The Biology of Happy Relationships and Marriages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

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

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

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

The tail swings both ways.

Sincerely,
Thanks, but no thanks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Nice Guys Finish Last in Relationships and Marriage, Part 4, Compromise and Sacrifice

Now for the most destructive of all “Nice Guy” traits, self-sacrifice…

Brace yourself, because I’m about to either open your eyes or piss you off royally. But a little excitement won’t hurt you either way.

The subject of self-sacrifice is always controversial because most people are very confused about the meaning of the word “sacrifice;” they often refer to choices they have made in “trade” as “sacrifice” without realizing it, and then get angry when somebody says, using the word “sacrifice,” that they did something wrong. Let me give you an example or two to make sure we’re on the same page before we move on.

Let’s say you meet a guy on a street corner, and it’s obvious that he’s homeless, penniless, and a drug addict; he’s wearing short sleeves, has visible needle track marks, and is in obvious withdrawal. You give him money, which he uses not for food, clothing, or shelter, but to buy more drugs and bring himself closer to the grave.

Now take that same situation, except instead of it being obvious that the man is a drug addict, it’s obvious that he’s hit tough times and trying to claw his way back up out of the hole. His clothes may be somewhat tattered, but they’re clean. He asks if you’ve heard of any available work. And he looks you in the eye when he speaks. You give him money, which he uses for food and a payphone to try to find a job.

The former is sacrifice, the latter is trade. In the former scenario, you are trading a marker of value, money, which is in turn a marker for some portion of your life that it took to obtain that money, for absolutely nothing. Nobody benefits, and that value is destroyed. In the latter, you are trading that value for the satisfaction of helping someone get back on his feet. There is something in it for you and the other guy. That is trade.

Now, let’s bring the situation closer to home. Some family member has a substance abuse problem (I use the example only because it’s easy to see the impact, not because I have an axe to grind), and you keep pouring money into rehabilitation clinics and medical bills, and in return they act abusively toward you, do not turn away from their substance abuse, and instead steal from you to buy more drugs from some people they met at the rehab clinic.

Or, same scenario, but the family member actively works to avoid the temptations to return to abuse, gets a job, builds self-esteem, and thanks you for helping them.

Again, the first scenario is sacrifice, the second is trade.

Now, let’s bring it to your relationship, and this time, instead of substance abuse, we’ll talk about love, or what many think is love, but will find out shortly is anything but. You pour all of your time and energy into catering to the wants, whims, needs, and desires of a woman who won’t give you the time of day. She has no respect for you, demonstrates no love for you, and no matter what you do, she complains that it isn’t enough. She is abusive, accusing, bitchy, and maybe even goes so far as to tell you that she’s going to see other men while you go to your job or watch the kids at home.

Yes, that’s sacrifice. And the more you heap upon her, the less she’ll respect you and appreciate it. (And by the way, women are about as likely to encounter this scenario with a man; there is no gender-bias here. I’m writing primarily to men so I use pronouns appropriate for writing to men, but ladies, this lesson applies equally to you.) There’s absolutely nothing positive in it for you.

But you love her, you say? Sorry, Buddy, but no, you don’t. To love is to value, and you cannot value someone who would treat you this way. True sacrifice has one cause: NEED. Even people who don’t know the difference between need and love will not feel compelled to make sacrifices unless they need the approval or acceptance of the other person. (For more on the relationship emotions of love, attraction, need, and lust, see my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report before you really screw yourself up.)

And we all know what comes when your relationship is based on need instead of love, right? Abuse, disappointment, frustration, and demise, because nobody wants to have a needy wuss suckling on their jugular vein.

You may have heard for all your life that good relationships are based on sacrifice, or compromise, and that’s utter crap. A relationship based on sacrifice destroys life, plain and simple. A relationship based on compromise puts two people who need to be cooperative partners in the position of score-keeping competitors whose satisfaction comes at the expense of the person who should be their partner. Compromise is how people deal with the shortcoming of a lack of compatibility, not how they express love. If you are compromising, or asking another to, you and your values are in conflict with the other’s, and this diminishes, not strengthens, love. If you find yourself at odds, you must resolve it with trade, not compromise, to truly resolve the situation, maintain respect and love, and flourish as a couple in the long term.

Good relationships are based on compatibility, cooperation, genuine love and active attraction. Incompatibility creates points of contention and competition, which makes cooperation difficult to impossible. The absence of love means the absence of friendship, loyalty, trust, and respect, among other things, all of which are required for intimacy of any kind, the condition that determines the depth and staying power of the relationship, and the satisfaction of being in it. And the absence of attraction creates boredom, the primary catalyst in dissolving any good relationship that ever was formed.

This isn’t theory or opinion, and isn’t something you can debate or choose to believe or disbelieve. It’s that kind of self-evident, in-your-face reality that you either use to make your life better or ignore at your own peril. Give your love, life, and energy only to someone who gives theirs to you in return, and if you find that you have joined yourself with a parasite, predator, user, abuser, or loser, realize that there is nothing about them to love, that you are seeking their acceptance or approval, validation, or some other such nonsense, or else you are a codependent in need of psychological help. Also realize that someone else’s approval is meaningless. The only approval in the world that matters at all is your own.

That should be a lot easier, should it not? To approve your own life and self instead of depending one someone else, who isn’t qualified to judge, to approve it for you? You might be shocked at how many people I hear from every day who cannot do it. And the nemesis that thwarts them every single time?

Guilt!

Guilt because they had a good childhood. Guilt because they worked their ass off and got a better job than somebody else who didn’t. Guilt because somebody important to them chose to get behind the wheel of a car while drunk and killed himself in a car crash or chose a military career and didn’t make it out alive. Some of it is guilt over things they’ve done and should have worked their way through and forgiven themselves for years ago, but most of it is guilt for things that not only have they not done and weren’t responsible for, they had no control over at all!

If you’re having issues like these, get over them, as fast as possible and at any expense necessary. Guilt will suck the life out of you like nothing else can, not to mention make you somebody that nobody else wants to be around, especially the woman living in your house (unless she’s a parasite or predator). Feeling guilty will never in your life make anyone else’s life better, will not make up for a mistake anyone, including yourself, has made, and will never result in you feeling like you’ve paid sufficient penance to feel good again. Resolve it, or die with it and be miserable until then. There is no other choice.

So there it is. Why “nice guys” finish last in relationships isn’t because they’re nice. It’s because they’re either grossly ignorant of the relationship emotions or grossly ignorant of what women perceive as truly “nice.” I can help you with both, and a whole lot more…

Start by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com and downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and getting the real scoop on everything that you, as a man, need to know about women, which will enable you to quickly learn even the finest points to be learned about the woman you love.

And while you’re at it, grab my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report and get a fast head start on managing and preventing crisis in case you’re unwittingly making any major mistakes now, or turning crisis around if you’ve already stepped in crap. My free “What Women Really Want” report will do you a world of good, too.

Together, we can get you on the road to happiness, but you have to take that first step alone; I can open the door, but you have to walk through.

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 with her to get along with her. You need to know when to be tough and when to be gentle and reassuring, when to indulge and when to reject, when to make her laugh and when to stand tall and get serious. If things have slowed in your bedroom, that’s not old age setting in, it’s one of the first symptoms of real relationship problems, the kind that lead to affairs – a symptom of advanced relationship decay – and divorce.

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line on Testing and Why Being a Nice Guy is BAD for Your Relationship and Marriage

It’s not such a big secret anymore that being a “nice guy” is bad for your relationship, and men are finally waking up to the fact that much of the bratty behavior they see from women is in fact nothing more than a “wuss test.” Here’s why, and a few other things you really ought to know…

During an interesting discussion with a new student, we got on the subject of women testing men’s level of wussitude and why being a nice guy doesn’t work for either of you, and since I’ve not spoken about it for awhile, I’d like to share briefly with you the high points of that conversation. Even if you think you already know all of this, read it anyway, because you can never tell when the spark of inspiration or revelation will light you up!

To get you newbies caught up, women often push bad positions in arguments, insist on unreasonable concessions, pout, pitch fits, and engage in a lot of other seemingly absurd behavior with a very logical and targeted purpose, and it’s not to get what they want. You heard me; it’s not to get what they want. It’s to get you to say, “NO.” Why?

It’s one of the elements of that “men are hunters, women are gatherers” thing that anthropologists talk about. I’ll spare you most of the boring details, but suffice it to say that as we evolved (and I’m talking about improving and becoming more sophisticated as humans, not about the age-old debate about evolution vs. creation as an explanation as to how we got here, so save the anti-evolution hate mail for somebody who will read it), we developed different skills and physical characteristics that made each gender better suited to handle specific tasks.

Over time, men who had larger lungs, bigger skeletons and musculature, and spatial skills (navigation, being able to mentally gauge proximity to guess the arc of a spear as he threw it, developing tools, etc.) to help provide food and protect themselves and others survived better and reproduced more. Women who had wider hips (to aid in childbirth), advanced language skills (to cooperate with others in building huts, processing skins and sinew to build weapons, and other tasks that were best conducted in cooperative enterprises), sharper sense of smell (to sense danger approaching the dwelling and identify edible or poisonous plants), etc., also survived and reproduced more.

As with everything biological in every species of life, those who were the best-developed reproduced the most – survival of the fittest in its purest form. Some men were better protectors and providers than others. Some women were better at tuning in to a man’s traits and determining how much of a hunter and leader he could be. Through the generations, they became biologically “wired” through this process of natural selection (by locking in those genes that created successful traits) to possess skills that helped in finding a good mate.

While chasing down and killing a deer with bare hands or a bear with a spear is no longer required for a woman and child to eat, and indeed, in most parts of the world women routinely provide for themselves quite adequately without the help of a man, these mechanisms are still present and active in the female brain, and they automatically engage to size a man up from time to time – indeed, virtually every time they encounter a man, familiar or not. Much has changed, but one thing hasn’t: the nature of the test…

…which, in a nutshell, is to provoke you in some way to see if you will say “NO” to her when she is being unreasonable. Most of the time it is not at all deliberate, and you would laugh yourself silly as you read transcripts of conversations and e-mails in which women said, “I NEVER test a man. That’s silly!” and then confessed to it within just a few seconds as their testing actions were called to their attention, after which many of them said, “Oh my God! He must hate me!”

No, he doesn’t hate you, Ladies. Your testing is a pain in our collective ass, but it doesn’t make us hate you. It makes us think you’re nuts until we understand what it is and why you do it. Then it’s usually somewhere between mildly annoying and amusing. So on that note, guys, here it is, in a nutshell:

A woman knows, instinctively, without ever being told, as a result of biological development through the ages, that if a man can’t stand up TO her (when appropriate), he cannot stand up FOR her or WITH her. “When appropriate” is a big deal, too, because when it is inappropriate to stand against her, you must also be able to stand with her, no matter how much ego or crow you might have to swallow.

Write that down, and recite it mentally every time you start to enter a conversation with a woman until it becomes second nature, because you will eventually need it with every women you ever meet if you talk to her more than a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds. They have to know, and are biologically-driven to find out, whether it’s in a casual or formal situation, public or intimate context, and regardless of the nature or longevity of your relationship.

You WILL be tested, and if you can say “NO” to a woman she will feel safe in letting you get to know her better, safe in letting you hold sway over her emotions, safe in letting you negotiate on her behalf or as her adversary (because you’ll say “NO” directly instead of saying “YES” and then trying to trick her or cheat her in some other way). No matter what you may think, there is no possible downside to saying “NO” when it’s appropriate and the logical thing to do.

But when is that? We’ll get to that in a minute, but before we do, let me clue you in on a HUGE difference in the way we communicate: nearly all communication you ever have with a woman, and ALL communication that carries the potential for conflict, will start as a negotiation.

It is EXPECTED that you enter a discussion with either a position or a statement that you require more information. So when saying “NO,” unless you are abusive about it, in a woman’s mind and according to the protocol she will naturally follow, that “NO” is not final; it is merely your opening negotiating position, and she expects a chance to give you input that will persuade you. An inappropriate “NO” will only anger a woman if you deliver the “NO” and deny her the opportunity of negotiation. That’s why they get so ticked off when we act like we’re afraid to say “NO;” it’s just too wussy for words in their world.

But it does make things easier if you try to say “NO” only when appropriate, because it shows that you are reading her, which in turn means that you are paying attention to her, a big compliment in the women’s playbook. The easiest way to draw the line between an appropriate and inappropriate “NO” is to ask one simple question, “Has she earned a ‘yes’?”

If your wife says she wants new furniture for a room, and has contributed to the smooth and secure operation of the household, whether through a job or “domestic efforts,” been loyal and trustworthy, given you love and respect, etc., then she’s earned a “yes,” as long as what she’s asking for is within or can be worked into your budget, obviously. If she’s laid around on her lazy or drunken butt while you and the kids have done everything and complained because you didn’t do it fast enough, abused herself and you, and exhibited a general lack of respect for herself and everyone around her, no, she hasn’t. Indeed, she’s earned a trip out the door to divorce court, just as you would if you did the same thing. It’s really that plain and simple.

Or, put another way, if you think she deserves it and want to agree because of that, she’s earned a “yes,” but if you’re thinking about giving in to earn some favor from her that really isn’t a favor, but something a wife should be doing, you’re about to get busted for being a wuss, and getting the furniture without gaining whatever favor you were after is just the beginning of your punishment, so don’t go there. You can reward good behavior and punish the bad behavior, and you can exhibit good behavior by acting like a man of self-respect, but you cannot “buy off” a woman, at least not any woman worth having. That is in essence saying to her that you think she’s a prostitute, and they don’t take kindly to such things, sometimes even when they are.

As I said to this new reader today, I have searched extensively to find any rational downside to a man having genuine self-esteem and engaging in attractive behavior like being strong for his wife or girlfriend, and I have failed utterly to identify even an iota’s worth of a good reason to do anything less. If a woman says she wants something, even if you think it’s the right thing to do, invite her to make her case, thereby opening the negotiation that she expects and WANTS to engage in. Yes, you read that right.

Women naturally engage in negotiation to communicate nearly everything, and if she’s testing, you’ve made the right move, and if she’s not, she’ll be happy to build the emotion of making her case instead of just having you give in. The same thing if you think you should say “no” – yes, really! If you think it’s a bad idea, say so, and immediately invite her to make her case so that she doesn’t feel shut down and retaliate. It would sound something like:

Her: “Honey, what do you think about our living room furniture?” (Implied statement: “Honey, I want new living room furniture, and it’s time to negotiate.”)

You: “I like it fine, why?” (The “why” is needed for her to continue; if you don’t say it, she will most likely take it that you shut down the discussion!)

Her: “Well I think it needs to be replaced.” (Or in the long version, “Don’t you think it looks old and worn out (or the color is wrong, or it’s uncomfortable, etc.)?” meaning “I want to change it.” Some women will continually ask questions to repeat the statement they are trying to make until you make it for them.)

You: “Well, like I said, I don’t see any problem with it, but you live her too, so tell me what makes you want to replace it.”

From there, she’ll either give you good reasons to do so, like pointing out that it’s stained, uncomfortable worn, or she’s so bored with it she doesn’t feel comfortable in the room anymore (yes, that can be a very legitimate reason, as you would know if you knew everything you need to know about women, depending on whether she is truly bored with the furniture and the room condition or if she is generally bored and wanting “retail therapy” on the magnitude of a furniture purchase), or she’ll stammer around talking about where you can buy it on sale, or giving you the old “you’d just buy it for me without asking questions if you loved me,” routine if she doesn’t have a good reason and is either testing you or showing her true colors as a gold-digger (and maybe it’s time to test her a bit, too!)

The bottom line is that if she has a good reason, she’ll enjoy talking about it and enjoy the intimacy and challenge of the negotiation. And if she doesn’t, her behavior will make it quite obvious.

Living with a woman is easy if you are fairly well-matched in terms of values, tastes and interests and you understand what you need to know about women, which is how they are both like us and different from us, and how to communicate well enough to recognize negotiations, questions that are statements, etc. Now, you have a decision to make…

Are you going to spend a lifetime trying to learn on your own and reach the end of your life lonely and still not knowing?

Or worse, assume that I’m full of crap and you don’t need to learn anything?

Or are you one of us guys who see a problem, seek out a viable solution, preferably one that has already worked for somebody else in similar circumstances, and fix it?

If you’re that first guy, I commend your can-do attitude, but isn’t reinventing the wheel a gross waste of time? Not to mention a HUGE risk of having life – family life – as you know it, come to a sudden halt if you don’t figure it out, or don’t figure it out fast enough?

If you’re that second guy, why are you reading my newsletter? If you’re looking for validation of your past actions instead of a solution to your self-inflicted problems, you’re looking in the wrong place. I help people fix problems, not feel good about having created them.

If you’re that third guy, let me hook you up with what you need, and yes, it has already been tested and proven by thousands of couples. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Read it. Study it. Learn from it the answer to that oldest of man’s questions: “What makes a woman tick?” and that next oldest: “What do women REALLY want?” Then go sweep your woman off her feet…I dare you! (And for those of you in the southern United States, “I double-dog dare you!”)

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

Women Test Men Constantly in Our Relationships and Marriage, So Why Not Test THEM? Here's HOW!

Women test us constantly, so why don’t we test them? Not in retaliation, but to help determine if they are testing us and what they might be trying to communicate. Here are a few tips…

I was listening to an old set of self-improvement tapes, Roger Dawson’s “The Secrets of Power Negotiating,” (a classic if you’ve not heard of it, available at Nightengale Conant) and in a section on negotiating tactics, he was talking about overcoming objections and said the main tactic to overcoming objectives is to “always test for validity.” Here’s an example:

You’re negotiating a car deal, and the seller says he can’t possibly go a penny under $25,000 for the vehicle. You ask, “What if I could bring you cash instead of a cashier’s check?” If he says it won’t make any difference, he’s rigid on the price for some reason, and you need to dig deeper to find out what his issue is to see if there is any way to address it, but if he says, “Well, then I could possibly come down a little,” $25,000 is not a firm price and he does have some negotiating range.

The same tactic can be used when women test us, or when we suspect they might be testing, to either neutralize the test or establish that we are dealing with a legitimate issue and need to give it due attention. Let’s say your wife is saying she wants new furniture, and you don’t know if it’s a test, a whim, or a legitimate need. You can test the legitimacy of the issue by finding out how much she’s willing to do to have it: “Well, I [like this furniture/don’t care either way/might be interested in replacing this, too] IF our budget will allow it. If the budget won’t handle the extra expense, do you want this bad enough to do something extra to make up the difference?”

Now you’ve got her. If she says, “Well no, I guess not,” it wasn’t that important. “Well I thought you might be nice and get a part time job to do this for me,” definitely means it’s a test, and we’ll deal with that in a minute. “Yes, I would, because I really want this stuff out of here,” means it’s definitely important, and you should then consider saying, “Well, then I’ll see what I can do as well, but if I’m going to help buy it, I reserve the right to help pick it out, at least to the extent of declining on anything that isn’t comfortable for me to sit in. Agreed?”

It’s not required, but it’s a good idea to remain involved so you don’t end up with a houseful of furniture that you hate, and doing things like that together is part of what long-term committed relationships are about, isn’t it? Besides, women love it when you take the lead and make decisions – as long as you provide that needed and expected input channel for them– it’s ATTRACTIVE!

Now, what if you find out it’s a test? The test looks on the surface like it’s to see what she can get away with, but what it usually is really about is to see if you can say “no,” a check to see if you can define and exercise personal authority. And be advised, if you see a lot of this kind of test, and you see a negative reaction when you reject the idea because she’s not willing to help pay for it, you need to be researching “toxic wife” on Google, Bing, or your search engine of choice.

This is a good time to switch back and forth between the responsible budget administrator and “the naughty negotiator.” Starting with something like, (straight face) “Well, I might consider being nice and helping with it, but if you want it that bad, you’re going to have to help, and you’re going to have to give me a pretty good reason to help, (sudden switch to naughty grin) so whatcha gonna do to be nice to me?”

Banter back and forth and make it plain that you’re not just going to roll over and give it up, even if she has recently done something nice, but make it fun for her to be told “no.” Bring sexual innuendo into it, like, “I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of fun on this couch, I hate to see it go,” or “We’ve not finished breaking this couch down…er…I mean in…It would be a shame to get rid of it before we’d got all the nookie….er….I mean useful life out of it…”

Do NOT get into anything that sounds like you’re willing to trade furniture for sex, because it can be taken as a very degrading remark that hints at prostitution. Whatever you do, DO NOT make it sound like you’re a sugar daddy and she’s a prostitute. Fun, not condescending. Challenge, not control. I’m appalled to even have to say that, but I did get an email about it once in the past, so for the sake of the very few who won’t realize it, I’m stating what’s obvious to most of us.

Use your imagination, but make sure you keep rocking back and forth between serious and naughty to keep her off balance, and keep dropping bits of sexual innuendo. You’re likely to end up having sex on the furniture before the discussion is over, just because the playful, naughty attitude and sexual tension may get to her that much, and then you can say, “See, we need to keep this couch!” and wink at her.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, fear going into this process. Remember that a woman’s first criteria in evaluating you and any other man is “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me.” This is how you earn her respect, her trust, her attraction, and to a significant degree, her love. It’s also how you flush out a predator or parasite who is stealing your life from you. It’s a no-lose situation for you, so get on it.

It’s easy to test for validity once you get used to the game and get skilled at playing. To see the rules in vivid detail, along with lots of examples of how to play the testing game, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” What you’ll save on furniture the first time it comes up will more than pay for the book! Just kidding! Seriously, it costs less than a good meal for two, and any time you can throw a few dollars and a little time at a problem and watch it go away, that’s an offer you simply have to take!

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

Unringing a Bell: Negotiation in Relationships and Marriage

A man writes with a real problem. In his absence, his wife applied a lot of effort and expense to make the master bedroom evolve from “nice” to “drowning him in estrogen,” and he hates it. How does a man approach a woman to change this – or anything else that he doesn’t like -- without starting World War III?

Did you ever hear somebody talk about a problem that made you just cringe because you could really empathize and feel their pain and frustration? I got one from another David, apparently a fellow Southerner. Meet David F.:

Hey David,

Man I could use your advice on a problem that is making me want to move out of the bedroom I share with my wife. My wife is one of those chronically nesting women that love to redecorate at least every year or so, especially the master bedroom. They tell you they do this to spice things up. I have no problem spicing things up or even making changes to make them look better, however I do have a problem when the place I am supposed to be able to relax in, make love to my wife in and get a good night’s sleep in ends up looking like an explosion in a flower garden.

I have known for a couple of weeks now that my wife was wanting to make changes to our bedroom and had no problem with her doing so. She has always had what I consider good taste and has always managed to make things look nice while keeping in mind that it was our room shared by a man and a woman.

Last night I returned home from a short business trip to find that our bedroom was no longer a room that a man would feel comfortable in, unless he was more woman than man. A brief description of what I walked into was this: the walls have been painted peach, now not just any peach almost a neon peach and if that was not bad enough there is a border around the top of the walls that all I can say about it is it is a mixture of the biggest, ugliest bunch of flower I have ever seen mixed with all shades of color. We now have lace window curtains with a matching lace comforter and dust ruffle. The pillows have lace pillow shams over them and I am not allowed to hardly touch them much less lay my head on one. To top it all off we now have “accent pillows” as she called them covered with satin roses.

I feel like setting fire to the whole room and just letting it burn. I asked her what happened to making the room male-friendly so we both could enjoy it and she just smiled at me and said, “I thought you would like the change.” What I would like to know is where the pod is this woman came out of while I was away. This is a nightmare and the worst thing is that she is so proud of herself and this room that I am not sure how to handle telling her that it has to go without making it seem like I am being an asshole about the whole thing.

How about helping a brother out with this and tell me how to point her in the direction of returning this to OUR special room, one we both can be happy in instead of a recreation of the room she had when she was living with her parents and the room did only belong to a real girlie girl.

Appreciate it,

David F.

(Gentlemen, note that while David’s problem is centered on the redecoration of the bedroom, the following advice applies to any situation where something is done that you don’t like after you failed or refused to be involved in a decision or process, so keep reading!)

Appreciate you (that’s Southern for “thanks for” for all non-Southerners) writing David, and thanks for reminding me of one of my favorite classic Sci-Fi movies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) with that remark about the pods! Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that your wife has been replaced by one of the pod-born zombies…

Women don’t miss details about you like that. The average woman, especially the really girly ones, are ultra-sensitive and ultra-thoughtful when it comes to the likes and dislikes of those around them, especially those under the same roof. If she submerged your master bedroom in an estrogen ocean, she knew that you wouldn’t like it when she did it; however, she did NOT do this out of spite, so calm down before you get riled up (that’s Southern for “pissed off” for all non-Southerners – LOL!).

Seriously, she did it to get a reaction; yep, you guessed it. It was a test. How do you know? You knew about the impending redecoration event for a couple of weeks, then it happened while you were out of town. If she was really looking to rile you, she wouldn’t have said anything and would have gloated and been pissy when you returned to find it, trying to rub it in and rile you good (yes, that does mean “really piss you off good” – okay, I’ll stop. I just get a kick out of living in the South because we have our own version of “English”). So what’s really going on?

You were gone on a business trip; have you been paying enough attention to her? Or have frequent business trips made her feel a little ignored? Did you listen to her when she tried to speak with you about her decorating plans, or did you just shrug her off and say, “I don’t care, Honey. Just do whatever you like,”? Somewhere along the line, you’ve dropped the ball, and she’s calling it to your attention, hoping that you will be motivated to listen to her next time and really hoping that you don’t act like an ass over it, or even worse, just wuss out and not say anything at all.

First, don’t worry about all the stuff she bought. It’s possible that everything but the paint and the border can either be returned, gifted to someone, or has been borrowed. In any case, what she spent to teach you this lesson was a bargain compared to what a divorce would cost you if she just let it go unaddressed until she got good and riled (I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist!) and kicked you out of the house, so get over it. She’s looking for you to say that you don’t like it, but you need to be decent about it. How?

She’ll likely make comments from time to time about the room just to invite you to say something; remember that almost all communication with a woman takes the form of a negotiation. If you want to be smooth about it, but a little on the wussy side, you can wait for her to bring it up, but it’s much better if you lead the conversation by initiating it yourself by asking HER if SHE really likes it as much as she thought she did when she first did it. If she’s extremely merciful, she’ll say, “No, it’s not really exciting me the way I thought it would,” or something like that, and if she’s really wanting to rub your nose in it she’ll say, “Yes, I do! Don’t you?” or even worse, “Yes, I just love it! Isn’t it great?”

Either way, it’s an invitation for you to say that you don’t like it, but you can’t just blurt out, “Hell no, I think it sucks. It’s just too girly.” That’s what a moron does, not a gentleman, or a loving partner. As always, you must try to keep the tone positive. “I’ve tried to get used to it and give it time to grow on me (which is covering your ass for not saying something immediately, and she knows this, but you have to follow along and you do get bonus points for playing the game with her), but it’s just not happening. You’ve always been so tasteful and considerate in making this room good for both of us and I probably should have said something to acknowledge and thank you for that before now, and I’m sorry that I haven’t. I know you probably put a lot into this, but I would be a lot more comfortable in here if it were more similar to the way you have been doing it, and I’ll be happy to help you make whatever changes are necessary since I didn’t speak up when I had the chance before this was done.”

Do you see the difference? First, you’re trying to do things on her level while not being feminine about it, which is attractive. While apologizing for not paying enough attention to what was happening and being more involved in it, you’re not sucking up, and offering to help is not buying her off; it’s just common courtesy. You’re acknowledging your own mistake, but the apology is simply expressing the recognition of error, not begging forgiveness. Acknowledging her past efforts to be considerate of you is also just common decency, not sucking up to get out of the doghouse. Also notice that you’ve not said anything derogatory about what has been done, only that you would be a lot more comfortable if it were done without so much feminine flair. And the best part is…

You don’t have to explain any of this to her. She knows what every last word on the lines and between them means, and will be happy, although maybe not overtly so, to fix the problem. You may end up doing a lot of the work, and making trips to the home center to get supplies, and fielding a few odd glances and remarks about how it would have been better if you had said something before she went through all that trouble, but you earned whatever hard time you got by being inattentive, so suck it up and enjoy the time together. Find ways of interjecting some playfulness, including some naughty playfulness, into the situation from time to time. It makes the work go by faster and brings you closer together, especially when the lights go out at night.

Now, the most important lesson of all. If you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you would not have had any chance of going through any of this, because you would have known better than to make the mistakes you made. You would have known that you needed to be more attentive because you would have seen the signs long before she hosed your bedroom down with concentrated estrogen.

You would have known to “give her the gift of missing you” (thanks to David D’Angelo for finding such a memorable way to say that) while you were gone, and how to make it a positive event for her instead of either a wuss-fest of calling all the time or a scary ordeal of solitude, as most men do when they go way for a few days. You would have known what to do before you left and while you were gone to help her to look forward to your return and think wonderful things about you in your absence. All this and much more (see the list at the web site!) is waiting for you in an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, so get on it, now, before you come home to a teal poo with fuchsia shutters and your neighbors (at least the women) know you still don’t get it and are being punished again.

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

Don't Win the Battle Just to Lose the War: Conflict Resolution in Relationships and Marriage

E-mails and blog posts gave more coverage to Darren Sherman’s stalking behavior after a date didn’t go his way than about the problems of the world. Could it be that’s because this kind of behavior is a far bigger problem than crooked politicians and (alleged) oil shortages? Look at what you can learn from this poor idiot’s behavior concerning your marriage or committed relationship.

If you didn’t see one of the e-mails floating around about Darren Sherman’s post bad date behavior a couple of years ago, you’ve missed one of the most pathetic yet funny incidents I’ve ever heard. Here’s a hugely entertaining rendition of it at Peter Shankman’s “PR Differently” blog and there’s a lot you can learn from reading it and listening to the voice mail message that isn’t so obvious at first glance. Jump over there and check it out before continuing here…

Pathetic just doesn’t really scratch the surface, does it? But since we’re talking about committed relationships and marriages here, let’s move past the idiotic, crass, and utterly uncouth bit of demanding a refund on her half of the check (because she was out of town and didn’t get his messages, leading him to believe there would be no second date, which, from his behavior, seems to have been a reasonable expectation on his part anyway!) and look at his behavior in from a broader perspective.

First, according to the girl’s letter, he apparently assumed that she didn’t want to see him again in spite of no facts supporting such a conclusion. Since it may have been awhile since you were in the dating world and possibly out of touch with current practices, if you’re going to call somebody you’ve been out with to acknowledge a good time and chat them up for another date, you call one time, and then you go about your business, and if they haven’t called by the time you need to make another date for the weekend, you simply call somebody else. A lot of people are subject to go out of town suddenly, especially in a town of movers and shakers like NYC, and you have to give them a bit of time to “clear out the clutter” and get their schedule stabilized before calling you back.

He apparently jumped into wuss mode, assumed that since she didn’t immediately call back that she didn’t want to see him again and was just snubbing him, and his ego jumped into the driver’s seat. And then what does he do?

He starts very childishly trying to punish her for the assumed rejection, and continues to escalate it, apparently without any regard for the risk he’s taking under today’s stalking laws, or for the mathematics of the situation; the guy is the CEO of a compliance consulting firm, and that’s “big bucks” anywhere you go, and double in NYC, and there is no way in the world that $50 came close to covering the value of his time in pursuing it. Got the picture? Okay, now let’s bring this closer to home…

How many times have you made or seen these mistakes made in your own or other relationships?

1. Letting an incorrect assumption motivate an act of reprisal against someone

2. Continuing to escalate a situation after finding out that your assumption was incorrect and that there’s really nothing to be pissed off about (but possibly something to be terribly embarrassed about, such as the original absurd assumption!)

3. Getting so hung up on “who’s right” and “winning” that you lose track of “what’s right” and “the risks and cost of fighting the battle.”

Silly things like assuming that somebody didn’t pick up something you wanted at the store while they were out when in fact the store was out of stock on the item can spur an incident that follows this path of escalation and destruction to the point that it causes a break-up or a divorce, and if you haven’t seen it happen at least once in your lifetime, I’d like to hear from you just to know that you exist. I’ve watched it all my life, and frankly, well over half a lifetime ago (I was 17), I did it myself, and ended up screwing up a very good relationship that could have easily turned into a life-long partnership. Now for the big question…

What can you do to stop this from happening?

I’ve preached enough on the law of cause and effect and when trying to fix a problem you should seek to treat the cause and not the symptom, so I’ll spare you the justification for that approach and say that the cause of Darren’s problem and all occurrences of this kind of mess is low self-esteem. That’s right! If you feel good about yourself, you have no reason to be anxious and jumping to negative conclusions with nothing but fear of the unknown as the basis for that conclusion.

Nor do you have the need to get competitive and try to punish somebody for a disagreement and force yourself or your opinion on them or make them regret having disagreed with you. Right?

And most of all, when you feel good about yourself, you’re much more interested in what’s right than who’s right, so you focus on finding the truth instead of securing an empty victory. People who feel good about themselves also avoid putting themselves at risk unless the possible benefit justifies that risk.

Assuming for the sake of discussion that a man has a six-figure or even seven-figure salary and will lose it if he goes to jail for stalking, is that in any way justified in the recovery of fifty bucks for a meal check? Or is the risk of a divorce and having your family torn apart, life turned upside down, and losing half or more of everything you have justified by getting your partner to admit that to doing something that they haven’t really done, or say that they agree with you when they really don’t, just to placate you and shut you up?

It’s intriguing to see how many of the laws of physics apply to relationships; for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Granted, in the case of a relationship the reaction may indeed be disproportionate, and it’s likely to be an over-reaction if you make somebody fairly angry or hurt them. Monitor your emotions carefully, and next time you catch yourself feeling like you want to “uncork on your partner,” stop and think, “What am I going to gain by going through this, and what am I going to risk losing?” Then answer!

The easiest rule of thumb to follow is if you’re going to gain or maintain your self-respect, then you should continue (although you should try to keep your anger in check and ask questions and discuss rather than just jumping down your partner’s throat), and if you are going to risk losing your self-respect (through embarrassment over assumptions, etc.), it’s very likely going to be a bad idea and you definitely have some more thinking and fact-finding to do.

Another of my favorite laws of physics is the Law of Inertia. It states that an object in motion tends to remain in motion and an object at rest tends to remain at rest, until acted upon by an equal or superior force. This can be universally applied by merely simplifying the language:

If you always do
What you’ve always done
You’ll always get
What you’ve always got.

The limerick format just makes it easier to remember. So now think about this. If you’ve always had problems and do nothing to change the underlying cause, is there any reason to expect them to just fix themselves? Of course not, and you there, in the back, nodding your head “yes” with a dumbfounded expression on your face, will stay after class for remedial training and possible scheduling for a brain transplant. Where problems are concerned, a continuation of the problem without escalation is your best-case scenario if you don’t do something to fix it, and continuance with escalation and disaster is the most likely course if it’s causing any kind of ill feelings.

No ill feelings? Are you sure? Are you hearing things like, “You never listen to me?” Or are you hearing nothing at all? Have things slowed down at the dinner table discussions, or in the bedroom? Are you getting short or even monosyllable answers to questions that you’d think would invite a more verbose answer? Are you going separate directions when you go places that you used to explore together? An answer of “yes” to any of these questions is a highly-reliable indicator that there are indeed problems, either unresolved issues or boredom at least.

Didn’t know boredom was a major problem? You don’t know much about women, do you? Ask one how she feels when she gets bored. You and I aren’t that uncomfortable with it, indeed, it’s often a good excuse for a nap, but in women you’ll find that they are so stricken by it that they start exhibiting some of the same symptoms we do when we feel anger or fear: trembling, inability to focus, sensation of desperation, willingness to do anything, even if it’s wrong, just to cause some change in the situation, just to name a few. The greatest gift you can give any woman is to love her enough to remain vigilant and protect her from boredom.

That sounds like a pretty tall order, but if you talk to people who have been married fifty years and are still happy together (especially those who still have “the heat” for each other, and yes, there are plenty of them), you’ll find that the secret to their success is that they have learned, usually the hard way, how to cope with these problems or they are so well-matched that they never experience them enough to notice.

Whether subconsciously or consciously, they keep an eye on the status of their relationship, and they fix things when they break. They recognize that men and women have different needs and ways of doing things, especially communicating and dealing with problems and emotions, and they consider and accommodate these differences to reduce stress and build trust. They know what each other likes and values, and they share common values. They also know what turns each other on and off, and reserve their bedroom for sleep, sex and intimacy instead of taking their problems in there.

I’ve worked with hundreds of such couples, and imparted the knowledge that worked for some to the rest of the group to see what was universally true and what was more appropriate for only some participants. Everything that worked for 90% or more of the couples is in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you should download it at http://www.makingherhappy.com right now, and have the benefit of all those who succeeded before you to do wonderful things in your own relationship…

…or, you can keep doing what you’ve always done, and keep getting what you’ve always been getting, like frustration, confusion, fear, celibacy, affairs, fights, questions with no answers, dirty looks, spousal abuse and sabotage – I really don’t need to give you the whole list, because you’re living with it. By the way, I’m not living with it anymore, and from the testimonials I’m receiving from readers, they’re not either. So how about joining us?

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

Blind-Sided: Failure to Talk Is Just As Bad As Failure to Act in Any Relationship or Marriage

A profound demonstration of an attitude that can kill a relationship in a heartbeat, from a man who will likely never be able to fix his relationship or anything else. Don’t make his mistake…

I get a lot of material for lessons from readers’ letters because most ask really good questions, but every now and then, somebody’s comment on the “unsubscribe” (how I hate what computers are causing to evolve in this language!) Would anyone care to discuss the use of the word “input” as a verb? Try conjugating it, and let me know what you think when you get to the past tense, “inputted”! LOL!) form opens the door for a great one as well. Observe the comment at the bottom of this form:

-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXXX@hotmail.com [mailto:XXXXXXX@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 2:28 AM
To: David
Subject: AWeber mhh_tips: This Lead Unsubscribed: XXXXXX@hotmail.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: XXX
Email: XXXXX@hotmail.com
Signup Date: 05/05/07 05:06 AM EST

Comments:
your wasting my time

We’ll ignore the poor spelling (“you are” is “you’re,” not “your” which is possessive), lack of capitalization and punctuation, and the ridiculous assertion that I’m wasting his time when the choice of how to spend his time is his own, not mine, and look at the communication issue, which is relevant to all kinds of relationships. I sent him the following reply, and after you read it, we’ll draw parallels into committed and other relationships:

Hi Wes,

Really? How so? What would make this worth your time, and why did it take you almost three months to come to this realization? Has there been something change recently that you dislike? Tell me what's making this a waste and I'll try to address it, or are you one of those people who sits and waits for validation of the bad choices they've made and when they don't find it, move on to another source? People who want information ask for it; they don't just turn their back on it and walk away. So tell me, what is it that you want to see and know?

David

Yes, I goaded him a bit, hoping to wake him up and make him realize that he did have an input channel (he’s never written once in nearly three months to ask a question or make a suggestion as to how I could better serve his needs), and to possibly provoke him into taking a hard look at himself and determining if he was indeed looking for validation instead of information.

(Yes, Ladies, we guys can do stuff like that. We also jab each other with mild insults about our weight, signs of aging, etc., to help us thicken our skin a bit and be a bit better at handling criticism, and at least some of us know that it doesn’t work the same way with you, especially after I did that “What to Do When She Gains a Few Pounds” newsletter earlier this month.)

He never responded, but look at what we have here, because there’s plenty to learn from it:

How many times have you seen relationships end like this? Everything seems to be cruising along for months, no questions, no discussions, seeming like everything is on a pretty even keel, and suddenly, BOOM! A huge fight, or worse, a break-up or divorce, without there ever having been a word of discussion about a problem?

How many times have you found yourself being irritated or confused and wanting to say something, but didn’t? Or found yourself not understanding something and frustrated and wanting to ask something, but didn’t? We get pissed off at women for appearing to expect us to read their mind, but how many times have you been guilty of doing the same thing? Expecting her to “just know” that you need to say something or ask something, need her to do something, need se’x, or whatever is just as ridiculous, if not more so, than her expecting you to, because as a man, your job is to initiate and lead discussions and actions, remember? Demonstrating strength and leadership skills is one of those attraction-building activities we’re constantly discussing.

Your lesson for today? If you have an issue that involves your partner, don’t walk away from it, and don’t expect them to “just know” that there’s an issue. Talk to them about it – don’t whine about it, yell about it, or act needy or controlling because of it. Just put it out there and talk about it, and invite her to remain engaged and to discuss it with you, otherwise you’ll come across as just lodging a complaint and nothing more will happen.

Yes, I’m serious! If you need an answer, keep her talking until you have it. If you need her commitment to a goal or behavioral change, negotiate it. And if something comes up that you really do need to work on, suck it up like a man and fix it if you expect her to ever engage in any other discussion with you. Problem-solving is a double-edged sword; sometimes you find out that YOU are the problem, and that YOU are the only one who can act to fix something. Sometimes it’s going to be her.

Sometimes it’s something both of you have to work on. Even on occasions where neither of you really did anything to contribute to the problem, both of you may need to contribute to the solution. Speaking of which, enter into problem-solving seeking the best solution for the problem, not the best solution for your convenience, or validation for your mistakes.

Women love to talk, as long as somebody is listening, and they love to listen as long as they will also be able to speak. They are, after all, far and away the more social gender of the two, and also far and away the most active and aggressive when it comes to managing relationships, so as long as you are talking and listening, you can usually expect her to do the same as long as you conduct yourself with respect, for yourself and for her.

You may be surprised at how adept many women can be at solving problems, especially if you can stay focused on the problem and stay away from discussing the people involved and the drama that comes from that. Focus on WHAT the problem is and WHAT can be done about it, not WHO caused and WHO needs to act. And if you see a pattern of one-sided solutions, examine the pattern; is it because one partner or the other is contributing more to the problem, or because one partner or the other refuses to acknowledge their contribution to the problem?

If it's the latter, you need to be examining whether you should even be in the relationship or marriage, because living with someone with that short of entitlement mentality will rob you of life or cause you to spend much of your fighting to defend against it. Either way, it’s no way to live, and there are a LOT of good women around looking for a good man; I hear from them daily wanting to meet the single men on my mailing list because they’re tired of wusses who are threatened by their independence and want a man who appreciates a loving, low-maintenance woman.

“But how do I talk and listen to her?” you say? “How do I know whether I should be here or not?” Good question! And thanks to the cooperative and combined efforts of several hundred women, it’s all laid out for you in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com right now with little more than a couple of mouse clicks. Hop on over and get yours and start having answers and resolution instead of confusion and frustration.

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

A Funny Example of How Women Negotiate: Good Communications in Relationships and Marriage

A brilliant and very funny example of how women attempt to negotiate what they want instead of just saying it outright.

In several editions of this newsletter and in my free report, “Break-Up Busting 101,” I gave you a two-page excerpt from “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” that gave an example of an extreme difference in the way men and women converse, entitled “Men State, Women Negotiate.”

If you have read it, you will recall a rather lengthy and detailed description of what ensues when a woman asks a man, “Are you hungry?” (If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and go back and do it now, because it’s one of the most important bits of information you will ever see in print about understanding women.) This morning, I got the following joke from Mari-Jo Tyler, a sex-therapist, dating guru, comedienne and professional acquaintance in Austin, Texas (http://www.laughintolove.com – tell her I said “Hi!”), sent in by one of her readers:

A woman asks her husband, "Would you like some bacon and eggs? A slice of toast and maybe some grapefruit and coffee?"

He declines. "Thanks for asking, but I'm not hungry right now. It's this Via’gra," he says. "It's really taken the edge off my appetite."

At lunchtime she asked if he would like something. "A bowl of soup, homemade muffins, or a cheese sandwich?" He declines. "It’s the pills, I’m tellin’ ya," he says, "they really trash my desire for food.

Come dinnertime, she asks if he wants anything to eat. "Would you like a juicy porterhouse steak and scrumptious apple pie? Or maybe a rotisserie chicken or tasty stir fry?"

He declines again. "No, still not hungry."

"Well," she says, "would you mind letting me up? I'm starving."

As you can see, when a woman asks you a question, she’s often not seeking information; she’s giving it to you, or seeking a channel through which to give it to you. This woman isn’t asking if the man is hungry so much as telling him that she is, and you’ll see that a lot in your day-to-day interaction with your partner.

Refer to the aforementioned book excerpt for the detailed explanation of how all this works, but due to the advanced level of communication skills almost all women are “wired” for, and their highly social nature (also hard-wired into the vast majority of them), they don’t just blurt out a statement of what they want the way we do, they ask a question to open a negotiation forum in which they can discuss having their need fulfilled. You’ll often find that questions are statements and statements are questions when they come from a woman.

Gentlemen, you REALLY need to understand this if you want to get along well with your female partner. You’ll find that the few women who are aware that we don’t understand because of biological differences don’t expect us to come all the way up to their level because we don’t have the necessary “receptors” to pick up on all the body language and other signals they use, and they do greatly appreciate it when we work to try to develop a better understanding of how things work and recognize basic differences like this so we can work better with them.

You’ll also find that those who have no idea that we really communicate differently (and there are many!) will be thrilled when they see you starting to “tune in” and “get it,” because they’ve been thinking all along that you’ve been insensitive and ignoring them because you don’t care! You’ll see how your newly developed understanding and skill reduce their stress level, which in turn, as you hopefully know by now, ultimately reduces YOURS!

Speaking of stress, it may not be obvious to you that while having an argument or any other kind of stressful discussion, people tend to revert to their natural behavior; any learned behavior becomes obscured as the energy to keep employed learned behavior is diverted to handle the stress. When a woman is agitated, her communications style will become more and more feminine, even if she has recognized your differences and tries to be more blunt with you, and any ability to interpret her when under stress that you might develop could help you to diffuse her agitation and get her back down to a level where rational problem-solving is possible. That alone would be worth the effort: DRAMA-FREE problem resolution!

Making her happy is truly the path to ensuring your own happiness in a relationship, and what you need to know to do a supreme job of it is in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Refer back to that excerpt in the free report mentioned above, see the level of detail and the quality of information – show it to any woman you know and she’ll verify it for you because a large group of women was involved in writing it! – and then go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy so you can start making you both happy today!

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

Cute or Cruel? The Fine Line Between Play and Abuse in Relationships and Marriage

One of the easiest ways to learn how to do something right, including creating attraction, is to model the behavior of someone who is already skilled. However, you still have to know enough about the process to know whether the behavior you are thinking about modeling is the right behavior to model.

I hope you are enjoying this day as much as I am. In the July 4, 2009 edition of this newsletter, I wrote to you about playing with women, and how many of the things we do with each other as men to bond and help each other develop “a thicker skin” are perceived differently by women, cruel in fact, because they use the same behavior to attack each other and therefore misconstrue some of our joking as an attack as well.

This is obviously not well-received by a woman from a man who tells her that he loves her. That lesson inspired the following letter from Nina, who notes the difference between ignorance and abuse (and yes, there are valuable lessons here for those of you whose relationships don’t involve abuse, so please stick with me here and you’ll see what I mean):

Hi David,

My husband and I have been reading your newsletters since my we started having trouble last summer, and your book has made a world of difference in our life. We were in a bit of a death spiral, bored and frustrated with each other and had begun picking and sniping at each other in retaliation against what we both thought were deliberate attacks and disrespect, and I need to thank you for helping us get that all sorted out.

He’s back to being the man I married, and I feel better about our marriage and my life now than I’ve ever felt, because Karl never bores me anymore. He’s fun and playful one minute and strong and decisive the next, and in spite of his growing “spare tire” around his middle and his receding hairline, he keeps me in the clouds, if you know what I mean. And by the way, thanks so much for teaching him about the value of anticipation and taking it slow. We’re both enjoying that part of our life more than we did during our dating and honeymoon periods combined.

I wanted to tell you about something I saw today, and have been seeing since our new neighbors moved in. I didn’t realize what I was really seeing until your newsletter about how men and women play differently. I thought that this was what our neighbor Gene was doing to his wife Carrie, but I think I was wrong. Every time we’re over there, no matter who is around or how Carrie really looks (she’s usually very slender and fit but sometimes she puts on a couple of extra pounds when she has to work late a lot at the hospital here), he’ll walk up and say to her, “You’re looking pretty chunky in those shorts (or pants or whatever). We’re going to have to get that weight off of you!” And then he’ll swat her on her bottom or pinch her or grab her and pull her skin to make love handles. It embarrasses her so badly that she’ll start crying and walk away, and he just laughs.

I thought for a long time that he was really that stupid and insensitive, but I’ve noticed other things lately. She never leaves the house without him, and very often when we’re all together and she’s asked a question, she’ll look at him before answering, and won’t answer until he makes eye contact with her and twitches some part of his face. I’ve never seen him hit her, and haven’t seen any bruises, but I think he’s controlling and abusing her, because she never looks happy and often the only way I can describe the way she looks is “trapped.” Is there anything that I can say to her or do for her to help her through this?

Thank you so much for your help, and for listening,
Nina

My reply:

Hi Nina,

I’m so happy to hear that you and your husband have had such success, and I’m equally sorry to hear that your neighbor is having such trouble. There is nothing to help her through, except exiting the relationship, unless she wants to risk going to jail by cracking him in the head with an iron skillet next time he abuses her.

Seriously, this is probably out of your league and hers. She needs some professional help to help her understand that she doesn’t have to tolerate his abuse and should in fact give him an ultimatum to either stop or leave, and that’s obviously not something that can be successfully handled by e-mail or phone, so she needs to find a local counselor.

What you can do for her is to point out to her that her accepting his behavior is self-destructive and unnecessary, that his behavior is controlling and abusive and not the “norm” for male behavior, and that if she is uncomfortable facing him down herself that she should get counseling from someone who specializes in abuse cases and start getting the problem handled. But be warned, she may try to suck you into her problems, or begrudge you sticking your nose into her marriage, and getting involved in your neighbor’s domestic disputes and relationship problems can land you in all sorts of trouble, including emotionally draining you to the point of damaging your relationship with your husband or causing a feud with your neighbor, so don’t let that happen.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Now, what can the rest of us learn from this situation? First, some women are just as capable and skilled at this kind of controlling, demoralizing behavior as men; indeed, some of them are even better at it than we are. They may not even make a pretense of playing with you; they may just attack you outright in public, airing your dirty laundry, discussing your mistakes and failures, describing in detail your embarrassing moments, complaining about things you do, etc.

But not every attack is abuse. Now, pay close attention here so you can learn to distinguish between a desperate plea for negotiation and abuse…

When a woman does this infrequently and it’s limited to a single issue, like some on-going disagreement that you’re having, it’s a sign that the two of you are having a communication problem on that issue, she’s frustrated, and thinking that she may get you to work harder to listen to her if she gives you a dose of embarrassment and frustration as punishment. Not the best solution in the world for sure, but malice, control, and abuse are not the motivation behind the problem. She’s merely getting desperate for communication and trying to bully you a bit to get it and punishing you for making it rough for her. HOWEVER…

If the attacks are frequent, and not related to problems, but to things that destroy self-esteem, like overtly trying to embarrass you over your receding hairline or recent weight gain, being passed over for promotion at work, etc., hitting hot buttons that have nothing to do with anything in dispute and especially target your manhood and independence, you have a spouse abuser on your hands, seeking to control you and keep you close to home by destroying your self-esteem and making you seek their approval.

On the issue of abuse, we have it just a little easier than most women. Most of us don’t generally have to worry about our wife beating us to a pulp and putting us in the hospital. But that’s about the only advantage. They can still hurt us financially in any number of ways, including burying us in debt and keeping us there, relentlessly putting us down in front of people to the point that we withdraw from the outside world to keep from being embarrassed in front of anybody we know, acting seductive toward other men in our presence or even bringing them home, and in extreme cases, even mixing things like mild poisons, things we’re allergic to (peanuts, shell fish, etc.) in our food in just high enough a concentration to make us miserable without endangering us. Abusers, male and female alike, don’t want their victim dead, they want them utterly submissive, alive and healthy enough to fully experience the abuse.

If you are with such a person, you can leave or throw them out. There may not be any criminal charges to file, and life may be a bit rough for a little while as you get used to being on your own again, but the truth is that no matter how insecure your abuser makes you feel, you don’t have to take it, and there are others in the world who will treat you with love and respect. It may take you awhile to heal and regain both your self-respect and your ability to trust women again, but you can do it, and I and thousands of others are capable of helping you through it, so you don’t have to do it alone, either.

Being well-matched is one of the cornerstones of a great relationship, and something I devote a lot of time and energy to explaining and helping you to understand in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and being strapped to an abuser for the rest of your life is definitely NOT what anyone would call “being well-matched,” unless of course you are a masochist.

Getting away from an abuser (and that includes predators who use attacks on your self-esteem to keep you submissive and in the habit of spending your entire life for their benefit at the expense of your own) first requires ascertaining that you are indeed with one, then either quashing their abusive behavior or separating yourself from them (almost everyone ends up doing the latter, because the underlying problems that make one an abuser of any kind rarely can be corrected, even with professional help, which is why we have nice, big prisons with lots of tiny cells), and then going through a process of healing and regaining your manhood and self-respect.

It also requires that you recognize that the odds of being struck by lightning are better than the odds of finding some way to reform an abuser, and accepting that they’re not going to change for you or anybody else, nor are they likely to change for their own sake. They live to find targets, and punish or exploit them. Nothing more, nothing less.

This must all be followed by overcoming any lingering fear you may have of future abuse, and then gaining a complete and working understanding of what a high-quality woman looks and acts like, how she thinks, and what she wants, and then evaluating yourself to see if some part of you needs to grow in order to satisfy such a woman.

The growing part is actually easy, because nearly all of us are born with a hero within, a part of us that wants to do better, have better, and be better, and the only thing that suppresses that part of us is bad programming that we pick up from the world around us. Remove the bad programming by accepting your true nature, and self-improvement comes very naturally and aggressively, because you suddenly realize that you both want and deserve it, and nothing can get in the way of you having it.

Great relationships don’t happen every day, but it’s not because they’re not available. It’s because even with all the school we attend and everything else we go through in growing up, very, VERY few of us are ever taught – by example or otherwise – what we need to know to find, build, and maintain a great relationship or marriage. We do what we’ve been programmed to do, or worse, what our insecurities, caused by our lack of understanding of the opposite sex, force us to do, and screw things up royally, and it doesn’t have to be that way at all.

As I said, I and thousands of other can help you, to varying degrees depending on our expertise and specialty, with any problems you have, but you have to first admit there is a problem and then choose to do something about it before any of us can do anything for you. I’ve been helping people with all sorts of problems my whole adult life, and I’m not a bit shy about saying that I’m one of the best you’ll find to help you, because I have thousands of business and individual clients to back me up on it, and nobody will ever tell you that I couldn’t help, at least to the extent of referring them to other competent help if their needs were outside my area of expertise. You can argue with opinions, but you can’t argue with history.

So what are you going to do about your problems? Are you going to just continue to wallow in them and hope somebody gives you a magic wand or powder or pill that makes them go away, or are you going to take the bull by the horns and get some help to get things going your way quickly so you can get back to (or get around to, if you never have) enjoying your life?

If you’re tired of things being touchy, rocky, scary, boring, tense, lonely or celibate in your relationship, stop tolerating it and let me help you fix it, a lot quicker and more easily than you would ever imagine, because I have the one thing above all others that you are lacking: good information that has been tested and worked for EVERYBODY who has used it, and it will work for you, too. Just jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you’ll see what I mean.

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

The Key to Conflict Resolution in Relationships and Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another MUST READ: For men, “what you see (or hear!) is what you get,” but with women, often statements are questions and questions are statements, and if you don’t read them right, you’re toast! (Ladies, print this one and give it to your husbands!)

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

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

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

Wrong answer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said, “Well, everybody else does!”

I said, “Define ‘everybody else.”

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

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

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

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

Here are some other common examples:

“Are you wearing that?” is actually a statement: “You should not wear that.” For some women, it’s another statement: “You look really stupid wearing that.” Either way, don’t wear it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth About Testing and Why Being a Nice Guy Will Destroy Your Relationship and Marriage

It’s not such a big secret anymore that being a "nice guy” is bad for your relationship, and men are finally waking up to the fact that much of the bratty behavior they see from women is in fact nothing more than a “wuss test.” Here’s why, and a few other things you really ought to know…

During an interesting discussion with a new student today, we got on the subject of women testing men’s level of wussitude and why being a nice guy doesn’t work for either of you, and since I’ve not spoken about it for awhile, I’d like to share briefly with you the high points of that conversation. Even if you think you already know all of this, read it anyway, because you can never tell when the spark of inspiration or revelation will light you up!

To get you newbies caught up, women often push bad positions in arguments, insist on unreasonable concessions, pout, pitch fits, and engage in a lot of other seemingly absurd behavior with a very logical and targeted purpose, and it’s not to get what they want. You heard me; it’s not to get what they want. It’s to get you to say, “NO.” Why?

It’s one of the elements of that “men are hunters, women are gatherers” thing that anthropologists talk about. I’ll spare you most of the boring details, but suffice it to say that as we evolved (and I’m talking about improving and becoming more sophisticated as humans, not about the age-old debate about evolution vs. creation as an explanation as to how we got here, so save the anti-evolution hate mail for somebody who will read it), we developed different skills and physical characteristics that made each gender better suited to handle specific tasks.

Over time, men who had larger lungs, bigger skeletons and musculature, and spatial skills (navigation, being able to mentally gauge proximity to guess the arc of a spear as he threw it, developing tools, etc.) to help provide food and protect themselves and others survived better and reproduced more. Women who had wider hips (to aid in childbirth), advanced language skills (to cooperate with others in building huts, processing skins and sinew to build weapons, and other tasks that were best conducted in cooperative enterprises), sharper sense of smell (to sense danger approaching the dwelling and identify edible or poisonous plants), etc., also survived and reproduced more.

As with everything biological in every species of life, those who were the best-developed reproduced the most – survival of the fittest in its purest form. Some men were better protectors and providers than others. Some women were better at tuning in to a man’s traits and determining how much of a hunter and leader he could be. Through the generations, they became biologically “wired” through this process of natural selection (by locking in those genes that created successful traits) to possess skills that helped in finding a good mate.

While chasing down and killing a deer with bare hands or a bear with a spear is no longer required for a woman and child to eat, and indeed, in most parts of the world women routinely provide for themselves quite adequately without the help of a man, these mechanisms are still present and active in the female brain, and they automatically engage to size a man up from time to time – indeed, virtually every time they encounter a man, familiar or not. Much has changed, but one thing hasn’t: the nature of the test…

…which, in a nutshell, is to provoke you in some way to see if you will say “NO” to her when she is being unreasonable. Most of the time it is not at all deliberate, and you would laugh yourself silly as you read transcripts of conversations and e-mails in which women said, “I NEVER test a man. That’s silly!” and then confessed to it within just a few seconds as their testing actions were called to their attention, after which many of them said, “Oh my God! He must hate me!”

No, he doesn’t hate you, Ladies. Your testing is a pain in our collective ass, but it doesn’t make us hate you. It makes us think you’re nuts until we understand what it is and why you do it. Then it’s usually somewhere between mildly annoying and amusing. So on that note, guys, here it is, in a nutshell:

A woman knows, instinctively, without ever being told, as a result of biological development through the ages, that if a man can’t stand up TO her (when appropriate), he cannot stand up FOR her. “When appropriate” is a big deal, too, because when it is inappropriate to stand against her, you must also be able to stand with her.

Write that down, and recite it mentally every time you start to enter a conversation with a woman until it becomes second nature, because you will eventually need it with every women you ever meet if you talk to her more than a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds. They have to know, and are biologically-driven to find out, whether it’s in a casual or formal situation, public or intimate context, and regardless of the nature or longevity of your relationship.

You WILL be tested, and if you can say “NO” to a woman she will feel safe in letting you get to know her better, safe in letting you hold sway over her emotions, safe in letting you negotiate on her behalf or as her adversary (because you’ll say “NO” directly instead of saying “YES” and then trying to trick her or cheat her in some other way). No matter what you may think, there is no possible downside to saying “NO” when it’s appropriate and the logical thing to do.

But when is that? We’ll get to that in a minute, but before we do, let me clue you in on a HUGE difference in the way we communicate: nearly all communication you ever have with a woman, and ALL communication that carries the potential for conflict, will start as a negotiation.

It is EXPECTED that you enter a discussion with either a position or a statement that you require more information. So when saying “NO,” unless you are abusive about it, in a woman’s mind and according to the protocol she will naturally follow, that “NO” is not final; it is merely your opening negotiating position, and she expects a chance to give you input that will persuade you. An inappropriate “NO” will only anger a woman if you deliver the “NO” and deny her the opportunity of negotiation. That’s why they get so ticked off when we act like we’re afraid to say “NO;” it’s just too wussy for words in their world.

But it does make things easier if you try to say “NO” only when appropriate, because it shows that you are reading her, which in turn means that you are paying attention to her, a big compliment in the women’s playbook. The easiest way to draw the line between an appropriate and inappropriate “NO” is to ask one simple question, “Has she earned a ‘yes’?”

If your wife says she wants new furniture for a room, and has contributed to the smooth and secure operation of the household, whether through a job or “domestic efforts,” been loyal and trustworthy, given you love and respect, etc., then she’s earned a “yes,” as long as what she’s asking for is within or can be worked into your budget, obviously. If she’s laid around on her lazy or drunken butt while you and the kids have done everything and complained because you didn’t do it fast enough, abused herself and you, and exhibited a general lack of respect for herself and everyone around her, no, she hasn’t. It’s really that plain and simple.

Or, put another way, if you think she deserves it and want to agree because of that, she’s earned a “yes,” but if you’re thinking about giving in to earn some favor from her that really isn’t a favor, but something a wife should be doing, you’re about to get busted for being a wuss, and getting the furniture without gaining whatever favor you were after is just the beginning of your punishment, so don’t go there. You can reward good behavior and punish the bad behavior, and you can exhibit good behavior by acting like a man of self-respect, but you cannot “buy off” a woman. That is in essence saying to her that you think she’s a prostitute, and they don’t take kindly to such things.

As I said to this new reader today, I have searched extensively to find any rational downside to a man having genuine self-esteem and engaging in attractive behavior like being strong for his wife or girlfriend, and I have failed utterly to identify even an iota’s worth of a good reason to do anything less. If a woman says she wants something, even if you think it’s the right thing to do, invite her to make her case, thereby opening the negotiation that she expects and WANTS to engage in.

Women naturally engage in negotiation to communicate nearly everything, and if she’s testing, you’ve made the right move, and if she’s not, she’ll be happy to build the emotion of making her case instead of just having you give in. The same thing if you think you should say “no” – yes, really! If you think it’s a bad idea, say so, and immediately invite her to make her case so that she doesn’t feel shut down and retaliate.

It would sound something like:

Her: “Honey, what do you think about our living room furniture?” (Implied statement: “Honey, I want new living room furniture, and it’s time to negotiate.”)

You: “I like it fine, why?” (The “why” is needed for her to continue; if you don’t say it, she will most likely take it that you shut down the discussion!)

Her: “Well I think it needs replaced.” (Or in the long version, “Don’t you think it looks old and worn out, or the color is wrong, or it’s uncomfortable, etc.?” meaning “I want to change it.” Some women will continually ask questions to repeat the statement they are trying to make until you make it for them.)

You: “Well, like I said, I don’t see any problem with it, but you live her too, so tell me what makes you want to replace it.”

From there, she’ll either give you good reasons to do so, like pointing out that it’s stained, uncomfortable worn, or she’s so bored with it she doesn’t feel comfortable in the room anymore (yes, that is a legitimate reason, as you would know if you knew everything you need to know about women), or she’ll stammer around talking about where you can buy it on sale, or giving you the old “you’d just buy it for me without asking questions if you loved me,” routine if she doesn’t have a good reason and is either testing you or showing her true colors as a gold-digger (and maybe it’s time to test her a bit, too!)

Living with a woman is easy if you are fairly well-matched in terms of values, tastes and interests and you understand what you need to know about women, which is how they are both like us and different from us, and how to communicate well enough to recognize negotiations, questions that are statements, etc. Now, you have a decision to make…

Are you going to spend a lifetime trying to learn on your own and reach the end of your life lonely and still not knowing?

Or worse, assume that I’m full of crap and you don’t need to learn anything?

Or are you one of us guys who see a problem, seek out a viable solution, preferably one that has already worked for somebody else in similar circumstances, and fix it?

If you’re that first guy, I commend your can-do attitude, but isn’t reinventing the wheel a gross waste of time? Not to mention a HUGE risk of having life – family life – as you know it, come to a sudden halt if you don’t figure it out, or don’t figure it out fast enough?

If you’re that second guy, why are you reading my newsletter? If you’re looking for validation of your past actions instead of a solution to your self-inflicted problems, you’re looking in the wrong place.

If you’re that third guy, let me hook you up with what you need, and yes, it has already been tested and proven by thousands of couples. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Read it. Study it. Learn from it the answer to that oldest of man’s questions: “What makes a woman tick?” and that next oldest: “What do women REALLY want?” Then go sweep your woman off her feet…I dare you! (And for those of you in the southern United States, “I double-dog dare you!”)

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

Do Her Chores Include YOU? Curing the Doldrums of a Stale Relationship or Marriage

There’s a word for forced intimacy born of duty or guilt instead of passion: CHORE. Make your sex life – and HERS – a treat, not a chore! Here’s how…

It’s another happy day, Ladies and Gentlemen! I was concerned briefly that I might not be able to find something for you that is as interesting as what my buddy David has been sharing with you for the last four days, but something always shows up to share with you. Here’s another couple who have used "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" to make their relationship one of passion and excitement instead of a torturous, miserable, boring coexistence, and you can learn a lot from them. Meet Marti:

Dear David,

Due to changes in our marriage and the feeling my husband and I had for each other, a few months ago we decided that we either had to make major improvements or call it quits. In doing research for help and talking to friends your book was recommended to us. The couple that told us about you is one of the happiest couples we know, and they said that it is because they have simply used what they learned in your book. So we decided to dive right in and see what you could do for us.

My biggest problem was that I felt as if sex with him was a chore, not something to enjoy or even want. Please close your mouth, yes I said I felt like sex with my husband was a chore. I had even compared it to mopping the floor one time while talking to a friend and she was in shock. Is that not one of the worst things you have ever heard? I guess maybe you have heard it all by now, but I felt like maybe I was not the only woman that had ever had these feelings and in writing you maybe you could share this with other women.

What made it worse was that I tried and tried to tell my husband that the passion was gone and that we were in a rut, but I couldn’t get through to him. I asked him countless times how he felt about our relationship and our intimate life, and he would just say that he didn’t have or see a problem, and that was the end of the discussion, never giving me the chance to tell him what I needed to tell him. I just laid there, thinking about other things, sometimes other people, waiting for him to finish so I could go to sleep.

Since we have now completed your book and have put into our everyday life what we learned in it I can say I shocked myself. Everything in our relationship is better than it’s ever been! There is nothing about sharing myself with him that even comes close to a chore now. In fact is just the opposite. He listens to me, and we really talk now, not just about our sex life, but about everything! When we started tuning into each other it was like our dating and marriage up to that point had just been a practice run. We finally REALLY know each other, all the time, and it’s wonderful!

As for the bedroom, now all he has to do it give me “that look” or touch me in the small of my back or just on my arm and I find myself wanting him as close to me as possible. And when he teases me and cracks that naughty grin I just want to eat him up! Sometimes he starts in on me before we even get out of bed in the morning, caressing and teasing, and then laughs and jumps out of bed and tells me if I’m good I’ll get more when he gets home. I daydream about him touching me, kissing me, enjoying my body as I enjoy his throughout the day every time he does that. Oh God right now just thinking about it I feel like calling him to come home for lunch!

WOW how different our lives are now! Now I am always looking forward to bedtime instead of looking for excuses not to have to go to bed until he is asleep. I do things to get his attention instead of avoiding him, because he is fun and exciting to be around. My friends even comment on how much they enjoy being around him now, and they used to tell me that it was time to move on because he was such a stick in the mud and I could do better. You have saved our marriage in more ways than one and I just wanted to say “Thank you” for all your hard work and for making it easy for us to save what we had and get back what brought us together in the first place - and then some!

Love ya,
Marti

My reply:

Thank you for that, Marti! It always makes my day when I get a success story like this, one in which the couple has followed my recommendation to use my book together, and learned from each other as the process continued. "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" was written for men partially because they have the most to learn, but also because it is the man’s job to take the lead, because taking the lead, even in the pursuit of enhancing attraction, is attractive to his female partner. You’re on the right track; just stay on it!

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Notice that Marti doesn’t just talk about their sex-life reaching new levels. Their improved communication skills have brought them closer together, making their emotional intimacy more intense in addition to their physical intimacy; you may have noticed that she said she “asked him countless times how he felt about their relationship” and he would say it was fine and end the discussion without her getting to tell him what she needed to say. That’s the “asking questions to make a statement” mechanism at work as I’ve been describing it to you, a statement that she has a problem that she needs to discuss and that she wants the discussion to open NOW. A horribly common problem these days, but one that they will never again make, and one that you don’t have to make now that you know about it.

Being attractive to the woman you love obviously enhances your sex-life, but it also enhances the rest of your life together as well, often being the catalyst in escalating relationships between married couples (being pulled together by attraction makes couples want to explore other aspects of each other) who were functionally just roommates and/or business partners to true LIFE PARTNERS, friends, playmates, adventure partners – even better parents!

Or had it not occurred to you that it would be much easier to be better parents if you could communicate with each other more effectively and prepare a more unified front to present to the kids? And guess what else there, DAD…your daughters are “women-in-training,” and what you learn to communicate better with their mother will also help you to keep from drowning in that estrogen ocean when their hormones start surging and “Daddy’s little girl” turns into “Daddy’s little drama queen”!!! Daughters in their teens grow away from fathers for the same reason wives grow away from husbands, because he doesn’t understand them when they try to talk and they just get frustrated and give up. Don’t let them give up on you!

Gents, there is no downside here, and an unlimited upside. Opportunities like this don’t come along often, so take advantage of this one while you can. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" for less than the cost of a good meal for two, and start reading, right now, before you waste another minute of your life, because life’s too short to be regarded as a chore, and if your wife regards you as a chore for long, she’s likely to tender her resignation, and take half or more of “the company” with her!

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

A Reader's Concerns About Lie Detection Spoiling His Relationship and Marriage

A reader questions whether I may be over-emphasizing lie detection in relationship evaluation and improvement efforts. Not at all. Read and see why…

Have you ever met a true optimist? Somebody so intent on seeing the positive that they refuse to see the negative even when it’s there? I got a letter from one today that brings up an interesting point. Meet Karl:

Hello David,

I read your article about lie detection techniques a few days ago and it’s been on my mind frequently ever since. I’m a trusting person by nature, and while I’ve been hurt several times by people who have lied to me, I still prefer to try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I just can’t live my life going from minute to minute being paranoid about whether everyone is lying to me. If I did, I would surely lose my mind.

Karl

(Karl is referring to the article on Lie Detection in my free 45-page “Break-Up Busting 101” report, which you can download along with my free 50-page “What Women REALLY Want" report. Both are streamlined and printer-friendly in PDF format, and feel free to share both of them with your friends!)

My reply:

Me too, Karl. But because I know how to tell with near-100% accuracy when someone is telling me a lie, I also know how to tell with near-100% accuracy when someone is telling me the truth! Hence, I’m never paranoid or even concerned about whether anyone is lying to me.

If you know and practice lie detection, it becomes second-nature, very automatic. Lie detection is also, by definition, truth detection, as one cannot exist except in contrast to the other; there is no state in between “true” and “not true,” although some politicians would love to have you believe otherwise. Can you see the very positive ramifications of this?

If you’re feeling a bit stressed about how things are going at work, and someone says to you, “Well, I know you’ll pull through,” what do you do? Most of the time, nothing, because you don’t know if that person is just being polite, really has that much confidence in you, or knows something bad is about to happen and wants to see you fall on your face or doesn’t feel comfortable sharing it with you. But…

If you are a competent lie detector, and hence a competent truth detector, you can take their statement as a vote of confidence or as a sign that they know something you don’t and that things are going to work out. If you knew that they were lying, you’ve identified either an enemy or somebody who knows what your enemy knows.

What about at home, where the stakes are even higher? Forget the petty suspicions about infidelity for a minute and let’s focus on common, every day practical issues, like you’re unsure that what you are wearing is attractive or appropriate and you ask for your partner’s input. If they say you look nice and you can tell they are telling the truth, it helps your self-image and makes you more confident, which in turn makes you more fun and attractive. If you detect that they don’t like it and they are lying to try to protect your feelings, you can try something else instead of continuing to be guarded and uncomfortable for the remainder of the evening, constantly wondering if everyone who sees you is mentally laughing at your bad taste.

There is absolutely no downside to being able to know when anyone is telling you the truth or a lie, and the upside is virtually boundless, especially if you look at the more positive aspects of acting with more confidence when you know that you can act upon what others tell you.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Trust, confidence and accurate communication are indescribably critical to a long-lasting, fun and exciting relationship – indeed, ANY relationship of any kind. Without them, you can continue on auto-pilot for awhile, pretty much as long as the attraction or the novelty hold out, but if you don’t know how attraction is made or destroyed, you can bet you’ll end up inadvertently destroying it, and then you’re in a pickle to say the least – no fun, lots of trouble, and insufficient communications skills to discuss everything and work out a happy ending.

They’re also critical to getting out of a bad relationship with your dignity and at least a fair share of your accumulated wealth intact. Yes, it is possible to trust someone you’re splitting up with, if your communications skills and lie (truth) detection skills are such that you can come to an agreement about leaving a bad relationship instead of making someone feel crappy about it and want to punish you for it. So no matter what you do, what relationships you have, or what relationships you need to end, you need to develop these skills.

And, there’s great news! In my book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," you will learn all of that and more. There’s no need for your relationship to ever fall into crisis due to boredom, lack of attraction, poor communications, or fights that never seem to accomplish anything except driving you farther apart. Get over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get what you need to get your relationship on track and then kick it up to notches previously unknown, because fighting for your relationship is infinitely more rewarding than fighting over your relationship!

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

Are You Looking For Success or Attention? The REAL Path to Manhood and a Great Relationship and Marriage

Do you do what you do to enjoy doing it well, or to be seen doing it? Attractive behavior isn’t just an act to try to mimic an alpha male. It’s the result of BEING the alpha male, a real man of competence and confidence, which virtually any man can be. It’s both his birthright and responsibility, and for the vast majority of men requires only shedding some programming and attitudes that are oppressive, stressful, and lead to gross insecurity and stagnation in all parts of a man’s life. Read on and learn why and how!

I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t watch much television, and the little I watch is either informative (news, how-to, or self-improvement) or mentally challenging, and when I find an on-screen example of something readers can watch to get a clue about attraction and attractive behavior, I write about it, because a picture is truly worth a thousand words.

Having been deeply involved in alternative medicine for all of my adult life and more, the NBC series “House” (about a doctor who’s supposed to be the world’s best diagnostician and determines what’s wrong with people when nobody else can) is challenging (the writers rarely make a medical mistake, but when they do, it’s hilarious, such as when Dr. House had a sinus allergy and claimed to take 1,000 mg of diphenhydramine, the little pink pills that most of the rest of us know as “Benedryl,” and are dosed out at 25 mg per tablet, meaning that he took a dose of 40 of those little pink pills, which would likely ruin an elephant’s day and knock a human out for a week), and the governing dynamics of the personalities of the characters on the show are diverse, well-conceived and fascinating.

Dr. House is an alpha male, but with a twist. He’s brilliant, strong, funny, cocky, etc., but somebody on the writing staff apparently is intimidated by alpha males because they gave him a permanently damaged right leg and chronic pain to go with it, and a hydrocodone bitartrate (Vicodin, et al, regarded as “morphine-like in all respects” according to http://www.streetdrugs.org/hydrocodone.htm) addiction to go with the pain, which I find somewhat perverse, but it does make for some interesting twists in the plots.

One episode featured a doctor who spent his entire career treating tuberculosis in remote parts of Africa, contracted the disease himself, but with a pancreatic tumor that caused life-threatening symptoms unrelated to the tuberculosis. What was interesting about the character, and what both the character of Dr. House and I took exception to, was that this doctor didn’t present the appearance of doing the job to do it well, but to be seen doing it; he was constantly courting the media, even to the extent of refusing treatment for his own tuberculosis and calling a press conference to call attention to it.

The script writers did a good job of keeping it unclear as to whether the character’s main motivation was altruism or a need for attention, but it made me think about some of the letters I’ve received from readers of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” and this newsletter, complaining that it was hard to keep up the image of an alpha male and call sufficient attention to themselves without being too obvious. That’s an understatement if ever there was one; one that makes me want to pull my hair out.

First, putting on an act for a woman, especially in the long term, is a practical impossibility. The sheer fear of being caught putting on the act creates insecurity that gives it away, and no matter how many times I state that to some people, they still don’t get it. Attractive behavior is not the result of some theatrical effort; it’s the result of BEING attractive, having the confidence, attitude, wit, and competence to naturally be in this attractive state. You can fake it a little and for a short time in an emergency, but the successful on-going presentation of alpha male behavior depends entirely on the successful attainment of alpha male characteristics, which is not difficult, and a lot of fun.

So you see, the “trick” isn’t to act attractive and find a way to call attention to it that doesn’t give away the fact that you are trying to call attention to yourself. Seeking attention (or approval) is the opposite of alpha male behavior, regardless of why you’re doing it. That’s why the PUA’s and their peacocking (“Styles,” “Mystery,” etc., a la Neil Strauss’s “The Game”) is so bloody annoying to the rest of us.

Indeed, there is no trick, and the solution is far easier to pull off. You must simply understand what it is that women respond to with attraction, which turns out to be confident, fun, intelligent, “cock of the walk” behavior, realize that there are some things in your life that you can take pride in, develop them so that you can fully enjoy that pride, see yourself as worthy of having fun and enjoying your life, and let nature take its course. While nature is taking its course, you learn all you can about women, especially what they enjoy and how they communicate, so you can recognize the feedback that they’ve been giving you for years. Feedback that you were never able to interpret because you didn’t realize it was feedback. What???

Yes, they really have been giving you feedback for years, but most of it is non-verbal, and the verbal part is very indirect. For instance, when a woman says she wants a man “who just knows what she wants,” she isn’t speaking of a psychic (unless she’s a complete idiot just “parroting” something she’s heard other women say). She’s saying, “I want a manly man who does manly things, and pays enough attention to me to learn how to communicate with me so I don’t have to explain everything to him like I would a three-year old.” She saying that she wants a guy who is a guy, but who knows to communicate with guys like guys and be more perceptive and attentive when communicating with a woman, recognizing her social nature and her need to negotiate and be a social conduit instead of stating, reporting, and dictating as men do. Where’d that come from?

You’re right. Most women would never come out and explain that to a man, but a few of the very smart ones are always on the lookout for men who want to communicate effectively with them, and I had 118 of them who were in long-term committed relationships or marriage plus nearly a hundred more who were single respond to a survey I conducted before researching “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” They taught me everything they could think of about how women communicate with each other and how that affects the way the communicate with men, and when we finished that training, we talked – in “girly-speak,” or “feminese” as one of my readers is fond of saying – about what they thought they wanted in men and what they actually respond to, and exploded many, many myths, especially about the “nice guy.” (You’ll be shocked when you find out about the one version of the “nice guy” that women do respond to, and you’ll do so when you read my book!)

As we made lists upon lists of good and bad behavior and what caused it, we got their male partners (husbands and boyfriends, for future reference) involved, and tested everything we’d found. Some we fine tuned and improved, some wasn’t as consistent as I wanted because it was affected by culture or personal taste and was culled; everything that made it into the book worked for 90% or more of the couples, and in the end, everybody’s relationship was improved to the point of being fun and exciting again, not because the men learned how to act, but because they learned how to be and live NATURALLY as “real men,” which creates – BY DEFAULT – the very behavior that women respond to best, because it’s genuine, stress-free, fun and exciting for everyone involved.

There were even unexpected benefits of improved sleep, motivation to diet and exercise, children doing better in school, and a closer-knit family because the parents were feeling better about themselves, setting better examples for the kids and creating a more nurturing environment for them. (How nurturing an environment is it when parents are bored, frustrated, avoiding home and yet scared of their family coming apart at the seams?)

The bottom line is that there are no tricks, no magic bullet, no cute lines or secret potions (or positions!) that will save a stale relationship, but the solution to the problem is far easier and more enjoyable than employing any deception could ever be. It’s in my book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and it’s waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com, ready to Fully tested, proven and ready to deploy. Go get it and get busy, because life is too short to spend it enjoying your relationship even a little less than the most it can be enjoyed. Don’t settle; SUCCEED! (And you’d be doing yourself a favor to make that your personal motto, too!)

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

How Honey-Do Lists Affect Your Relationship and Marriage

We all have them. Some of us find them amusing and fun, while others hate them as the bane of their existence, a constant source of stress and a major hurdle to doing anything that they may want to do. Yes, I’m talking about the dreaded “Honey-Do” list. How you handle it has a HUGE impact on your relationship, and it can be good or bad. The good news is it’s YOUR choice, not hers…

I spent almost all of this weekend in my workshop building cabinets, doors, tool storage racks, etc., turning it into a real man cave for a “do-it-yourselfer” like me. In my life, productive work is a person’s greatest virtue, and I love doing anything that helps me to do more or do things more efficiently. Next weekend I may well do the exact same thing, and love every minute of it.

You have a weekend coming up in a few days, too. What are you going to do with it? According to your letters, for many of you Friday is just your last day of rest before another frustrating and laborious weekend spent trying to shorten your “Honey-Do” list.

I want to ask you a really simple and blunt question: WHY???

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself a single question about your honey-do list, let alone all of the pertinent questions? Well brothers, it’s time.

The first question you need to ask yourself is why you have a honey-do list (hereafter referred to as simply “the list”) to start with! To answer that question, we need to consider the various reasons that women construct the list, and then look at what is on YOUR list to verify their intent. Ready?

Some of the reasons women construct this list are logical and productive, others amusing, and still others downright diabolical. Let’s take a look at these.

1. It makes you look and feel important around the house

2. It makes you unavailable to look and feel important around other women

3. It helps distribute the task load so that you each have equal free time

4. It helps distribute the task load so that she has more free time and you have less or none.

5. It gets things done that she is unable to do herself

6. It gets you to do things that she could do herself so that she’s free to have fun while you’re working on the list.

7. It promotes a feeling of cooperation and teamwork

8. It creates an investment in the relationship that you will be reluctant to cash in

9. It makes good use of otherwise idle time

10. It puts her in complete control of your free time and ensures that you won’t be tempted to have any fun of any kind without her, even though she may be having loads of fun without you while you’re working on the list.

11. It’s more affordable for you to do the work instead of hiring it out

12. It frees up money for her to spend on other things that she wants, without regard for what you might want, which will be purchased when she’s out shopping while you’re working on the list.

13. It lets your wife see you acting competently and confidently to get things done.

14. It lets your wife see just how much crap you’ll put up with from her – TESTING!

What’s the first thing you notice about this list? How about that there are an equal number of good and bad reasons for the list and its elements, and that each good reason has a directly opposing bad reason? That means we cannot make snap judgments and say silly stuff like, “My wife would NEVER do that to me,” or “My wife is such a nagging, selfish witch that she’s just making me do everything so she doesn’t have to,” so drop any preconceptions and let’s look at the facts of your relationship through a few other simple questions.

How many of the things on your list are things that:

…your wife is unable to do?

…your wife is unable to help you with?

…you do well and/or enjoy doing?

…you don’t do well and/or despise doing?

…your wife offers to help you with or you will be doing while she is working on something else?

…your wife informs you that you will be doing while she is out shopping or doing something fun?

The answers to those questions will tell the tale. They will also tell you what you need to do about your list!

If there are things on your list that your wife could do, why isn’t she doing them, or helping you to do them?

If there are things on your list that you hate to do or aren’t skilled enough at to do competently and safely, why are they not either being done by your wife or being hired out?

If there are things on your list weekend after weekend that you are doing while she is out having fun, when did you hand over your testicles to her?

Yes, I DID say that. Committed relationships and marriages are partnerships, are they not? That doesn’t mean that you do all the hard stuff while she has all the fun any more than it means that you drink up your paycheck every week and beat the hell out of her to keep her in submission while you spend her paycheck to keep the bills paid. It’s a two-way street, and if you’re not doing your share of traffic control, somebody else in your house is “wearing the pants in the family,” as the saying goes.

So what do you do? That depends on what answers you have to all these questions, but when you have the answers, what you do about it will be self-evident. If your tasks are on your list for the right reasons, have fun with it. Open some negotiations and playfully challenge your wife on her contributions, get her to help you with the items on the list, etc. Tit-for-tat (no pun intended) can be a lot of fun.

If however, your list turns out to be a “massive cargo of bovine fecal matter” (a big load of bulls**t), it’s time to turn the tables. Tell your wife that you’re done spending every free minute you have working on the list while she’s out having a good time, and that she’s going to share responsibilities, to include taking up a part time job to help pay for things that need to be hired out if your financial situation calls for it. If she threatens to leave over it, let her go; either she’s testing (women do a lot of that, remember?) or you just flushed out a spoiled brat or a gold-digger who was taking a free ride at the expense of your life and hard work, and life’s too short to live like that.

Gentlemen, it’s really just this simple: If you are referring to your wife as your “ball and chain,” you’re either married to the wrong woman, you’re allowing her to take advantage of you, or you’re being punished for not stepping up to the leadership position that you are supposed to be filling, whether it’s intentional or not.

These problems are entirely correctable, and only serious cases of incompatibility or skullduggery require divorce to correct them. Most problems, honey-do list and others, require only that you stand up and act like a man, taking a leadership role (not a bullying, controlling role, mind you) in the decision-making, resource allocation, etc., and then inviting, listening intently to, and considering your partner’s input if she has any before finalizing decisions. Can you do that?

Certainly, but maybe not in your present condition. To lead you need to know about leadership, and to lead a woman you need to know about women: how they think and communicate, what they want, need and expect, what turns them on and pisses them off. You got all that under control there, Sparky?

If not, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get it under control, quickly and effectively, as have the many before you who have done everything from stopping divorces dead in their tracks to making mediocre relationships the envy of the community.

Who am I to make such a claim? The translator for several hundred women who contributed to the content and have watched their husbands become the man of their dreams. If you’re going to ask for advice, go to the source, somebody who HAD the same problems as you and fixed them, not somebody who HAS the same problems you do and miserable, or worse yet, has never had the problem and has only an opinion as to why you do or what to do about it.

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

Women Test Men Constantly in Our Relationships and Marriage, So Why Not Test THEM? Here's HOW!

Women test us constantly, so why don’t we test them? Not in retaliation, but to help determine if they are testing us and what they might be trying to communicate. Here are a few tips…

I was listening to an old set of self-improvement tapes, Roger Dawson’s “The Secrets of Power Negotiating,” (a classic if you’ve not heard of it, available at Nightengale Conant) and in a section on negotiating tactics, he was talking about overcoming objections and said the main tactic to overcoming objectives is to “always test for validity.” Here’s an example:

You’re negotiating a car deal, and the seller says he can’t possibly go a penny under $25,000 for the vehicle. You ask, “What if I could bring you cash instead of a cashier’s check?” If he says it won’t make any difference, he’s rigid on the price for some reason, and you need to dig deeper to find out what his issue is to see if there is any way to address it, but if he says, “Well, then I could possibly come down a little,” $25,000 is not a firm price and he does have some negotiating range.

The same tactic can be used when women test us, or when we suspect they might be testing, to either neutralize the test or establish that we are dealing with a legitimate issue and need to give it due attention. Let’s say your wife is saying she wants new furniture, and you don’t know if it’s a test, a whim, or a legitimate need. You can test the legitimacy of the issue by finding out how much she’s willing to do to have it: “Well, I [like this furniture/don’t care either way/might be interested in replacing this, too] IF our budget will allow it. If the budget won’t handle the extra expense, do you want this bad enough to do something extra to make up the difference?”

Now you’ve got her. If she says, “Well no, I guess not,” it wasn’t that important. “Well I thought you might be nice and get a part time job to do this for me,” definitely means it’s a test, and we’ll deal with that in a minute. “Yes, I would, because I really want this stuff out of here,” means it’s definitely important, and you should then consider saying, “Well, then I’ll see what I can do as well, but if I’m going to help buy it, I reserve the right to help pick it out, at least to the extent of declining on anything that isn’t comfortable for me to sit in. Agreed?”

It’s not required, but it’s a good idea to remain involved so you don’t end up with a houseful of furniture that you hate, and doing things like that together is part of what long-term committed relationships are about, isn’t it? Besides, women love it when you take the lead and make decisions – as long as you provide that needed and expected input channel for them– it’s ATTRACTIVE!

Now, what if you find out it’s a test? The test looks on the surface like it’s to see what she can get away with, but what it is really about is to see if you can say “no,” a check to see if you can define and exercise personal authority. This is a good time to switch back and forth between the responsible budget administrator and “the naughty negotiator.” Starting with something like, (straight face) “Well, I might consider being nice and helping with it, but if you want it that bad, you’re going to have to help, and you’re going to have to give me a pretty good reason to help, (sudden switch to naughty grin) so whatcha gonna do to be nice to me?”

Banter back and forth and make it plain that you’re not just going to roll over and give it up, even if she has recently done something nice, but make it fun for her to be told “no.” Bring sexual innuendo into it, like, “I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of fun on this couch, I hate to see it go,” or “We’ve not finished breaking this couch down…er…I mean in…It would be a shame to get rid of it before we’d got all the nookie….er….I mean useful life out of it…” However, do NOT get into anything that sounds like you’re willing to trade furniture for sex, because it can be taken as a very degrading remark that hints at prostitution. I’m appalled to even have to say that, but I did get an email about it once in the past, so for the sake of the very few who won’t realize it, I’m stating what’s obvious to most of us.

Use your imagination, but make sure you keep rocking back and forth between serious and naughty to keep her off balance, and keep dropping bits of sexual innuendo. You’re likely to end up having sex on the furniture before the discussion is over, just because the playful, naughty attitude and sexual tension may get to her that much, and then you can say, “See, we need to keep this couch!” and wink at her.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, fear going into this process. Remember that a woman’s first criteria in evaluating you and any other man is “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me.” This is how you earn her respect, her trust, her attraction, and to a significant degree, her love. So get on it. It’s all up-side for you.

It’s easy to test for validity once you get used to the game and get skilled at playing. To see the rules in vivid detail, along with lots of examples of how to play the testing game, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” What you’ll save on furniture the first time it comes up will more than pay for the book! Just kidding! Seriously, it costs less than a good meal for two, and any time you can throw a few dollars and a little time at a problem and watch it go away, that’s an offer you simply have to take!

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

Women Test Men Constantly, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

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

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

I’m an expert and published author on the subject, have proved that to nearly all the women I know during the course of writing “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” as I researched and tested the material, and they’ve acknowledged it, yet all of them test me nearly every time we talk! Some get embarrassed about it, some just laugh, but they know that I know, many want to avoid it because they know they’ll get busted and I’ll give them a hard time over it (in a naughty, mischievous way, not hateful or demeaning!), yet they still do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, keep in mind the characteristics of the alpha male: strength, self-esteem, authoritative, confident, playful, intelligent, etc. You must strip yourself of all the wussification programming that you’ve received since birth and allow the real man within you to emerge; you can’t “fake it until you make it” when being tested. The tests that you face will be tests that challenge these traits and try to get you to expose a hidden weakness, especially in a weak moment, to make sure you’re not just a wuss PLAYING THE PART OF a real man, the alpha male.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With us guys, “what you see (or hear!) is what you get,” but with women, often statements are questions and questions are statements, and if you don’t read them right, you’re toast! (Ladies, print this one and pass it along to your husband!)

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

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

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

Wrong answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said, “Well, everybody else does!”

I said, “Define ‘everybody else.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

I came home with two beautiful dresses and did wear one to the party that evening and received several nice comments on it, to which I told the story about my wonderful husband giving me money to buy the dress because of my hard work for the party, etc., etc. Everyone thought he was so great.

That night, after cleaning up the kitchen and house, I collapsed in bed, exhausted, and he wanted to start messing around. I told him that I was totally bushed and wanted to just get some sleep to which he replied, "didn't I get you two really nice dresses today?"

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

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

The tail swings both ways.

Sincerely,
Thanks, but no thanks

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

Sex is the strangest weapon in existence. It’s devastating, yet no real victory can ever be won by using it; in any contest where it is deployed, everybody loses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We started yesterday with Mark’s first letter to me and my response, in which he demonstrated how a playful attitude went a long way toward reestablishing trust and intimacy in his marriage as he and his wife work to recover from a crisis, one resulting from the slow decay of a good marriage inducing the wife to have an affair. Today we continue with a partial transcript of several e-mails that have passed back and forth between Mark and me. Today he gets into the real meat of his discoveries, or rather confirmations of my own discoveries with his own experience. Let’s continue…

David,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you so much for all your help.

Mark

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

Hi again!

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

Thanks, and take care,
David

To which he replied:

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

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

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

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

Mark

So how much of this soaked in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I gathered a large group of women and asked them!

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

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

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

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

MUST READ! When She Gets Mad: Keeping the Peace in Relationships and Marriage

Women get mad at us for a lot of different reasons, a significant number of which have nothing whatsoever to do with us. Handle it wrong and you’re in the dog house; handle it right and you’re golden…

Today you’re going to get a HUGE favor. I’ve abstained from writing about today’s subject in this newsletter because quite frankly it’s something I want men to learn after reading my book, but something has happened that compels me to do so before I can do another thing.

I got a call telling me that another of my best friends has died, this one in a car crash after he and his wife had an argument about something they shouldn’t have even been discussing at the time. She was moody and upset, needed an outlet, picked a fight with him over something he’d said two weeks prior, and he left in a huff, apparently to try to cool off.

He got plowed at an intersection. He was not intoxicated or otherwise impaired, but witnesses said he ran a red light and was struck in the driver’s side door by an oncoming car. It was only two blocks from his home, so while there is no way of knowing what really happened, we must admit that there is at least a high probability that he was angry or otherwise distracted, or possibly driving too aggressively, and paid for it with his life. Fortunately, the driver of the car that hit him sustained only minor injuries thanks to safety belt and air bags.

Dane was a good guy, a very rugged, manly man, but he was stubborn as the day is long and repeatedly refused a copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” because he thought it was silly for a man to read a book about how to get along with women. A pity, because it could have saved his life.

Dane never learned how to deal with his wife’s temper and moodiness. He had an odd temperament himself; it took a lot to make him angry, but if you pushed him that far, he went all the way and just blew up. He never hit his wife, and never said anything purposely to hurt her, but he would yell and knock things over and then leave to keep from destroying his home any further or hurting his wife, and thought that was handling it well enough. As I said, a good guy, but stubborn.

So to try to make sure that this doesn’t happen to any of you, I’m going to tell you about women’s anger and how to handle it. And I will ask something of you in return for improving your relationship and possibly saving your life as well, but we’ll get to that in a bit…

Sometimes women just get angry to bleed off the emotional energy of being bored and frustrated. I’ve written frequently and at length about this problem how to avoid it, and you can find a lot of articles in my archive and blog, but the two most relevant are the August 12, 2008 article, “Women’s Biggest and Loudest Complaint About Men, and What You Can Do About It BEFORE It Kills Your Relationship” and the June 09, 2008 article “Differing Emotional Scales: A Key to Understanding Women and Improving Your Relationship” If you’ve not read them, please do so, because understanding female boredom and a woman’s emotional scale are critical to properly handling and avoiding fights.

Women can also easily get mad at you for something they THINK you’ve done, without first trying to find out whether in fact you’ve done it. They’re much more emotionally-driven than we are, and worse, emotionally-dominated. The reasons for both these traits are spelled out in the two aforementioned archived articles, so I won’t repeat them here; there’s already a lot that must be said today and limited space (and limited reader attention span!) in which to say it.

Then the clincher, they get mad at you over something you really have done, whether you realize it or not. It’s important that you understand all this so that you will in turn understand how crucial it is to try to find out which kind of anger you’re dealing with. For instance, if she’s mad at you for something you haven’t done, there’s not a whole lot you can do to “undo” it, right?

So, the obvious first step is to try to determine, OBJECTIVELY, whether she has a legitimate issue, just thinks she does, or doesn’t care whether she does because she just needs to vent and you happen to be handy.

If she’s just in a foul mood or picking a fight over something ridiculous, point out to her that she’s angry at something that normally wouldn’t be an issue, and that you’ll be happy to either try to do something with her to bleed off that energy or she can pitch a fit at somebody else, because being a whipping post isn’t in your job description.

Or, if you’ve mastered the art of the naughty boy grin, call the preceding “plan B” and bust on her a bit and convert that negative energy to positive, playful energy. Even if you’ve not mastered it, give it a shot, and if she insists on remaining pissy then go with “plan B.”

It’s a little tougher when she thinks you’ve done something that you haven’t, because you’re facing genuine anger instead of general moody pisstivity. She thinks she really has an issue.

Instead of sticking your foot in your mouth and blurting, “What did I do?” which almost instantly pins guilt on you by triggering psychological anchors from past fights, or “What’s wrong with you?” which is absurd when you think about it because it’s obvious that what’s wrong with her is that she’s angry, in a leadership tone, tell her, “Tell me what’s really bothering you so we can get it fixed and move on.”

It’s important that you direct her to open up rather than asking her anything. The act of leadership alone will help to calm her anger and subconsciously make her feel like you are interested in listening and making amends. The same thing applies when you suspect that she really has a legitimate issue, and the same process should be followed up to this point.

The difference here, when you’re dealing with “real” anger, is that there are two and only two possibilities: that she does or does not have a legitimate issue. In neither case do you want to argue with her, because nobody ever wins an argument. Now that you’ve ascertained what she thinks is the real problem, your job is to lead her out of being mad.

That doesn’t mean that you con her. I’m talking about true leadership and a real solution. If she just thinks that you’ve done something that you really haven’t done, start with, “I think I may see where you could think something like that, but here’s what’s really happened…” and then just explain it to her. If she tries to reject your explanation because she’s still amped up or wants to stay pissed until she can milk some more adrenaline out of it, go back to the plan for handling a mood, and try first to convert the negative energy to positive by getting playful and if that fails, tell her she’s going to have to be angry with somebody else because enabling pissy, bratty, bad behavior by arguing or fighting with her is not in your job description.

If you have indeed done something wrong, your job is still to lead her out of the situation. First, you admit that whatever you did was wrong, could have been handled better, or whatever is an appropriate admission, and tell her that it was a mistake that you won’t be repeating, at least not deliberately, and that you didn’t do whatever it was to hurt her or make her angry.

There is no need to be heaping apology on top of apology, and in truth, much of the time an apology can actually work against you if you have already admitted that you were wrong. An admission of guilt and expression of remorse is strong, while many women – but not all – view apologies as weak, especially if they are repeated. And it can be one of those “be careful what you wish for” things too, where she wants an apology and loses respect for you if you give her one.

This issue of apologies varies widely from woman to woman, and you’re best bet in handling it is to ask her at some time when she’s in a good mood how she views apologies, and whether she’s ever noticed losing respect for someone or seeing them as somehow weaker after they did so. This is the kind of “what’s really inside you” question that women like to discuss, and you’ll get the best answer she can give you. Then when the situation arises, watch her reaction to see if it is congruent with what she’s told you.

Getting back to the altercation, once you have admitted guilt and pledged a better effort in the future (which you’d better make good on or you will lose credibility very fast!), if she continues to act pissy and like she’s trying to hang on to the anger, again try to flip it around to playful, and if she refuses to go there, refuse to be an enabler and tell her that you’re not going to be a wuss and grovel before her. You’ve admitted guilt and pledged reform, and if she wants anything more than an apology beyond that, she can talk to you after she calms down.

There are several caveats here. First, NEVER, under any circumstances, try to buy her off with some kind of gift or favor, even if she demands it. You’ll only anchor the gift to a negative meaning and emotion, and look like too big a wuss to handle a problem head on. Indeed, if she demands it, she’s proving that she can be bought, proving in turn that she’s a prostitute, not a wife, and you need to get her out of your life quietly and quickly, before she decides that she’s going to leave and has time to bleed you dry and hide the assets.

Next, never succumb to the urge to return fire if she starts saying things to try to hurt you, because once it’s said, it can’t be taken back. Don’t slink away with your tail between your legs, but do tell her that there is obviously an issue that needs to be worked out and she can talk to you about it when she has calmed down and is ready to address the issue instead of pitching a fit, but in the meantime, you’re her husband, not a whipping post, and she will deal with you as her husband or not at all. (If you can’t stand up TO her when you should, in her estimation, you can’t stand up FOR her when you should, which causes her to instantly lose respect and attraction for you, so don’t hesitate to stand tall.)

There’s never anything to be gained from a competition to see who can hurt each other the most. That’s called “war,” the most spectacular and costly of all human endeavors, and it is a last resort, not a standard operating procedure. You fight when all other options have been exhausted, and not until, and when you fight, you fight coldly and deliberately, to win, not out of anger, to punish. If you find yourself pushed to the point of having no choice but to fight with a woman you’re living with, you’re either with the wrong woman or she’s with the wrong man.

And if there is a single rule that will help you get through delicate situations without a fight, it is this:

“Always focus on what is wrong and how to fix it, not who is wrong and should be punished.”

It sounds simple because it is, and it works better than anything I’ve ever seen. As long as the two of you are focused on the problem and fixing the problem, you are in a mode of cooperation, even if one or both of you is upset. It’s when the discussion turns competitive – Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who gets punished? Who gets to “win” the fight and who has to “lose”? – that things escalate and get ugly, and there’s really no good reason that should ever happen.

So that’s it. Use it in good health. Live long and prosper.

That’s some of the most important advice that anyone will ever give you, and it works for everything from a moody little spat to a working through divorce issues. It’s also one of the cornerstones of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and I’m giving it to you unsolicited and with my blessing.

In return, I’m going to ask a favor or two. First, invite your friends, whether they are having trouble or not, to subscribe to this newsletter by filling out that short subscription form at the bottom of the page at http://www.makingherhappy.com. Forward a copy of this newsletter along with your recommendation so they can see that it's real advice, not just a glorified sales letter. Also download my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report and my free "What Women REALLY Want" report and attach them to that e-mail and forward it to them as well, and invite them to pass this information on so we can start putting an end to at least some of the fighting and frustration that goes on in every couple before somebody else ends up dead during or after a “domestic dispute.”

Second, visit my new web site, again at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and seriously consider downloading your own copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," especially since there’s new content going in and there’s about to be a price hike. (All buyers get free lifetime updates.) It’s time to learn all those things that you should have been taught earlier in life about women, relationships, and marriage, and make your life and relationship all it can be, because life can be fleeting; it can be gone before you know it, and for no good reason.

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

An Attitude and Mistake That Can Kill ANY Relationship or Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can we learn from this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 October 15, 2008 edition (about 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. 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. 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

Know What She REALLY Means, or Lose Your Relationship or Marriage

Keeping attraction alive in a relationship is crucial, as is solid compatibility, but there is another crucial element that can chip away at it or explode it in a cold minute: communication. You don’t have to read her mind, but you do have to know what’s on it when she speaks. Can you?

As you can imagine, I get a ton of e-mail every day, including a lot of strange news, jokes, and cartoons from friends and readers who share my love of comedy and the “truth is stranger than fiction” examples found in the world. Wait until you see this one!

The following is a real classified ad in a newspaper offering a motorcycle for sale:

Post Date: Aug 7th, 2006
Expire Date: Sep 6th, 2006

$10,000
06' Suzuki GSXR 1000
Farmington, UT 84025 - Aug 7, 2006
2006 Suzuki 1000. This bike is perfect! It has 1000 miles and has had its 500 mile dealer service. (Expensive) It's been adult ridden, all wheels have always been on the ground. I use it as a cruiser/commuter. I'm selling it because it was purchased without proper consent of a loving wife. Apparently "do whatever the f*** you want" doesn't mean what I thought. Call me, Steve. (801) 555-5555

I’ve changed his phone number to protect his identity since the ad has expired. Now, would you have bought the motorcycle? Not me!

I know that anytime the word “whatever” comes out of a woman’s mouth, I need to pay close attention to the context. Why?

As you will note in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, while “whatever” generally means “anything you want is fine with me” to us men, to women it rarely has a positive connotation unless they have a sincere smile on their face. Observe some definitions provided by female readers and test group members:

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.

Obviously there will be a few times when “whatever” is benign when spoken by a woman, but as I said, unless there is a genuine smile on her face, beware. Steve was apparently a world class bone-head, because even without the 90% of his wife’s communication that was non-verbal, you can still see and feel the anger in her statement, “"do whatever the f*** you want." You can almost smell the threat of punishment in that, can’t you?

If not, there are two things you need to do immediately. The first is to download that free report I just mentioned and see where else you’re setting yourself up for trouble, or worse, a break-up, and see what you need to do to reverse that trend before it gets out of hand. There’s a lot of good information in that report, and there’s more than one author in this industry angry at me for giving it away. They think it’s too much to give away. I don’t. The same goes for another free report, called “What Women REALLY Want.”

The other thing you need to do is go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get all the details on how to evaluate your relationship properly (women do this constantly, and you’d better be doing it at least periodically, or you’ll pay dearly), what women really want from us, how they think and why, and how use what you know about them to make everybody’s life fun, exciting, rewarding, and sexy, instead of boring, frustrating, scary, and celibate.

Those who are doing it are stopping divorces and making their relationships better than they’ve ever been, or realizing that they never should have come together in the first place and moving on peacefully and with dignity, some already to the best relationships of their lives. Join them, now, while you have room to maneuver and life and energy left to enjoy. Life doesn’t wait for you; you live it while you have it or you lose it forever. ‘Nuff said.

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

The Bottom Line on Testing and Why Being a Nice Guy Is Bad for Your Relationship and Marriage

It’s not such a big secret anymore that being a ‘nice guy” is bad for your relationship, and men are finally waking up to the fact that much of the bratty behavior they see from women is in fact nothing more than a “wuss test.” Here’s why, and a few other things you really ought to know…

During an interesting discussion with a new student today, we got on the subject of women testing men’s level of wussitude and why being a nice guy doesn’t work for either of you, and since I’ve not spoken about it for awhile, I’d like to share briefly with you the high points of that conversation. Even if you think you already know all of this, read it anyway, because you can never tell when the spark of inspiration or revelation will light you up!

To get you newbies caught up, women often push bad positions in arguments, insist on unreasonable concessions, pout, pitch fits, and a lot of other seemingly absurd behavior with a very logical and targeted purpose, and it’s not to get what they want. You heard me; it’s not to get what they want. It’s to get you to say, “NO.” Why?

It’s one of the elements of that “men are hunters, women are gatherers” thing that anthropologists talk about. I’ll spare you most of the boring details, but suffice it to say that as we evolved (and I’m talking about improving and becoming more sophisticated as humans, not about the age-old debate about evolution vs. creation as an explanation as to how we got here, so save the anti-evolution hate mail for somebody who will read it), we developed different skills and physical characteristics that made each gender better suited to handle specific tasks.

Over time, men who had larger lungs, bigger skeletons and musculature, and spatial skills (navigation, being able to mentally gauge proximity to guess the arc of a spear as he threw it, developing tools, etc.) to help provide food and protect themselves and others survived better and reproduced more. Women who had wider hips (to aid in childbirth), advanced language skills (to cooperate with others in building huts, processing skins and sinew to build weapons, and other tasks that were best conducted in cooperative enterprises), sharper sense of smell (to sense danger approaching the dwelling and identify edible or poisonous plants), etc., also survived and reproduced more.

As with everything biological in every species of life, those who were the best-developed reproduced the most – survival of the fittest in its purest form. Some men were better protectors and providers than others. Some women were better at tuning in to a man’s traits and determining how much of a hunter and leader he could be. Through the generations, they became biologically “wired” through this process of natural selection to possess skills that helped in finding a good mate.

While killing a deer with bare hands or a bear with a spear is no longer required for a woman and child to eat, and indeed, in most parts of the world women routinely provide for themselves quite adequately without the help of a man, these mechanisms are still present and active in the female brain, and they automatically engage to size a man up from time to time – indeed, virtually every time they encounter a man, familiar or not. Much has changed, but one thing hasn’t: the nature of the test…

…which, in a nutshell, is to provoke you in some way to see if you will say “NO” to her when she is being unreasonable. Most of the time it is not at all deliberate, and you would laugh yourself silly as you read transcripts of conversations and e-mails in which women said, “I NEVER test a man. That’s silly!” and then confessed to it within just a few minutes as their testing actions were called to their attention, after which many of them said, “Oh my God! He must hate me!”

No, he doesn’t hate you, Ladies. Your testing is a pain in our collective ass, but it doesn’t make us hate you. It makes us think you’re nuts until we understand what it is and why you do it. Then it’s usually somewhere between mildly annoying and amusing. So on that note, guys, here it is, in a nutshell:

A woman knows, instinctively, without ever being told, as a result of biological development through the ages, that if a man can’t stand up TO her, he cannot stand up FOR her.

Write that down, and recite it mentally every time you start to enter a conversation with a woman until it becomes second nature, because you will eventually need it with every women you ever meet if you talk to her more than a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds. They have to know, and are biologically-driven to find out, whether it’s in a casual or formal situation, public or intimate context, and regardless of the nature or longevity of your relationship.

You WILL be tested, and if you can say “NO” to a woman she will feel safe in letting you get to know her better, safe in letting you hold sway over her emotions, safe in letting you negotiate on her behalf or as her adversary (because you’ll say “NO” directly instead of saying “YES” and then trying to trick her or cheat her in some other way). No matter what you may think, there is no possible downside to saying “NO” when it’s appropriate and the logical thing to do.

But when is that? The easiest way to draw the line is to ask one simple question, “Has she earned a ‘yes’?” If your wife says she wants new furniture for a room, and has contributed to the smooth and secure operation of the household, whether through a job or “domestic efforts,” been loyal and trustworthy, given you love and respect, etc., then she’s earned a “yes,” as long as what she’s asking for is within or can be worked into your budget, obviously. If she’s laid around on her lazy or drunken butt while you and the kids have done everything and complained because you didn’t do it fast enough, abused herself and you, and exhibited a general lack of respect for herself and everyone around her, no, she hasn’t. It’s really that plain and simple.

Or, put another way, if you think she deserves it and want to agree because of that, she’s earned a “yes,” but if you’re thinking about giving in to earn some favor from her, you’re about to get busted for being a wuss, and getting the furniture without gaining whatever favor you were after is just the beginning of your punishment, so don’t go there. You can reward good behavior and punish the bad behavior, and you can exhibit good behavior by acting like a man of self-respect, but you cannot “buy off” a woman. That is in essence saying to her that you think she’s a prostitute, and they don’t take kindly to such things.

As I said to this new reader today, I have searched extensively to find any rational downside to a man having genuine self-esteem and engaging in attractive behavior like being strong for his wife or girlfriend, and I have failed utterly to identify even an iota’s worth of a good reason to do anything less. If a woman says she wants something, even if you think it’s the right thing to do, invite her to make her case.

Women naturally engage in negotiation to communicate nearly everything, and if she’s testing, you’ve made the right move, and if she’s not, she’ll be happy to build the emotion of making her case instead of just having you give in. The same thing if you think you should say “no” – yes, really! If you think it’s a bad idea, say so, and immediately invite her to make her case so that she doesn’t feel shut down and retaliate. It would sound something like:

Her: “Honey, what do you think about our living room furniture?” (Implied statement: “Honey, I want new living room furniture, and it’s time to negotiate.”)

You: “I like it fine, why?”

Her: “Well I think it needs replaced.” (Or in the long version, “Don’t you think it looks old and worn out (or the color is wrong, or it’s uncomfortable, etc.)?” meaning “I want to change it.” Some women will continually ask questions to repeat the statement they are trying to make until you make it for them.)

You: “Well, like I said, I don’t see any problem with it, but you live her too, so tell me what makes you want to replace it.”

From there, she’ll either give you good reasons to do so, like pointing out that it’s stained, uncomfortable worn, or she’s so bored with it she doesn’t feel comfortable in the room anymore (yes, that is a legitimate reason, as you would know if you knew everything you need to know about women), or she’ll stammer around talking about where you can buy it on sale, or giving you the old “you’d just buy it for me without asking questions if you loved me,” routine if she doesn’t have a good reason and is either testing you or showing her true colors as a gold-digger (and maybe it’s time to test her a bit, too!)

Living with a woman is easy if you are fairly well-matched in terms of values and interests and you understand what you need to know about women, which is how they are both like us and different from us, and how to communicate well enough to recognize negotiations, questions that are statements, etc. Now, you have a decision to make…

Are you going to spend a lifetime trying to learn on your own and reach the end of your life lonely and still not knowing?

Or worse, assume that I’m full of crap and you don’t need to learn anything?

Or are you one of us guys who see a problem, seek out a viable solution, preferably one that has already worked for somebody else in similar circumstances, and fix it?

If you’re that first guy, I commend you’re spunk, but isn’t reinventing the wheel a gross waste of time? Not to mention a HUGE risk of having life – family life – as you know it, come to a sudden halt?

If you’re that second guy, why are you reading my newsletter? If you’re looking for validation of your past actions instead of a solution to your self-inflicted problems, you’re looking in the wrong place.

If you’re that third guy, let me hook you up with what you need, and yes, it has already been tested and proven by thousands of couples. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Read it. Study it. Learn from it the answer to that oldest of man’s questions: “What makes a woman tick?” and that next oldest: “What do women REALLY want?” Then go sweep your woman off her feet…I dare you! (And for those of you in the southern United States, “I double-dog dare you!”)

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

Women Test Men Constantly in Our Relationships and Marriage, So Why Not Test THEM? Here's HOW!

Women test us constantly, so why don’t we test them? Not in retaliation, but to help determine if they are testing us and what they might be trying to communicate. Here are a few tips…

I was listening to an old set of self-improvement tapes, Roger Dawson’s “The Secrets of Power Negotiating,” (a classic if you’ve not heard of it, available at Nightengale Conant) and in a section on negotiating tactics, he was talking about overcoming objections and said the main tactic to overcoming objectives is to “always test for validity.” Here’s an example:

You’re negotiating a car deal, and the seller says he can’t possibly go a penny under $25,000 for the vehicle. You ask, “What if I could bring you cash instead of a cashier’s check?” If he says it won’t make any difference, he’s rigid on the price for some reason, and you need to dig deeper to find out what his issue is to see if there is any way to address it, but if he says, “Well, then I could possibly come down a little,” $25,000 is not a firm price and he does have some negotiating range.

The same tactic can be used when women test us, or when we suspect they might be testing, to either neutralize the test or establish that we are dealing with a legitimate issue and need to give it due attention. Let’s say your wife is saying she wants new furniture, and you don’t know if it’s a test, a whim, or a legitimate need. You can test the legitimacy of the issue by finding out how much she’s willing to do to have it: “Well, I [like this furniture/don’t care either way/might be interested in replacing this, too] IF our budget will allow it. If the budget won’t handle the extra expense, do you want this bad enough to do something extra to make up the difference?”

Now you’ve got her. If she says, “Well no, I guess not,” it wasn’t that important. “Well I thought you might be nice and get a part time job to do this for me,” definitely means it’s a test, and we’ll deal with that in a minute. “Yes, I would, because I really want this stuff out of here,” means it’s definitely important, and you should then consider saying, “Well, then I’ll see what I can do as well, but if I’m going to help buy it, I reserve the right to help pick it out, at least to the extent of declining on anything that isn’t comfortable for me to sit in. Agreed?”

It’s not required, but it’s a good idea to remain involved so you don’t end up with a houseful of furniture that you hate, and doing things like that together is part of what long-term committed relationships are about, isn’t it? Besides, women love it when you take the lead and make decisions – as long as you provide that needed and expected input channel for them– it’s ATTRACTIVE!

Now, what if you find out it’s a test? The test looks on the surface like it’s to see what she can get away with, but what it is really about is to see if you can say “no,” a check to see if you can define and exercise personal authority. This is a good time to switch back and forth between the responsible budget administrator and “the naughty negotiator.” Starting with something like, (straight face) “Well, I might consider being nice and helping with it, but if you want it that bad, you’re going to have to help, and you’re going to have to give me a pretty good reason to help, (sudden switch to naughty grin) so whatcha gonna do to be nice to me?”

Banter back and forth and make it plain that you’re not just going to roll over and give it up, even if she has recently done something nice, but make it fun for her to be told “no.” Bring sexual innuendo into it, like, “I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of fun on this couch, I hate to see it go,” or “We’ve not finished breaking this couch down…er…I mean in…It would be a shame to get rid of it before we’d got all the nookie….er….I mean useful life out of it…” However, do NOT get into anything that sounds like you’re willing to trade furniture for sex, because it can be taken as a very degrading remark that hints at prostitution. I’m appalled to even have to say that, but I did get an email about it once in the past, so for the sake of the very few who won’t realize it, I’m stating what’s obvious to most of us.

Use your imagination, but make sure you keep rocking back and forth between serious and naughty to keep her off balance, and keep dropping bits of sexual innuendo. You’re likely to end up having sex on the furniture before the discussion is over, just because the playful, naughty attitude and sexual tension may get to her that much, and then you can say, “See, we need to keep this couch!” and wink at her.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, fear going into this process. Remember that a woman’s first criteria in evaluating you and any other man is “If you can’t stand up TO me, you can’t stand up FOR me.” This is how you earn her respect, her trust, her attraction, and to a significant degree, her love. So get on it.

It’s easy to test for validity once you get used to the game and get skilled at playing. To see the rules in vivid detail, along with lots of examples of how to play the testing game, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” What you’ll save on furniture the first time it comes up will more than pay for the book! Just kidding! Seriously, it costs less than a good meal for two, and any time you can throw a few dollars and a little time at a problem and watch it go away, that’s an offer you simply have to take!

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

Unringing a Bell: Negotiation in Relationships and Marriage

A man writes with a real problem. In his absence, his wife applied a lot of effort and expense to make the master bedroom evolve from “nice” to “drowning him in estrogen,” and he hates it. How does a man approach a woman to change this – or anything else that he doesn’t like -- without starting World War III?

Did you ever hear somebody talk about a problem that made you just cringe because you could really empathize and feel their pain and frustration? I got one from another David, apparently a fellow Southerner. Meet David F.:

Hey David,

Man I could use your advice on a problem that is making me want to move out of the bedroom I share with my wife. My wife is one of those chronically nesting women that love to redecorate at least every year or so, especially the master bedroom. They tell you they do this to spice things up. I have no problem spicing things up or even making changes to make them look better, however I do have a problem when the place I am supposed to be able to relax in, make love to my wife in and get a good night’s sleep in ends up looking like an explosion in a flower garden.

I have known for a couple of weeks now that my wife was wanting to make changes to our bedroom and had no problem with her doing so. She has always had what I consider good taste and has always managed to make things look nice while keeping in mind that it was our room shared by a man and a woman.

Last night I returned home from a short business trip to find that our bedroom was no longer a room that a man would feel comfortable in, unless he was more woman than man. A brief description of what I walked into was this: the walls have been painted peach, now not just any peach almost a neon peach and if that was not bad enough there is a border around the top of the walls that all I can say about it is it is a mixture of the biggest ugliest bunch of flower I have ever seen mixed with all shades of color. We now have lace window curtains with a matching lace comforter and dust ruffle. The pillows have lace pillow shams over them and I am not allowed to hardly touch them much less lay my head on one. To top it all off we now have “accent pillows” as she called them covered with satin roses.

I feel like setting fire to the whole room and just letting it burn. I asked her what happened to making the room male-friendly so we both could enjoy it and she just smiled at me and said, “I thought you would like the change.” What I would like to know is where the pod is this woman came out of while I was away. This is a nightmare and the worst thing is that she is so proud of herself and this room that I am not sure how to handle telling her that it has to go without making it seem like I am being an asshole about the whole thing.

How about helping a brother out with this and tell me how to point her in the direction of returning this to OUR special room, one we both can be happy in instead of a recreation of the room she had when she was living with her parents and the room did only belong to a real girlie girl.

Appreciate it,

David F.

(Gentlemen, note that while David’s problem is centered on the redecoration of the bedroom, the following advice applies to any situation where something is done that you don’t like after you failed or refused to be involved in a decision or process, so keep reading!)

Appreciate you (that’s Southern for “thanks for” for all non-Southerners) writing David, and thanks for reminding me of one of my favorite classic Sci-Fi movies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) with that remark about the pods! Unfortunately, it’s highly unlikely that your wife has been replaced by one of the pod-born zombies…

Women don’t miss details about you like that. The average woman, especially the really girly ones, are ultra-sensitive and ultra-thoughtful when it comes to the likes and dislikes of those around them, especially those under the same roof. If she submerged your master bedroom in an estrogen ocean, she knew that you wouldn’t like it when she did it; however, she did NOT do this out of spite, so calm down before you get riled up (that’s Southern for “pissed off” for all non-Southerners – LOL!).

Seriously, she did it to get a reaction; yep, you guessed it. It was a test. How do you know? You knew about the impending redecoration event for a couple of weeks, then it happened while you were out of town. If she was really looking to rile you, she wouldn’t have said anything and would have gloated and been pissy when you returned to find it, trying to rub it in and rile you good (yes, that does mean “really piss you off good” – okay, I’ll stop. I just get a kick out of living in the South because we have our own version of “English”). So what’s really going on?

You were gone on a business trip; have you been paying enough attention to her? Or have frequent business trips made her feel a little ignored? Did you listen to her when she tried to speak with you about her decorating plans, or did you just shrug her off and say, “I don’t care, Honey. Just do whatever you like,”? Somewhere along the line, you’ve dropped the ball, and she’s calling it to your attention, hoping that you will be motivated to listen to her next time and really hoping that you don’t act like an ass over it, or even worse, just wuss out and not say anything at all.

First, don’t worry about all the stuff she bought. It’s possible that everything but the paint and the border can either be returned, gifted to someone, or has been borrowed. In any case, what she spent to teach you this lesson was a bargain compared to what a divorce would cost you if she just let it go unaddressed until she got good and riled (I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist!) and kicked you out of the house, so get over it. She’s looking for you to say that you don’t like it, but you need to be decent about it. How?

She’ll likely make comments from time to time about the room just to invite you to say something; remember that almost all communication with a woman takes the form of a negotiation. If you want to be smooth about it, but a little on the wussy side, you can wait for her to bring it up, but it’s better if you lead the conversation by initiating it yourself by asking HER if SHE really likes it as much as she thought she did when she first did it. If she’s extremely merciful, she’ll say, “No, it’s not really exciting me the way I thought it would,” or something like that, and if she’s really wanting to rub your nose in it she’ll say, “Yes, I do! Don’t you?” or even worse, “Yes, I just love it! Isn’t it great?”

Either way, it’s an invitation for you to say that you don’t like it, but you can’t just blurt out, “Hell no, I think it sucks. It’s just too girly.” That’s what a moron does, not a gentleman, or a loving partner. As always, you must try to keep the tone positive. “I’ve tried to get used to it and give it time to grow on me (which is covering your ass for not saying something immediately, and she knows this, but you have to follow along and you do get bonus points for playing the game with her), but it’s just not happening. You’ve always been so tasteful and considerate in making this room good for both of us and I probably should have said something to acknowledge and thank you for that before now, and I’m sorry that I haven’t. I know you probably put a lot into this, but I would be a lot more comfortable in here if it were more similar to the way you have been doing it, and I’ll be happy to help you make whatever changes are necessary since I didn’t speak up when I had the chance before this was done.”

Do you see the difference? First, you’re trying to do things on her level while not being feminine about it, which is attractive. While apologizing for not paying enough attention to what was happening and being more involved in it, you’re not sucking up, and offering to help is not buying her off; it’s just common courtesy. You’re acknowledging your own mistake, but the apology is simply expressing the recognition of error, not begging forgiveness. Acknowledging her past efforts to be considerate of you is also just common decency, not sucking up to get out of the doghouse. Also notice that you’ve not said anything derogatory about what has been done, only that you would be a lot more comfortable if it were done without so much feminine flair. And the best part is…

You don’t have to explain any of this to her. She knows what every last word on the lines and between them means, and will be happy, although maybe not overtly so, to fix the problem. You may end up doing a lot of the work, and making trips to the home center to get supplies, and fielding a few odd glances and remarks about how it would have been better if you had said something before she went through all that trouble, but you earned whatever hard time you got by being inattentive, so suck it up and enjoy the time together. Find ways of interjecting some playfulness, including some naughty playfulness, into the situation from time to time. It makes the work go by faster and brings you closer together, especially when the lights go out at night.

Now, the most important lesson of all. If you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you would not have had any chance of going through any of this, because you would have known better than to make the mistakes you made. You would have known that you needed to be more attentive because you would have seen the signs long before she hosed your bedroom down with concentrated estrogen.

You would have known to “give her the gift of missing you” (thanks to David D’Angelo for finding such a memorable way to say that) while you were gone, and how to make it a positive event for her instead of either a wuss-fest of calling all the time or a scary ordeal of solitude, as most men do when they go way for a few days. You would have known what to do before you left and while you were gone to help her to look forward to your return and think wonderful things about you in your absence. All this and much more (see the list at the web site!) is waiting for you in an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, so get on it, now, before you come home to a teal house with fuchsia shutters and your neighbors (at least the women) know you still don’t get it and are being punished again.

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

How Do Honey-Do Lists Affect Your Relationship and Marriage?

We all have them. Some of us find them amusing and fun, while others hate them as the bane of their existence, a constant source of stress and a major hurdle to doing anything that they may want to do. Yes, I’m talking about the dreaded “Honey-Do” list. How you handle it has a HUGE impact on your relationship, and it can be good or bad. The good news is it’s YOUR choice, not hers…

Welcome to yet another Friday (as I write this on Friday evening!), gateway to another weekend. What are you going to do with it? For some of you, it’s your last day of rest before another frustrating and laborious weekend spent trying to shorten your “Honey-Do” list.

I want to ask you a really simple and blunt question: WHY???

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself a single question about your honey-do list, let alone all of the pertinent questions? Well brothers, it’s time.

The first question you need to ask yourself is why you have a honey-do list (hereafter referred to as simply “the list”) to start with! To answer that question, we need to consider the various reasons that women construct the list, and then look at what is on YOUR list to verify their intent. Ready?

Some of the reasons women construct this list are logical and productive, others amusing, and still others downright diabolical. Let’s take a look at these.

1. It makes you look and feel important around the house

2. It makes you unavailable to look and feel important around other women

3. It helps distribute the task load so that you each have equal free time

4. It helps distribute the task load so that she has more free time and you have less or none.

5. It gets things done that she is unable to do herself

6. It gets you to do things that she could do herself so that she’s free to have fun while you’re working on the list.

7. It promotes a feeling of cooperation and teamwork

8. It creates an investment in the relationship that you will be reluctant to cash in

9. It makes good use of otherwise idle time

10. It puts her in complete control of your free time and ensures that you won’t be tempted to have any fun of any kind without her, even though she may be having loads of fun without you while you’re working on the list.

11. It’s more affordable for you to do the work instead of hiring it out

12. It frees up money for her to spend on other things, which will be purchased when she’s out shopping while you’re working on the list.

13. It lets your wife see you acting competently and confidently to get things done.

14. It lets your wife see just how much crap you’ll put up with from her – TESTING!

What’s the first thing you notice about this list? How about that there are an equal number of good and bad reasons for the list and its elements, and that each good reason has a directly opposing bad reason? That means we cannot make snap judgments and say silly stuff like, “My wife would NEVER do that to me,” or “My wife is such a nagging, selfish witch that she’s just making me do everything so she doesn’t have to,” so drop any preconceptions and let’s look at the facts of your relationship through a few other simple questions.

How many of the things on your list are things that:

…your wife is unable to do?

…your wife is unable to help you with?

…you do well and/or enjoy doing?

…you don’t do well and/or despise doing?

…your wife offers to help you with or you will be doing while she is working on something else?

…your wife informs you that you will be doing while she is out shopping or doing something fun?

The answers to those questions will tell the tale. They will also tell you what you need to do about your list!

If there are things on your list that your wife could do, why isn’t she doing them, or helping you to do them?

If there are things on your list that you hate to do or aren’t skilled enough at to do competently and safely, why are they not either being done by your wife or being hired out?

If there are things on your list weekend after weekend that you are doing while she is out having fun, when did you hand over your testicles to her?

Yes, I DID say that. Committed relationships and marriages are partnerships, are they not? That doesn’t mean that you do all the hard stuff while she has all the fun any more than it means that you drink up your paycheck every week and beat the hell out of her to keep her in submission while you spend her paycheck to keep the bills paid. It’s a two-way street, and if you’re not doing your share of traffic control, somebody else in your house is “wearing the pants in the family,” as the saying goes.

So what do you do? That depends on what answers you have to all these questions, but when you have the answers, what you do about it will be self-evident. If your tasks are on your list for the right reasons, have fun with it. Open some negotiations and playfully challenge your wife on her contributions, get her to help you with the items on the list, etc. Tit-for-tat (no pun intended) can be a lot of fun.

If however, your list turns out to be a “massive cargo of bovine fecal matter” (a big load of bulls**t), it’s time to turn the tables. Tell your wife that you’re done spending every free minute you have working on the list while she’s out having a good time, and that she’s going to share responsibilities, to include taking up a part time job to help pay for things that need to be hired out if your financial situation calls for it. If she threatens to leave over it, let her go; either she’s testing (women do a lot of that, remember?) or you just flushed out a spoiled brat or a gold-digger who was taking a free ride at the expense of your life and hard work, and life’s too short to live like that.

Gentlemen, it’s really just this simple: If you are referring to your wife as your “ball and chain,” you’re either married to the wrong woman, you’re allowing her to take advantage of you, or you’re being punished for not stepping up to the leadership position that you are supposed to be filling, whether it’s intentional or not.

These problems are entirely correctable, and only serious cases of incompatibility or skullduggery require divorce to correct them. Most problems, honey-do list and others, require only that you stand up and act like a man, taking a leadership role (not a controlling role, mind you) in the decision-making, resource allocation, etc., and then inviting, listening intently to, and considering your partner’s input if she has any before finalizing decisions. Can you do that?

Certainly, but maybe not in your present condition. To lead you need to know about leadership, and to lead a woman you need to know about women: how they think and communicate, what they want, need and expect, what turns them on and pisses them off. You got all that under control there, Sparky?

If not, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get it under control, quickly and effectively, as have the many before you who have done everything from stopping divorces dead in their tracks to making mediocre relationships the envy of the community.

Who am I to make such a claim? The translator for several hundred women who contributed to the content and have watched their husbands become the man of their dreams. If you’re going to ask for advice, go to the source, somebody who HAD the same problems as you and fixed them, not somebody who HAS the same problems you do and miserable, or worse yet, has never had the problem and has only an opinion as to why you do or what to do about it.

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

Kissing Ass Never Saved a Good Relationship or Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you respond with, “I’m sorry. I’LL let YOU be in charge of the remote from now on,” you’ve probably just ensured that you won’t have sex again for about 2 months, whether she does or not, because you just gave in. Something like, “Well, it’s MY house and MY TV and I’LL change the channel whenever I feel like it,” will get you more punishment over the coming months than you could ever fathom, and you won’t know that most of it hit you.

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

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

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

Now, there are several really big things that you need to notice in that. First, you will notice that nowhere are you directly apologizing. You are indirectly apologizing by saying “never gave it DUE consideration,” and that is important, because you are acknowledging the mistake without being a big mushy wuss about it. Believe it or not, the words “I’m sorry” should rarely if ever come out of your mouth; acknowledging your mistakes in a manner that says that you should have performed better or with more consideration of her input is almost always enough and even preferred because it refers to something specific instead of a generic apology that everybody gets all the time. (If there’s ever a time that it’s not enough, she’ll let you know.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I finally listened, wrote it all down, gave it back to the women it came from to see if I had translated it right and then gave it to their husbands to use to make sure it was accurate. It was then refined and tested again until it was working for everybody involved after we found that there were a few things that women thought they wanted that they didn’t want at all after they got them.

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

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

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

Why Is Breaking Up So Hard? Ending Relationships and Marriage When Necessary, and with Dignity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at the whole relationship and weigh the good and the bad. Identify what can and cannot be repaired, and how important those things are to you. In the end, if the relationship can’t be fixed, get out, but do it like a civilized adult, with dignity, and leave the other partner room to do the same. If a friendship can be maintained, by all means do so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

I came home with two beautiful dresses and did wear one to the party that evening and received several nice comments on it, to which I told the story about my wonderful husband giving me money to buy the dress because of my hard work for the party, etc., etc. Everyone thought he was so great.

That night, after cleaning up the kitchen and house, I collapsed in bed, exhausted, and he wanted to start messing around. I told him that I was totally bushed and wanted to just get some sleep to which he replied, "didn't I get you two really nice dresses today?"

It has been twenty four years and I still remember how small and insignificant that 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 nice things my husband did for me. The marriage ended about two years after that incident and after many more similar situations, but please tell your readers that we don't want to pay for things that you give us with our bodies any more than you want us to withhold from you until we get what we want!

The tail swings both ways.

Sincerely,
Thanks, but no thanks

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

Sex is the strangest weapon in existence. It’s devastating, yet no real victory can ever be won by using it; in any contest where it is deployed, everybody loses.

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

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

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

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

What Women Really Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 2A, Readers on the 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 we think and communicate differently, she takes everything that you say as having meant 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. 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, and it’s far easier and faster to create crisis than success.

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 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.

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 I'm sure you get the point. 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 weren’t 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 pay attention to 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 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 you, this 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!

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 things 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 long 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!

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.

I’m not even 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 responsibility in 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!

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 a 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 have indeed been able to answer it. Would you like to? Then join me!

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

The Biology of Happy Relationships and Marriages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken Coffee Table $39.99
Hot Breakfast $4.20
Two Aspirins $.38
Saying the right thing, at the right time. PRICELESS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biologically, a woman responds to being protected from boredom, and she responds to that protection with sexual attraction. Then, being protected from rejection and other forms of fragmentation of her nest and household, she responds with nurturing. If you can find a better trade than that anywhere on this planet, I’ll quit right here and eat a bullet, because I really don’t think I would want to live in such a world.

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

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