a diminished libido all their life because of low hormone levels. And even then, according to my readers, many people who have had diminished libido, upon gaining love and intimacy with someone, will more often than not seek a hormone supplement or other libido booster from their physician or over the counter. So in the end, there is very likely something that can be done for nearly anyone to help them have physical intimacy with their mate. Men are paying $15-$20 per tablet for prescriptions or some other enhancer, and there are some testosterone supplements that cost less for a whole month’s supply than a single dose of some sort of enhancer. It’s not beyond your reach. But I digress…

What about not talking because there’s nothing to talk about? What does that tell you? If it’s happening frequently, and you’re both finding yourselves driven to outside hobbies and friends and avoiding spending time together doing anything that requires conversation (like one of the few things you do together is watch television or a movie or sit in the same room reading but not discussing what you read), it tells you that now that you’ve come to know each other you have nothing in common to keep the relationship going (common values, common interests, etc.) and may well be so mismatched that you don’t make it.

Look for common ground to give you something to talk about, and if you don’t find any and can’t make any, consider easing out gracefully before you wind up getting frustrated with keeping up pretenses and bored to death because there’s nothing fun, interesting, or important to do together, and can logically discuss what is happening without the interference of being angry with each other over problems that developed and couldn’t be fixed; don’t get into “the blame game.” It’s a lot easier to part friends who acknowledge the common mistake of being incompatible than to fight a war because you’re hurt and frustrated and wanting to punish each other for making you feel “not good enough to change for.” You can’t change who you are to suit someone else any more than someone else can change for your sake.

There are lots of early warning signs because there are many potential pitfalls in committed relationships. Being able to identify the pitfalls and warning signs are a simple matter of knowing what it really takes to make a relationship work, which in turn takes knowing what your partner needs and wants from both you and the relationship. That will require knowing how to communicate effectively with her, which is a lot more complex than simply marrying someone who speaks the same language; a man and woman can say the same words in the same tone of voice and the meanings be very different, even stark opposites.

Yes, it’s pretty much a minefield, but there’s a map through the minefield, called "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you should download your copy at http://www.makingherhappy.com right now, and get your own DEW Line developed and in place, or if the missiles are already inbound, find out how to shoot them down and get yourself into some “intense diplomatic negotiations,” fast!

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

Reader Responses Confirm: Your Diet Can Kill Your Relationship and Marriage

A reader comments about his experience after eliminating soy and the feminizing effects of the estrogen it contains from his diet. In short, he’s feeling like a man again! And other readers confirm that they're feeling better without it.

On July 17, I wrote to you about how soy estrogens have a feminizing effect on men because they tie up testosterone receptors and keep the male sex hormone from making you masculine while enhancing any potential feminine appearance and personality factors. I received the expected ranting and raving from people who feel (but don’t have one iota of scientific evidence) that soy is the ultimate healthful food, and prevents all sorts of diseases, including cancer (which incidentally, numerous scientific studies have proven can be CAUSED by soy estrogens, not prevented by it). However…

I also got several letters in the last two days from men and a woman who have had the good sense to try removing soy from their diet for themselves and see if they notice any difference in their demeanor, appearance, etc., to confirm or contradict what I reported. Here are a few of their notes:

Hi David,

I did as you suggested and stopped drinking the two glasses of soy milk my wife had me drinking every day, and I’m already feeling a lot more like my old self, and specifically, a lot more like the MAN I used to be. I thought getting cloudy-headed and having trouble focusing on tasks, and getting frustrated and fussy over things that didn’t bother me in the past was just old age setting in, even though I’m only 46. My wife has noticed the difference, too, and now she’s beginning to question her vegetarian diet and its effect on our kids. Thanks for the heads-up!

John T.

Hey Dave, [For future reference, I really prefer people don’t call me “Dave” – it’s not all that offensive, it’s just not “me,” if you know what I mean.]

My wife and I have been trying to have another baby, and not having much luck. In fact, we were getting pretty frustrated. After reading your article on soy, we started researching and found that soy has been linked to fertility problems. We’re vegetarians and eat a lot of soy-substitutes for meat products and drink a lot of soy milk, and this has us questioning our choice. However, I want to thank you for the information and to let you know that in following your advice and taking the lead in the research and discussion on the subject and doing the naughty play things you mention, my wife’s acting differently toward me, like sex isn’t just a chore to have the baby. My guess is we owe you a lot, so thanks!

Gary

(Note: birth control pills contain estrogen and progesterone, and estrogen interferes with thyroid and adrenal function that is crucial to fertility in women and lowers sperm count, so soy estrogen interfering with fertility in either gender is not a surprise.)

Hi David,

I was skeptical of your newsletter and of the book you mentioned [“The Whole Soy Story” by Dr. Kaayla Daniel], so I got a copy of the book and in trying to debunk what she says, ended up finding proof of most of what she said before giving up and accepting it as truth. My doctor has been harping at me over elevated homocysteine levels and estrogen levels, and I expect that when I see him next month I’ll see improvement. You may have saved me a heart attack, and I thank you.

Janelle

(It may have saved her from some form of cancer, too, as estrogen is a cellular reproduction hormone and elevated estrogen levels have been causally – not casually -- linked to several types of cancer, especially of the breasts and female reproductive organs.)

So guys, here’s the scoop: Nothing that makes you feminine or unhealthy is going to make you attractive, and soy has proven and is continuing to prove to be a major cause of wussification and feminization of men, along with a whole collection of health problems that studies have linked to soy (while my work is entirely related to relationships, it’s still very valuable information, and I urge you to read it):

1. Elevated homocysteine levels, a crystalline amino acid that erodes blood vessels and causes them to hemorrhage, which is then filled with LDL cholesterol, which acts like radiator “stop-leak” and seals the fissure, but continues to collect and forms plaque as it picks up minerals like calcium from the blood and ultimately, if unchecked, causes a blockage, which can result in heart disease, heart attack, stroke, pulmonary embolus (if the plaque breaks loose and lodges in the lungs, which is often deadly), etc.

2. Cancer, especially of the breasts and reproductive organs

3. Allergies and reduced immunity

4. Thyroid dysfunction (caused by genistein, a major constituent of soy products, which is known to depress the thyroid gland, causing stunted growth, lower intelligence and heart disease, any of which can indeed cause relationship-impeding problems)

5. Malnutrition and digestive problems (many people are allergic to soy, especially soybean oil, which is why potato chips cooked in “Olean” and other modified soy bean oils that supposedly lower fat content causes some people digestive upset.)

6. Nutrient deficiencies, including calcium (vital for bone health and the prevention of osteoporosis, and doctors blindly parrot the propaganda that estrogen-containing HRT helps prevent bone loss when it in fact contributes to it!)

7. Reproductive disorders (another relationship-straining possibility) and infertility (also caused by ingestion of genistein)

8. Cognitive and mental decline (care to bet on whether this could put a damper on a relationship?)

9. Psychosexual problems (high estrogen levels make concentration difficult, and make one “edgy” enough to interfere with libido, as you’ve seen in women who tend to drift to the shopping list and chore lists while in the middle of sex)

I want to be perfectly clear about this: I am not “attacking” soy, and have no agenda, except to report to you things that bona fide scientists and doctors have discovered, proven and reported about something that can have a severe impact on both your relationship and your life together. I’m not in this just to help people light things back up in the bedroom; it takes a healthy sex-life to have a healthy and long-lasting relationship, but it also takes communication, intimacy, love, trust, respect, etc., and good health certainly facilitates all of the above, does it not?

In case anybody is wondering, this whole apparent myth about soy being healthy started in 1995 when a character by name of Dr. James W. Anderson did what is called a “meta-analysis” of soy. Meta-analysis is where someone who can’t conduct their own study and doesn’t know enough about a subject to get a grant or involvement in a bona fide study gathers data from a collection of other studies and renders an opinion based on nothing more than statistical analysis and their interpretation of the findings.

Since those who use meta-analysis don’t know enough about the subject to independently study it directly, they have no way of knowing if the studies they throw into the mix were conducted correctly, are scientifically sound, etc., and bad results often follow as things are either taken out of context or based upon studies that are flawed, merely “suggest” something instead of “proving” it, turn out to be another meta-analysis of other studies, or turn out to be biased by virtue of who paid for the study.

Anderson’s meta-analysis was funded by Protein Technologies International, a major promoter of soy products – a pretty big red flag – but everybody jumped on the band wagon. Since then, Anderson himself has admitted that other studies conducted since 2005 have proven the inaccuracy of his initial study and findings by stating that these other studies have “reported less impressive results.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has also received warnings from its own staff experts about supporting the claims of a statistician, but they were ignored.

Consequently, governments of Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, among others, are issuing warnings against the use of soy formula for infants, especially regarding the effects of genistein. They’re slow to act, as any government is, but hopefully they’ll get around to noticing that it’s bad for adults, too.

In a nutshell, POSSIBLE benefits of soy use are clearly outweighed by PROVEN risks.

And, by the way, have you yet asked yourself whether the soy in your diet might be the reason for those expensive little blue pills you need to perform? Let’s see, raises estrogen, lowers testosterone uptake, interferes with thyroid, which lowers metabolism and available nitric oxide, which those pills are used to increase so that certain muscles are able to contract and hold blood in a particular area…are you getting the picture here?

So there it is, folks. It’s a long, complex story, and I may have provided more detail than many of you care to stomach, but I’ll not apologize for trying to take good care of you and providing facts instead of unsupported opinion and theory. I sell books on improving long-term relationships and counsel individuals and couples to make my living, but I’m here to help you live long and happy lives together, and I’m going to report to you any factual information I encounter that will help you to do that.

Speaking of selling books (big wink!), I’ve got a winner for you. It’s called "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and it covers so much more than attraction; it teaches the thorough evaluation of your relationship and its constituents, what you need to know to truly understand women, their needs, their habits and methods, and how to communicate with them, and how to build attraction for them to spice up your intimate life and protect them from their greatest enemy of all, BOREDOM.

Yes, I said boredom, and if you don’t believe me, just ask one of them! Then download your copy and get started on kicking your relationship up to notches unknown!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do Kids Know About Building a Great Relationship and Marriage That YOU Have Forgotten?

Did you ever notice a couple of teens getting hot and heavy in a public -- or not so public -- place? Ever wish you could go back to those days? You can, if you’ll just let yourself…

Those of you who have read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” understand how and why a small boy knows more about attracting a female than most adult males seem to. Have you ever wondered what else you might learn from children about how to be an adult, or at least how to enjoy being one? Ask Dawn:

Dear David,

I am not sure how to word this so it does not sound like I have been spying on my daughter. The truth is at 16 I do watch her closely, probably a lot more then most parents.

There is one major thing that I have noticed about her and her new boyfriend is how they look and talk to each other. At such a young age they seem to understand many of the things you talk about better then most men who have many more years on them. It just seems so open and honest and that the attraction between the two of them is not only red hot but that it is what as an adult I want in a man.

How can it be they know at their tender age so much about attraction and all the older men I know seem to know nothing?

Dawn

My reply:

Well Dawn, it’s not what they know, it’s what they don’t know. In fact, it’s what they’ve not yet learned: inhibition! Their hormones are raging and their youth and inexperience is making the exploration of themselves and each other exciting, so once they get past the awkwardness of the invitation to the first date and get into each other, they could care less about whether they’ve gained a couple of pounds, they have a little razor stubble, whether the kids might walk through the bedroom door and catch them, what might be going on at work next week, what that noise downstairs might have been, whether the dry cleaning has been picked up, what their friends or family might be doing, or any of the other things that men and women allow to interfere with their “quality time.”

They just let go, and do what comes naturally. Granted, their hormones are pushing them hard, but that’s merely sauce for the goose. When was the last time that you tried it? You say you want that kind of heat and passion, but who’s keeping you from having it, other than yourself? Don’t worry about two pounds you gained during the holidays; when the lights are out or his eyes are closed, he’ll never be able to tell the difference, except you might feel just a little better pulled up close to him; ribs and hipbones jabbing us is a bit distracting. ;-)

I’d just as quickly chastise the men for letting things interfere with passion in this manner. “Lock the damned bedroom door, for crying out loud! Get yourself up to Alpha Male standards, fire that woman up, and get into her and let her get into you like you did when you were teenagers. Worry about what’s going on at work next week when next week gets here, or while you’re at work tomorrow morning. Unless that noise downstairs is followed by a scream, a barking animal, an alarm bell, a crash or explosion, or the sound of an adult voice cursing, it can wait until after you and your partner have enjoyed each other.”

There is no aphrodisiac in the world that will guarantee good sex tonight or tomorrow night (or in the morning!) like good sex last night! Don’t let the world put a damper on your sex life. If you need a little help turning the clock back, go to a drive-in instead of renting a DVD, or get a room in a cheap hotel, not the kind you would rent today, but the kind you rented when you were a teenager and weren’t supposed to be renting a room! Add that seedy, naughty flavor to the mix, and play up the mischief, nostalgia, and “getting away with something” angles. A covert quickie in a public place might be more enjoyable --on occasion -- than the girly dream date with candles and flower petals in the bed or on the mattress. Have fun with it – and each other!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Gentlemen, everywhere you look is something that can help you to revive and enhance your relationship if you know what to look for. Knowing what to look for comes from having that romantic, can-do hero’s attitude and knowing what women want. You don’t have to be young, rich, powerful, or drive a fancy car to get your wife’s attention or any other woman’s attention; you just have to be a man, a REAL man who enjoys living and leading as a man, the man she went crazy over and married.

If you want to keep her attention, you keep her guessing, not at whether you’ll be around tomorrow, or have a job next week, but at what kind of laughter and excitement you’re going to create for her today. Will it be walking into a room like you own it, telling a grand tale, or whisking her off to some fun place or activity? The choice is yours, and she expects you to make it. Indeed, quite often her mental and emotional survival DEPEND on you making it.

Women have affairs because they are bored, not because they don’t love their husbands anymore; lost love comes well after lost attraction, if it comes at all. (And for you ladies reading, the same thing is true of men!) Have you ever heard that bit, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore,”? That “in love” bit is attraction, not love.

All you need to become a master of attraction and supreme boredom-fighter, the confident ultimate male who knows what women, especially his partner, want is contained in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and you procrastinate at reading and using it at your own peril. Get ahead of the curve and stay there by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com and downloading your copy right now, and bring back that passion, intimacy, and honeymoon, because life’s too short to spend it playing catch-up.

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

Don't Find Time, MAKE Time to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

A reader asks how to find some time in a busy schedule to spend with her husband. In her case, and maybe in yours as well, finding time isn’t possible because it just isn’t there to find. When When there’s none to be found, you have to make some!

I love hearing from the women who subscribe to this newsletter as much as the men. Their questions are just as relevant and they prove that women really do want time with their men to be intimate and nurturing and to have some fun. Meet K.:

Hello David,

I have a question for you. My husband and I work together as we own our own construction company. We are together 24 hours a day, and need to find a way that we can spend time together but not as work. It seems like when we get home we are too tired to have any intimate time together and when we are at work we are AT WORK. I want to know how I can separate work from pleasure with him. We don't have much family that we can rely on to take our son, and the one's that we do have that take him are sick right now. So when we need our alone time we want it.

How can we get this?

K

My reply:

Good morning, K!

Under the constraints you’ve listed, you can’t, so you’re going to have to make some changes, at least small ones. You’re going to have to change your priorities to make that time together actually important enough to take it, and then manage your schedule so that you can, no matter what that takes. Maybe until your babysitters get well, you might have to schedule one day a week where the two of you disappear at lunchtime for an hour or longer, to an intimate lunch or a hotel or whatever, or schedule a late opening one morning so that you can have a little while at home after your child has gone to school before going to work, or something like that. How you do it isn’t important as long as it doesn’t destroy your business, but you have to schedule the time and then take the time instead of just waiting for a window to open.

I’m all about achievement and getting the job done, and this was a very hard lesson for me to learn as well; very early in my own marriage, my wife and I were both over-achievers and found ourselves in serious trouble before we realized that while we love each other dearly, we had inadvertently let our work schedules take over our lives, and had evolved from husband and wife into roommates and business partners. That was one of the problems that led to me doing the research to write "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and one of the first problems that I put to the test group to solve.

It turned out they all had it to some degree, either with spending all their time with their jobs or their kids, and for most, just scheduling one date and one lunch per week was enough to keep them close and engaged while continuing to get things more under control, and all of them found that once the schedule was made and acknowledged, it was very easy to keep to their commitments as long as they were smart about scheduling the time, avoiding times that were common for meetings, times that were in the middle of project start-ups, times that were during peak customer flow or when they knew they would have problems getting a sitter, etc., and they always secured a sitter before planning the date – “We need a couple hours some evening this week; when would be good for you?” was the question. And when the sitter gave them a date, it was set in stone, and only an event that produced fever or lots of blood was a good excuse for breaking the babysitting engagement and spoiling the date.

This isn’t as hard as what it may sound. An hour or two per week isn’t going to make that big a difference in your business, if any, and it will make a world of difference in your life together. Just realize that you’re together for the long haul, and you should therefore try to give each other the best part of your day instead of what’s left over after everybody and everything else has worn you out all day.

Speaking of which, when you do schedule an evening date, try to keep your day-time schedule a little lighter than other days to make sure you aren’t too tired to enjoy the time together, and never let yourself think that you are too tired to enjoy some time together without at least trying it. You’d be surprised how rejuvenating a little intimate, playful time together can be, because it gets your adrenaline pumping. Sometimes a long day doesn’t create so much fatigue as it does simple frustration and depression, and some time together in celebration of a job well done and a rough work day brought to a close can be the best pick-me-up of all.

And if you’re really all that tired and need some low-energy together time, pile up together on the couch with a drink and a bowl of popcorn or anything that can be shared, sit close, clink the bottles or glasses in a toast, and just be still and relax together. No, it’s not steamy sex on a yacht or hiking in the Andes or some deep emotional discussion, but when you’re that tired at the end of a long day of over-achieving, even that quiet, mindless time spent in the intimate ritual of sharing food and entertainment is better than just crashing and forgetting about it. Do whatever you are able to do to indulge in what husbands and wives enjoy doing together.

Give this a try, and let me know if I can be of further help. You can do this.

Take care, and keep in touch!
David

A lot of couples make this mistake. They try to find time instead of making time, not realizing that when your life is in overdrive, even small amounts of time scattered through the week can make a huge difference in keeping your relationship on track, and if a couple hours a week is going to make the difference between your business folding or succeeding or the difference in you being able or unable to pay your household bills, you’ve got bigger problems than you realize and need to be finding some professional help. It’s like arguing over a nickel at the cash register; if that nickel is going to break either you or the vendor, you’re already broke.

Make the time for what’s important, and get your priorities straight. You will most likely outlive your career, your parents, and your friends by a very long time, and while you may not outlive your children, they will be moving out of your house somewhere around age 20 and you won’t be seeing that much of them after they are gone. Your partner, on the other hand, is supposed to be with you for life, right? Common sense should tell you that your partner should therefore be your first priority, and if they are not, then you need to stop and figure out whether your priorities are wrong or you’re with the wrong partner.

Finding a new job, making new friends, or even making new babies is relatively easy compared to finding a true life partner and soul mate, and if you’ve found one and lose them, that lengthens the odds of finding another somewhat, does it not? Look at your life, and get your priorities in order, and then do whatever it takes to support those priorities. Yes, it’s really that simple.

When it comes to your partner, Gentlemen, doing what it takes to keep her happy and striving to nurture and excite you is a simple matter of communications and manliness, something you aren’t taught in school, and have no hope of learning from watching television unless you’re able to home in on that tiny percentage of programming that shows men and women being men and women, and not this homogenized New Age mess of political correctness and utter wussification and victim mentality that seems to be swallowing the world.

For a tested and proven, tutorial and definitive reference on “keeping mama happy so she keeps everybody happy,” go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Life’s too short to let it pass under-lived and unenjoyed, and as anybody who has ever used it will tell you, this book is “the hook-up” you’ve been looking for.

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

What Are You Looking for in Your Relationship and Marriage, or Are You Looking At All?

Great things are where you find them, especially in relationships, marriages, and opportunity in general, but you have to be looking for them to see them. Believe it or not, that’s a lot more a matter of attitude than opportunity, luck, or providence…

I’m swimming in testosterone right now (Saturday afternoon, July 4), because there’s a hundred pounds of pork ribs in my smoker that is going to feed an army of hungry “good people” shortly, and I smell of hardwood smoke and burning pork fat, which where I live, is a very powerful aphrodisiac! No matter where you live or what your life is like, find a reason to get together with others at least once a month and practice these rituals of cooking over fire, communing and telling stories, all of which have evolved from the ancient hunt. It awakens something primal and wonderful for which there does not seem to be any substitute.

Since everything is looking good in the smoker and it will be awhile before time to greet family, friends, and neighbors, I sat down to check my e-mail and found a couple of starkly contrasting pieces that screamed out “NEWSLETTER!!!!” So while I usually do this late at night based on some experience of the day, I’m doing it early today while the message is still at the forefront of my mind and easy to share with you.

The first thing I saw was a notice that a reader named Ryan had ended his subscription to this newsletter. Ryan had subscribed eleven days prior, and his comment describing his reason for cancelling read:

“NOTHING OF VALUE”

Just below it was an e-mail from another reader, and I about laughed myself sick when I looked up his subscription date and found that it was the same day, and he submitted the following:

Hello David,

Thank you! Your book is awesome! All of your readers of your daily email should sack up and buy your book. Sometimes that macho crap gets in the way and we limit ourselves from learning more about the women in our lives. We do often think that we should naturally know everything....after reading your book I knew that I didn't know much!

My marriage came to an end a while ago and my ex was always turning to "relationship experts" like Dr Phil and John Gray just to name a couple. Yes being the good man (or trying to) I read their books. Although they had some interesting ideas, none of them had an impact on me the way your book did.

I have been in a new relationship with a woman now for about a year. I did not want this relationship to turn sour like all the other ones so I decided to be proactive and read your book. WOW! Over the past couple of weeks since I bought your book, I started to take control and the results have been amazing. I have not had a problem with self confidence or had a problem attracting women through out my life, but after a while things would always change. I could not sustain the attraction. This woman is amazing and I did not want to sabotage this one too. Your book is the bomb dude and I will direct as much attention to you as I can!

One of my buddies asked me this weekend why I was so happy and I told him I wish that he could feel for 5 minutes what I feel everyday now. My beautiful woman is into me like no one’s business and looks at me in a way where I feel her love, even when we are not together. After almost a year we are more in love today than ever before. Thank you David for doing what the so-called "relationship experts" could not.

Rock on Dude,

Mike

P.S. By the way...I packed her stuff up and we went for a picnic this weekend when she got home from work. The results are too X-rated to put here...lol. Later!

(The picnic Mike refers to in the post script is a surprise outing I describe in the "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” wherein after you have learned how to read your partner and pay attention to the little things about her, like what she never leaves the house without on a day trip, weekender, etc., you come home a little early from work or send her off on an errand so you can have the house to yourself for an hour or so and prepare a picnic, day trip, weekend outing, etc. – just any kind of surprise trip to shake things up and give her a break from routine, then pile her in the car and announce the destination after you’re under way, or even better, upon arrival. It’s a wonderful exercise in attraction-building and adventure that every woman appreciates.)

The stark contrast in the findings and underlying attitudes of these two readers is stark and significant. One was looking for answers and found them, and I’m still trying to figure out what the other one was looking for, but it quite literally took them exactly the same length of time to report their findings; my e-mail is updated every three minutes and these two came in together.

I wish you could have been here when they arrived, too. I’m hyper-analytical. You could probably count the original thoughts I’ve had in my life on your hands and feet, but I can extract the cause and effect relationships from any situation near-instantly and accurately, and it’s ruthlessly automatic. Everything I see or hear first causes me to visualize, then analyze, then look for parallels once the cause and effect is known and logical deductions and projections that can be made from them. (That’s why you never find opinion or theory in my newsletters or books!)

So when these letters hit me, the immediate question was, “What else do men miss because they aren’t looking for it, or are looking somewhere besides at their partners to find it?”

Think about that. Is there something that you wish you and your partner shared, or could share or do together, that you have just assumed she wouldn’t be interested in or do? Are you right now or have you recently made the mistake of involving others in the problems of your life or relationship because you assume that your partner won’t want to discuss it, or resolve it?

Parenthetically, NEVER, EVER discuss intimate family problems with anyone outside your household unless they are a professional problem-solver who is both competent and paid for their confidentiality. Aside from the fact that it’s unlikely that they are emotionally-unattached, rational, and experienced enough to get to the root of your problem and help, when personal relationships end badly, all information that you have given a former friend, coworker, etc., or even a relative that you can’t really cut off, becomes a weapon to embarrass and hurt you with.

People do horribly hurtful things that cannot be undone when they are angry, and the things that go on between you and your spouse – YES, I am talking to both men and women here – are fodder for a quick-tempered and later-regretted revenge. Don’t tempt fate by arming people you care about with information about other people you care about. I see it every day, and it NEVER ends well.

Getting back on subject, do you have any idea how many missed opportunities to deepen and improve your relationship and your life occur as a result of assuming that your partner won’t be interested? Or how many affairs are started because of that? How many misunderstandings it generates?

Don’t be like Ryan, oblivious to the potential of what’s in front of you. If there’s something lacking at home, don’t go outside to find it (and if you ultimately do decide to go outside your marriage, end the marriage first) before making absolutely sure that it’s not sitting there undiscovered right under your nose at home. Talk to your partner, and listen – or are you able?

I’ll go to my grave preaching this sermon. Effective inter-gender communication is not something that we are born well-suited to even do, let alone do competently. It is a skill that must be developed, not a talent determined by a gene. For those of you who have seen the “Men State, Women Negotiate” excerpt from "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, you know that as complex as it all seems, it pretty much boils down to the ruthless exercise of three simple rules that anybody can follow.

The question is “What are you looking for?” which begs the other question, “What is motivating you to look for anything?” Are you like Ryan, maybe looking for validation for your past mistakes so that you can blame somebody else for leaving you, or are you like Mike, realizing that you wouldn’t be reading this if everything was perfect, and that something that appears logical, people are using with success, and is guaranteed to work is worth a try, and therefore taking action and getting outstanding results?

Only you can make that choice, and I dare say that it is inevitable that you will be held accountable for it, if by nothing else, the state of your own life and that of your family’s, so choose well…

I don’t want to get too carried away with coincidences, but if you want to be “like Mike” (to those of you who saw the movie, I swear that’s his real name!), just do what he did. Download your own copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get busy. It took him 11 days to write that letter. How quickly can you turn your life and relationship around?

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

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

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

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

Thanks,
Troy

My reply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

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

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

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

Handling Tough Times and Avoiding Marital Boredom, a Relationship and Marriage Survival Skill

One easy time for a woman to become bored and frustrated is when you have to be away a lot. Let’s touch on that before leaving this subject for awhile.

I got a very humorous and insightful comment on the recent edition concerning how far women will go to escape boredom from one of the newest readers which spawned a great lesson for you. It’s great because it’s an issue that is tough for the untrained man to deal with but the solution is easier and safer to implement than you might otherwise imagine. Here’s the note that started it all (the name has been changed to protect the brilliant):


Note to Self:

Rule #1. Do not under any circumstances allow your woman to become bored. Rule #2. Do not under any circumstances allow your woman to become bored. Rule #3. See Rules 1 & 2, above.

~~~~~~

Hi David,

Damn. That is scary. And VERY instructive.

Thanks, - H.

That made me wonder about the rules, and I wrote back:

Note to H.:

Rule #1: A woman must never, EVER be allowed to be bored.
Rule #2: If you ever fail to be a man, a woman will become bored.
Rule #3: Should you break Rule #1, you will find it happened because you broke Rule #2!

Yep, it is scary, until you realize that Rule #2 makes the whole thing a matter of your choice. That's the silver lining in the "take responsibility for everything" cloud. Once it's your responsibility, it's your choice as to how it works out, and that's not at all scary when you have the information to make it work out. Indeed, it's a lot of fun! You don't even have to worry about tough times if you make the right choices, because a woman will be thrilled to be invited into a challenge. Take for instance you having to do late nights, 12-hour days, for two weeks to get a project wrapped up on schedule. First, you conscript her help:

"Honey, I have a problem at work and I'm going to need your help. I have to do 12-hour days for the next two weeks to bring this project in on time. I need you to take over the (insert list of chores here) that I usually handle so that when I get home, we can still have some time together. (That's leadership, authority, delegation, issuing a challenge, trusting her to be competent, and a whole world of other things that women yearn for, including a commitment to keep her close instead of shutting her out in favor of your work.)

"After the project is finished, we'll take off for the weekend and catch up on some rest and time together. No, don't ask, because it's a surprise!" (Anticipation, mother of all pleasures in a woman's world.)

Being a hero instead of an a**hole is just a matter of paying attention and framing things right. Get it? Sure you do. That was a silly question. LOL!

Take care, and keep in touch!
David

It really is that simple, as long as it’s not an on-going problem. On-going problems like working long hours for months on end are not heroic. They are a declaration that you can’t handle things and your life is out of control, even when she wants to believe otherwise. While there are some predators and parasites around, most women do not marry a man to have somebody pay their bills for them and be gone all the time to do it. They marry a man to have someone to love, trust, respect, be loyal to, and share their life with. Women are generally emotionally-driven creatures, and a large part of why they marry a man is his ability to make them feel things they enjoy. That doesn’t happen when the only time the two of you are together is while you’re asleep.

The point? She will help you get through problems, but only so long as you can continue to give her the companionship (and leadership) she needs. Women are social in nature, and they need interaction with others; it’s a matter of biology, not of choice, so don’t make a habit of over-committing yourself and expecting her to take up the slack. Don’t get into that rut of trying to force problems to go away by just spending more time working on them. Learn to work smarter instead of longer and harder.

How? Get help when you need it! Using work as an example (since I’ve been a management consultant for a lot of years and have fallen into this same trap myself on occasion), there’s a big difference between saying to your boss, “I’ll get this done, no matter what,” and then missing the deadline, missing work because of fatigue, illness or family disputes that arose because you over-committed yourself, and saying, “I may be able to get this done in the time you need it, but the risk to both myself and the company is considerable because I’ll be spread too thin and something can fall through the cracks and hurt us. Get me some help on this to ensure that we come in on time with acceptable quality so that we all look good at review time.”

People who want to get things done will support your effort to the best of their ability because they have others leaning on them for performance. Even the owner of the company has people leaning on him: his customers! Nobody wants to finish the day with egg on their face, and when you speak up like this you establish yourself as somebody who looks ahead and acts rationally instead of an egomaniac with a hero complex or a persecution complex who would sacrifice himself to be noticed and risk his boss’s and his company’s reputation to do it.

Your life has to maintain some semblance of balance for you to be able to enjoy it. Part of that balance is your job, part is your wife and family, part is yourself, etc. If any one part starts getting too much attention, it will be at the expense of the other parts. There’s no escaping or denying it. If you don’t give your job its fair share, you’ll get fired. If you don’t give your wife her fair share, you’ll get fired, too, in the form of a divorce! If your kids don’t get their fair share, they’ll fire you, too, and replace you with whomever will give them the attention they need, even if it’s the local drug dealer, pimp, gangster, or the warden at the jail.

Balance may not be the key to all things in the universe (although it sure looks like it is from here!), but it is certainly an essential part of a healthy relationship, a happy marriage, and a happy life. Take a good look at your life and see for yourself if everything is in balance, and make a serious effort to correct any balance issues you see.

Involve your wife in the examination after you’ve looked for yourself, invite her input and compare it to your own. Impress upon her the need for balance as well. She shouldn’t be letting her job, hobbies, you, or the children consume her entire life any more than you should. She needs the variety that balance provides to keep her from getting bored with any one aspect of her life!

We’ve about beaten the subject of boredom to death, so tomorrow we’ll be moving on to something else, but I hope that over the last few days you’ve come to realize, if nothing else, just how different a woman’s needs are from your own and what you can easily do to fulfill those needs and keep your relationship and marriage enjoyable. We can’t expect them to be entirely like us because they’re not, nor are they entirely different.

Our similarities and differences are not always obvious, and at times are even deceptive; you may recall articles I’ve sent you in which we discussed how men and women can use the exact same words to express the exact opposite meaning, and have no idea that it’s happening. (If you missed it, it’s the third of the communications lessons in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, which you can download at your convenience.) We, as men, being born to lead, must be aware of these similarities and differences and should take the initiative to make sure that everyone else in our family understands them as well. Otherwise, we fail as leaders, and we fail as men. I hate it when that happens…don’t you???

It’s time to step up and get the information and training you need to be the man you were born to be, but others have tried their best to make sure you never could be. Conspiracy? Maybe. Theory? Hardly. We’ve been told the wrong things about how to be a man for thirty years or more. We’ve tried it, it’s failed miserably, and it’s time to get back to what works.

Your guide is called “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and you should go now to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy immediately. Thirty years is long enough to do it the wrong way and be punished for making the effort. Start being a man as you were born to be and be rewarded for it, with happiness, success, and possibly best of all, the love and adoration of the woman you love.

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

Dangerous Words That Can Kill Relationships and Marriage

Let’s talk about communication under stress, and how to know when you’re in trouble. Men and women are “two genders separated by a common language,” but it’s not so confusing when you know how we use the same words differently.

I’ve noticed that a lot of you still haven’t yet downloaded my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report or my free “What Women REALLY Want” report, and I know that many of you are skeptical of anything “free.” I am, too, and for the same reasons you are. Most “free reports” don’t amount to anything more than a sales letter.

So I thought I would share this lesson from that report today, to show you how much solid information is in my free reports and that it will be worth your while to download and read them. Clicking on the links provided in the right margin of this page/at the end of this newsletter will open a PDF file in your browser, which you can save and keep for reference and pass along to your friends, without subjecting you to any sales pitch, survey form to fill out, “gimme your e-mail address” screen, or anything else, so go for it.

I’ve discussed, lectured, harped, preached, and nearly yelled about the need for couples to communicate effectively in any relationship, but especially a committed relationship or marriage, and some people are so dense that when I’ve pointed this out to them and had members of the opposite sex write down their definitions of words to compare, they argued that the other gender’s definition was wrong instead of just accepting the fact that men and women have their own languages; there are a lot of common elements, but enough differences to start a war if one doesn’t know what they are.

In the process of trying to bring your relationship out of the crisis of divorce or other break-up, things are going to be tense, especially at first, and definitely at times when you are trying to work out any differences that remain from the past. You’re also going to be at risk of undoing all the good you’ve done by letting another fight get started for as long as things are tense and unsure, and you absolutely MUST be able to recognize when the situation is heading in the wrong direction.

To that end, I’ve identified four seemingly innocuous words that are a constant source of problems when the two partners don’t attach the same meaning to them. This is because their gender-specific meanings in many contexts are quite opposite, and that makes them dangerous.

The three most dangerous words in the English language, with regard to male-female relations, may be ““okay,” “fine,” and “sure,” although “whatever” may take out any one of the other three if the right woman says it. They are universally understood between members of the same sex, and almost universally misunderstood between members of opposite sexes. What’s worse, what these words mean to men are grossly opposite of what they mean to women.

Men pretty much stick to dictionary definitions at best. We’re simple, very simple, with regard to communications. Few of us are adept at the elevation of language to a tool of diplomacy, innuendo and espionage, and ladies, since I know you’re reading, we don’t have ulterior motives or hidden meanings when we speak. (That’s a huge part of my book and other newsletters, and won’t be explored here.) What you hear is what you get, right guys?

Women, on the other hand, are generally born diplomats and politicians. Nothing is spoken directly, questions are statements and vice versa, everything has multiple meanings and ulterior motives, and exchanges are almost always negotiations rather than reports. Hence, while they always know what they’re saying to each other, men often don’t have a clue what a woman is really saying. We hear words that we recognize and take them literally, much to the chagrin of our female acquaintances at all levels. To the average woman, conversing with the average man is at times no different from conversing with a four-year old, because we lack this sophistication and they have to explain things over and over again, usually without success because they just can’t manage to spit something out directly until pushed to the point of male-like aggression brought on by anger and frustration, if then.

Let’s look at these three words from a man’s point of view:

Okay (male):

1. From the last-century acronym for “Our Kind,” meaning, “we like that.”
2. In good health, as in “I woke up hung over, but now I’m okay.”
3. Affirmative, as in “I need your help with this, okay?” or “Okay, I’ll do that for you.”

All positive meanings, pretty much right out the dictionary, right? Let’s move on…

Fine (male):
1. Of high quality, as in “fine China” or “a fine automobile.
2. Satisfactory, as in “We’re doing fine,” or “he’s fine, and thanks for asking.”
3. Very small, as in a “fine mesh,” “fine-toothed comb,” or “fine sanding grit.”

It’s a positive word in either of the first two connotations, and benign in the third instance. Again, all pretty much straight out of the dictionary, right? Keep going…

Sure (male):

1. Affirmative, and with enthusiasm, as in “Sure! I’ll be glad to help with that,” or “Sure is!” – synonymous with “Certainly!”
2. Certain, as in “I am sure this will work” or “this is a sure bet.”

As with the other two, fairly positive, simple, straight out the dictionary. And here’s a beauty:

Whatever (male):
1. Anything, usually used in being agreeable, as in “Whatever you want is great,” or “Whatever works, works for me.”

No surprises, right guys? Well, some of the ladies might be surprised, because to them, these words have many meanings, and you can’t always tell the difference from the context. To wit, consider these examples from some of the women on my support team’s comments on the subject, quoted verbatim:

Okay (female):

1. You aren't listening and I am going to shut up now.
2. You are screwed, Mister!
3. Screw you, you don't care...
4. I understand but am not happy about it.
5. Yeah, we’ll do it your way, and you will pay for it later!

Fine (female):

1. If you want, but you will regret this later.
2. Go screw yourself. You are an idiot and I am not going there.
3. If you say so, but I will do it my way anyway.
4. You think you know, I will let you think you know, but you know precisely nothing.
5. Keep talking but I am not listening.
6. You are a complete asshole if you think I am listening to what you are saying and would ever consider doing that.
7. Keep telling me what to do and you will be sleeping on the couch, Buddy!
8. Yeah, you want me to wear that so I can look like a ho in front of your friends.
9. Yeah, you want to see that movie and don't care if I don't.
10. Yeah, nice restaurant, don't ask my opinion, you will pay for it (Lobster and Moet, anyone?)

Sure (female):

1. Go screw yourself!
2. What a moron!
3. You wish, buddy!
4. What the hell are you thinking???
5. Is he still talking?
6. You think I will do what you say....ha!
7. Damn, he is a jackass!
8. He can't be serious!
9. He can't believe I agree with him!
10. You have your views, I have mine, never the twain shall meet, but I will say I agree just to shut you up!
11. I have to what with your mom?
12. I have to what with your friends?
13. Damn, I really don't want to do this...
14. Crap! I have to do this, but he will pay SO dearly later
15. Oh no he DIDN’T just…(say/do/whatever)

Whatever (female):

1. Screw you!
2. Screw you and die!
3. Go screw yourself and die the Death of 1,000 cuts!
4. Screw you, and you will be dying, slowly, painfully, and without even knowing it, just as soon as I figure out how I’m going to torture you to death.
5. I’m done, you’re screwed, and that’s that.

Do you see a pattern here? All of these words have somewhat to very positive meanings for men, but negative to life-threatening meanings as women use them; "fine" to a man means really great, where to a woman, it means at best, "well, if that's the best I can get, I'll settle, but you're going to make it up to me later."

In general, any one-word answer given by a woman to a question from a man is probably bad. It gets worse. When these words appear in the same sentence, the amount of trouble you are in and the punishment you will endure as a result increase exponentially. Case in point, have you heard, “Okay, fine!” recently? That happened right before she stormed out of the room, huh? And there was nothing pleasant in your life for some time after that, was there Big Guy? “Okay, fine!” does not mean “Alright, you win.” Quite the contrary; it pretty much means, “War has just been declared!” or more subtly, “No, you don’t win. I’m just tired of beating my head against a wall and now I’m going away while you screw something up, and I’ll be plotting revenge in the meantime.”

Indeed, did you lose your keys and find them in a place you didn’t remember having them, and a calm air of satisfaction on her face when you found them, or in extreme cases, you looked for them for half an hour, got frustrated because you were late to do something with your friends (it wouldn’t make you late for work), and then SHE finds your keys in a really ridiculous place, like in the clothes dryer, claiming you left your keys in your pocket and she laundered the pants this morning? Uhhh, yeah…thought so.

Speaking of the dryer, did you happen to notice your underwear were rather scratchy feeling, like the fabric softener had been left out? Or a mysterious stain appeared on your favorite garment, or worse, your golf clubs or bag? Did the remote for the TV disappear just in time to inconvenience the hell out of you when there were about a half-dozen different sporting events on that you wanted to surf? Who woulda thunk it?

It can be anything from semi-benign little jabs like these to grudge sex with your brother or one of your friends, or if she’s really mad, grudge sex with somebody you really despise, and you may or may not find out about it. Being able to keep you in the dark about it is a sort of everlasting punishment that causes her to smile or smirk ever-so-slightly as she leaves the room when you’re being a real jerk.

So you now have to ask, what happens if you get all four together? If you ever hear the following sentence:

“Okay, sure, fine! WHATEVER!”

DUCK! COVER! RUN! And make sure your health insurance is paid up and you have fresh ammo. Trouble’s coming on a pale horse, and Hell will be following after. (Excuse the Biblical metaphor, I noticed an ad recently for Clint Eastwood’s movie “Pale Rider,” and couldn’t resist.)

Gentlemen, as you can see, they tell us when we’re doing things that are going to get us in trouble, but they use the same language we would use to say that everything is great. Incidentally, Ladies, what about “great”? It has a few juicy meanings too, does it not? This could make for a really fun study of you readers, if you’d like to make it one. Everyone is invited to write in with your own use of these words and more, stories of altercations or misunderstandings, etc., and you really should do it, because if several people respond, it will make for some interesting reading for all of us! Just because the rest of the world chooses to wallow in a communications quagmire and remain boring and ignorant doesn’t mean the achievers on this list of readers has to join them!

As you can see, there’s a lot more to keeping a relationship on course and fun than they told us in the storybooks when we were little kids, or the textbooks when we were big kids for that matter. That’s why many of us end up in one or more divorces during the course of our life.

A good relationship takes some work, and stopping and reversing a break-up can take a lot of work, but you can work smart instead of hard. You can work hard every day trying to put up a front, making compromises that you later resent, biting your tongue, etc., or you can spend some effort in a one-time exercise to learn how to get along and how to be that attractive, funny, naughty alpha male stud muffin that every woman drools over. A no-brainer, huh?

After that exercise, you can spend a little time in what the corporate types might call a “self-directed improvement endeavor” to make those traits, skills, and behavior a part of yourself, so that being the man of your partner’s dreams is natural, effortless, automatic, and most of all, fun! I cannot overstress that above all else, doing the things that make for a perpetual honeymoon are the most fun you can have with your clothes on! And, most important, unless your relationship has been severely damaged by extreme substance, physical, or emotional abuse, making these changes have proven to stop a divorce cold in as little as a week!

As I said, it wasn’t in the storybooks, and it wasn’t in the textbooks, but it is now -- sort of! “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” is like a textbook on the perpetual honeymoon and what it takes to have it, but unlike a textbook, it doesn’t just put the information out there in front of you in a sterile, academic presentation of theories and opinions. It’s a seminar in book form, telling you what you need to know and providing examples to train you to make the required behavior a part of yourself.

Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy today, because no matter what kind of shape your relationship is in, you can make it better with the help of the information in this book, even if making it better means getting out of it (if it’s abusive, parasitic, or otherwise destroying your life instead of fulfilling it) and starting over with a worthy partner. It’s all that, and it’s yours for less than the cost of a good meal for two. Care to compare that to legal fees, loss in the property settlement, alimony, etc.? Another no-brainer, methinks…

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

An Accurate Barometer of Your Relationship or Marriage Status

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

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

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

Hey David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Gentlemen, I hope you realize how privileged you are to have access to the experience and input of the women on this mailing list and my blogs. They frequently provide extremely valuable insight anonymously, to you as a stranger, that you might not ever 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 although some women obviously thrive on drama and reliving bad times, not all of them do, and in fact may be having an emotionally-difficult time relating all of this just 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 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 the 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 them 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. And they should happen by mutual consent for the mutual benefit of the partners, not by coercion of one partner inducing the sacrifice of the other.

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, at best, winning a battle to lose the war.

Besides, if you’re doing what you should be doing and firing those automatic attraction triggers with leadership, authority, humor, mystery, adventure, expertise, etc. – the things that make being a man enjoyable -- 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, fully and incontrovertibly, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My reply:

Good morning, Steve,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care,
David

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

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

But what about our women?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why People Grow Apart and End Relationships and Marriage, and What YOU Can Do to Stop It!

Why do people who are in long-term relationships, whether married or not, grow apart? In a nutshell, it is because they have lost interest in each other. That, my friends, is a preventable and curable condition! The medicine, you ask? ATTRACTION, of course!

I had a call last night from a friend, Bill, with whom I’ve not spoken in a nearly a year. He and I used to work consulting projects together frequently, and we were pretty close. He found this gal that he really meshed well with, and they got married and were happy for a long time, but a major problem had come up that he needed to talk about.

Her father died a few years ago and they moved away to be near her mother, and Bill and I kept in touch for awhile, but our interests started growing in different directions because he changed careers and we lost a lot of common ground that used to give us a lot to talk about. We fell to calling each other at birthdays and major holidays, and as we started finding we had less and less to talk about, quit calling because there just wasn’t enough to talk about to make it interesting.

It’s bad when friends grow apart like that, but I wasn’t the only one from whom he’d grown apart. He and his wife had a great foundation for a good marriage, being extremely compatible in all regards, especially the important ones like personal values and tastes, and having plenty to talk about when romance wasn’t in the air, but over the course of the last year, he and his wife had grown apart to the point of not enjoying each other’s company anymore and frequently getting on each other’s nerves.

Bill called because we were old friends, I had known him and his wife for a long time, and he knew from working with me that I had conducted seminars on getting along with people and was hoping I could help him and his wife figure out what had happened and fix it. He had no idea that I had published “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and he was in for a shock!

Bill’s wife had started spending more and more time with her mother, eventually giving up her job to care for her full time, while Bill had sought to enhance his career and make up for the lost household income by taking on extra duty at work and starting a small, part-time home-based business. They had previously averaged about five to six waking hours together per day, and this had fallen to about an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, much of which wasn’t even “quality time” together.

Their interaction with others increased as their interaction with each other decreased, and they got out of the rythm of spending time together. As this happened, their interests were influenced by people outside their household, pulling them even further in opposite directions. Bill’s wife had taken up volunteer duty at a local retirement home where his mother volunteered, and Bill’s home-based business was the result of something one of his co-workers was into. By the time they realized what had happened, lack of mutual interests had insidiously reduced them from a happy married couple to a pair of disgruntled and celibate roommates.

In case it’s not obvious, and it probably wouldn’t be to anyone who hasn’t either read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" or been subscribing to this newsletter for quite awhile, it wasn’t so much that their personal interests had changed as the fact that their interest in each other had failed because they had stopped doing the things that made them interesting to each other, trustful of each other and intimate. When they lived near me, they were constantly challenging each other, playing with each other, picking on each other in a very good-natured and often thinly veiled and obviously sexy way. They were not only spouses; they were playmates, adventure partners, workmates, confidants, etc. They enjoyed each other for long periods every day.

Stress, fatigue and time constraints limited their time and attention, and finally attraction was lost. When attraction goes, boredom sets in, then frustration, anger, resentment, blame, etc., and then the all-too-well-known steps down to the dungeon of affairs and divorce are taken one by one, often rapidly. Bill and his wife had both been married before, and knew what was coming, and wanted to fix it rather than go through giving up what they had once had and breaking up a household while in their early fifties.

I sent Bill a copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and he and his wife are going through it. I’ll probably be keeping you posted on their progress. Most of you subscribing to this newsletter are doing so because you’re already where they are or can see yourself getting there at some point. Don’t let this happen to you. It’s far easier to prevent the loss of attraction than it is to get it back, but you can get it back if you want it.

(Update: this lesson was originally published on September 4, 2005. In the few months that followed, Bill and his wife did indeed figure out where they had gone wrong, made corrections, and are now happier than they have ever been. They always had fun together in the years before their problems, but communications had been lacking, and now that they really understand each other because they know how to listen to the opposite gender, they’ve made a connection that would have never been possible otherwise. She tells her girlfriends that “he always just knows what she’s thinking.” He’s not psychic; he just listens to her as a woman instead of as a man! And this second honeymoon has been lasting for a little over three and a half years now.)

The dating gurus say it’s impossible to regain lost attraction, but in their world, you’re dealing with a window of seconds to a few hours at most; in that context, that is quite correct. But in a mature, committed relationship, you have months, maybe even a year or two, because you both have so much invested in the relationship, and anyone can recapture and then go beyond the attraction felt during your first hours and days together if they have the information to (re)develop the skills needed. Indeed, if you started out with enough compatibility to make for a good marriage, success is almost a foregone conclusion. Everything you need to know to start doing that this very minute is contained in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” so set yourself up for success in your relationship by downloading your copy right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com.

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

Can You Ever Be TOO Prepared for a Great Relationship or Marriage?

A reader reminds us that it’s never too soon to start working toward a better life and relationship, and I provide additional tips on how to get it done.

I got a quick note from a new reader I’d like to share with you. It holds a wonderful lesson for anyone whose eyes are open. Meet Brad:

Hello David, I just bought your book and I just wanted to let you know that it is very insightful. I am still single but you have much needed understanding of the most interesting female mind...you've got to love them. Brad

Here’s an excerpt from my response, followed by additional commentary:

Hi Brad!

I’m glad you’re finding my book useful. I’ve had quite a few readers comment that they wish they had been able to read something like that before they ever got into a relationship, and others go so far as to say that it should be required reading in high school.

Do yourself a HUGE favor and don’t skip the first part of the book, the part on evaluating relationships. That part works wonders in mature relationships to make sure they have a foundation sufficient to warrant improvement, and it also really shines if you use it as you see a relationship starting to develop and do your evaluation as you go in and as the relationship evolves, so you can get out early if you start seeing red flags. An ounce of prevention is worth several tons of cure when it comes to relationships and marriage!

Also remember that the rules for creating attraction are different in the dating world, mainly because your window of opportunity is very narrow in dating, so once you’ve finished my book, if you’re having trouble meeting women let me know and I’ll steer you to the dating gurus who can really help you; most of them are about as full of crap as most of the marriage gurus, selling snake oil and academic theory as if they were solutions, but there are a few that get results every time, and I know who they are and will be happy to point you in their direction if and when you decide the time is right.

Take care, and keep in touch. I can’t tell you how delightful it is to see a young single man taking the bull by the horns and doing his relationship prep work on the front end instead of trying to do crisis control on the back end.

David

Brad has it right. He’s thinking both ahead and “outside the box.” He’s single, but will be looking for a permanent relationship at some point, so instead of just looking for information on how to get phone numbers, he’s looking for what will help him understand women and choose the right one for the long haul. (Remember the old adage about dressing for the job you want, not the one you have? Same principle!) Getting the phone number might get you a date, or even two or three, but being a man who understands women and can converse comfortably with them near or at their own level, and knows what flips their attraction switches will get him his choice of women in a relationship that lasts for as long as he continues to act like a man.

It’s never too early to prepare to succeed, and not just no, but hell no, there is no such thing as being too prepared for success. If your relationship or marriage is anything less than a honeymoon now, it’s because you went in unprepared to sustain it.

If it is at honeymoon status right now, do you know that you know what it takes to sustain it, or are you just guessing that it will go on forever without you needing a back-up plan for when the novelty of the new relationship wears off and reality sets in? Be warned; you do indeed need one, because it won’t. Do you even know that there are chemical changes in men and women at between one and two years into a relationship that stop automatically providing the honeymoon spark? Ask anyone who’s been married more than a couple years where the magic went. They know it’s gone, but don’t know where.

One of the reasons that the average couple who has been married for two years or more has sex six times per year is this body chemistry change, but you can overcome it easily if you know what will compensate for it. And the good news is that compensating for that lost chemical costs you nothing, not even time and effort, once you’ve learned how it works.

So if that spark is gone and even if it’s been gone for years (I got an e-mail from a man a while back that said he and his wife had not slept in the same bed or had sex together in 18 years, they had stayed together by reason of religious convictions, and he had her back in his bedroom permanently the day after finishing my book), that doesn’t mean it’s too late for any of you. Unlike in Brad’s world, where windows of opportunity are very small, perhaps only seconds long, and the window tends to get slammed on your fingers because there are so many possibilities and little or no vested interest in a relatively new relationship, couples that have been together a couple years have a vested interest (“sweat equity,” kids, real estate, time, life, etc.) in continuing the relationship and will only let it go as a last resort.

Hence, where a wrong remark or sideways glance can ensure that you won’t have a second or third date (or maybe even her name and phone number!), a woman will give you months, maybe even years, to straighten up and fly right, especially if she knows that you’re making an effort, not to just do everything her way, but just to try to meet her in the middle on some basic issues, like understanding her when she speaks, being a stand-up guy who exercises a little personal authority, enjoys life with her, and protects her from boredom by giving her some excitement from time to time, all of which is far, far easier than you’d ever imagine.

Being the guy every woman wants is never hard to do; indeed, much of it is quite natural, and the part that isn’t all that natural is still a lot of fun. Imagine, after all those years of telling those jokes about the genie who could build a bridge from Los Angeles to Hawaii but couldn’t grant a man’s wish to know everything he needed to know about women, you suddenly knew! How would that change your life? No matter how much you think it will, based on the history of my readers, I’ll bet it will still be more than you think, and for the better.

Or maybe you’d just rather sit and wait and let things blow up in your face, like it has for your friends. None of your friends saw it coming when it hit them either, did they? And how’s that working for them, by the way? All that business of having their family torn apart, losing half or more of everything they own, plus getting saddled with alimony and child support – yep, sounds like something every man looks forward to, huh?

Frankly, I’d rather have my testicles pounded flat with a meat tenderizer than to go through that mess. How about you?

It’s never too soon and seldom too late to get on the right path, the path to personal authority, success, and happiness. Even if she’s gone, she may not be gone for good, and if she is gone for good, there are a whole lot more that will be lucky and happy to take her place after you’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and become one of the few of us whom women recognize at first glance as a man “who just knows what a woman wants.” Go to http://wwwmakingherhappy.com/ and get your copy right now, or wait awhile and let things blow up in your face and catch you unprepared, so you can see if you handle disaster any better than your friends did. It’s your choice; choose well…

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 they say 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:

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.

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.)

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?

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.

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

Why a Man Should Be Naughty, Not Nice, to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

A male reader asks why his relationship is going to hell while he’s being the nicest, sweetest guy he can be. Let’s see if he likes the answer!

I’m both proud of this reader and dismayed at his question. I’m proud because he’s asking a good question, albeit one that is probably answered on my web site home page at http://www.makingherhappy.com, but I’m not going to fault somebody for taking the direct approach to getting needed information! I’m also dismayed that his life has gone this sour this soon after marriage; it usually takes twice this long, but he does hint that he’s doubling as a “girlfriend” for his wife. Meet Roy:

Hi David,

I just signed up for your newsletter yesterday, and I’m guessing you’re either some sort of guru or a real idiot if you’ve published a book like your ad claims, so I have to ask a question. I’ve been married for a little over a year now, and my marriage has gone from being hot dates and great sex to one never-ending routine. I can’t get my wife interested in doing anything with me anymore. She’s told me I’m the nicest, most considerate guy she’s ever met, and likes it that I’m “in touch with my feminine side” as she calls it, and we’ve been friends for years before getting married and get along fine, but the spark is gone. I’ve always heard that marriage is the surest way to kill the female libido known to science, but it’s not just her libido that has gone. I can’t even get her to go out to dinner with me anymore. I offer to let her choose the restaurant and everything, and she just won’t go for it. Is this the way it always goes, or am I missing some magical mystery ingredient? Help a brother out here!

Roy G.

My reply:

Well, Roy, you came to the right place for help, but I don’t know if you’re going to like the answer. It’s going to depend on how easily you can accept reality and adjust your attitude to match it. You see, you’ve been doing everything we men have been told to do all our lives, and it’s all wrong!!!

We grow up being told by our mothers, teachers and everybody else to be “nice” to women, to be considerate by letting them make all decisions, etc., and a lot of them even think they like it when a man does it if they’ve recently been with some abusive jerk who tried to control their life and didn’t even leave them room for input into a decision.

As you’ll find in my book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” it’s not a nice guy nor an abusive jerk that they really want and respond to, but a guy that’s in the middle, a guy who’s assertive without being controlling, confident, naughty without being an abusive jerk, and can at least grasp communications on a woman’s level even though he’s not wired with the equipment to be able to communicate on such a complex and sophisticated level. It’s love, respect, leadership, adventure and fun that they need, not somebody fawning over them and catering to their every whim, which all but a damaged few actually find boring and annoying.

I know it doesn’t sound right, but it’s a biological response, not a conscious or logical one, like her attraction mechanism is on autopilot, and women aren’t visually stimulated to attraction like men are, except to the extent that the sight of a man’s self-confidence and self-respect intrigues and excites them. Picture in your mind the ugliest, nastiest, smelliest old “ho” you can think of, and gauge your sexual reaction to that visual. There’s no changing it, either, is there? Well, to her, a boring nice guy who acts like a wuss and dumps all the decisions in her lap and doesn’t recognize her frustration with him acting that way is the same emotional picture as your mental image of that old “ho,” and her reaction is the same, and just as unavoidable, automatic, and if I may say so, violently sickening.

In a woman’s mind, nice guys are wusses; predictable pushovers that present no mystery, no challenge, and no strong self-image. Indeed, such men often appear to be trying to buy respect and affection because they can’t command it. The underlying thought is that if you can’t stand up TO her, you can’t stand up FOR her. And the idea of “easy pickings” being a problem shouldn’t be foreign to you, either; what do you pursue in your own life? The too-easy and boring, or the challenging and exciting? Pretty clear when you stand in another’s shoes, huh?

Obviously, since I had to write a whole book on the subject to cover it, I can’t tell you how to fix your problems in a few paragraphs of a daily newsletter. You’re best bet right now, since you’re already in trouble, is to go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download the book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and start reading. Once you have a command of what you need to know, you’ll find it easy, and to some degree automatic, to get your attitude right and put what you’ve learned into practice. Procrastination is the tool of losers, and action the tool of achievers, so get busy! Life’s too short to spend another minute of it losing!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

What else can I say? If the problem sounds familiar, the solution is the same. Get busy! And get happy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey David,

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

Thanks,
Zane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any takers on the prevention offer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Dad! The Impact of Fatherhood, Good and Bad, on Relationships and Marriage

Being a strong father figure is just as important in being attractive to your wife as being a strong husband figure, as this mother points out.

What a week this is starting out to be for reader letters! Get a load of this one from Margret:

Dear David,

I got your book for my husband and he won’t read it. He says he’s already attractive enough because all mechanics are manly men. I beg to differ.

I have a 16-year old daughter who wants to date a 19-year old college student and musician. Coming from a situation similar to this that got me in a lot of trouble I have a problem with letting her go out with this guy, but her father, my husband, who is supposed to be the man of the house, leaves all the decisions about her up to me. A father should stand up, meet the young man and make sure that his one and only daughter is not in harm’s way. In my household it is up to me to make the choices and I hate being the bad guy all the time.

In my eyes this makes him the biggest, wussiest candy-ass I have ever known. What father lets his daughter go out with a guy he has never met? What kind of man lets his wife decide if she should be allowed out with a boy like this? Is it wrong to want a man who takes charge and makes sure his daughter is safe from the world outside? I feel like the husband most of the time and he should be the wife.

This is the biggest attraction killer for me. I want a real man who can make a decision, not a girly-man who has to defer everything to me because he doesn’t have the spine to say “no” to a 16 year old girl. If that was what I wanted I would be married to a woman instead of a man.

When it comes to his kids, a man needs to take the lead in decisions about who and where the children spend their time. I like to have a say in the matter, but I hate that I have to be the one to make all the decisions. Our daughter stays mad at me all the time, and I can deal with that, but why should it be only me she is mad at? Then he gets mad at me when I fight with my daughter because I don’t feel like being intimate with him later in the evening! I wish he had that kind of nerve when it came to making decisions.

Do you have any advice?

Margret

My reply:

Hi Margret!

Yes. Beat him until he grows a pair and fights back. Just kidding. Seriously, he has some issues that he needs to work out. My book can help him if he’ll read it, but you’re either going to have to reason with him, which probably isn’t going to work since he’s obviously in denial and shutting you down every time you try to get him to take responsibility, or play dirty pool.

That’s right, I said that, and I know I told you to hold off on drastic actions, but at this point all other peaceful options have been exhausted and it’s time to escalate. Cut him off completely – no sex, no dinner cooked, no laundry done, and anything else you can think of to isolate him and apply pressure. Tell him that when he is ready to acknowledge that there is a problem and to work with you on it and lead his family, he can rejoin the family, and until then he’s on his own.

And tell him yes, it really is that serious, so serious in fact that he’s flirting with a divorce, because you are not going to be left in the position of always being the bad guy and alienating your children for much longer. I know from your previous letter that these thoughts are already on your mind, so go with them until he realizes that this is serious and he treats you, your children, and the situation with the appropriate consideration and respect.

Take care, and keep me posted,
David

I hate more than almost anything to have to say something like that to somebody, but Margret’s already tried the diplomatic route and there is no more effective solution. Indeed, she’s gone a lot farther than most women would go, because I’ve already told her that she needs to bluntly state what she thinks is obvious because being a man, he won’t readily interpret her questions about the young man as statements that he needs to get involved. Yes, you can spend a bunch of money on counseling, file for divorce to get his attention, etc., but they are all grossly expensive, have no better a chance of bringing him out of denial, and may take things in the wrong direction because they are riskier than a few days of simple isolation that she’s already considering.

Gents, the big message for you here is that what you do as a father has intense bearing on how you are perceived and treated as a husband. You can do everything in the world to be fun and exciting and strong as a husband and blow it to bits in an instant by pussy-footing around with your kids when they need leadership or discipline. Women sometimes don’t like that we demand more discipline of children than they do, but they never like it when they are left to be the disciplinarian and decision-making parent, especially the ONLY disciplinarian and decision-making parent.

Make no mistake, most of the biological engine that drives female attraction is based on primal factors that would have made a man a strong provider and father in early times. I’m not saying that you should be a good dad just so you can get laid, and anybody who sends me a nasty-gram making such a ridiculous accusation will be fired. What I am saying is that you must be a leader in all areas of family life, not just in romance, because if you slip up in any part of it, the effect will be the same catastrophic withdrawal from intimacy as if you had said, “I don’t want to offend you, but is it okay if I kiss you?” on your first date.

Relationships are complex, but the rules are not. The forms of female communication seem equally complex, but broken down into discreet components, almost 100% of communicating effectively with a woman follows one or more of three simple rules. What are they?

Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com, download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and find out. Be the first and probably the only guy on your block who knows what women want, what makes them tick, and how to work your way through that jungle of hints, signs, and signals that she throws at you every time your together so that you know what’s on her mind at all times (ever heard one say, “I want a man who just knows…”?). It’s easy, it’s surprisingly affordable, and it’s guaranteed to work, so do it now. Never put off until tomorrow the success you can enjoy today, because tomorrow may not come.

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

Start Out Right If You Want a Great Relationship or Marriage That Lasts

A reader success story that proves that if you start out with good information and a clear picture of what you want in a relationship, you’ll have it. He started out right and kept going. What can I say? Gentlemen, this is something you can easily do too!

I found an e-mail that just made my day. This guy, Daniel, sounds like a fellow Southerner to me, and is an achiever. He gets the tools to get the job done, prepares himself at the beginning and follows through. As much as I despise censorship, I had to modify part of his letter to keep it PG-rated – I don’t want somebody’s children reading over their shoulder and asking questions that a parent isn’t prepared to answer. Check him out:

Hi David,

Early last year I meet a woman that just plain stole my heart. We dated for awhile, then dated steady, and finally got engaged. We put the wedding off a couple of times because of family problems, and I noticed things starting to go the same way another relationship had gone before. We were running out of things to talk about, she was breaking dates, and I knew there was a problem but she wouldn’t talk about it, and the more I tried to be nice to her and asked what was wrong, the worse it got.

Not wanting to screw things up and make the mistakes I had always made, I read your book and put all I had learned into action. All I can say it WOW!!!! I have never had a relationship like this and I never want this to end. It’s even better now than it was in the beginning, because I can understand her better and we have more fun because I’m not walking on eggshells anymore. I know for sure that my success with this woman is all due to you and your book.

The words “thank you” seem so small for what you have taught me on how to be attractive to my woman and keep her coming back for more. She even calls me to come home from work sometimes and I walk into the bedroom to find her totally naked on the bed [doing naughty fun things that I couldn’t reprint – D.C.] and I cannot get out of my clothes fast enough. We just keep going and going if you know what I mean.

From one guy to all the others, if you never do anything else for yourself buy David's book. It’s the one gift you can give yourself that will last you a lifetime and I truly believe that if you follow David's words you will never use your bed for just sleeping anymore.

Daniel L.

My reply:

Well, Daniel, congratulations on getting it done right. I am going to have to correct you on something, though. Your success with your partner and your relationship is not all due to me and my book. You had to read it, understand it, and put it to work to have your success. I put a lot of effort into writing this book, and so did all the people that helped me research it and then test and fine tune the advice it presents, but you had to make the choice to salvage your manhood and the relationship, learn the material and then diligently apply it to raise your attractiveness and your relationship to such an extraordinary level. I’ll accept some of the credit, but you have to accept some as well, as most men don’t care enough about themselves and their partners to do what you did.

Yes, I said that. Most men either think they know it all (and are still thinking that everybody else was wrong and everything was everybody else’s fault after the divorce is final, they’re broke and strapped with big alimony and child support payments, but no wife and limited visitation rights that are wielded like the ultimate weapon), or they subconsciously don’t feel worthy of a good relationship and sabotage their chances of having one at every turn. You saw that things were going somewhere that past experience told you that you didn’t want them to go, admitted the problem, got help, and worked it out. That’s what a real man does; he fixes problems by taking action. I need to print up some membership cards for the “Manly Men Who Do Manly Things Club” so I can send them to guys like you when they send in a success story like this. J Again, congratulations!

Take care,
David

Guys, there may come a time when you have to make the same choice. It may be staring you in the face right now for all I know; there must be some good reason you’re reading this newsletter. You can do what most guys do, be the know-it-all or wuss out – either way is what a loser would do – or you can do what real men like Daniel do: Take the bull by the horns, admit there’s a problem, get the tools to fix it (many, if not all of which are in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” which you can download immediately at http://www.makingherhappy.com), and get it fixed, then get it “dialed in” and take it to the winner’s circle.

It’s your decision, and it really doesn’t sound like a hard one to make, does it? I mean, “alone, broke, and unhappy” versus “in a great relationship both in and out of the bedroom” – how much thought can that one take? Not much, huh? Then do it now, before you do anything else! ;-)

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

Verbal Ping Pong: Clear and Effective Conversation in Relationships and Marriage

MUST READ: You’ll be shocked to find out how much your partner has tried to tell you when you thought she had nothing to say, and how much she thinks you’re not listening when you don’t drag it out of her.

This is going to be one of those articles that you probably should forward to your friends, because very few of them are going to have any clue that the world works this way and will thank you for sharing this with them. So, grab a cup of coffee or whatever your favorite libation happens to be and settle in for an awakening like none you’ve ever had (unless of course you’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage").

I probably have more female friends than most guys because of the nature of the kinds of work I’ve been attracted to in my life, especially this work, and it gives me a chance to observe female behavior on a fairly large scale without the potential emotional stress that can interfere with communication when you catch your partner having a bad day or in a foul mood. The things I notice I eventually put to the test with my wife and pass along to the support team to verify in their own lives, and once in a while, I stumble upon something that is just about Earth-shattering.

One such thing is the difference in how men and women convey information, especially historical information (“How was your day, Dear?” or “Tell me about your trip,”) to each other. Hopefully by now, you’ve read in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report the excerpt from "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" titled “Men State, Women Negotiate,” but if not I encourage you to do so before continuing, because what you are about to read takes that understanding up to an even higher level, one that could save you half or more of the ill feelings that your wife might ever feel toward you – yes, it’s really that big.

When a man has something to report, that’s what he does. He just spits it out and moves on. Women want to go through somewhat of a ping-pong exchange to convey the same message.

Consider the following scenario: A man comes home from an overnight business trip and his wife says, “Hi Honey! Welcome home! I missed you. How was your trip?”

He replies, “It was good. The hotel was nice, the food was good, the meeting with the client went well and we got an even bigger order than I’d hoped for. I’m tired and hungry, so I’m going to unpack real quick and grab a shower and then I’m taking you out to dinner to celebrate.” And he leaves the room.

The odds are that at this moment, his wife is somewhere between feeling left out, angry, and hurt, all to varying degrees. Why? We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s turn the tables and see how the conversation would have gone if it were her who had just come home from the exact same trip, with the same experiences to relate to the husband, and he reacts as most men do:

She hits the door and says, “Hi Honey, I’m home!”

He comes strolling in and says, “I see you made it back in one piece. How was your trip?”

She says, “It was good. Really good.”

He says, “Well that’s great. Look, I’m hungry, so how about I take your luggage to the bedroom and we go get something to eat?”

What just happened? That depends on whose point of view you are considering. From his point of view, because he doesn’t realize that he needed to invite her to share more information, she had a good trip and is tired and not feeling talkative. WRONG ANSWER! In her mind, he just completely blew off her activities and accomplishments and was more interested in stuffing his face, and she’s even more upset than she was in the previous scenario. If this has happened much in the past, it’s just one more nail in the coffin of their relationship.

Because of the same brain structure issues disclosed in the “Men State, Women Negotiate” chapter of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," women also handle reporting in that same back-and-forth manner. Hence, when she starts to speak, she pauses to have you acknowledge what she has said and invite her to continue. Their stated reasons vary from wanting to test to see if you’re interested to being polite to “I don’t know, that’s just the way it is,” but it’s really that same biological, brain structure-dependent mechanism, and you’ll find that the “girlier” she is, the more prevalent the behavior.

How would this conversation have played out if it would have happened in her perfect world? Let’s look. First he comes home from the trip, she welcomes him as before, and he begins to answer her:

He says, “It was really good. I’m glad I went.”

She says, “How was the hotel?”

He says, “It was good. I enjoyed it.”

She says, “Was the bed comfortable?”

He says, “Yes, I slept well and had a great breakfast the next morning.”

She says, “And you meeting went well?”

He says, “Yes, very well. The client was pleased and placed a big order.”

She says, “Pleased with you or the proposal?”

He says, “Both, and so much so that this is worth celebrating!”

She says, “Oh my! Dinner out then?”

He says, “Yes, I’m starved, so I’m going to clean up and whisk you away to Scalini’s for Italian. How about that?”

She says, “That will be wonderful. I’ll be ready in a minute.”

As you can see, there really wasn’t much more information conveyed, but she feels good about it because it was more interactive. There was that social element of sharing so prevalent in the female communication style. The conversation would have been near-identical, again in her idea of a perfect world, if she had been the one on a trip, but there would have been a lot more information conveyed if he had dragged it out of her with the right questions:

He says, “How was the hotel?”

She says, “It was wonderful. The place was clean and the people were so nice.”

He says, “Really?”

She says, “Yes! And the sheets smelled so good I didn’t want to get out of bed. I meant to ask them what that scent was.

He says, “Was the bed comfortable?”

She says, “Yes, I slept well and felt great when I woke up.”

He says, “How was the food?”

She says, “Wonderful! I had a great breakfast of a Florentine omelet with juice and coffee. It was fabulous.”

He says, “That’s great. I didn’t know you liked spinach in an omelet.”

She says, “Oh yes, and the coffee was just the way I like it and the orange juice was fresh-squeezed for me at the table. I’ll definitely go back.”

He says, “And your meeting went well?”

She says, “Yes, very well. The client was pleased.”

He says, “Pleased with you or the proposal?”

She says, “Both, and placed a big order. He’s a very nice man too. He was very respectful and didn’t interrupt me once.

He says, “Well, that sounds like cause for celebration. Do you feel like going out?”

She says, “Yes, I’m starved!”

He says, “Well then, I’m going to clean up and whisk you away to Scalini’s for Italian. How about that?”

She says, “That would be wonderful, but it takes so long to get served there. Can we do Martin’s Steakhouse instead?”

He says, “Sure, I’ll be ready in a minute.”

So you see, any invitation to continue brings greater and greater levels of detail. At first, it may feel like you’re trying to pull dragon’s teeth to get her to spit it all out, but eventually you’ll both understand each other’s needs and tendencies and it will get easier for both of you. Also notice even though it’s her celebration, she makes no suggestion as to the venue, even though she obviously has an idea of where she wants to go. This gets back to the negotiation lesson that you should have learned in the excerpt from "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage."

One other thing that you will notice as you get used to this sort of parley is that she drops subtle clues for him to help him lead the conversation, such as mentioning that the sheets smelled good before addressing the most common of all issues with bedding and sleep, which is comfort. A woman will tend to hold off on the most important things until last and work their way up to them, where we tend to spit them out first and drop less-significant, parenthetical details after we’ve established the main point. Remember that women can go through a lot of tests to make sure you’re interested in the subject before they give you the real meat of the conversation.

So do you now see why she would have been upset with him in the first two examples? In the first, he left her no way to interact and indeed, cut her off by announcing that he was leaving the room when he was done speaking, and in the second, he appeared to her to assume that there was nothing more important than his appetite left to deal with, when in fact he just didn’t realize that he needed to invite her to tell him the rest of the story.

Now, think back over your life together to all the times that something like this might have happened, and then go tell your wife that you had no idea that it worked this way. Then tell her that you will be trying to make it more interactive for her and that she in turn needs to realize that especially when under stress, your natural tendency will be to be as brief as possible to make more time for either handling the situation or returning to normal after it’s passed, and that if she wants more information than what you provide, that she has a standing invitation to ask questions until the two of you get more in tune with each other’s tendencies and needs and can anticipate and get along better.

Gentlemen, as usual, it’s not rocket science; it’s just different from what you are accustomed to. She won’t expect you to do everything her way, but she’ll greatly appreciate you trying to meet her in the middle and you’ll find that your conversational skills and appeal to both sexes will improve as you do this, because you’ll learn how to better read people and know whether they have more to say before you change subjects or make them feel like they need to. Being liked is purely a function of giving people a reason to enjoy your company, and being a good conversationalist is one of the surest ways in the world to be wildly popular, especially with women.

There you have it. It’s long, and the examples may have even been a little boring because you’re not used to going through so much “ping-pong” to get a message across, but as you progress, you’ll also find that you learn things about your partner from those extra little details she provides that are indeed valuable, because they provide useful hints about her likes and dislikes, which in turn help in another of the most difficult of all human endeavors, choosing the perfect gift for your wife or girlfriend.

All of this and more, including the full scoop on how to communicate effectively with the women in your life, how to buy the perfect gift, and how to easily make her life so fun and exciting that she’s breaking fingernails trying to get you out of your clothes are some of what you’ll learn in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," if and only if you go to http://www.makingherhappy.com, download your copy, and read and apply it. If I publish another thousand newsletters you still won’t see all the proven, critical information in this book that will allow you to make your relationship as good as it can get, so go ahead, do it now, because life is too short to waste it waiting for something good to happen when you can quickly, easily, and cheaply MAKE IT HAPPEN!

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. 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, 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 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.” 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 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 hear “yes;” you’ll see 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

Time Is On YOUR Side When Saving a Relationship or Marriage

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

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

Hi David,

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

Buddy G.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wusses Are Boring and Non-Wusses Are Mean? Untangling Dilemmas in Relationships and Marriage

The Great Female Contradiction (being a wuss is boring, but being a non-wuss is mean), and how to deal with it to have a happy relationship and marriage.

It’s always an interesting morning when the “mailbag” (my e-mail inbox) contains several concerns over accusations of sounding “mean.” This is a point that every man and woman who is going through a relationship makeover needs to understand. It’s covered in detail in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but I’m going to give you a crash course this morning so you’ll know what it’s about and that it can be handled without bloodshed and is actually an incredibly good sign that you are doing the right things and your efforts are paying off.

Meet Scott D., who seems to do the best job of succinctly stating the problem:

Hi David,

I bought your book and signed up for your newsletters almost a month ago, and I must tell you that I am pretty impressed with both the writing and the results I’m seeing. I’m not accustomed to someone writing to me in the same style and tone as if we were just sitting and talking, and it’s made it both an enjoyable read (my wife calls you “her favorite smart-ass”) and a huge help in recognizing past mistakes and correcting them. The change in my wife is noticeable. As I get more ballsy and playful, she gets more sexy and playful. But, there’s something I have to ask you about.

Sometimes when she’s “being a brat” (I would have never thought of her pouty, whining, demanding behavior that way before reading your book) and I bust on her to let her know that she needs to grow up and lighten up she says that I’m “just mean.” She says it kind of sheepishly with a hint of both a pout and a smile, like she’s been caught off-guard (or with her hand in the cookie jar) and a bit embarrassed, but I can’t help but wonder if she’s hinting at something that I’m not picking up on and if I’m setting myself up to get punished for something if I don’t catch on soon, so I’m asking you, straight up, what’s going on? Please respond, because things are going so well that I’d hate to blow it over missing a signal.

Take care, and thanks!
Scott D.

My reply:

Well, Scott, congratulations on taking control of your life by buying this book and working for the results and the life you want! You’re not missing anything. You’ve caught her in a somewhat juvenile attention-getting ploy, and she’s a little embarrassed because she’s not used to you (or any man) “getting it” – knowing that she’s being a brat and not wussing out and surrendering control to her. It makes them a bit uncomfortable until they get used to the new, “alpha male” you. It’s no big deal, and don’t dwell on it and make it one. [She sees it, is surprised, tests to see if it’s real, finds out that it is, sexes up and lives happily ever after. One of my favorite stories.]

We’re all a bit resistant to change, even when it’s for the better. She doesn’t want you to be a wuss, and she doesn’t want to be in total control (at least not if she’s not emotionally damaged from some prior trauma). Women want to know if we are real men, ready and able to lead and protect, or really are just wusses pretending to be real men until we have them hooked into some kind of complicated commitment like marriage or a mortgage. They’re not trying to take control, and not trying to make us wusses, but all the testing can eventually perpetuate the result she doesn’t want, because we can get either tired of the testing or insecure about it and wuss out if we don’t know what’s going on or aren’t pure in our desire to be a man and live happily as such.

This is really important for both sexes to understand, and I will probably die preaching this sermon. The tests make it look like they want us to wuss out, and since the testing stops when we finally do, it appears that we get rewarded with a discontinuation of the minor abuse that constitutes the test, so we somewhat logically but incorrectly deduce that we gave them what they wanted. It’s incorrect because we didn’t know some things that needed to go into the equation before logic could work, starting with “no woman wants to live with (again, unless she’s severely damaged) a wuss that gives into her every whim.”

In the end, years of testing and having you and other men wuss out on her have created a habit of feeling in control. She just needs to break the habit so she can fully enjoy the rush she gets from being attracted to you again. You will never, EVER chase a woman off by making her feel attraction, unless she’s so insecure or emotionally scarred that she equates attraction with abuse or some other trauma and runs from it.

While we are on the subject, if she hooked up with you while in this damaged state, there are several things you can be sure of: she was never attracted to you, doesn’t want to be attracted to you, was and is probably using you as a safe haven from men she would be attracted to, and most likely will run like hell if she starts feeling attraction for you. Logic leaves no alternatives. You can let her run, or try to hang with her while she fixes it; be advised that people who are damaged that badly seldom fix it, even with love and lots of therapy, so if you decide to hang with it, establish some sort of time table and performance criteria so that you don’t waste your whole life waiting for the impossible.

Take care,
David

Make no mistake, attraction is biological, not logical, so virtually all women seek it and respond to it. Indeed, a woman’s first criteria in evaluating a man is this rule: “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me.” But don’t sweat it. If you do what men are born to do, it happens quite naturally, and once it happens, many women will literally kill to protect that feeling, so you can imagine what an effect it has on a committed relationship, and how destructive its loss can be as well.

To know all you need to know about attraction, communication, compatibility, evaluation, and many other things that are crucial to a life-long happy relationship, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and see how you can kick your relationship up to notches unknown to humankind!

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

Use Natural "Guy Drive" to Improve Your Relationship or Marriage

Guys are naturally tinkerers and tweakers, so why don’t we channel that natural energy into tuning up and dialing in our relationships or our marriage?

I thought of this several days ago, and I’ve been stewing over it ever since. There is something that all of us do, one way or another, that is so distinctly masculine that it’s included in any stereotype of men. We just can’t leave well enough alone.

We can buy a perfectly good car, and can’t rest until we’ve customized something or souped it up. We buy a computer, and have to tinker with all the settings to try to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of it, even if it’s already so blazing fast that it’s obscene. We sharpen a knife or tool until it’s sharp, and then keep going until it will shave, and then shave cleanly, and then shave so cleanly that we can’t feel the blade taking the hair off of our forearm. We’ll shoot a 70 at the golf course and spend another thousand dollars on training videos and consultations with a golf pro to shoot a 69 next time. And the list goes on and on…

So why the hell don’t we spend any time or effort trying to “trick out” our relationship or marriage until we’re threatened with losing it??? Does that make even a little sense to you? Frankly, I find it downright embarrassing!

The masculine brain is physically and chemically configured for problem-solving and optimizing, and we’ll flat burn it up trying to squeeze one more mile per gallon or one more tenth of a second in the quarter mile out of our car, or rigging some kind of sharpening jig for a hand tool blade, or a cutting jig to get that line just a little straighter, and we’ll get down on our knees with our ass higher than our head in a public place to check the lay of the ground around the hole we want a golf ball to go into without a second thought, yet we waste this most amazing of all resources on this planet when it comes to getting along with the woman we love!

Gentlemen, that’s just insane! If you’re going to engineer something, or optimize something, make it something that really counts, and something with unlimited potential for payback, like your marriage! This may come as a shock to you, but “optimizing” a relationship or marriage can be more fun and rewarding than any other pursuit you can name! Just imagine a life that’s filled with love, fun, adventure, sex, and laughter, and devoid of eye-rolling, fit-pitching, being screamed at for something that never happened, etc. You want some of that? Yeah, I though so. Indeed, having lived with it, I can tell you with authority that you want all of it you can get.

So I’m going to keep this short today, and issue a challenge to every man alive. Use your greatest natural resource, your brain, and that wonderful thing, whatever it is, that makes us push to make things the absolute best they can be, to bring your relationship and/or marriage up to a level where both of you can enjoy it to the exclusion of all else. Once you have that done, and while maintaining it, turn your energy to your children, and your career, and any other worthwhile pursuit.

Get your priorities straight, take responsibility for the condition of your relationship or marriage, and channel your natural talents and energy where they can do you the most good. Who cares that you golfed a 69 last weekend if while you were doing it your wife was sitting with a bunch of women bitching about how inattentive you are, or worse, holed up in a hotel room somewhere with another man laughing about what a moron you are? It may not be that bad yet, and if you get on the ball right now, it will get better before it has a chance to get that bad.

And I’ll give you a leg up, too, the relationship tweaker’s encyclopedia. It’s called "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and you can download your copy at http://www.makingherhappy.com/ right now and be getting your relationship or marriage dialed in within just a few minutes. Or you can go play another nine holes or put new plugs in the hot rod while your wife is fantasizing about (or “doing”) the gardener, pool boy, your best friend – get the picture? It’s your call. Make the right one.

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

See What Buddha Knew That Could Save Your Relationship and Marriage

I’m not a Buddhist, and I was surprised at how relevant this advice is to modern-day relationships and marriage. Indeed, you may be as surprised as I was!

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, newsfeeds, advisories, etc., in a lot of different fields to stay on top of various things that are happening in my life. One of them is Michael Masterson’s “Early to Rise,” which is a free daily with health, wealth, and wisdom tips, a word-of-the-day bit, and a few other interesting things.

I know Michael from years gone by when I was studying copywriting; he runs the American Writers and Artists Institute, and is pretty much a “brainiac” who is an expert marketer, has done very well for himself investing, has a lot of very good contacts in healthcare education (he’s also behind the Health Sciences Institute), and probably a lot that I don’t know about these days. This is not a paid or affiliate recommendation; his stuff is simply good enough for me to find useful information in and I’m sure you will too.

The main reason I mention it is in a recent edition, one of his associates, Robert Ringer, wrote a piece on Buddha’s quote, “All unhappiness is caused by attachment,” and it struck a chord, rung a bell, or however you want to say that it got my attention, because that is more true of relationships than anything else.

People get attached to habits, ideas, people, places, jobs, possessions, etc., and they make bad decisions out of fear of losing those things, instead of good decisions about advancing their life. I’ve addressed that in other newsletters and in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and will be addressing it frequently in the future, because it is so very important in keeping things in perspective. Let’s look at just how those five things I just listed could literally destroy you or your relationship:

Habits. Let’s say you and your wife smoke at the time you get together, and something causes her to quit, maybe a case of pneumonia or flu, adult-onset of asthma, a close call with lung cancer, or whatever, and she gives up the habit and you can’t, or won’t. What if you and your wife enjoyed clubbing before she became pregnant, and you insist on continuing to go several nights a week without her when she cannot go, and she takes exception to you being out drinking and dancing with other women in a place that is pretty much designed for singles to “hook up” in? Or maybe some dangerous hobby that you indulge in every week, that you should consider giving up now that you have children to support?

Ideas. Somebody tells you they think your wife might be cheating, because they saw her somewhere talking to a guy; she tells you it’s her brother, or a coworker, or somebody harmless, but your insecurity keeps you from letting it go and the idea continues to escalate even though there is no evidence. Or you have an idea for a business or product that you think the world will beat a path to your door to buy, and you continuously keep sinking more and more money into it, in spite of marketing data and other real-world facts saying that it was a bad idea, because you think you know more than the world does about what it wants? Henry Ford almost bankrupted the Ford Motor Company doing that…

People. Do we even need to go here? Ex-girlfriends, ex-wives or an ex-employer that you continue to be involved with in spite of the objections of your current partner or employer? So-called “friends” who trash every good idea you come up with because they can never come up with a good one and want you to be as miserable as they are? An employee who is bankrupting you with their incompetence but you don’t want to fire them because you’re concerned about the rest of their family? And biggest of all, a current partner who has declared it’s over and followed up by doing all the things that tell you that it’s not just a wake-up call and is definitely an unsalvageable situation?

Places. The house that you don’t want to move out of because of fond memories that keeps you from advancing your career because of the geographical constraints? The town you don’t want to leave because some ex-partner or friend lives there, in spite of the fact that your partner is going to leave town without you if you don’t go, or your career will dead-end?

Jobs. Don’t get me started! The job that you hate to get out of bed every morning to face but won’t leave because you’re afraid to look for another, or have yourself so over-extended that you can’t afford to leave it, even if the stress ends up killing you or ruining your marriage and alienating your children?

Possessions. Shall we start with the car, boat, or airplane that you can’t afford the payments on but would rather go bankrupt than to admit that you had overspent? What about the clutter of all those hobbies a person can start but never see through, and refuses to get rid of the trappings and clutter from those hobbies because they’re going to get back into it “one of these days…” Or my favorite, the stocks, real estate, collectibles, etc., that people get stuck with and take a bath on by holding onto them believing that they will forever continue to appreciate in value? Dot-com stock, anyone?

You’re quite right in observing that many of the things I listed don’t necessarily have a direct bearing on your relationship with your partner, but indirect relationships can be more than powerful enough to destroy it. Anything negative that is happening in your life stresses you out, makes you edgy, and possibly insecure, and those things do impact your relationship, often hard, and all too often fatally.

Another thing that caught my attention in that article was something that the writer has taken from something written by the Dalai Lama (the Buddhist leader, for those of you who are unfamiliar) about the dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness being the interest in the alleviation of suffering and the quest for happiness. He supported this by quoting the four “Noble Truths” that Buddha taught in his first sermon:

Noble Truth No. 1: There is suffering.
Noble Truth No. 2: Suffering has an origin.
Noble Truth No. 3: The cessation of suffering is possible.
Noble Truth No. 4: There is a path to the cessation of suffering.

I’m not a Buddhist; my interest here is philosophical and logical, not religious. These four truths are indeed axiomatic, so profoundly factual as to be self-evident. There is suffering everywhere you look, and there is always a cause for it. A remedy for suffering can always be found and end it, even if that remedy is death (there are some political and religious leaders who take strong objection to this statement, because they want you to believe that your purpose of existence is to suffer). And last, due to the law of cause and effect, if suffering can be caused, so can its remedy. What does this mean for you and your relationship?

There are questions you can ask yourself to help you find that path to the cessation of suffering. Among those questions are “What did I do or fail to do to cause this?” and “What can I do or refrain from doing to fix this?” These are the questions a man will ask, a leader will ask, not a wuss who’s looking to blame everyone and everything else for his troubles. Asking these questions and formulating a factual answer is one of the most basic skills that distinguish the alpha male from all others. He takes responsibility for his situation and takes charge of improving it. Women love that, and they’ll tell you so. Just ask them.

What you will also find axiomatic is that your path will never be found in the answer to questions like, “Who did this to me?” or “Why did somebody have to do this to me?” or even “What can I get somebody to do to get me out of this mess?” You get out of problems by identifying them, figuring out how they came to be a problem, and figuring out what you can do (or refrain from doing) that will fix the problem, and then following through. Period.

The more you can let go of ego, blame, insecurity, dependence, fear, anger, etc., and take responsibility for yourself, your actions, and your situation, the more objective and truly “enlightened” you will become. The Buddhists aren’t the only ones for whom “enlightenment” equates to happiness…

If you are having problems in your relationship, your “path to enlightenment” can very likely be found in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It contains the wisdom and experience of hundreds of people who have had relationship problems and overcome them, and then turned solid relationships into truly great relationships by getting tuned in and turned on to each other. (No, Baby Boomers, you DO NOT drop out – Timothy Leary was a long way from being “enlightened” or happy).

Seriously, it will help you figure out where you are, what got you there, where you need to go, and will give you the tools to lead a happy life whether it’s with your current partner, if she’s the right one, or another if she’s not – sometimes mismatched partners are one of those things you have to detach from to put your life back on track. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, and get started down your own path to happiness, because life is too short to spend it wandering down any other path.

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

Do You "Get It" When It Comes to What Women Want in Relationships and Marriage?

Some men just don’t get it, even when their wife beats them over the head with the truth. Don’t be one of these guys, because when a woman gets tired of beating you, she won’t just stop, she’ll go away…permanently.

Today’s edition will be short and sweet because it is so self-evident that a lot of explaining won’t be necessary. When somebody buys a copy of my book, signs up for the newsletter, or ends their newsletter subscription, I get an e-mail advising me of the activity. I get to create the forms for these tasks, and rather than just notify me of activity, I also try to use them to get feedback from readers about what they need to know, what’s important to them, and even why they end their subscription to the free newsletter as quality control measures. Here’s an example that just floored me:

From: zeusXXXX@yahoo.com [mailto:zeusXXXX@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 5:08 PM
To: David Cunningham
Subject: AWeber mhh_tips: This Lead Unsubscribed: zeusXXXX@yahoo.com

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: Axxxxxx
Email: zeusXXXX@yahoo.com
Signup Date: XX/XX/XX 0X:XX PM XST

Comments:
Never signed up...EX-wife did...

I’ve sterilized the personally identifiable information to protect his privacy, so don’t be cute and try to send an e-mail to zeusXXXX@yahoo.com because it won’t go anywhere. Now, look at the “Comments” portion, which is just the field name for a blank on the form that is captioned something like “Reason for ending subscription.” He didn’t sign up, “his EX-wife did…” What can you divine from this comment?

I’ll not get into the macho inference by his choice of the name “Zeus” in the e-mail address; it could be the guy is just likes Greek philosophy. Yeah, right. (His wife also subscribes and she said he really was that full of himself, but without any good reason.) His wife signed him up for it (and according to her, she wasn’t his EX yet, but was now looking forward to it), trying to tell him that he was falling short, and giving him an example of what he needed to be doing to help their relationship.

Rather than being glad that she was providing him valuable information and taking action (not to mention being glad that she was signing him up for a newsletter instead of having an affair with the perfect example of what she wanted and purposely getting caught in the affair to show him, as many women have done and written to me about!) he slams the door on her. Hence, she is now his “EX-wife” in his mind, and soon to be in reality, when she wasn’t looking for a divorce, she was trying to save their marriage.

Notice how he emphasizes “EX;” he resents being told that there’s something wrong, and let a fragile ego, which probably contributed to the wussy attitude and behavior she was trying to get him to change, cost him his marriage. There’s no telling how much or in how many ways she tried to communicate problems to him, but like most men, he didn’t understand that he was being given instructions on how to fix things, and it doesn’t matter whether she left because he didn’t fix anything or he left because things weren’t suiting him, it’s over, and it probably could have been fixed.

All it would have taken was a little less ego and a little better communication skills, and a little effort to follow-up and make the improvements, but “Zeus” here was too busy protecting his ego to develop some real self-esteem and appreciate the fact that his wife wanted him instead of an affair or a divorce. Now, instead of a loving wife who was interested in staying married to him, he lives alone with a big neon sign that says, “Hey, I’m an idiot who can’t see past the tip of my nose!” Don’t let this happen to you!

And there’s no reason you should! “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” is filled with the benefit of the real-life experience of 118 couples who helped with the research of the original version, my own experience, and the experience of hundreds of readers who have commented and shared since. Each point in it has been tested and proven to work in 90% or more of all test cases, and if you think about that, that’s pretty amazing. That means, among other things, that 90% or more of all the women involved in this have agreed on and responded to each of these things! Can you imagine that?

Waiting until you have a crisis on your hands is the worst time to start working on fixing it. It can still be done, but it’s a lot harder than if you just get things in order and keep them that way, not to mention a whole lot more of a pain in the neck, with all the frustration, boredom, fights, affairs, etc., that crop up before the crisis is evident – often in an attempt by the wife to MAKE it evident.

So do yourself and your family a favor. Go on over to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now, before you do anything else, and download your copy of this truly amazing book. Get your house in order, and keep it that way, because life is too short to be living behind a big sign that says “OUT OF ORDER,” or even worse, “I’M AN IDIOT!”

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

Is Your Intimate Behavior Killing the Attraction in Your Relationship or Marriage?

When people are together long enough to get comfortable they start doing things exclusive to their relationship, like “baby talk” and wearing sloppy or goofy-looking clothes, that might be cute to them, but can kill attraction deader than a rock. Sometimes they get so comfortable with it in private that they give the rest of us a dose of it, too! (Yeah, YUCK! is right!) Look for signs of this in your relationship.

I had a visit from a couple of friends, Bill and Cheryl. It was a study in “what not to do” as they say. They’ve been married for about twenty-six years, and acted SO married it almost seemed scripted to watch them. They finished each others’ sentences, ate from each others’ plates, talked “baby talk” to each other (gag!!!), and were about the shabbiest dressed wealthy couple I’ve seen in a long time.

She was in an oversized men’s sweat suit (despite the 90+ degree F. / 32+ degrees C. weather) because it was “comfortable” and wearing no makeup. He was wearing baggy cargo shorts, an over-sized graphic T-shirt, and sandals (accentuating his bow-leggedness, very knobby knees, and extremely large feet sitting below his rather robust torso, a left-over from his college days as a football player, giving him the look of some sort of cantilevered rock formation found in the deserts of the American Southwest).

Eventually she excused herself to the powder room, and I asked him how things were going, ready to bet the farm that they were comfortable and bored stiff; I would have won the bet. They had started out very into each other, having a lot of fun together, and things had cooled off quickly not long after their marriage.

They had joined that large group of couples in long-term relationships that sleep together every two months – yes, that’s a sad but true statistic, at least in North America. Adult couples in mature married relationships (two years or longer) average six sexual encounters per year. Sad, isn’t it?

These two were a textbook example of what happens when two people get too comfortable with each other. Take a close look at what they were doing. Is there anything whatsoever sexually exciting in hearing your partner talk like they are addressing a baby? Or like they are one? Not unless you’re a pedophile. “Sweet” as the girls say, maybe, but no way it’s sexy.

As for the flour-sack-esque, nearly homeless-looking attire, she might as well have been in an over-sized bathrobe with curlers in her hair and a cigarette dangling from her toothless mouth, and he might as well have been holding up a sign that said “will work for food” and looking like he hadn’t bathed in a month or two, except maybe in a bottle of cheap wine. Just makes you want to snuggle right up to one of them, doesn’t it? It's a shame, because properly dressed and groomed, they're a strikingly good-looking couple.

I also noticed that as they talked, if they weren’t doing the “baby talk,” they acted a lot more like girlfriends than husband and wife, especially the business with finishing each others’ sentences and reaching over to touch each other every time they started a sentence. Now, Bill is anything but effeminate, and when he spoke to me it was very “mano-a-mano,” and I found myself staring at him as he switched modes every time he switched between talking to me and his wife.

Don’t let this happen to you! A man and woman should communicate, freely and openly, but not in a way that kills their attraction for each other. They should be comfortable around each other, but not in ways that make you dull, sloppy, uninteresting, or project an extreme lack of self-respect.

Your partner should be the most important person in your life (other than yourself – holding your spouse as more important than yourself makes for a good romance novel, but makes for a disaster in real life) if you have a great relationship, and as such, they deserve the best in you, not the worst, the most interesting, not the most mundane. That’s how life-long love relationships are enjoyed, by keeping in mind that all other relationships are likely to be transient, and are therefore less important than this one.

Many people would shrink back in indignation or jump on a stump and start preaching at the mere suggestion that your partner be more important than even your children, and I’m not going to debate that subject with anyone; however, I will ask you to at least take a logical – yes, entirely unemotional -- look at it for a minute.

Your children come along, and you live with them day after day for eighteen years, plus or minus a year or two. Then they’re gone except for weekly visits if you’re lucky, if you are the average parent. Your partner, if you manage your relationship properly, was there before the kids, and will be there long after the kids have gone, day after day after day, “until death do us part,” right? You don’t want your adult children living with you, but you want your spouse living with you for the rest of your life, at least if you have a good marriage.

So logically, who is more important to your life’s happiness, someone who by definition (early death notwithstanding) will stick around for 18 years and be gone, or somebody who (again, early death notwithstanding) could be with you day after day for 50 years or more, if you give them a good reason to stay, like loving them, being interesting and fun to be around, sharing their values and celebrating their achievements with them? Pretty obvious, huh?

Obvious or not, and whether you accept it or not, real-world experiences bear it out. Men will probably be comfortable with this much more readily than women because of (as usual) biological factors, but everyone should think about it and come to grips with it as self-evident truth, because it helps you to at least appreciate the full significance of a commitment to a life-long relationship.

(And for any of you women who are right now thinking, “How dare he? My kids are going to come first and he can just get over it!” get this: if you make your husband take a back seat to your children or anything else, you give up your right to be upset, hurt, mad, or anything else when he chooses to let you take a back seat to something. Double standards and hypocrisy don’t work any better in relationships and marriage than they do anywhere else, so get some perspective before you make a choice that the whole family will ultimately suffer over. Put your marriage first if you want it to last a lifetime, or accept responsibility for spending your retirement years alone after alienating your husband by treating him like a second-class citizen.)

This doesn’t have to happen to you. It’s your choice, and it doesn’t take much effort. Basic awareness of the potential causes of the problem and choosing to do something other than commit one of those causes is really about all there is to it. Baby talk, men acting like girlfriends instead of men, and dressing yourself and acting in a way that does not project self-respect are only a few of the ways in which you can kill attraction dead, and knowledge is power!

Know what kills attraction, and what creates it, and use that knowledge to make one of those relationships that has you happy to be together for fifty or more years! (You wouldn’t believe the things people buy you for your fiftieth anniversary! Just kidding…) I put that knowledge together for you in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s there, tested, working and guaranteed. All you have to do is go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download it, and then USE IT. It’s just that easy, and life is just that short that you don’t want to spend it being part of some miserable statistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see what’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Should You Bother to Fix Little Problems in Your Relationship and Marriage?

Why should you want and expect to make an effort to fix a strained or distant relationship? I couldn’t even type that question with a straight face, but some people 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! Read, and get the real scoop…

I just got the most ridiculous e-mail I think I’ve 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 they say 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 ignorant), let’s look at a few things from a logical point-of-view:

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.

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’s got a serious problem with a bored wife.)

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, huh?

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.

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.”

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 who 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.

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.

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. Do you relish the thought of coming home and finding your wife in 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 violetn, 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 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" is full of motivational stuff that will 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? Maybe you’re one of those “comfortably unhappy” people. I don’t know, but together, we can find out.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David Cunningham

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 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

“Coulda,” “Shoulda,” “Woulda”: the Wrong Words to Say When You Look Back on Your Relationship or Marriage

A MUST-READ ISSUE! How often do you use the phrases “could have,” “should have,” and “would have”? If it’s more than very rarely, it’s a good sign that you’ve got some room for major and easily-achieved improvement in your relationship and your life in general.

It’s another wonderful Friday morning as I write this, and after the weekend will come another of 52 great opportunities you will have this year to start the week off right. Make the best of it. If you haven’t already made your plans for the week, make them over the weekend, and include some form of self-improvement in each of three areas: your personal development, your career development, and your relationship with your partner (or preparing to have a great relationship with a partner if you don’t currently have one).

Wow! Stop and think about this for a minute. You have 52 chances every year to begin a week the right way and get things done. By the same token, you have 12 chances to start a month right, 260 or more chances to start a work-day off right, 52 chances to start a weekend right, and 365 chances to start a day off right, with a bonus chance every four years. That’s a huge number of opportunities to improve! Have you ever thought about what happens as you let all these opportunities slide by unused?

Time passes, and your life with it – the most precious resource in all the universe, and one that you never even know how much you have left to enjoy. When it passes and you don’t avail yourself of the opportunities it presents, the end result of all the boredom and frustration that breeds is resentment, a grudge against yourself for not living the best life you could live, but few of us ever recognize resentment as the result of our own choice.

People often transfer that grudge to other people because they don’t take responsibility for their life. They sit around singing the old “Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda” song and making themselves miserable, as well as most of the people around them. How attractive do you think that can be? How much of your company do you think your partner (or your friends or your employer, for that matter) can even endure, let alone enjoy, when you’ve become poisoned with resentment to the point that you have developed the mentality of a defeatist, or a victim? Right, not much. What can you do?

You watch for opportunities and you take action, of course! If your partner does something that annoys you, don’t spend months or years resenting it, talk to them about it and see if there is some alternative, or even better, full resolution. The person you live with is the last one you want to resent, because they are supposed to be the one you spend the greatest amount of your life with, right? And if you choose to not tell them that you have a problem with something they are doing, it’s entirely your fault that you are annoyed and feeling resentment, not theirs. It can’t become an issue for them until you tell them it is an issue for you!

If the company you work for has a policy or other employee that annoys you or you think could be improved, don’t just sit around resenting it; discuss it with the appropriate person. It’s entirely possible that nobody noticed the problem you noticed, and also possible that everybody noticed but you were the only one who had the guts to stand up and say something. That can get you promoted or fired, and if it gets you fired, you’re in the wrong company anyway. Work for a company where your insight and initiative will be appreciated -- and paid for!

If after you notify them and they choose to do nothing you are still dissatisfied, find a new place to work! The worst job in the world is the one you resent getting out of bed to face in the morning, and again, that is YOUR choice. Choose to pursue your passion instead of just dreaming about it. Dreaming a dream only makes you a visionary if you pursue it; dreaming dreams that you never pursue makes you a loser.

What about your friends? Are they really friends? If they are, you can talk with them about things that are problematic in the relationship you have with them, and if you can’t, they’re not really friends after all, are they? You can’t expect them to mold their entire life to suit you, but if you’re allergic to tobacco smoke you can ask them not to smoke in your house when they visit, or if you’re allergic to pet dander you can ask them not to bring their pet with them or leave it outside when they come to visit.

If they have a different political or religious preference than you and it seems to be a sore spot, you can ask them to stop trying to convert you and just agree to disagree. “Here’s the deal: you don’t invite me to [go to your church/be a conservative/join the PTA], I won’t invite you to stop [going to church/being a liberal/being in the PTA].” If they can’t afford you the respect to make your own choices after having heard whatever they have to say once, they’re not a friend, they’re a crusader, and you don’t need that around when there are so many other people around who could be good friends, right?

What about other opportunities that come up between you and the world? The opportunity to start a small business, trade cars, get a great deal on a piece of real estate? Before you pass them up, take some time and give them an objective look if they interest you in some way, instead of looking back from some point in the future and saying that you “shoulda-coulda-woulda”.

What are you going to miss if spend an hour checking out some seemingly great opportunity, an episode of “Law and Order” or “CSI”? Or “American Idol”? (Give me a freaking break!) What might you gain? Or what loss might you protect yourself from by doing a thorough investigation instead of being caught up in the emotion of the moment and just jumping in – the other side of the opportunity coin?

There’s a word for people who sit around saying “I could have,” “I should have,” “I would have,” and it’s not a nice one. It’s spelled “L-O-S-E-R,” and combined with the resentment that it forms, it earns you a second label, spelled “W-U-S-S.” All your incessant telling of tales of woe over all the things you should have, could have, and would have done earns you a title as well, “BORING,” which you may remember as the one word above all others that you never want to have a woman assign to you if you want to live happily (and intimately!) with her. Combine that with “wuss,” and you’re done. Period. End of relationship.

Take a look around you, a close look, at your life, your career, your relationship, and how you view the world and your place within it. If you don’t like what you see and it makes you complain to others or silently grumble to yourself, exercise some personal initiative and make some choices and some changes! You don’t have to become a storm tro