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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stepping down off my stump now… ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Are Your Friends Affecting Your Relationship or Marriage?

Who’s giving you advice? Are they succeeding in whatever way you want to succeed and living the way you want to live? If not, they’re not the people to be advising you, especially about your relationship.

I was out with my wife once at a local Mexican restaurant and saw something disgusting that we need to discuss. No, it wasn’t something with legs in the enchiladas or the salsa verde. It was a couple of fairly young men, seemingly in their early thirties. One of them was slouched over, in grungy clothes, looking like a total slacker – I looked under his table to see if there was a skateboard hiding there. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair disheveled and if he had come to my door to visit my daughter looking like that I would have kicked his sorry butt out the door and told him to come back when he’d acquired soap – both the body and laundry varieties – and some self-respect.

His companion looked considerably better. He sat up straight, and was dressed for being in public. He was fairly well-groomed, His shirt was tucked in and his clothes were not wrinkled. He had more of a worldly air about him. There was a near-empty margarita pitcher between them and they were both talking louder than they should have been. (It’s amazing how tequila damages others’ hearing and not your own, isn’t it??? LOL!)

The most respectable-looking of the pair was dating a co-worker of theirs, apparently a high-quality girl that was pretty popular in the office. He told his friend he wanted to escalate the relationship because he thought they were right for each other. Before he got to the end of the sentence, his friend the slacker said, "Dude, no way she’ll hang with you! You're not her type. She’s into power and sleeps with the boss. Even if she did hook up steady with you, you’d just screw it up like you’ve done with every other woman you’ve dated."

Doesn’t sound like much of a friend, does he? Unfortunately, it’s not that uncommon amongst "friends" for one who’s having a hard time or just generally negative about everything to rain on everybody else’s parade. In his mind, if he’s not happy, it’s not fair for anybody else to be. Instead of being happy for his friend, he’s throwing cold water on his friend’s desires/ambitions, possibly for no better reason than to keep himself from having to find somebody else to drink with or complain to.

The disgusting thing is that it worked! The poor guy sat there a moment and then said, "Yeah, you're probably right." He allowed his so-called "friend" to rob him of his ambition and convince him that he didn't have a chance with her. They worked in the same office! If she’d really been sleeping with the boss, wouldn’t they BOTH have heard about it by then? It’s ridiculous that so many people do this to one another, and still call each other “friends”! It’s just plain sick to think about, but it’s the nature of people who lack self-esteem.

Losers have a tendency to want to pull others down to their level, instead of learning from their friends and drawing on their successes as inspiration for their own success, which would elevate them to their mentor’s level. Lacking character, it’s easier for them to talk trash to the achievers around them than to get off their lazy butt and achieve something. Is this the kind of person you want to take advice from, about anything in your life??? I hope not, and I can tell you categorically and with authority that it is not.

This kind of person is a prime target for the “hire slowly, fire quickly” method of forming relationships of any kind. No matter how much you want to do or try to do, they will try at every turn to discourage and disparage anything that is above them. This is the last person in the world that you want to be discussing anything important or personal with, because they can’t possibly have anything good going on in their life or they wouldn’t be talking to you this way.

Their opinion of what you should be doing or any advice they may offer is therefore worthless; otherwise, they would be having some successes and being upbeat about at least a few things in their life. Their sole purpose in any conversation with you will be to bring you down, not celebrate your dreams and successes with you.

Always make sure you are fully supported by your friends and family. If you have any “friends” that are constantly telling you that you will not be able to accomplish something, or that you’re wife will end up leaving you, or that you can’t possibly get that better job you’re going after without any facts to back up their claims (if you’re trying to learn to play piano with no hands, or you’re a violent spouse abuser, or the job you’re applying for requires a PhD and you don’t have a high school diploma, they may have a point, but you know what I mean), fire them!

They’re not worthy of sharing your life’s energy and your space. Know the difference between a good friend who has relevant facts that you don’t yet possess and cares enough to give them to you and the pessimistic gothic ne’er-do-well who thinks it rains 24/7 and wants to make sure you stay soaked in their misery.

People like this can insidiously turn you into a carbon copy of themselves, and as you can imagine, that’s about as unattractive as it gets. Just ask any woman (who’s not one of these constantly complaining losers) what she thinks of them. She’ll tell you, in no uncertain terms, that she wants someone fun and upbeat, somebody with brains and vision and leadership skills, not some loser who ridicules greatness because he’ll never aspire to it, let alone achieve it. Nobody who looks at his shoes when he talks and walks and disparages everything he hears is attractive, to anyone, in any way, except maybe to a hard-up mugger looking for a target.

Besides, what kind of valuable advice would someone who is always negative and never going anywhere or doing anything have to give? There’s an old Chinese proverb that really comes into play here: "The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." Ayn Rand also had something very valuable to say about this: "The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity." What opportunities will you be availing yourself of while you have “Joe Doomengloom” constantly telling you that you’re just going to fall off the ladder? Kick his (or her) ass to the curb and get on with the business of being a man.

Always surround yourself with positive, up-beat people -- people who have confidence in themselves and in you. Real friends will strengthen and support you when you’re onto something good, and if they do say something negative, it will be to give you the benefit of their experience or insight and keep you out of trouble, not to keep you from achieving.

Also, no matter what you’re doing, if you are going to ask somebody for a recommendation or advice, make sure that they have been successful in pursuing whatever you are pursuing, and therefore have valid experience to draw on and valid advice to give. Don’t ask your CPA for legal advice (unless he’s also a lawyer) or your lawyer for tax advice (unless he’s also a tax accountant). Don’t ask somebody who doesn’t even use a computer and has never sold anything to review your Internet business and give you suggestions. And above all, don’t ask an unhappy slacker who has no history of lasting, happy relationships about anything having to do with your relationship. If you want to succeed at anything, find somebody who has already succeeded, and learn from what they did, both right and wrong.

I’m a guy you can ask for help with a relationship, especially one that’s gone stale over time and needs reviving. I’ve done it, and I don’t think I could ask for things to be much better. In addition to my own experience, I have that of 118 other couples who all helped develop and test the content of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” – they all improved their relationships dramatically with this very material as we researched it, as did thousands more who have added the benefit of their experience in the years since. We all learned how to evaluate relationships, how to communicate to effectively bridge the inter-gender communications gap, and what it takes to trip a woman’s attraction triggers and bring that honeymoon back with a bang!

Learn from us and make your own relationship all it can be by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now and downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," because it works, it’s guaranteed, and life’s too short to wait for good things to happen – YOU MUST MAKE THEM HAPPEN, AND YOU CAN!

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

The Power of Negative Thinking in Your Relationship or Marriage

Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking has been required reading in any self-improvement curriculum since the 1950’s, but have you ever thought about its antithesis, and how you might be inadvertently creating your own insecurities and failure?

This time of year I look through a lot of catalogs for small but highly personal gifts for friends and family. I was looking through one that had a lot of gag gifts and unusual memorabilia and there was an item billed as a “Motivational T-Shirt” that said “I didn’t come here to lose…” on the front of it.

I thought, “What an idiot!”

You see, there is a big difference between “I didn’t come here to lose…” and “I came here to win!” But a lot of people make this mistake and consequently program themselves for failure.

When faced with a new opportunity, they ask, “What if I can’t do this?” instead of “What do I do after I succeed at this?” Believe it or not, it’s been proven that this “framing” of situations plays a huge role in how you get along in your own environment, you self-esteem and confidence, and your chances of success in anything that you pursue.

(If you want to pursue it further, start with Maxwell Maltz’s Psychocybernetics, in which he describes the mental mechanisms that move us toward whatever we focus on, whether it’s good or bad for us.)

This kind of negative programming can turn you into an insecure wuss in a fairly short time, no matter how tough you are. The subconscious mind doesn’t discriminate between positive and negative and doesn’t process terms of negation in your speech or thoughts (it ignores words like “not”); it merely works very hard to bring you toward whatever you are focused on, so if you focus on “not failing” instead of succeeding, you’re actually focused on failure instead of success.

To bring this closer to home, if you’re sitting there reading this newsletter because you are having problems in your own relationship or marriage, you’re reading a lot of advice. If you’re reading multiple sources, you’re reading a whole lot more advice. And if every time you read something you think, “I’d like to try that, but what if I fail?” or “That sounds okay, but what if it doesn’t work?” you’re programming yourself for failure, frequently and effectively, even without regard for the advice you are reading.

You must question the advice you are given. Only a fool would follow blindly everything he reads. But when you question it, do so in a way that doesn’t sabotage your efforts. Ask, “Does this make sense?” “Can I see myself succeeding and moving on to the next step if I do this?” These are reasonable, direct questions that need to be answered and are in the proper context…

…after all, you’re looking for something to help you succeed, not something to help you fail, right?

So why concern yourself with failure??? Your questions should be about what will bring you closer to your goal, and nothing else. And anybody with advice worth using should be able to tell you how it helps and why it should help by virtue of having proven that it works, preferably with their own success among others, so if you can’t find answers to those positive questions, it’s time to look at something else, is it not? It’s the output (the RESULTS!), not the input, that is important, right?

Who cares how many copies of a book have been sold? Mine has sold a lot, and so have others, but that doesn’t tell you how many people mine or others helped! Would you care to guess how many books have been sold that advocated crying with a woman at a chick flick and leaving all decisions to her to make sure she felt like her position had been considered? Or how many books have advocated lying to a potential partner to get them in bed or even worse, marry them? I saw one recently advocating celibacy to enhance a marriage! Can you believe that crap? Marriages survive on compatibility, attraction, and intimacy. Celibacy destroys intimacy, and goes against the biological drives that torment all of us if not served. Using celibacy to enhance a marriage is like using hot fat to treat a burn!

Who cares how many degree titles somebody has trailing after their name? That doesn’t tell you whether they’re giving you proven, repeatable reality or some pet theory that hasn’t been tested and proven to work. (And yes, in case you’re curious, I do have fun little academic acronyms after my name, so I can say that.) It says they’ve been in class, not whether they learned anything, whether what they learned was factual, nor whether they can think rationally enough to apply what they learned. I don’t know about you, but when I was looking for help, I found lots of theories in lots of books, and they were such utter hogwash that didn’t work in the real world that I ended up having to research and write a book just to have something to use myself! Strange, and pathetic, but true!

And when you get right down to the nitty gritty, should you even care what it costs? According to a recent study, the average divorce in the U.S. costs $27,000 excluding alimony, child support, etc. Indeed, I received an e-mail today outlining a settlement of $275,000 up front, plus $150,000 per year, plus he has to maintain a $750,000 life insurance policy with her as the beneficiary so that she still gets future payments if something happens to him. And who knows what the lawyers got out of it! Most self-help products, mine included, are way under a hundred bucks! Indeed, mine’s presently under forty! Compared to the cost of a divorce (and we’re not even going to get into the pain of a divorce), that’s pocket change, and I can also tell you why it works, why you can expect it to work, and how many people it’s helping, including myself!

So the short answers are that my information was researched and tested with a fairly large group of women and then double-checked with the help of their husbands and boyfriends. To the best of my knowledge, based on testimonials I’ve received, it’s helped everyone who has used it (the only refunders have been two who made duplicate purchases and one thief who asked for a refund within one minute of having purchased it, claiming she’d read it and it didn’t provide the information she was looking for to help her pick up lesbian women!), and that in turn is why you can expect it to work for you, as long as you do actually use it instead of getting it, reading it, and then talking yourself out trying with questions like “What if this doesn’t work for me?” or “What if I can’t do this?”

When I refunded one duplicate purchase we both had a good laugh out of it. He commented, “Thank you, I am more embarrassed than anything else, the good news is that I found the book very informative and was sold twice so to speak. I had failed to sign up for the newsletter the first time.”

So there it is. This isn’t rocket science, or some 12-step program. It’s just the real story on what women want, what makes them tick, how to communicate with them, how to be fun and exciting without being a clown or a flake, how to feel good enough about yourself that your self-esteem and confidence levels make you a man that she loves being around instead of a man she feels like she has to raise and protect like a mother would do a child, and how to choose and hold out for a good woman or know if you have one already. I’ve not yet met a heterosexual man who couldn’t do everything in it, easily and naturally, within a short time.

So what about you? Are you sitting there in front of your computer staring at this newsletter and thinking, “What if it doesn’t work for me?” or are you thinking, “What will life be like after I get through this?” If it’s the former, there’s not a thing in the world that I or anybody else can do to help you. But! If it’s the latter, get your butt over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get busy, because this is what you’ve been looking for, real answers proven by real people.

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

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

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

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

But I don’t care!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****
Note to Self:

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

~~~~~~

Hi David,

Damn. That is scary. And VERY instructive.

Thanks, - H.

*****

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

*****
Note to H.:

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

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

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

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

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

Take care, and keep in touch!
David
*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our similarities and differences are not always obvious, and at times are even deceptive; you may recall articles I’ve sent you in which we discussed how men and women can use the exact same words to express the exact opposite meaning, and have no idea that it’s happening. (If you missed it, it’s the third of the communications lessons in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report, which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com/Break-Up%20Busting%20101%20Free%20Report.PDF at your convenience.) We, as men, being born to lead, must be aware of these similarities and differences and should take the initiative to make sure that everyone else in our family understands them as well. Otherwise, we fail as leaders, and we fail as men. I hate it when that happens…don’t you???

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

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

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

Walk "the Matador's Walk" for a Great Relationship and Marriage

Your attitude toward your life, your relationship, and everything else may be more of a determinant of how well they go than the actual effort you put into them. Understand this thoroughly before doing anything else, because you can program yourself for failure even easier than you can program yourself for success, especially in your relationship, because it’s the most emotional issue most of us face every day.

I hope you are enjoying your day, safely of course, but with gusto! Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, I hope you are doing it well and enjoying it, expecting it to work out for you.

Speaking of which, a letter caught my eye last night that triggered a huge rush of analysis and coaching, and I need to share it with you. Meet Marcus:

Good evening David,

I just finished reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and I must say I see many things that I can improve on. It certainly looks like you’ve done your homework, and now I have to do mine and make things happen. Wish me luck, because if this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!

Thanks so much!
Marcus

That last sentence set off alarms and started red flags waving immediately. I wrote the following to Marcus to help him get things in perspective and keep him from tripping himself up:

Hi Marcus!

Congratulations on making it this far; so many people know they have problems but wallow in them instead of fixing them for a variety of reasons, none of them good. If you see what you have to do, you’re already way ahead of the game, because many people’s first reaction is denial; they don’t want to accept that they have caused their problems through the choices they’ve made, which keeps them from realizing that fixing their problems is also a matter of choice and entirely within their control.

I needed to write to you to warn you about something that you did that may seem trivial at first glance but is indeed self-destructive. In the last sentence of your letter, you said to me, “Wish me luck, because if this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!” Take a closer look at this with me…

First, you don’t need luck. You’ve recognized your problem, sought and found help, defined the various components of your problem and have solutions to apply to them that have worked for many other people under similar circumstances. In short, you have the tools, and now must simply use them to enjoy success.

Next, and possibly even more important, is the phrase “If this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!” Do you realize what you’re saying here? First, you’re focused on the possibility of failure instead of the likelihood of your success. Then, to make matters worse, you’ve violated the first rule of self-programming: never use negative language when talking about yourself or your life. Why is that important?

One of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, Maxwell Maltz, wrote about it in his most excellent book, “Psychocybernetics,” in which he describes a subconscious mechanism that automatically and constantly works to move you toward whatever you are focused on. Whether you focus on failure or success, that’s where it takes you. And there’s an even uglier part of that at work here…

The subconscious mind does not process negations! For instance, if I say, “I must not fear,” the subconscious processes that as “I must fear;” hence what you should say in that case is “I must be brave.” Now look at what you said: “If this doesn’t work, I’m screwed.” Your subconscious hears that as “If this DOES work, I’m screwed!” That’s a pretty nasty thought, isn’t it?

You have the tools, and you know they’ve worked for many others. Use them with the expectation that they will work for you, too. If you’ve ever watched a bullfight, even in a movie, you will have noticed how the matador always walks around the ring with the bull acting as if he has already won. Walk the matador’s walk! Know that you will succeed because there is no other possible outcome if you merely apply what you have at your disposal.

In your case, it’s a fixed fight, because what you are working with are triggers to involuntary behavior in her and the scoop on all her best-kept secrets, all the things that she talks about with her girlfriends behind your back and more! All you have to do is learn, think things through, and then follow through.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Well, Gents, there’s very little that I could add to that, so I will simply invite you to join Marcus and many others in learning and employing the knowledge in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you should download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because if you’ll look at the calendar, summer is almost gone (for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and the winter holidays are fast approaching. What better gift could you give both yourself and your wife than a new and improved YOU???

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

Some Thank You Notes with Great Lessons on Relationships and Marriage

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

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

Hi David,

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

Much appreciated,

Karl.

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

Hi David!

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks David,

Dave

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

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

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

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

Confidence Building: Yet Another Crucial Part of Great Relationships and Marriage

One of the greatest things you can do for your relationship is to build self-confidence. Here’s why, and more important, HOW…

I just got off the phone with a man for whom I feel incredibly sorry. I’m not one generally given to pity, and usually hold people accountable for their choices, but this guy had been hammered into the ground from birth, programmed for failure and zero self-esteem to the extent that he didn’t want to accept that feeling any other way was even possible, let alone normal.

I’ll spare you the details; he basically grew up in a home with a single mom who was abandoned when she found out she was pregnant and hated men, and had the bad fortune to be pregnant with a son who looked identical to his father. She’s spent his entire life abusing him and blaming him for her bad choices, and has him convinced that he is totally worthless, and the cause of all her problems.

Needless to say, he’s never had a good relationship with a woman. He rarely even gets into a relationship because he rarely gets a date, let alone a series of dates from which a relationship can grow. After about two hours of discussion he finally started coming around to the idea that he really has a choice and asked how he might go about building self-esteem and confidence. What follows is the advice I gave him, at least parts of which should be useful to all of you.

Self-esteem is defined as regarding one’s self with respect, recognizing one’s own value. It has to be there to recognize it, and when it’s there it MUST be recognized and accepted. You must know that you deserve whatever life you have by virtue of whatever choices you have made, and that if you have made bad choices, you simply must make better ones to make your life better. Self-esteem comes from nothing more and nothing less than the use of one’s virtues to achieve and attain one’s values (the Law of Existence), and recognizing that you have done it (the Law of Identity).

To some of you that will sound terribly simplistic and self-evident, but you’d be shocked at how many people I’ve counseled or encountered at seminars who think that their value is determined by what OTHER people think of them and not what they think about themselves. To make matters worse, people who look to others for their self-esteem are often so afraid of what others think that they will either withdraw completely or go to the other extreme and become an acute approval-seeker, which is self-defeating since nobody will respect anyone who seeks their approval.

As an aside, many women suffer from a particularly nasty variation of this condition. Because of their social nature in combination with having had their self-esteem hammered into the ground almost since birth (by the beauty and fashion industries, other destructively competitive women, predatory men who know to abuse women to get them in approval-seeking mode, etc.), they anticipate all possible criticism and negative comments about everything going on in their life, and then respond as if that criticism and those comments had in fact been made.

This leaves them constantly feeling under attack by those around them when in fact they are their own attacker, and it leaves those around them wondering what they did to deserve such a tongue-lashing or thinking the woman is paranoid. Should you see this, try to talk with her about it and take whatever measures are necessary to build her self-esteem, or else she may end up going down and taking you down with her.

Now, getting back to you, once you have taken responsibility for your choices and have thereby empowered yourself to make more and better choices, assess yourself, and see what value you have. Take stock of your good and bad traits, and see that the good ones outnumber and outweigh the bad ones; if they don’t, that just means you have more choices to make and corrective actions to take than the average guy, so don’t panic. Building a man is a lot easier than building a house if the man desires the improvement.

It is crucial that you appreciate all the good things you find in yourself. If you are a talented artist, a skilled craftsman, a competent manager or decision-maker, don’t just blow that off as something that you were born with. Even if you were born with it, you still had to DO SOMETHING WITH IT to recognize your talent. If you haven’t done enough to feel good about it, take that as your cue to start doing more to leverage your existing skills and talent. Why?

Self-esteem and ultimately confidence comes from achievement, and nowhere else. And yes, even the smallest accomplishments count! The more you accomplish, the more you feel qualified and prepared to accomplish more. That feeling of readiness to face new challenges is the very essence of confidence, and recognizing that state of readiness is the essence of self-esteem. It makes you more able to face the potential for success and adversity with the idea that you can influence and survive the outcome.

And when you achieve something, take a minute to appreciate and celebrate it. Acknowledge that you have done something well. It doesn’t matter if anyone else acknowledges it; it’s your work and your achievement, and there is nobody else as qualified as you to know the quality of your achievement or how good it should make you feel. Reward every achievement by acknowledging it, and achievement will be come more pleasurable, more desirable, and easier to conceive and complete, in turn making you a much more interesting, confident and fun person to be around.

Why am I talking about confidence in a newsletter about relationships and marriage? Because women absolutely love it! And when they see it genuinely exist in their man, they will whip a running saw mill to protect him and their relationship. Why?

Because they literally dream of finding a man who feels good about himself. Such a man is low-maintenance and potentially high-excitement, and what’s a woman’s greatest enemy? All together now, 1…2…3…BOREDOM!

Yes, that’s right. Everybody who said “boredom” gets a gold star.

Did you ever hear a woman say that she wants a man who makes her feel safe? Did you make the mistake of thinking that she was talking about having a man who was just a bodyguard? Probably, so here’s the low-down:

When a woman says she wants a man who makes her feel safe, she’s talking about a man who will not play games with her feelings, or be so caught up in his own drama that he allows her to drown in hers. She’s talking about a man who won’t consign her to being bored to tears and feeling like life has no purpose because he’s too busy whining about his own problems.

She wants to feel like part of something worthwhile, and like the man she trusts as her partner is qualified to lead her without being an ass and trying to control her. In short, she’s talking about having a man with healthy self-esteem who values himself and her, and knows how to interact with her in a way that is complimentary instead of competitive, or even worse, parasitic or predatory. That’s why women flock to a confident man like ants to sugar, and why when a woman has such a man, she’s just as likely as not to kill to keep him.

So there you have it, and I’ll bet it’s nowhere near as hard as many of you thought. I hear so often that confidence is something that “other people are born with and I’ll never have” that it’s sickening, because it’s simply not true. You can have it, indeed, you can EARN it, and it’s simply a matter of making some choices to identify and accept the truth about yourself and then improve on it if necessary.

I don’t walk into a room feeling confident because there’s a 99.9997% chance that I’m the smartest guy in the room, even though it’s true according to IQ points, or because there are a lot of things I could do better than anybody else in the room, even though that’s true as well. I walk into a room feeling confident because I know that no matter what happens in that room, I’m going to meet interesting people I can speak with, laugh with, and if appropriate, learn things from and accomplish things with. No matter what happens, I can have an interaction that enriches my life and the lives of others and very likely take something with me when I leave the room that also improves my life. What does that tell you?

It tells you that confidence is not a matter of how you stack up to the other people in the room; it’s a matter of how you see yourself in being able to survive and flourish the events of the foreseeable future. And that, brothers, is precisely the measure of a man, and when you measure up, the people around you recognize it, involuntarily, and respond to it, especially your partner.

It’s literally the single best thing you can do for your life, and it’s either the best or second-best thing you can do for your relationship, depending on your communications skills; for some, improving your inter-gender communications skills will provide more improvement in your relationship because you can’t get along if you can’t communicate, and we’ll get into that in other lessons – indeed, MANY OTHER LESSONS.

Or, instead of waiting for more lessons, you can just grab the bull by the horns and get everything you need to know by downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and accomplish in hours or days what might take months or years otherwise, if you could accomplish it at all without the knowledge required to navigate the rapids of relationships. Talk to some of the confident people you know about their rules for success, and one of the things you’ll hear is “Never put off until tomorrow the things you can accomplish today.” Truer words nor better advice were never spoken…

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

Is Somebody Bringing You Down? Insidious Killers of Relationships and Marriage

There are some people who not only don’t want anything in their life to go right, they don’t want anything in your life to go right, either. These people will pose as your friends, but if you carefully listen to them, you’ll know they don’t act like friends, because every time you get excited about something going well in your life, they have something negative to say. These people can even end up being your partner or your spouse, and if they do, they “gotta go!”

I had a run-in with a defeatist this morning, and it reminded me that defeatists, people who are simply resigned to defeat without regard for real chances of success, are a scourge not only to all achievers, but to relationships, since a great relationship with them is not possible and a great relationship in their presence is something they will fight tooth-and-nail, and I want to make sure you can recognize them and get them out of your life before they can do too much damage to you or those you love.

You shall know these people by their works, as the saying goes. They lead a mediocre life at best, always complaining about some problem, always a day late and a dollar short, and always trashing any idea you have to get ahead or trying to tell you that whatever success you just experienced will have to be short-lived because they tried it and it didn’t work out for them.

The plain and simple truth is that these people have no self-esteem and refuse to see themselves as successful, and to confirm that success is impossible, they have to obstruct everyone else’s success in whatever way possible, else their little delusion explodes and they have to admit that success is possible and it’s their choice to fail that has caused them to fail all their life.

You do know them, huh? Maybe some of these:

1. The guy who says the car you’re trading up to is a piece of crap, and Consumer Reports or other professional reviews only say it’s good because they’re taking money under the table.

2. The woman who says that the business you want to start can’t possibly succeed because everybody knows there’s no real market for something like that, and only by dishonest means can you ever make a living selling real estate, manufacturing some way cool new gadget that the world is begging for, or performing a service that everybody and their brother is asking you to quit your job to come to do for them.

3. The guy who spends more time bitching about not having a job, or more effort trying to look like he’s trying to find one while milking unemployment insurance for every penny he can get, than it would take anyone to actually get one.

4. The chronic chemical abuser who says there is no sense being clean and sober because they couldn’t do anything worthwhile anyway, and by the way, neither can you, so you might as well join them for a few drinks, smokes, pills, etc.

5. The zealot who greets your ambitions with sermons about how “money is the root of all evil,” and “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and telling you that you should be volunteering for their pet charity instead of starting or expanding your own business, trying to make you feel guilty about wanting to improve yourself and your situation through honest effort and hard labor.

I’m sure you get the picture by now. No matter what you want to do, they say it can’t work, and no matter what you do succeed at, they say it can’t last, or they want to throw some obstacle in your way, like guilt, or the futility of the system, or some lament about life not being fair.

There are three basic scenarios in which these sorry people can have a negative impact on your life and especially your relationship, if you let them. Above all else, keep in mind that they can only impact your life if you let them, because you always have the choice of eliminating them, even if YOU are the defeatist; we’ll talk about that scenario last, so pay attention, because it’s the biggie.

The first scenario is where someone who doesn’t live in you household is the defeatist. Maybe a co-worker, somebody you erroneously regard as a friend (no real friend who values you and whom you can value can truly be a defeatist – they are more likely to be some kind of dependent and need you rather than care about you), or even a family member who doesn’t live with you. These are the easiest people to dispatch, because you can give them two choices, to straighten up and support your aspirations or stay out of your life; you can ultimately hold them accountable for their choice by cutting them out of your life if they don’t get with the program.

Yes, they might get pissy, and might say bad things about you, but while they’re sitting around talking about how you cared so little about them that you just went off and succeeded without them (a defeatist’s favorite lament), you’ll be off succeeding without them! Big whoop, huh? Hardly…

In the second scenario, the defeatist lives in your household. Ouch. That either means family member or some down-on-their luck “friend” (yeah, right, see the first scenario) that has suckered you into taking responsibility for their bad judgment and may have even out-stayed their welcome within the first day of moving in. This scenario is considerably tougher, but still ultimately in your control; you may just have to pay a higher price for their cooperation.

Sounds harsh, huh? Well, yes it does, until you realize that the defeatist is so efficient at killing any chance of achievement and happiness they might have that they almost always end up in trouble as a result of their own choices, not random events. Yes, there were certainly some defeatists displaced by Hurricane Katrina or a tsunami, and one could reasonably argue that at least some of those were there by choice (to stay when they could have left and ultimately to live there at all) as well, but regardless, they would be doing it to themselves if natural forces weren’t doing it to them, because they choose failure after failure. What do you do with them?

The same thing you would do with the ne’er-do-well in the first scenario – you give them the choice to straighten up or leave! By continuing to support them as they destroy their own life and try to influence you to destroy your own, you are “enabling” them! And they will reward you by inviting you to join them in their pity-party, and may even let you continue to pay their bills while they’re sitting around too depressed to look for a way to fix their problems and regain their independence, if they ever had any. Just what you live for, right? They think so.

If you know a defeatist, look at their life – indeed, check out several. See how many are living in really bad rental housing, shacked up with friends, parents or other relatives (well into adulthood!), and how many of them are working minimum or near-minimum wage jobs when the average person of their age and expected experience level is at twice that or better. There may be some emotional repercussions from ousting them, but can you afford to be influenced by that failure-mongering attitude? Can you afford to have your partner or your children (if you have any still at home) influenced by them, or disrespecting you because of your failure to rip them from your jugular vein? Get them out of your life before they impact your relationship with members of your family.

But wait! What if it is your partner that is the defeatist? Does that make a difference? Should it? Think with me for a minute here. You’re on an ocean liner, it’s going down, you and the rest of your family and friends are on a lifeboat, there’s still more room and plenty of supplies, but your partner says, “no, I’m just going to go down with the ship, because if I get in that raft, nobody’s going to find us.” What do you do?

Do you step out of the raft and back onto the sinking ship to go down with them when there was clearly an available and attainable choice to live??? Not me, nor anyone else who realizes just how precious a resource your life is. Being on that sinking ship – that they choose to go down with rather than to step on the raft – is a bad choice on their part that does not in any way create an obligation on your part.

Repeat after me: “A bad choice on your part does not create an obligation on my part.” Again. Again. Keep going. Yes, again! Keep repeating it until you understand it, accept it, and can live it. You may choose to help somebody out of a tough spot, but there’s no good reason for you to sanction and enable someone’s stupidity by bailing them out of a bad choice that was made simply because they wouldn’t acknowledge the possibility that they could succeed at something else and give it a try.

If it’s your spouse, give them some time, support, and even professional counseling if they need it, as well as ample opportunities to succeed so they can learn that they can indeed do it, and hold them accountable for both the outcome and a timetable for an outcome, and if they just can’t make the choice to snap out of it, fire them! It may cost you half of everything you have, but that’s better than having the defeatist costing you everything you have, including your life, for the rest of your life.

Hmmm….who does that leave for the third scenario? Well, yes, YOU! If you are the defeatist, you’re in big trouble, because everyone around you either pities you, is annoyed with you, or flat out wishes you’d find somebody else to bring down with your negativity. Yes, YOU are the one who may be about to get the “shape up or ship out” ultimatum, and no, there’s no nice way to put it, they’re really feeling that way!

But, since it is you who is the defeatist, it is you who has ultimate control as to whether that defeatist philosophy and attitude gets fixed! You don’t think it’s you? Well, take the test. If as you read the preceding paragraphs and kept feeling you needed to defend those mentioned because they just couldn’t help making bad choices because everybody always makes bad choices and nobody does anything right except by luck, guess what! You’re a defeatist!

If you are the defeatist, denial time is over. All these things I’ve been talking about doing are subject to be brought to bear against you, and somebody may already be contemplating it. You’ve thought all your life that you couldn’t succeed, and as long as you thought that, you were right, precisely because you thought it.

Henry Ford, the great American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company was known for being tough and rude, and at times, a little too arrogant for his own good (such as trying to tell the market what it was going to accept, which almost bankrupted him over the Edsel), but he was also incredibly wise in areas of human intelligence and human behavior.

He was known to take prospective employees out for a meal, and watch to see if they salted their food before tasting it. If they did, they were creatures of habit, not people who salted food because it needed salt, and he wouldn’t hire them. He wanted thinking people. And one of his favorite expressions according to historians was, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” Wisdom from the grave.

Ask any achiever about happiness and success and they will tell you two things: Success is a choice, and hanging out with losers is something they won’t do. So start by choosing to believe that success is a choice, then pick a successful person and learn from them.

It doesn’t have to be a Fortune 100 CEO, just somebody who is living a life that you would like to live. Model their behavior, especially how they think about life, success and achievement. It will give you the picture of success to move toward, the thought processes to help you get there, and the confidence to continue succeeding and be strikingly attractive to your partner! Then instead of wishing you were somewhere else, everyone will want to be around you and doing things with you for a change. ‘Nuff said!

Folks, success and happiness really are choices you can make, no matter what it is you want to do, as is a great relationship. You must choose to believe you can succeed, you must choose to act to succeed, and you must choose to eliminate anything from your path that will keep you from it. Nothing that is a part of your life is a neutral; it is either for you or against you, enriching your life or detracting from it. Remove the detractors and live. Part of your job as a husband and father is the same as that of a soldier, to protect your family and domicile from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And if you fail in that job, you have no right to complain when those in your charge want new leadership.

If you’re having relationship or career troubles, or any kind of trouble, seek advice from those who have successful experience upon which they can base good advice, not somebody who whines about how there’s no use in trying. Don’t waste your time discussing your plans, hopes, and dreams with someone who plans for nothing and expects nothing but failure, hopes everyone else will fail to validate their own failure, and dreams of nothing but rationalizations for their own failure (or someone handing them success, such as those people whose retirement plan consists of buying a lottery ticket every week), or seeking advice from those who obviously have none of value to offer.

If improving your relationship is on your list of things at which you want to succeed, there’s a ton of good advice in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s tested, proven, and works. Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because success is a choice, your choice, as is a truly great relationship, and what you need to know to get it done is just a few mouse-clicks away!

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

What Rudyard Kipling Knew About Being a Man and Having a Great Relationship and Marriage

The great poet Rudyard Kipling knew a lot about being a man, the kind man that every woman wants, and unlike most poets, his poetic liberties were taken only with his choice of words, not with the image of a man as he is born and should live. Check this out…

As a general rule, I don’t have a lot of use for most poets. I enjoy good poetry as much as anyone else, but I’m told I’m a picky bastard when it comes to what constitutes good poetry. Indeed, I just avoid anything that would argue against being human, being a man, being happy being a man, or being attractive as a result of being happy being a man, and enjoy art and poetry that celebrates life, reality, and all of the above. You should, too. Think with me for a minute or two:

For me, and any Objectivist, fact and reality are the keys to the universe, and humans are acknowledged as being the top of the food chain because we are the only species that has the power of reason, granting us the ability to use facts to improve our lives and standard of living beyond the bare minimum requirements for survival; we are the only species of life on the planet able to do this. This makes us at least somewhat heroic, as we go beyond what all other life forms do in the pursuit and achievement of excellence.

For us, art, in all its forms must imitate and enhance life, not mock it, distort it, disparage or discourage it. It should be uplifting and inspiring or it serves no productive purpose. Hence, poetry, prose, music, plays, and films that reject or distort reality, or attempt to socially engineer our actions to go against that which we are born to be, is offensive, and there’s a lot of so-called “art” that falls into that category. Pretty direct and pretty simple.

I’ve published W.E. Henley’s “Invictus” in more than one newsletter because it is such an uplifting work, along with some translator’s notes based upon Henley’s own comments because his choice of language and the period in which he wrote it made parts of it a little difficult to decipher enough see the picture that Henley was trying to paint with his words, but that won’t be necessary with Kipling…

He describes the man women want to know and love in great detail, calling out characteristics of leadership, confidence, character, courage, sense of humor, and everything else women want with example after example of the behaviors that flow from having an attitude proper to a man. Study and learn from him.

Without further ado, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

This was passed on to me by one of my star students, a top executive in a very large company who is about as much a real guy as you’ll ever meet; despite a six-figure income he eats mostly game he kills himself and builds furniture in his workshop when he needs something. It’s not a matter of what he can afford, it’s the satisfaction and pride that a man feels in being competent, self-sufficient, and entirely independent that motivates him. (After reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," he’s a recruiting poster for ultimate males who know exactly what women want, say, and think and know how to respond!) Here’s what he had to say when he passed this poem on to me:

“I've had this posted in my office for years - one of only two things of the sort - I'm sure you've read it, but it's a newsletter in itself, I think. Men were better in those days.“

He’s right. Men were better in those days, before we all fell under the spell of bad programming that made us believe – in spite of generations of evidence to the contrary – that women want a nice guy who cries in public – and in her presence -- and leaves all the decisions up to her. But men are getting better…

They’re reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and their partners are responding as they shed this old programming and learn things that most men never knew about understanding and communicating with women to boot! Break-ups and divorces are being stopped, sometimes in as little as a week, as men find out that the root of their problem was some combination of being a wuss, not understanding what their wife was telling them, and allowing their wife (or girlfriend) to become bored and recognizing neither their part nor their responsibility in that mistake.

The causes were simple but mysterious, yet the cure is simple, not mysterious at all, and no longer has to elude you. Simply go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," right now, and get your relationship back on track, quickly, or just go right ahead and keep thinking that those conversations and romantic interludes in the bedroom that are growing shorter and less frequent don’t really mean anything, and then come see me when she says she’s leaving and it’s ten times harder to stop and reverse the damage. The hard way, or the easy way – what’s your choice? Choose well, because your relationship and a good chunk of your life is riding on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you say, “What if I’m myself and nobody wants to be with me after the third date?” or “I’ve been married three times and none of them lasted longer than a year!” That’s where the work comes in! Not in faking your way into having someone keep your company, but by going through a self-evaluation and self-improvement period.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handling Women's Insecurity and Jealousy in Relationships and Marriage

What to do when your partner gets jealous. It’s a security and self-esteem issue, so you must be careful…

I received the following in response to the recent edition on “Being Your Own Man”:

Hi David....I agree with you on what this guy needs to do. Let me ask you though...When I am showing this confidence which I believe I do and in fact I enjoy seeing my wife getting attention from the younger guys, but is it possible that when she sees me so self-confident and not being jealous etc that the wife may start being insecure herself? Do you think that she could start thinking that all the other women are going to want him and she might withdraw into herself seeing other women being interested in him?

Thanks,
Keith

I told Keith that it was purely a matter of her self-esteem combined with his past behavior; if she feels good about herself and he’s shown himself to be trustworthy in the past, she’ll eat it up just like him, but if not, there could be trouble. I also pointed him to this article in my newsletter archive, which does bring a lot of clarity to the picture, especially on how to maintain that “They’re chasing me, but I’m going home with you, so don’t worry” connection going with your wife or girlfriends while others are flirting with you. Read it again if you’ve seen it before, because this is a skill you MUST acquire, and one that will be richly rewarded:

“When She Gets Jealous”

Let’s talk about our women, and how to give them one less thing to worry about each day.

Why should that be important? If you had read “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” you would know that women are wired differently from men in some rather fascinating ways (and yes, bothersome and delightful as well), one of which is that they are constantly evaluating and reevaluating everything in their world. That includes us, themselves, and all the other women they know, too, and there are some “competitive insecurities” that still creep in, even though we now live in a world where women routinely make it on their own without a man’s help.

Patience, everyone. It took at least a couple of thousand years to form those habits, and they won’t go away overnight, especially as long as every time you turn on the television you see commercials aimed at women whose sole purpose is to make them feel insecure about themselves so that they will spend more money on diet and exercise fads, makeup and clothing to try to outpace each other. (Yes, Guys, they’re doing it to us, too, with commercials about “dysfunction,” size, hair loss, etc., just not as aggressively as they do it to the women.) Until everybody gets together and figures out that there’s plenty of partners to go around and we all need to be a little more patient and selective when trying to choose one, we’re all going to have to deal with this.

Gentlemen, this is particularly a problem for us! How so? As you master the knowledge and techniques in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you will become more attractive – TO ALL WOMEN! Yes, that IS a problem if not handled properly. Put your ego back in your pocket for a minute and think with me here. What do you do when you’re in a public place and other women notice you and come up and start flirting with you, right in front of your partner?

She’s in a quandary, because she wants to be with a man who is in demand (F.J. Shark’s “social proof”), and wants to be proud to be seen with you, but unless she’s feeling particularly strong about you and your relationship, she’s likely to get a little uneasy, especially at first, if this is a new development in your relationship. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to allow her to see her man being in demand without making her feel insecure or even fearful of the other women noticing you. I cover this in detail in my book, but I’m going to give you the crash course here and now so you can have a better understanding of how things work and maybe avoid a bad situation before you get to that part of the book.

First, if you have followed my advice and let her read this book with you, she knows what you’re doing, and probably already knows that you’re becoming more attractive with her feelings and needs in mind and a desire to better your relationship and marriage. She just needs a little subtle but firm reminder, possibly frequently until she gets used to you being attractive and still remaining true to her – remember, they’re constantly reevaluating and testing, even when they know things are good. That reminder comes in the form of continuing to make contact with her when other women are around. Care for an example? Yeah, I thought so.

Okay, you have just spoken at a dinner, seminar, party, or some gathering and have become known to the room as some kind of leader, authority, entertainer, etc., that causes women to pay attention to you because you have just publicly defined authority and established alpha status in commanding the attention of the group, room, or whatever. Your partner is now at your side as these other women come up introducing themselves, asking questions, flirting, etc., which is their lead-in to testing you to see if you can be swayed and to see if you’ll give them attention, and on what level. They’re highly competitive and can’t help it, so there’s no avoiding it. Some of them will be subtly flirting, others may even overtly give you a phone number or a room key (yes, attraction is that powerful, as well as some women’s sense of competition in establishing their own “social proof”!) knowing that your wife is standing there.

Frequently, yet subtly, make contact with your partner, touching or even squeezing her hand, glancing at her and smiling as you answer the other women’s questions, etc., which telegraphs to her and to the other women that while you are the catch of the room at that moment, you’re committed to her, and happy to remain so. If you are passed any room keys, phone numbers, etc., DO NOT try to conceal them. Try to very subtly and politely refuse them, and if they insist, take it, slip your hand behind your back, and try to get your partner to take it, or slip it in your pocket while smiling at your partner, and then turn out your pockets for her when you are alone again. Let her dispose of the phone numbers and take the room keys to the front desk, not as an act of giving her control, but as a sort of trophy demonstrating your commitment to her, saying something like, “Well my dear, you’ve earned these, so dispatch them as you wish,” with a big naughty grin, of course.

If you know that you are going to be speaking publicly, discuss it with her! Yes, people really do things like that. “Honey, there are going to be women asking me questions tonight after the presentation, and some of them are likely to try to pass me phone numbers, room keys, etc. You know I have no interest in them, and I want you to be comfortable with handling the situation. I can dispose of the contraband myself or I can allow you to handle it if you prefer. Frankly, I find it amusing, and if you pay attention, you will, too.” Don’t do it apologetically, or like you’re asking permission, because you’re not. You’ve decided what’s to be done, and left her room for input.

If your relationship is pretty strong and you want to be really naughty about it, you can take that approach. “Damn, I get so tired of all these women flirting and carrying on at these things. I usually just toss the phone numbers and room keys, at least the ones from the ugly girls, but I’m getting tired of having to deal with it. Why don’t you take the keys to the desk and trash the notes and numbers for me tonight?” A big wink and a grin at that point will probably get you get you a good natured slap, kick, punch, or something that doesn’t hurt, along with a choice expletive or two and a kiss. Ride her about it a little bit more to get her to giggle if you can, and let it go. The main thing is to keep it framed as your decision, because it is. It’s your decision to be true to her and it’s your decision to have her participate in celebrating that fidelity. This is something you’re doing because you love her, not something you’re doing because you need her and are afraid of losing her.

Obviously, there are a lot more circumstances than these with the potential for an insecure wife to become jealous. The general rule is to remind her that it is your commitment, your choices, and your actions, not the actions of aggressive women, that will determine what happens, and that her voiced distrust of those other women is in effect expressing distrusting you. It would be really, REALLY helpful if at this point, you could honestly say to her, “…and all the evidence that you have tells you that it doesn’t matter what these other women do, I’m with you and will remain with you.” You can only do that if you’ve not been caught cheating, so keep yourself out of trouble. The only way to LOOK clean is to BE clean, right?

There are very few problems that a man and woman can have, or any two people for that matter, that some honest, factual communication can’t fix, even if it’s just to agree to disagree and move on; at least the conflict is stopped and closure secured. Listen to your partner, and trust them to listen to you, always. If you can’t, you may just be calling the wrong person “partner.” (Yeah, that’s another newsletter.) Learn how to make yourself this attractive and how to talk to your partner in the aftermath in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage;” your copy is waiting for you and your life is getting shorter with each passing minute, so I strongly suggest you get moving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Brad!

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

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

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

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

David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Your Own Man, Crucial to a Great Relationship and Marriage

There are two ways to react to the successes of those around you. You can let them make you insecure and jealous, or you can learn from them and use them as example and motivation to bolster and enhance your own success. You might be surprised at the self-destructive power of the first, and the achievement that can be brought on by the latter, not to mention the self-esteem and attraction created by that achievement!

I got a call from a man who thought he had a problem, but really doesn’t, unless it’s a memory problem. He’s apparently forgotten who he is!

I didn’t get to take the call, but my publisher said that he was about fifteen years older than his wife, who had recently gone through some self-improvement and suddenly had the attention of a bunch of younger men. He described himself as physically fit, pleasant-looking, etc., and my publisher described him as articulate, intelligent, and outgoing and very personable. So what’s his problem?

The sudden spike in the attention others pay his wife has left him feeling a bit insecure. He’s feeling like he’s competing with men who are young enough to be his sons, maybe even his grandsons, and it has made him question his attractiveness. In addition, he’s been wrapped up in some work issues and is concerned that his wife may succumb to the temptations these younger men put before her.

What he’s forgotten is that it’s not him that has changed, it’s her. She has straightened her act up and brought herself more to his level of attractiveness. That’s a good thing, because her improved self-confidence will make her feel sexier and more playful, and enhance their intimacy. However…

If he lets himself be challenged by these younger men and responds by feeling competitive and resentful, he will lose the attractiveness of his intellect, self-confidence, personality, wit, etc., and begin appearing to his wife as an over-the-hill wuss instead of the man she was striving to upgrade herself to please in the first place! After all, these young men are only competition if he acknowledges them as worthy to compete.

The answer? Simple! Celebrate her success with her, and laugh at all the young bucks chasing her. She’s old enough to know that what they’re after isn’t a wife and children, and if he celebrates her success with her and shows her off instead of acting insecure about her new attractiveness, that confidence will spark desire in her like little else can.

Such action says to the young suitors, “You’d better grow a little before you try to climb into THIS ring, Junior.” And as always, his wife will follow his lead. It also expresses trust, saying to her, “Yes, I see you, I’m proud of you, and I know you love me and will stay with me because we’re both worth it,” where being insecure and treating her as though she might succumb to the advances of the youngsters forces her to ask if there is some reason that she should. It also expresses that he thinks that she cannot be trusted and might be swayed.

Ask any woman what they look for and especially respond to above all else in a man, and they’ll tell you: confidence. Not looks, not money, not power, not a fancy car or home. Confidence. Followed by a genuine smile. But, when they tell you, will you hear them?

If this man’s wife is like most women, she has told him repeatedly what she wants and expects from him, but like nearly all of us, he didn’t hear a word of it, because she didn’t say it as a man would say it. She said it as a woman would say it, and with good reason: She’s a woman! (Duh! LOL!) So he doesn’t hear it, and thinks she’s saying nothing and he therefore has to either read her mind or guess, and she thinks she’s being ignored – one of the oldest and most destructive stories in the relationship book.

She may even be telling him that he needn’t be worrying about these silly boys thinking they’ve fixed their sites on a “cougar,” (a mature woman who pursues much younger men, often young enough to be their son) that she finds them amusing and their compliments entertaining, even delightful, but not truly alluring. His non-responsiveness, of which she is totally unaware because she doesn’t know how differently men and women speak either, will be construed as weakness and push her exactly where he thinks she already is if he doesn’t straighten up pretty fast. Textbook example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Fortunately, he’s already purchased his copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and will be realizing all of this shortly when he reads and learns what he needs to know about both her and himself. His worst case scenario is that he may feel some subconscious insecurity triggered by the presence of these younger men until he comes to grips with the fact that he is not only their elder, but their better, especially in his wife’s eyes, and he’ll return to his confident, attractive self, then kick it up to notches previously unknown as he learns what makes women tick, what they want, and how understand them so well that they indeed think he can read their mind; he’ll be one of those rare guys who “just knows…”

A sagely word of advice: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. You can do better, MUCH better, by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com and downloading your own copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," or you can continue doing what you’re doing. Unless you really like the way you’re feeling right now, you’d better get your mouse clicking!

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

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

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

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

Hi David,

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

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

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

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

Daniel L.

My reply:

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

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

Take care,
David

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

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

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

Don't ACT Attractive, BE Attractive to Have a Great Life, Relationship and Marriage

Simply trying to act attractive won’t work; you can’t live a lie for very long before you get caught. The good news is that you can quickly change yourself, your self-perception, and BE attractive, so that it’s effortless and fun because it’s natural.

I’m going to break tradition here this morning, and address something that is really bothering me badly, speaking to both the men and women of this list. I’m going to ask everyone to read it in its entirety, although it may appear briefly to be impertinent; the conclusion and advice will bring everything into clear focus and you will absolutely find it worth reading.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading a notorious book for women on how to “capture a husband” called “The Rules” and I’ve finished it, several times. It is the most disturbing book I have ever read. Why?

First, I want to say up front that I’m not setting out to trash another author’s work. There is some very good advice in that book on issues of security and a few other things, but the authors, like most men and women, apparently knew little to nothing about female attraction. (Guys, again, stay with me here…)

Their focus was on getting married, using tactics that one of their grandmothers imparted to them, tactics that were developed and used well over a hundred years ago when marrying well was a survival skill and marrying for love was a very low priority. If getting married, without regard to the quality of man you marry or whether he is a good match for you, is your only concern, what’s in it will work, however…

Many of the tactics they tout involve preying on a man’s insecurities to manipulate his emotions and control his reactions; they openly state this at more than one point in the book, and then try to rationalize it. Any woman will tell you that she cannot respect or be attracted to a man she can easily manipulate or control. So while this may get a woman married, it would not be to the man of her dreams, it would be to a scared, needy wuss. These tactics would never work on an alpha male. Even more disturbing, and the bigger issue was…

Much of the advice was worded and in a context that implied not being attractive, but putting on an attractive act. They also kept alluding to people who didn’t follow the program because putting on an act was too hard. Part of what was so disturbing was that they saw the problem as it being too hard to keep up an act and advising women not to discuss what they were doing so that nobody would talk them out of it – read “verify that it was a bad idea” – instead of realizing that the fix for being unattractive was to BECOME attractive, not to just try to ACT attractive.

Gentlemen (and Ladies!) I cannot overstress how bad a strategy this is. At best, when you try to act attractive instead of just becoming attractive, you’re only replacing one kind of stress with another, one source of frustration with another, and one fear with another. The things that you should do to be attractive and exciting to the kind of person you want to attract and excite, especially as your partner – independent, confident, caring, etc. – are fun things, not stressful things. They are things that have a positive impact in your entire life, not just your relationship with your partner, such as personal achievements, great and small.

So it behooves you to step up to some fun and adventure, and take that extra step or two and make whatever changes to yourself real and permanent. Life’s too short to spend it afraid of discovery and stressed out!

I usually try to focus on only one point at a time, but these were all so inter-related that it seemed logical to address them together. I’ll sum it up for you to make sure we are on the same page:

1. Always look at the motivation behind and purpose for any advice anyone gives you, and make sure they are competent to give it by virtue of having succeeded at (and by!) doing whatever they’re advising you to do.

2. Any attraction tactic that preys on a man’s or a woman’s insecurities is bad; indeed, if they respond strongly to such a tactic, consider it a red flag that there is a self-esteem issue there to deal with, and if this person is already your partner, try to help them build self-esteem, don’t continue to tear it down by gouging it with scarcity. Preying on insecurity or anything else is a manipulative act of a predator, by definition, right? This is not rocket science.

3. Any attraction tactic that requires that you lie to your partner (or prospect, if you are in or end up in the dating world) or put on an act will ultimately just add to your problems, not fix them. The key to happiness is to simplify it, not add more complexity and potential for mishap and disappointment.

4. Your goal in any relationship should be to have a good match, so that you can be yourself as much as possible and through compatibility find shared values and the love that it brings. Your personal goal should be to make yourself all that you can be so that you can live the life, not just look like it. As the saying goes, “Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk.”

5. Any time you approach a relationship or situation in fear of it not working out instead of looking forward to enjoying it when it does work out, you’re setting yourself up for stress and ultimately failure. If you can’t be confident in what you are pursuing, seek knowledge and training, and make the self-improvements that are necessary to achieve and deserve the success you desire. See those who have done what you want to do as mentors to be sought out, not competitors to beat down. The difference in success and failure is very often just the difference in starting with proper preparation and just trying to “wing it.”

There is a lot of tested and proven information in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” that will get you to that level of relationship quality and competence that will let you enjoy it instead of being bored with it or fearing losing it. I’ve used it, my support staff has used it, and the many folks who have bought the book have used it, and the most negative comment I’ve received to date has been “Great stuff!” so I’m guaranteeing that it will work for you, too – you won’t risk a thing except a few hours to read it. Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because life is too short to spend it stressed out, scared, bored, frustrated, and celibate.

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

Why Do Men Have Affairs, and How Do You Stop? More On Protecting Your Relationship and Marriage

An obviously troubled man writes to ask how he can STOP having affairs and get his life together. Let’s see what we can do for him – and YOU!

Guys and gals, lightning has struck! I have for you today proof that men can recognize and admit that they do not like having affairs, and do indeed want a stable, monogamous relationship, possibly even enough to do what is necessary to make it happen. Only time will tell whether this man has the courage of his convictions, but I’m sensing a very genuine desire and sense of priority in his words, and his language indicates that he’s going to step up and take charge of his life. Meet James:

Good morning,

My name is James and would like to share with you problems in my relationship.
It’s been ten years now with ma girlfriend. The problem is I love her but I’m having affairs.

I’m so insecure, jealous coz I think she’s doing the same thing, I don’t trust her at all.

I would like to overcome my problem and stick to one partner, get married, give ma seven year daughter all the support she can ever get.

I don’t think I’ll cope if she have an affair.

I’m OUTGOING, spend most weekends out with friends, on drinking spree,
Come weekdays, I’m a darling.

The problem has affected our sex intimate life, we get intimate once in a while.
She has feeling and will end up having an affair.

Please help.
James

This is obviously a man who is bottoming out, realizing that he’s at a crossroads, and is deciding that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life the way he’s spent the last ten years. I call that a damned good choice, based on what he’s written about the last ten years. My response:

Hi James,

I cannot help you while you’re pursuing affairs, but if you’re truly ready to stop and straighten up, listen to reason, and get your life on track I can definitely help. Before you can do anything, you’re going to have to identify the reason you are having affairs and eliminate it.

If you’re doing it because you have no self-esteem and are trying to substitute the acceptance and approval of other women for the genuine self-esteem created by achievement, then you’re going to have to start creating real reasons to feel good about yourself and stop thinking that chasing other women is going to make you feel any better about anything. Approval and acceptance must come from within, not from somebody else.

If it’s because you are bored, or because your wife is bored and the two of you aren’t intimate, then you just need to get back in tune, learn about how to create attraction and communicate effectively, and nature will quickly take its course and get you to where you need to be. That’s not hard to do, but you need to know how and you need to want it to make it happen.

Unfortunately, your weekend “drinking sprees” point toward low self-esteem, because a man who feels good about himself doesn’t spend every weekend poisoning himself and looking for cheap thrills with other self-destructive people; a drink or two is no big deal, but you’re describing a binge, and you know as well as I do that repeated bingeing is self-destructive behavior. A man who feels good about himself spends that time enriching himself with his hobbies and enjoying time with the ones he loves, not abusing himself and, potentially, those around him.

Low self-esteem makes you very unattractive to any woman who spends any time around you, and causes you to seek approval, acceptance, social confirmation, etc., from women, who may find you charming and witty when both of you are drinking or drunk, which is a huge red flag in itself, but after they sober up and see that you’re swimming in your problems instead of solving them, they quickly move on and the affair ends.

You have some pretty serious work ahead of you, and my book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," can help you if you read and apply it. Its primary purpose is to deprogram you from all the wussy crap that the media and other idiots have heaped on us over the last forty years or more and let the real man within you come out and take over, a man who is competent, confident, attracts and understands women, and is the kind of man that every woman wants to live with, a man-caught in a self-amplifying cycle of self-improvement instead of a death-spiral.

I’d suggest you give it a try before you become an alcohol-related death statistic, because all that is really in front of you is a series of choices to live a better life. The decision is the hard part; following through is easy once you’ve committed to change, because you get to see results and feel good about them, which in turn motivates you to achieve better and better results. Self-esteem-building becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that replaces the cycle of approval-seeking and self-destruction you’re caught in now.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

I saw a purchase notification from James within 24 hours, and I fully expected it. Why? Because he’s not in denial about his situation; he’s accepted it and admitted that he is the cause of his own problems. When people finally face the fact that what they are doing isn’t working and start asking for help, they usually go through with fixing it.

There are two exceptions. The first is that group of people who define “help” as having someone do everything for them instead of providing the information and support they need and then getting out of the way and letting them do what needs to be done so they can own their own achievement and feel good about it.

The second is that group who are looking for validation of their mistakes instead of solutions to their problems, and they will engage you in conversation on the premise of wanting help, but they don’t want to talk about a solution; instead, they want to talk about what they did and why they did it and how you must understand such-and-such. If you hear the words, “But you don’t understand…” the next thing out of their mouth will be some kind of plea to ignore the reality of their bad choices and tell them that they were justified for screwing up, they’re still a “good person,” etc. Don’t waste your time with them.

So if you’re ready to admit that things aren’t the way they should be and that you are ready to take an active part in the solution, that, Gentlemen, is where I come in. I’ve done the research with hundreds of couples to find out what makes for good and bad relationship and how you can evaluate your own, what women want and what truly makes them tick, and how to easily return to that natural male behavior that flips their attraction switches and turns up the heat, saving them from their primary enemy, boredom. Do you realize what this means to you?

Do you remember the story about the man who found the bottle, rubbed it, and out came a genie, who granted him one wish, and he said he wanted a bridge from Los Angeles to Hawaii so he could drive his wife, who was afraid of flying, there for a vacation? When the genii said it was too big a request, the man said, “Then I guess I just want to know what makes women tick,” and the genii said, “Hmmm…tell me more about this bridge.”

We were all taught through such jokes and stories growing up that this is something that we would never know, yet here before you is the opportunity to know, once and for all, that most mysterious and seemingly forbidden of all things. Indeed, Sigmund Freud, the renowned psychologist, is famous for saying, “The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, ‘What does a woman want?’” That conundrum being solved, the question now is “Do you have the sense and the guts to reach out and grab this knowledge that evaded even the likes of Sigmund Freud and put it to work in your life?”

Like James, you now have a choice before you. Are you going to continue to sit there in the dark picking up a few crumbs from this newsletter every day, or even worse, in denial about the cause of your problems and looking for someone else to blame? Or are you going to secure for yourself and your family the next best thing to the keys to the universe, the knowledge that will put you on the road to being all that you can be, in your eyes and hers?

That should be the easiest decision you ever made in your life, so jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now, before you do another thing, because as they say in The South, “Time’s a wastin!” and life is definitely too short to waste it.

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

What Are Outside Influences Doing to YOUR Relationship and Marriage?

Is your environment, especially the part of it you choose and create for yourself, increasing or killing your attractiveness? It’s easy to tell by taking a good look around you, if you know what to look for. Do you?

I get a lot of mail from men who are feeling bad about themselves, complaining that their wives disrespect them, don’t like their job, feel like they’re alone and have no friends, and generally have a crappy outlook on like. There are a lot of causes for this, but generally when a man is disrespected, disregarded, and/or has nobody around him he would call a friend, it’s the result of bad attitude. And that’s fixable.

Most of the causes of both good and poor attitude are in the things that surround us daily. Let’s take a look at your living and work environments to see what they may be doing for you, or TO you. Much of male attractiveness is the direct result of attitude, self-esteem, and confidence, and your environment can impact those things directly, so it can impact your attractiveness directly, which in turn determines how – and whether – those around you will want to interact with you.

Feeling good about yourself requires that you take action to succeed, which in turn requires that you feel worthy of success and motivated to go after it. How does your environment affect you in this regard? Everything around you can impact you, so let’s look at some of the big ones to give you a feel for what to look for, and you can refine your search from there. Let’s start with music.

Yes, that’s a biggie! Even if you aren’t listening actively, it’s still there, being interpreted and assimilated, and there are subconscious mechanisms that act upon what you hear, so to what influences are you exposing yourself? First, what do you choose to listen to? If it’s depressing, as a lot of alternative rock, death metal, and some country and honky tonk, ballads, and of course, blues can be, it’s working on you. In my own experience, according to pop culture lore Michael Bolton was a great guy, but his music was so depressing that I couldn’t listen to it, and while I like some of the instrumental portions of Iron Maiden and Metallica, the death-oriented lyrics of many of their songs make me want to just shake somebody and tell the to wake up and get a clue. (The same goes for the angry-sounding rap that glorifies rape and cop-killing; fortunately, this isn’t all rap, just the worst of it.)

I grew up in an area where country, bluegrass, and honky tonk music was popular, and in my childhood, country music was all about trouble. Even if somebody had something good to say in a song, it was in the context of missing it, or somebody else having it and wishing they could have it. I can remember even as a small child wondering why people wanted to listen to songs that spoke of people hurting each other, breaking up, divorcing, being lonely, etc., and I could see that those who listened to depressing music were depressed. That made me wonder which was the cause and which was the effect. I learned later in college that it goes both ways, and once in the rut, it forms a feedback loop that sustains and even amplifies itself.

Even if you’re not choosing what you listen to, as in cases where you have piped-in music in your office that someone else chooses, or have a partner or a child that tends to dominate the household music listening (which luckily isn’t as bad these days since personal computers and iPods make private listening much easier), you may consciously just ignore it, but your subconscious mind ignores nothing. Hence, the music you expose yourself to, at least with regard for helping you to maintain a positive attitude and good self-image, needs to be fun, uplifting, motivating, etc., providing at least some positive influence; at worst, it should be attitude neutral, like some form of light instrumental or dance music.

What about television? Do you watch informative shows that help you feel better-prepared to achieve? Comedies to help break the tension? Heroic adventures to see the good guys kill the bad guys and go home with the girl for “gratuitous whoopee”? Or do you watch sad stories, a.k.a., “human interest” stories, where the object is to pull you in to feeling sorry for the subject? Or nothing but news, which tends to be negative because disaster gets better ratings that acts of heroism? Being informed is necessary, but you have to be careful of the source, because between sensationalism and bias, it can wreck your outlook and attitude in a cold minute. How can anyone expect to have a good outlook on life if a good portion of what they see every day is negative? There is obviously a lot you can’t choose, but there is also a lot that you can, so choose well.

Speaking of what you see in the workplace, how is your job affecting your outlook on life? Are you well-suited to your chosen profession and advancing through achievement? Are you appreciated and rewarded by your current employer? Do you enjoy getting out of bed in the morning to start your work day or do you leave home at the last possible minute and arrive a few minutes late every day because you just really don’t want to be there?

High self-esteem comes from achievement and no other source, and in every day life, that means mainly from success at productive work.

If your work conditions keep you from feeling like you are accomplishing anything, either in your job or your career, or if it’s swallowing you (as seems to be frequently portrayed on police dramas like “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” or any of the various flavors of “Crime Scene Investigation” where the officers are constantly exposed to the worst elements of human behavior and cannot avoid it because their job is to deal with it), depression and unattractive behavior is virtually inevitable.

Take a hard, objective look at your job and your career, and if it is not satisfying you, talk with a professional headhunter or placement agency, no matter what you do now or think you may be capable of doing. They stay in business by competently matching people with good jobs, and often have aptitude tests and other placement aids they will be glad to offer you on the chance that they may be able to pick up a commission by placing you in a good job. And don’t let the idea of a career change scare you into failing to act. You may be surprised at how radical a career switch you can make but still be able to leverage your experience and be able to make more of a lateral – or UPWARD LATERAL! --move instead of having to start over at the bottom of another career path.

Another huge influence, and the last one I’ll speak about today, are the people around you. Achievers will influence you to achieve, and miscreants of every flavor, being unwilling to do what is necessary to achieve, will seek justification and validation by spreading their defeatist attitude around like a virus.

You know them, the people to whom you announce good news and they insist that all good fortune is either fleeting or something bad must happen to you to pay for your good fortune, and they’re always blaming their sorry life and lack of achievement on limited opportunities and some oppressive entity or system instead of doing what achievers do to make their own opportunities. You may include these people in your circle of “friends,” but they are not friends. Friends don’t try to impede the happiness of friends by trying to negate everything good that comes their way.

If you have any of these people around, even if they are blood relatives, get them out of your life before they take you down with them; if they had any interest in climbing out of their funk, they would have done something about it already, so don’t bother trying to “save” them, either. Learn to let people be accountable for their own choices, and be accountable for your own. It’s a lot easier to manage your life and affairs that way, and you’ll never be put in a position of feeling like a failure because of someone else’s failure to act.

Once you find and eliminate all these negative influences from your life, you’ll find it much easier to maintain that confident, “can’t touch this” attitude that women find so irresistible, not to mention finding your life a whole lot simpler and more enjoyable, and you’ll also find you have new-found room in your life for people you enjoy being around as well. And here’s a big bonus: when you couple that improved attitude with a solid working knowledge of how to evaluate relationships, how to effectively communicate with women, and what they automatically respond to with curiosity, excitement, and desire, a great relationship with a great woman is a foregone conclusion, even if you’re not currently with one!

What you need to know about all of that is waiting for you in a single source, my e-book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, fully tested and guaranteed to work -- and for less than the cost of a good meal for two at a nice restaurant! Can you afford to ignore such information? NO! Can you use such information? YES! So get clicking, Bub, because life’s too short to waste it feeling lousy about your life, job, and marriage! ;-)

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

Why Nice Guys Finish Last, Especially in Relationships and Marriage, Part 4, Self-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 you 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. 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).

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

See What Buddha Knew That Could Save Your Relationship and Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Let a Flood of Problems Wash Away Your Relationship or Marriage

My beloved workshop was hit by a flash flood today, and while I was outside building dams and watersheds behind it to divert a flash flood current in the middle of a deluge of rain, something struck me that every man should know, especially when things aren’t working right in his relationship or marriage.

I apologize for sending you two of these lessons in one day, but the one you received this morning was actually posted last night, and something happened today that I really need to tell you about now instead of putting it off until morning.

Yes, you read that summary paragraph right. The Eastern United States has been under a lot of rain for about 36 hours as I write this, and to say everything is flooding is an understatement. Everything is soaked and there’s nowhere for water to soak in, so every drop that hits the ground is running off.

I live at the mouth of a somewhat shallow sort of box canyon, elevated above the normal flood plain, but in exactly the spot where the run-off from two ridges and a hillside runs past my house and into a large creek that continues down the hill. The rain started coming down very hard this afternoon, and I looked out and saw the largest stream of water I’ve seen since I’ve lived here running from behind my workshop and across about an acre of my lawn. Curiosity and concern aroused, I suited up in rain gear and went out to inspect, and it was a very good thing that I did so, and not a minute too soon.

The rain was picking up, and the run-off had started a flash flood coming down the hills and converging just behind my workshop, and it was slamming into the back of it so hard that the water was shooting under the walls and washing across the concrete floor of the shop. Luckily, all of my equipment is on wheels or mobile bases, so none of the cast iron parts of my table saw, jointer, drill press, lathe, etc., got wet, but there was some wood and a few cardboard boxes with new tools and materials in them getting wet and the feet of my solid birch workbench were sitting in an inch of water.

I quickly got those things out of harm’s way and went out back to address the on-coming flood, which now literally resembled rapids in a large creek. There was a pile of broken concrete where I had repoured part of the driveway and several large ricks of firewood, so I grabbed a shovel and mattock to dig trenches through some high spots that were allowing water to pool near my workshop and then started throwing up dams of concrete chunks, firewood, and spare roofing shingles to divert the water around the workshop to keep it from driving into and under the walls.

While all of this was going on, I was reminded of an old naval comedy called “Down Periscope,” in which there was a scene where the submarine they’re on is leaking and flooding and everybody is scrambling, and at the end, one of the crew brushes the water out of his hair and says, “Now that was FUN!” And it hit me…

I grew up on a farm, and when something bad happened, there was neither time nor tolerance for throwing up one’s hands and saying, “Oh no! What are we going to do?” or to simply do nothing and hope that the problem fixed itself. Problems that affected the farm equipment, or especially the crops, could mean the difference between eating and going hungry. So when a problem came up, we were like the guys on that submarine. Everybody pounced on the problem, handling what they were best-suited to do first, getting the most critical elements handled first, and continuing, quickly and rationally, until it was fixed and the crisis was resolved.

That’s how a man must handle ALL problems if he is to respect himself and be respected. It’s the only way that he can head off trouble before it gets too big, and the only way he can handle trouble that is too big and moving too fast to head off while it’s small. It’s the only way that his wife will trust his judgment and leadership, which must happen if she is going to be happy in the marriage, feel like engaging in an active sex life, want to play and have fun with the man, etc.

So if things around the house, at work, or especially in your marriage are anywhere from slowly deteriorating to being in full-scale crisis, don’t be some scared wuss frozen in the headlights of an on-coming disaster while your life and everything you hold dear washes past your feet. Take action. The self-respect you gain from handling things will boost your confidence, and thereby your attractiveness, and as your self-confidence and self-respect grow, your wife will be drawn inescapably closer to you as primal instinct overwhelms her with the feelings that she can trust you and that she has married well.

If it’s your relationship or marriage that is slowing down, hiccupping, or coming apart at the seams, that is the LAST problem you could expect to fix itself; relationship and marriage problems always get worse without attention. They fester like a boil, and finally erupt in a smelly, painful mess of pus and blood. And it doesn’t have to go down that way, even if the marriage was one of those that never should have happened in the first place.

There’s tested and proven help for you in my book, "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and it’s about a mouse-click away at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It started with the stated needs and desires of 188 women, and was then tested and refined through the use and feedback of 118 couples, and has been continuously refined with the experience of thousands since. It’s working for everyone who uses it, and I have the testimonials to prove it, so it’s time for you to get moving. Or you could just keep right on standing there, the deer caught in the headlights, while everything you hold dear (and own!) goes right down the tubes in a flood of emotion, frustration, and confusion, except of course for the part that goes to line the lawyers’ pockets or to keep the wife’s boredom from killing you both. It’s your choice, so make it a good one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating Attraction in Relationships and Marriage: Not an Act, but an Attitude!

What works? And why do men, when they know what they are doing isn’t working, continue to do the wrong thing? What’s the right thing to do? Big hint: being attractive isn’t about an act, or a series of acts; it’s about attitude!

Let’s talk about why we do things, both right and wrong, when it comes to our interactions with other people, especially those of the opposite sex. It is said that there are only two reasons people don’t perform, ignorance (not knowing how) and apathy (not caring). Ignorance is treatable, simply by teaching, but apathy is much more difficult to treat, because it involves changing someone’s value system, which in turn is defined by their guiding philosophy. For most people, this is a place where fools rush in and angels fear to tread. Why?

It’s not very difficult to change someone’s perception of value of a particular thing if it already meets the requirements of their value system, because all you have to do is show them how it meets their needs. But when their value system says something is unimportant, you’re literally dealing with what makes them tick, their guiding philosophy even, the mechanism behind every decision that they make in their life. People resist changing their value system because if they do, then there’s going to be a whole lot of bad decisions in their past that they now have to acknowledge, and possibly feel guilty or atone for.

Not a pretty thought is it? And the older we get, the more choices we’ve made, and the more we might have to admit to as a mistake. (Objectivists are the only people I know who seem to be immune to this en masse, but that is because we treat mistakes as a resource for learning – an value the rest of the world could benefit from indeed.)

What about when a value system contradicts reality? That’s a pretty disturbing question, isn’t it? Reality always prevails, and people make bad decisions, and then try to blame them on something or someone else – “You just don’t understand,” “It’s the system,” “You just don’t care enough to see it my way,” etc. Spare me.

When I hear, “But you just don’t understand,” after giving someone a dose of reality, I know that whatever follows will be a direct contradiction with reality, and any further conversation with this person is a waste of my time and energy, because their purpose is now to drag me into their fantasy for validation. The same goes for when they keep asking the same question over and over, because they aren’t hearing what they want to hear, as if the answer would change to suit them if they ask it enough times. They’re seeking validation of the past, not improvement for the future.

What does this have to do with attraction and dealing with the opposite sex?

For how many years, decades, even centuries, have we been saying ridiculous things like, “I want to be liked for who I am,” when “who I am” is pretty disgusting? (I’ll address approval-seeking behavior in several other newsletters.) Guys, we’re visually stimulated more than anything when it comes to attraction. Like it or not, that’s just the way it is. Sorry Ladies, we may eventually evolve out of it, but for the time being our first impressions of attraction come from visual stimuli. Yours do too, but to a lesser degree.

Men are biologically wired to be excited about seeing a woman who looks healthy and able to bear healthy children, hence the triggers of ample breasts, wider, rounder hips, which are necessary for birthing and feeding, and good skin, hair, and teeth, which speak to one’s health and ability to nurture and raise children. Again, it’s not logical, it’s biological, primal – INSTINCT! Once that initial attraction is there, it is enhanced or diminished by personality factors, and ultimately can be replaced entirely by personality factors, but that first impression is often physical, and if not made by curves, is made by pretty eyes or a striking smile.

Women are wired to appreciate the alpha male, the guy who can take a club and bring down a buffalo or lead other men to do it for him or with him, but for most women, that is only the beginning of attraction, more on a level of curiosity or intrigue than attraction. It makes a man a candidate, not a target. A woman sees an obvious alpha male and wants to know more, where a man sees a sexy woman and subconsciously wants to mate, now, because curves equate to sex, which in turn equates to procreation – our biological purpose. To seal the deal with the man as far as attraction goes, especially in the early stages of a relationship, you don’t have to do much more than walk up to him, or smile when he walks up to you. Pretty boring, huh Ladies?

Ask them, Guys. Most of them are sick of men being such easy prey. Women like a good challenge as much as we do, especially in terms of building self-esteem. A man who is not a challenge is boring, and often perceived as desperate and weak. Remember that…

Once you have aroused the woman’s curiosity by exhibiting alpha male behavior, you still have a way to go. She’s already made up her mind whether you are a candidate for attraction, and at this point is testing to see if you blow it. You’ve still got to show that you have enough guts to approach her, which is intriguing, and then seal the deal by showing you can entertain her with a good sense of humor, at a bare minimum; charm, polish, savoir faire, etc., don’t even come into the picture until at least these three criteria are met. No if’s, and’s, or but’s, this is it, stark reality, no arguing about it.

And again (yes, I’m preaching, because this is that important!), this is BIOLOGICAL, not logical – primal and instinctive, and contrary to some really ridiculous crap that some of you readers have recently shown me in some other newsletters, not the result of “social conditioning.” Women don’t “lubricate” or men become erect at the sight of their attraction triggers because of “social conditioning;” biological responses come from biological causes. (Damn! There’s that pesky law of cause and effect again!)

So what do you do to make yourself attractive to this woman you love?

Exactly what I just described! Show her that adventurous, heroic, fun-loving guy she was first attracted to when you met, or even better that REALLY adventurous, heroic, totally independent fun-loving guy that you were born to be, before you were poisoned with all of the wussy programming you’ve been exposed to over the last forty years or more, by everyone from your mother to the media. If she has ever been attracted to you to any degree, it has been to the degree that you did what I was just describing. If you don’t think so, ask her. If you ask, be prepared for the truth, and accept it; it doesn’t do any good for her to try to soften the truth or for you to try to ignore it. Here’s where the problem starts.

Many men, including at least some of you, are at this point saying, “I don’t want to have to act differently just to make my partner interested in me again! She should like me and respect me enough for who I am to be attracted to me. Why else would she still be with me?” Good grief! I’m about to barf after typing that load of crap. LOL! Let me help you with that.

Imagine the most grotesque woman you can imagine. Seriously. Somebody you wouldn’t have sexual relations with using even an enemy’s genitalia. Let’s say about 500 pounds, dirty, stringy hair, rotten teeth and breath, warts all over her, a nice thick beard growing, and to top it all off, she has an affinity for cheap cigars and Polish Kielbasa and suffers from chronic flatulence, the kind that peels paint, in the house next door. Doesn’t bathe or brush her teeth, or shave anything and has more body hair and nose hair than you. Gross enough to guarantee that there’s no way you’d ever sleep with her? Good. Now imagine her saying, “I don’t want to change my looks and hygiene habits. I think men should get hot for me just the way I am.” Whaddaya think? Up for some of that? No? Hell no? I didn’t think so. Why not?

Because she didn’t trip your attraction triggers. Indeed, she negatively impacted most if not all of them. Now imagine that she was a hottie when you married her and this is what you have 20 years later. Any questions? So if you don’t want to straighten up and act a bit different to be attractive to the woman you love, why in the world should she be expected to respond positively to you when you’ve become lazy, or a wimpy girly man who bores her to tears, smothers her, seeks her approval at every turn, can’t make a decision about anything and defers them all to her, shaves his body but not his face (just like she does), and either uses more hair and facial products than she does and out-dresses her or doesn’t bathe and groom regularly and dresses like a homeless guy or “gangsta”?

In a nutshell, just like the 500-pound woman, the guy I’m describing demonstrates a total lack of self-respect and self-love, and that’s poison to a woman’s sense of attraction, turning every switch off and sending her running. You can’t expect her to go against her natural programming or wiring any more than you could be expected to do the same thing. If you want her to respond differently, you have to behave differently. End of story. Here’s a cool little rhyme to keep the idea fresh in your mind at all times:

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

No, it’s not today’s latest rap, but it gets the point across. Dare to be different. Now, you can go about this one of two ways, one of which will fail miserably, while the other succeeds every time. You can fail by trying to put on a cool act for her. An act might get you a date, and might even get you in the sack once or twice in a dating situation, but with a woman you’ve lived with for awhile and who knows you? Guess again. Ain’t happening. You’re going to get caught being a wuss and the attraction is going to die right then and there, and in the meantime, you’re going to live in fear of being discovered. Now, what if I told you that the way to succeed was far easier than the act that would surely fail? Want to give it a try?

The thing you can do is to simply BE a better man! Learn what it is to be an alpha male. Recognize that this is really who you were born to be and get the alpha male attitude. Be SOMEBODY! Be a leader when you are qualified to do so, even if it’s just in a conversation about something you like. Have fun, and don’t be afraid to be seen having fun. Tell anybody who would interfere with you truly enjoying your status as a man, your job and your ability to be competent, or try to diminish your self-image by telling you that it’s not politically correct to enjoy being a guy to take a bloody hike! Any wussy behavior will fall away and be replaced by the confidence in knowing that as an alpha male, people will seek your company and your counsel, especially the woman you love and live with, because you are what she wants! You don’t have to put up an act. All you have to do is be a guy.

Then, you can take a look at yourself and engage in a little self-improvement exercise by taking a look at the things women respond to, like charm, charisma, leadership, public speaking ability and comfort in a crowd, sense of humor, etc., and if any of these things aren’t a natural part of you and you like the idea of having them be part of you, you can develop them in yourself, and enjoy doing so. You study for other things you enjoy, don’t you? Athletic statistics, woodworking methods, fishing, camping, starting a fire in a charcoal grill, are all things you pick up to enjoy other parts of your life, so why not learn a few things about women so you can enjoy them more???

Public speaking is a biggie when it comes to tickling a woman’s fancy, and one of the most fun experiences in my life was joining the Toastmasters’ Club. There were a lot of wonderfully interesting people there who told funny stories and jokes, taught tips and skills, and even recited some pretty decent poetry, all just to get used to being and speaking in front of a group of people, and since everyone was there for the same purpose, the entire group was very supportive, and I made friends that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I could have cared less if I ever made a public speech; I just wanted to be able to confidently and calmly address a group, like telling a good story at a party or explaining to a group of peers something I’d learned, and it was great to finally be able to do that. The point?

Self-improvement should always be enjoyable; both achieving it and having it should be a true pleasure. And, once you have achieved it, it’s there, naturally, not just some act to be seen through, but genuine and enjoyable for those around you as well. Hence, if you target self-improvement efforts at things you enjoy and your partner finds attractive, improving your relationship, and consequently, your sex life, while a most serious pursuit, can be as enjoyable as any hobby, and the effects are forever useful, unlike a lot of self-improvement fads that change with the seasons (anybody remember “Total Quality Management” from the 1980’s, followed by “Continuous Quality Management,” and then “Continuous Quality Improvement,” all of which were replacements for the “Zero-Defect Standard” preached through the 1970s?)

The behavior women are attracted to might spawn different deeds as trends come and go, rather like raising a car door in the future (gull-wing doors) instead of swinging them outward as we do today, but the attractive attitude that determines the behavior hasn’t changed in centuries, and due to the extremely slow pace at which we biologically evolve and given that attraction is based on biological responses, you can be sure that it won’t be changing in your lifetime, either. So invest a little time and effort in your future…

I’ve given you the general lay of the land, but for the detailed map, how to travel it (including creating anticipation), and how to talk and listen along the way, go to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now, and download your copy of my book “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage”. It’s so named not because it sounded cool or catchy, but because IT WORKS. Period. Get your copy today and get back to being that real man you were born to be because life is too short to spend it acting like a wuss, not to mention being treated like one, which among other things, means being mostly celibate, frustrated, and lonely – not a good way to spend the holidays!

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

Preparation: Key to Easy Success in Relationships and Marriage

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

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

Hey David,

How's it going!

Well I'm doing pretty good indeed!

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

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

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

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

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

Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Your Friends Helping or Destroying YOUR Relationship and Marriage?

Who’s giving you advice? Are they succeeding in whatever way you want to succeed and living the way you want to live? If not, they’re not the people to be advising you, especially about your relationship.

I was out with my wife once at a local Mexican restaurant and saw something disgusting that we need to discuss. No, it wasn’t something with legs in the enchiladas or the salsa verde. It was a couple of fairly young men, seemingly in their early thirties. One of them was slouched over, in grungy clothes, looking like a total slacker – I looked under his table to see if there was a skateboard hiding there. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair disheveled and if he had come to my door to visit my daughter looking like that I would have kicked his sorry butt out the door and told him to come back when he’d acquired soap – both the body and laundry varieties – and some self-respect.

His companion looked considerably better. He sat up straight, and was dressed for being in public. He was fairly well-groomed, His shirt was tucked in and his clothes were not wrinkled. He had more of a worldly air about him. There was a near-empty margarita pitcher between them and they were both talking louder than they should have been. (It’s amazing how tequila damages others’ hearing and not your own, isn’t it??? LOL!)

The more respectable-looking of the pair was dating a co-worker of theirs, apparently a high-quality girl that was pretty popular in the office. He told his friend he wanted to escalate the relationship because he thought they were right for each other. Before he got to the end of the sentence, his friend the slacker said, "Dude, no way she’ll hang with you! You're not her type. She’s into power and sleeps with the boss. Even if she did hook up steady with you, you’d just screw it up like you’ve done with every other woman you’ve dated."

Doesn’t sound like much of a friend, does he? Unfortunately, it’s not that uncommon amongst "friends" for one whose having a hard time or just generally negative about everything to rain on everybody else’s parade. In his mind, if he’s not happy, it’s not fair for anybody else to be. Instead of being happy for his friend, he’s throwing cold water on his friend’s desires/ambitions, possibly for no better reason than to keep himself from having somebody to drink with or complain to.

The disgusting thing is that it worked! The poor guy sat there a moment and then said, "Yeah, you're probably right." He allowed his so-called "friend" to rob him of his ambition and convince him that he didn't have a chance with her. They worked in the same office! If she’d really been sleeping with the boss, wouldn’t they BOTH have heard about it by then? It’s ridiculous that so many people do this to one another, and still call each other “friends”! It’s just plain sick to think about, but it’s the nature of people who lack self-esteem.

Losers have a tendency to want to pull others down to their level, instead of learning from their friends and drawing on their successes as inspiration for their own success, which would elevate them to their mentor’s level. Lacking character, it’s easier for them to talk trash to the achievers around them than to get off their lazy butt and achieve something. Is this the kind of person you want to take advice from, about anything in your life??? I hope not, and I can tell you categorically and with authority that it is not.

This kind of person is a prime target for the “hire slowly, fire quickly” method of forming relationships of any kind. No matter how much you want to do or try to do, they will try at every turn to discourage and disparage anything that is above them. This is the last person in the world that you want to be discussing anything important or personal with, because they can’t possibly have anything good going on in their life or they wouldn’t be talking to you this way.

Their opinion of what you should be doing or any advice they may offer is therefore worthless; otherwise, they would be having some successes and being upbeat about at least a few things in their life. Their sole purpose in any conversation with you will be to bring you down, not celebrate your dreams and successes with you.

Always make sure you are fully supported by your friends and family. If you have any “friends” that are constantly telling you that you will not be able to accomplish something, or that you’re wife will end up leaving you, or that you can’t possibly get that better job you’re going after without any facts to back up their claims (if you’re trying to learn to play piano with no hands, or you’re a violent spouse abuser, or the job you’re applying for requires a PhD and you don’t have a high school diploma, they may have a point, but you know what I mean), fire them!

They’re not worthy of sharing your life’s energy and your space. Know the difference between a good friend who has relevant facts that you don’t yet possess and cares enough to give them to you and the pessimistic gothic ne’er-do-well who thinks it rains 24/7 and wants to make sure you stay soaked in their misery.

People like this can insidiously turn you into a carbon copy of themselves, and as you can imagine, that’s about as unattractive as it gets. Just ask any woman (who’s not one of these constantly complaining losers) what she thinks of them. She’ll tell you, in no uncertain terms, that she wants someone fun and upbeat, somebody with brains and vision and leadership skills, not some loser who ridicules greatness because he’ll never aspire to it, let alone achieve it. Nobody who looks at his shoes when he talks and walks and disparages everything he hears is attractive, to anyone, in any way, except maybe to a hard-up mugger looking for a target.

Besides, what kind of valuable advice would someone who is always negative and never going anywhere or doing anything have to give? There’s an old Chinese proverb that really comes into play here: "The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." Ayn Rand also had something very valuable to say about this: "The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity." What opportunities will you be availing yourself of while you have Joe Doomengloom constantly telling you that you’re just going to fall off the ladder? Kick his (or her) ass to the curb and get on with the business of being a man.

Always surround yourself with positive, up-beat people -- people who have confidence in themselves and in you. Real friends will strengthen and support you when you’re onto something good, and if they do say something negative, it will be to give you the benefit of their experience or insight and keep you out of trouble, not to keep you from achieving.

Also, no matter what you’re doing, if you are going to ask somebody for a recommendation or advice, make sure that they have been successful in pursuing whatever you are pursuing, and therefore have valid experience to draw on and valid advice to give. Don’t ask your CPA for legal advice (unless he’s also a lawyer) or your lawyer for tax advice (unless he’s also a tax accountant). Don’t ask somebody who doesn’t even use a computer and has never sold anything to review your Internet business and give you suggestions. And above all, don’t ask an unhappy slacker who has no history of lasting, happy relationships about anything having to do with your relationship. If you want to succeed at anything, find somebody who has already succeeded, and learn from what they did, both right and wrong.

I’m a guy you can ask for help with a relationship, especially one that’s gone stale over time and needs reviving. I’ve done it, and I don’t think I could ask for things to be much better. In addition to my own experience, I have that of 118 other couples who all helped develop and test the content of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” – they all improved their relationships dramatically with this very material as we researched it, as did thousands more who have added the benefit of their experience in the years since. We all learned how to evaluate relationships, how to communicate to effectively bridge the inter-gender communications gap, and what it takes to trip a woman’s attraction triggers and bring that honeymoon back with a bang!

Learn from us and make your own relationship all it can be by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com right now and downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," because it works, it’s guaranteed, and life’s too short to wait for good things to happen – YOU MUST MAKE THEM HAPPEN, AND YOU CAN!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody in my unit was young, full of piss and vinegar, and drawing hazard pay, got off on all the gung ho ritual language, and hence I replied, “Sir, I do not know. If the general would explain the difference I will deploy that knowledge in a swift, proficient, and distinctly military manner.”

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

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

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

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

David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely
Tom

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

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

For starters, Tom didn’t just automatically blame everything on somebody else and assume no responsibility for what happened that led to his divorce. He buckled down and found information that gave him answers as to what happened and what he could change to make sure it didn’t happen again. Lesson: Take personal responsibility when things don’t go as planned, figure out what happened, and learn how to make it go the right way next time.

Also note I didn’t write one word of advice targeted at those who are dating in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," yet Tom found all kinds of advice in it that helped him to be more successful in his dating life, BECAUSE HE WAS LOOKING FOR IT. Good information isn’t always where you EXPECT to find it, but it is always WHERE YOU FIND IT, if you know what I mean. Lesson: be ever-vigilant in looking for things that can make your life better; you may not find a pearl in every oyster, but finding a gold nugget lying in a pile of animal manure or a trash can doesn’t make it any less valuable than if it was found in a creek or a mine.

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

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

Instead of saying, “I’m tired of reading. I’ve done this before, I’m just going to jump in and it will be better this time,” Tom recognized that a recommendation from one good source of information about another source of information was likely a good call because no information seller will risk trashing his reputation by steering a customer in the wrong direction for an affiliate sale and blow any possibility of future direct sales. Lesson: Know your limitations, and do everything you reasonably can to obtain help in overcoming them by seeking the advice of those who have succeeded before you.

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

But! When you’ve been together for awhile and your interest is fully vested, that window could be measured in YEARS in some cases, and months in almost all cases. Women like the protective feeling of stability, and will give you ample opportunity to make things right IF they see that you’re trying to do so. Lesson: Even if the divorce is final, as long as she hasn’t filed for restraining orders (which indicate that all hope is indeed lost in nearly all cases in the long term, and in ALL cases in the short term), it’s NEVER too late to fix it as long as the compatibility is there to support it.

Also note he held her accountable for her mistakes, and that ultimately being held accountable and having to live the life that she chose was the worst punishment that could be heaped upon her. Lesson: Justice is sweet, while revenge is a dish that simply should never be served, unless it’s “self-served.” War isn’t just “the most spectacular of all human endeavors” (General George S. Patton), it’s the most costly and utterly destructive, on any scale.

Here endeth the lessons. Right now, some of you are saying, “Geesh, that guy is long-winded. That’s annoying!” while others are thinking, “Wow! That guy must really care about this stuff, because it must have taken him a long time to put that together to share it with me.” I do, and it did, several hours in fact. Several hours that I could have spent with family and friends, enjoying a hobby, cooking an elaborate gourmet dinner, or numerous other things for myself instead of for you. If you don’t need this much help from me, I’m happy for you, really, but I’m doing this to help people in crisis make their lives better just as much as I’m doing it to help other people keep their relationships from falling into crisis. Lesson: Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

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

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

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

How Wusses Are Created and Relationships and Marriages Are Destroyed As a Result

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it’s late in the day before I find inspiration for the content of this newsletter; I prefer to do it as the very first thing after responding to whatever reader e-mails are in my Inbox when I first sit down at my computer in the morning, but the world doesn’t always work the way I want it to. Sometimes I can receive as many as 200 e-mails from readers and not be able to use anything out of them for a newsletter, either because of the appropriateness of the content or not being able to obtain permission to reprint their letter in time (I a stickler for reader privacy).

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

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

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

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

Now here’s the important part. For everyone who didn’t know the difference between a “semi-automatic” and “fully automatic” firearm, they thought that the fully automatic sub-machine pistol shown spraying bullets all over the building was semi-automatic, which is simply the pistol that most police officers carry in their holsters, because the CSI officer erroneously said that's what it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, they don’t have to be filthy stinking rich to be successful. Wealth is not always a man’s goal. Some men prefer to succeed at fishing, hunting, wood or metal working, rebuilding cars, throwing darts, collecting stamps – you name it. But a man who succeeds at one thing will generally succeed at many things, because he has the formula – and he can demonstrate it to you simply by you being around him.

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

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

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

I asked a bunch of women!

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Negative Thinking in Your Relationship or Marriage

Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” has been required reading in any self-improvement curriculum since the 1950’s, but have you ever thought about its antithesis, and how you might be inadvertently creating your own insecurities and failure?

This time of year I look through a lot of catalogs for small but highly personal gifts for friends and family. I was looking through one that had a lot of gag gifts and unusual memorabilia and there was an item billed as a “Motivational T-Shirt” that said “I didn’t come here to lose…” on the front of it.

I thought, “What an idiot!”

You see, there is a big difference between “I didn’t come here to lose…” and “I came here to win!” But a lot of people make this mistake and consequently program themselves for failure.

When faced with a new opportunity, they ask, “What if I can’t do this?” instead of “What do I do after I succeed at this?” Believe it or not, it’s been proven that this “framing” of situations plays a huge role in how you get along in your own environment, you self-esteem and confidence, and your chances of success in anything that you pursue.

(If you want to pursue it further, start with Maxwell Maltz’s “Psychocybernetics,” in which he describes the mental mechanisms that move us toward whatever we focus on, whether it’s good or bad for us.)

This kind of negative programming can turn you into an insecure wuss in a fairly short time, no matter how tough you are. The subconscious mind doesn’t discriminate between positive and negative and doesn’t process terms of negation in your speech or thoughts (it ignores words like “not”); it merely works very hard to bring you toward whatever you are focused on, so if you focus on “not failing” instead of succeeding, you’re actually focused on failure instead of success.

To bring this closer to home, if you’re sitting there reading this newsletter because you are having problems in your own relationship or marriage, you’re reading a lot of advice. If you’re reading multiple sources, you’re reading a whole lot more advice. And if every time you read something you think, “I’d like to try that, but what if I fail?” or “That sounds okay, but what if it doesn’t work?” you’re programming yourself for failure, frequently and effectively, even without regard for the advice you are reading.

You must question the advice you are given. Only a fool would follow blindly everything he reads. But when you question it, do so in a way that doesn’t sabotage your efforts. Ask, “Does this make sense?” “Can I see myself succeeding and moving on to the next step if I do this?” These are reasonable, direct questions that need to be answered and are in the proper context…

…after all, you’re looking for something to help you succeed, not something to help you fail, right?

So why concern yourself with failure??? Your questions should be about what will bring you closer to your goal, and nothing else. And anybody with advice worth using should be able to tell you how it helps and why it should help by virtue of having proven that it works, preferably with their own success among others, so if you can’t find answers to those positive questions, it’s time to look at something else, is it not? It’s the output (the RESULTS!), not the input, that is important, right?

Who cares how many copies of a book have been sold? That doesn’t tell you how many people it helped! Would you care to guess how many books have been sold that advocated crying with a woman at a chick flick and leaving all decisions to her to make sure she felt like her position had been considered? Or how many books have advocated lying to a potential partner to get them in bed or even worse, marry them?

Who cares how many degree titles somebody has trailing after their name? That doesn’t tell you whether they’re giving you proven, repeatable reality or some pet theory that hasn’t been tested and proven to work. (And yes, in case you’re curious, I do have fun little academic acronyms after my name, so I can say that.) I don’t know about you, but when I was looking for help, I found lots of theories in lots of books, and they were such utter hogwash that I ended up having to research and write a book just to have something to use myself! Strange, and pathetic, but true!

And when you get right down to the nitty gritty, should you even care what it costs? According to a recent study, the average divorce in the U.S. costs $27,000 excluding alimony, child support, etc. Indeed, I received an e-mail today outlining a settlement of $275,000 up front, plus $150,000 per year, plus he has to maintain a $750,000 life insurance policy with her as the beneficiary so that she still gets future payments if something happens to him. And who knows what the lawyers got out of it! Most self-help products, mine included, are way under a hundred bucks! Indeed, mine’s presently under forty! Compared to the cost of a divorce (and we’re not even going to get into the pain of a divorce), that’s pocket change, and I can also tell you why it works, why you can expect it to work, and how many people it’s helping, including myself!

So the short answers are that my information was researched and tested with a fairly large group of women and then double-checked with the help of their husbands and boyfriends. To the best of my knowledge, based on testimonials I’ve received, it’s helped everyone who has used it, and that in turn is why you can expect it to work for you, as long as you do actually use it instead of getting it, reading it, and then talking yourself out trying with questions like “What if this doesn’t work for me?” or “What if I can’t do this?”

Until very recently, I was even able to say that I have never issued a refund! In the last three years, I have now issued two refunds. One was to a girl who claimed that she thought that she was buying dating advice (even though the advertising is pretty clear that it’s for people in committed relationships and marriage). The other one was to guy who missed the e-mail announcing the book’s title change and thought that I was releasing another book and he wanted it because he’d had such success with the first one.

I refunded his duplicate purchase and we both had a good laugh out of it. He commented, “Thank you, I am more embarrassed than anything else, the good news is that I found the book very informative and was sold twice so to speak. I had failed to sign up for the newsletter the first time.”

So there it is. This isn’t rocket science, or some 12-step program. It’s just the real story on what women want, what makes them tick, how to communicate with them, how to be fun and exciting without being a clown or a flake, how to feel good enough about yourself that your self-esteem and confidence levels make you a man that she loves being around instead of a man she feels like she has to raise and protect like a mother would do a child, and how to choose and hold out for a good woman or know if you have one already. I’ve not yet met a heterosexual man who couldn’t do everything in it, easily and naturally, within a short time.

So what about you? Are you sitting there in front of your computer staring at this newsletter and thinking, “What if it doesn’t work for me?” or are you thinking, “What will life be like after I get through this?” If it’s the former, there’s not a thing in the world that I or anybody else can do to help you. But! If it’s the latter, get your butt over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get busy, because this is what you’ve been looking for, real answers proven by real people.

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

Personal Responsibility and Abundance Mentality: Great Tools for Great Relationships and Marriage

One of the cornerstones of creating attraction is leadership, and the hallmark of leadership is personal responsibility. Let’s talk…

I was reading one of Shelley McMurtry’s newsletters (which you can sign up for at her website – she talks a lot about dating and provides some great insight into the female point of view and priorities in relationships and may be something you’ll enjoy) and she was talking about something a lot of us refer to as “perceived reality,” which is a phrase used to describe a condition where a person’s outlook on the world is inconsistent with reality because of how they have chosen to construe certain events.

An example she was using was a common one, people who have a few bad dates or bad relationships and give up, presenting the reason for their cowardice as “all men are bad,” or “all women are bad,” or “relationships just suck and aren’t worth the hassle.” She also told of a friend who has been married to a man who just got lazy, started spending all of her income and savings, and she ended up kicking him out, but instead of developing the “all men are lazy bums” mentality or “perceived reality,” she took responsibility for her situation, acknowledged that she had made a bad choice, took corrective action (kicked him out) and went on with her life.

It dawned on me in the course of reading this that what we (several of us newsletter and e-book writers) had been referring to as “perceived reality” was actually the product of a failure to take personal responsibility for one’s life, and I wrote to Shelley about it. I want to share that letter with you, and point out how you can use this to enrich your life and your relationship afterward.

Hi Shelley!

I wanted to thank you again for introducing me and my e-book to your readers, and to lodge a comment on this "perceived reality" concept that I think that you and many of your readers will appreciate.

Like you, I differentiate between "perceived reality" and plain, simple reality. However, we are both being too kind when we refer to it as "perceived reality," because it is indeed not at all perceived, but contrived by people who refuse to accept reality.

Perception is the process of the sensory organs of the body doing what they do, nothing more. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "perceive" as "1. To become aware of directly through any of the senses, especially sight or hearing. 2. To achieve understanding of; apprehend." What we have been referring to as "perceived reality" is actually a fantasy that people manufacture when they interpret their perception and choose to reject what their sensory organs pick up and conduct to their brain.

What's worse, they expect everyone around them to validate their fantasy by buying in! As you've noticed, every time you tell someone something factual and they come back at you with "BUT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" they're trying to force some fantasy on you to the extent that you either buy in or give them a superficial sanction or validation just to shut them up and get them out of your face.

What differentiates such people (like the prissy butt-nuggets you speak of) from us and your friend the university professor with the ranch is that we acknowledge that reality is what it is and take personal responsibility for functioning within it, where these other morons and losers take no responsibility for anything. They can be spotted from a great distance, or at least heard from a great distance, because they share the same pet phrases, like "Well it looks like it ought to..." "Well people say that..." "Well, it's generally conceded that..." "All men/women are..." and my favorite, "But I'm ONLY human." Such phrases are the leper's bell of an approaching loser butt-nugget who will not get with the program but expects you to get with it for them.

Personal responsibility not only allows, but compels a person to assess their situation and take steps to improve it. Those who take personal responsibility see the world around them and mold it to suit them through action; they don't need to fabricate some fantasy to validate their pathetic excuses.

That's what being human is about, and why we are at the top of the food chain of all life on this planet. Being human is not something for which we should apologize; it's something to which we should aspire! And reality, for all its punishment and rewards, is the court in which our achievements or lack thereof are judged.

Take care,
David Cunningham

Can you see where personal responsibility works in your favor, and failure to take it works against you? No woman will feel love or attraction for a man who can’t take personal responsibility for his life, at least not for long. A man who doesn’t value his own life enough to take responsibility for it will make it plain that he can be nothing more than a dependent, and never a partner.

A woman’s maternal drive may engage and try to nurture such a man, but she will also be “wearing the pants in the family,” and in her eyes, he will be no more than a weak, grab-asstic adolescent slacker, definitely not a candidate for intimacy or capable of creating attraction for her. Eventually she will get bored and look outside the marriage for relief from that boredom, and it won’t matter if it’s before or after the divorce, because she will feel justified and entitled.

Compare this to a man who does take personal responsibility. Like the butt-nugget (Shelley’s term for a person who doesn’t take personal responsibility), his situation is of his own making, but the man who takes responsibility will use that situation to define his options in achieving his goals and go after them, not just in his relationship, but in all aspects of his life. His bearing will be confident and heroic, where the slacker’s will be victim-like. I’ll give you a guess as to which one creates attraction and which one has the woman secretly (or even overtly) looking at the online personals and smiling at strangers.

(Men, the same applies to women, with a slight twist. If a woman refuses to take personal responsibility for her life, it can engage a man’s “protector mechanism,” and cause him to think he needs to “save” her. Never allow yourself to fall into this trap; any woman worth having doesn’t need saving. Those who need saving can’t be saved, and will only suck you dry like any other parasite and then move on to their next host.)

I’ll also give you a guess as to which one sees opportunity as seizes it and which one sees opportunity and says, “But what if it doesn’t work?” Which of those two guys is going to go the farthest in his career? Have the most friends? Have the most fun? Have the best marriage? Yep, you guessed it. And BAM! That thought just opened another door!

Do you recall (if you’ve been with me for awhile) me (or maybe John Alanis if you’ve been in the dating world recently, or any one of many motivational speakers) mentioning “scarcity mentality”?

Scarcity mentality is a state of seeing everything in your life as limited and scarce. It makes you hang onto a bad relationship, bad job, etc., because a bad one is better than none at all, where an abundance mentality is a state of seeing everything as a journey to better and better things, knowing that you can create your opportunities and do what is necessary to reach your goals.

Take two people, one with a scarcity mentality and one with an abundance mentality, and give them ten thousand dollars. The one with scarcity mentality will live in fear of losing his money, and will most likely spend it on things that bring him no real value rather than risk losing it, or will never spend it and enjoy it because he’s too busy keeping his options open to ever exercise one of them.

However, the one with the abundance mentality will see the opportunities that cash presents, and use it to make even more money, and will reach financial independence if he is diligent in the conduct of his business, or if someone manages to steal it from him or his market takes an unexpected turn against him, he will say, “Wow! Now I know how to do this right, and can protect myself from it next time. I’m going to raise capital and try it again!”

A lesser man might make it that far, but when faced with failure, have scarcity sneak in on him and cause him to decide, “Well, I’m just not cut out for this, and any business I start is going to fail, so I’m just going to not bother trying again.”

That same thing happens in relationships. People take responsibility, have a great relationship for a while, things go sour for some unexpected reason, and in a fit of emotional weakness, they say, “Well, I had the wool pulled over my eyes, and relationships aren’t worth it after all,” instead of just acknowledging the reality that either they made a mistake or their partner did, or maybe even both of them, and sitting down to discuss it and making repairs to the relationship or exiting to find a better one.

We could explore this subject for hours and still never talk about all of the ramifications of personal responsibility, the lack of it, and the effects of scarcity and abundance mentalities, but instead, I’m going to leave you with this to ponder and search your own life for the answer:

Personal responsibility coincides with abundance mentality, and a lack of personal responsibility coincides with scarcity mentality. It’s consistent, but is there a single cause-and-effect relationship, or does the door swing both ways, meaning, will taking personal responsibility induce an abundance mentality and will an abundance mentality also induce personal responsibility?

Ask the same questions of lack of responsibility and scarcity, and send me your thoughts on all of the above by replying to this newsletter. The point of the exercise is to help you identify ways to improve your life and relationship as well as traps that may cause you to get sucked into a pattern of thought and behavior that could rob you of everything you love before you know what happened.

If your own relationship is in anything less than the best condition it could be in, which is highly unlikely or you wouldn’t be reading this, you have an opportunity right now to take personal responsibility for it, regardless of fault, blame, or any of the other tools of the guilt-inducing parasite, and start making your relationship what best suits your life. You can take on the mentality of abundance with a single simple choice to see that things can be better and you can make them so, to see everything you want as an opportunity instead of a deficit.

If you do, the first step you need to take is to jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and get your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," where you will find everything you need to get your attitude in order, your relationship skills assessed and up to par, and get your relationship assessed and fixed (or replaced with one that works, if you’re one of the unfortunate ones in a destructive relationship). Take it now, because life is far too short to spend it doing, living and being anything less than the best and happiest you can, and this is your ticket to success.

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

Hot Buttons and Low Self-Esteem, a Combination Deadly to Life, Relationships, and Marriage

One of your fellow readers feels so bad about himself that he can’t see the simple truth in front of him, a truth that would allow him to be a happy and popular man. Read as he turns around and gets it right…

I’ve been recycling a lot of newsletters lately because many of you are new, those who have been around could use the review, and quite frankly, there hasn’t been anything new to write about, as the array of problems and solutions for relationships and marriages is really much smaller than you might think, and it’s a gross waste of time for me and boring and unproductive for you for me to reinvent the wheel every day. But today, we have a winner.

I’ve written several times about comments received when readers end their subscription to this daily newsletter. The vast majority are either changing their e-mail address (which you don’t really have to do, since if you click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom and follow the “change information” link on the unsubscribe page you can just change the address without having to unsubscribe and resubscribe with the new address) or they’ve achieved such success that they don’t need the daily support any more; many of those say they check my blog on the weekends looking for unfamiliar articles and new products. But once in awhile, BAM! A comment that makes for a great newsletter.

Such is the case today. A young man happened to sign up just in time to catch a series of newsletters about female boredom and recognized it as his problem, but his frustration level was so high and self-esteem so low that instead of seeing the lights turn on to illuminate his path to improvement, he heard the gavel rapping against the judge’s bench as he was convicted of being boring and sentenced to life without the company of a woman. Read his comment and you can really feel his anger and pain:

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: Matthew (Name changed to protect his privacy)
Email: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com
Signup Date: 02/12/08 05:00 AM Eastern

Comments:
Well, because I was very frustrated from reading the mails and reading that women are so bored of people like me.

Never had any success with women, except when I was drunk. I am 28 years old, and last 8 years have been full of delusions, insuccess and the utter ruin of myself, all because I focused on women.

I have enough problems happening in my life now than to be bashed continuously by your mails David, saying that basically I am an inadequate man because I cannot attract women.

If I have to destroy what I am to get a woman, the hell with them.

I’ve never stood in this man’s shoes, but I’ve stood next to him often enough, especially in helping all of you, that I could tell that he wasn’t just spouting punitively, but reaching out for help. The clue was that he took the time to state his problem and his history instead of just making some simple statement that I had angered him. You REALLY have to keep a level temperament and an open, rational mind to do this job, because as you may already realize, people with relationship problems can be highly emotional and not be able to clearly communicate their needs.

Luckily for all of us, the state required to do this job well is my natural state, so I wrote back to him:

Greetings, Matthew,

I have never bashed you, I have in fact encouraged you and given you what you need to feel better about yourself. And if you will continue reading for a moment, I'm going to help you.

What you seem to be reading is that you need to change for women. That is absolutely the opposite of what you need to do, and I have stated that incessantly and consistently. You need to change how you see yourself and what you DO, not who you ARE. And you need to change for YOU, not them. You need to focus on YOURSELF, not women. That is the reason you have failed, and the reason you only have success when you are drunk. Bear with me...

The primary side effect of alcohol consumption, aside from inebriation, is to interfere with nerve activity in the part of the brain that provides inhibition and discipline. Hence, when you drink, you return to that "I don't give a crap what others think about me, I'm going to have fun just being me and being a man" mode that you were born in. Then when you sober up, you return to "programmed" behavior that causes you to focus on women and try to please them, which they find boring because every man does it and it makes a man look like he's seeking their approval instead of just having fun and inviting them along for the ride.

It's not YOU that you need to change; it's your idea of what it takes to get along with women. You don't have to cater to them, defer to them, chase them, or follow them around. You focus on your own good time, and they will see that, see that you don't pursue them and simply enjoy them and having fun with them, and they will pursue you simply because you are above the other guys, above trying to get their attention.

That is what I have been explaining in my newsletters, what a large portion of my book is about, and what I have been encouraging you to do. Your low self-esteem because of your lack of success with women has made anything that you do wrong a hot button, and upsets you before you get a chance to realize that being popular with women is a whole lot easier and a whole lot more fun than trying to chase them while considering yourself unpopular with them.

I write about a lot more than boredom. I do spend several days at a time exploring various aspects of topics, and the last several days have been about boredom. I also talk about communication, leadership, naughty play, attraction building, selecting good women and avoiding bad ones, and a whole lot more, and you would be doing yourself, not me, a favor by resubscribing and hanging with the program for awhile. I'm not here to make you feel bad about yourself; I'm here to help you shed the programming and misconceptions that make you feel bad about yourself so you can feel good about yourself and have women feeling good about you as well. It's your move. Make it a good one.

David Cunningham

Apparently that was what he needed to wake up and see that his problem was fixable, or at least that someone was willing and able to help him. He replied to that e-mail quickly:

Hi David,

First of all let me thank you for the mail you have sent me. I appreciate very much the fact you have spent time to write a mail for me, and this had me reflect upon your points.

I am facing a difficult period, where I am basically paying for all my careless behaviour of the last five years. In the sense that I have stopped focusing on myself, my career, and I have let everything slip away. All because my frustration with women did not let me reach that tranquility that is the prerequisite for happiness.

I totally agree with what you say, and I have bought THE Man's Guide To Great Relationship And Marriage. I believe it can help me on my way to regain my lost confidence and my wrong idea about women.

Thanks Dave, I will let you know how it progresses.

Matthew

He gets two demerits for calling me “Dave” (I really don’t like that and never did, but in his defense, he didn’t know that, otherwise it would be ten), but he gets major points for stepping up to deal with the problem instead of being the typical wuss who is looking for someone to blame for his problem or validation for his mistakes instead of a solution. I’ve not heard from him in the last few days since I received this, but in this business, silence consistently indicates that somebody is succeeding, because they seldom write to the problem-solver when they’re handling their problems satisfactorily and don’t have questions. They either write with questions or to say that they have fixed the problem and offer thanks for my help.

So does any of this sound familiar? Do you remember having a much easier time with women when you were younger and more free-spirited, or inebriated? If so, loosen up and enjoy your life instead of trying to cater to hers. It will relieve stress for both of you, especially if you know what she enjoys and you happen to choose things that both of you enjoy.

Have you found yourself getting mad at your wife when she tries to tell you that something is bothering her? Stop taking it that she’s telling you that you’ve failed and recognize that she’s telling you how to succeed instead of hooking up with another man who already knows how. You know all too well that she has that option, and you should respect both her and yourself when she chooses to talk with you about problems instead of exercising that option.

Oops, maybe you don’t know how to interpret what she’s telling you about problems, or even how to recognize that she is. Did you know that if she asks you if you think everything is going okay in your marriage that she’s actually telling you that she thinks things are going badly and wants to talk about it? What else have you been missing?

Have you noticed that there is a lot of competition over who’s right, or whose idea is best, or whose way something is going to be done? If so, do you recognize that this competition could indicate simple frustration and punishment on her part, which is entirely fixable, or deep compatibility problems, which are not? Would you know how to tell the difference?

I do, Matthew is about to, and thousands of others have learned how. I have their unsolicited testimonials to prove it. Here’s one I got today, literally when I sat down to write this edition:

Hi David,

First, I want to thank my ex-wife, for turning me on to your program. And while you may not advertise it as such, it IS a program. The book is only the first part of it. After reading the book, continued reading of the newsletters provides both a refresher of subjects, and support to help kick the old habit of being a wuss-bag. I continue to hone my relationship skills by reading the newsletters. It is like AA for wusses (WA?) – “Hi I’m Andrew and I’m a wuss”. But I’m NOT anymore. And that is thanks to you, your research, your “program”, and your continued devotion to helping men and women bridge the gap between their different views on life and relationships.

You’ll be happy to know that after 14 months of separation, and being divorced for 10 months, I am moving back in to my house with my ex-wife and children. So, there is another success story for you. I’m not sure I would have gotten here so quickly, if ever, without you. Thanks again.

Andrew

His wife divorced him, then turned him on to this newsletter and my book. Sometimes women will take extreme measures to communicate that there is a problem when the basic method (“Are you happy with our marriage?”) doesn’t work. Would you know how to tell if she was really done with you or if she wanted to work with you to save your marriage, even after a divorce? The clues are subtle, but easily identifiable and 100% reliable, if you know what to look for, and I can teach you that, too.

I don’t know if Andrew is saying he was separated for 14 months before the divorce and 10 months since then or if the whole thing happened in 14 months, but good grief, Gentlemen, either way, he’s going back home! This stuff isn’t rocket science, and the testimonials like this one (not to mention the utter absence of refund requests) prove that it works for those who simply use it.

So what about you? Are you going to wait until you’ve been kicked out of your home for a year and divorced before you take some personal initiative and make things right? Andrew is living proof that it can be done, but why go through all that hassle – and attorney fees – of a divorce when you can fix it now, while it’s so much easier. Help will cost you enough to buy a meal; a divorce will cost you enough to buy a new car ($27,000 average in the U.S., according to the last survey I read) just to cover the legal expenses, not to mention moving, rent and utility deposits, etc. I strongly suggest you get with the program, Mister, before you find out that “Hell hath no fury like a woman ignored” and pay heavily for the education.

How? Easy. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and spend a couple hours reading (four if you’re a really slow reader). The lights will come on, you’ll see your mistakes and how to fix them, and life will very quickly become good. Very good. So as I told Matthew, do yourself a favor. It’s your choice, so make it a good one, and make it NOW.

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, 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.

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, 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 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 need to negotiate 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 ran 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 have to read the book to do it.)

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; what 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 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, and 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

What Are Outside Influences Doing to YOUR Relationship and Marriage?

Is your environment, especially the part of it you choose and create for yourself, increasing or killing your attractiveness? It’s easy to tell by taking a good look around you, if you know what to look for. Do you?

Let’s take a look at your living and work environments to see what they may be doing for you, or TO you. Much of male attractiveness is the direct result of attitude, self-esteem, and confidence, and your environment can impact those things directly, so it can impact your attractiveness directly.

Feeling good about yourself requires that you take action to succeed, which in turn requires that you feel worthy of success and motivated to go after it. How does your environment affect you in this regard? Everything around you can impact you, so let’s look at some of the big ones to give you a feel for what to look for, and you can refine your search from there. Let’s start with music.

Yes, that’s a biggie! Even if you aren’t listening actively, it’s still there, being interpreted and assimilated, and there are subconscious mechanisms that act upon what you hear, so what are you exposing yourself to? First, what do you choose to listen to? If it’s depressing, as a lot of alternative rock, death metal, and some country and honky tonk, ballads, and of course, blues can be, it’s working on you. In my own experience, Michael Bolton was a great guy, according to pop culture, but his music was so depressing that I couldn’t listen to it, and while I like some of the instrumental portions of Iron Maiden and Metallica, the death-oriented lyrics of many of their songs make me want to just shake somebody and tell the to wake up and get a clue. (The same goes for the angry-sounding rap that glorifies rape and cop-killing; fortunately, this isn’t all rap, just the worst of it.)

I grew up in an area where country, bluegrass, and honky tonk music was popular, and at that time, country music was all about trouble. Even if somebody had something good to say in a song, it was in the context of missing it, or somebody else having it and wishing they could have it. I can remember even as a small child wondering why people wanted to listen to songs that spoke of people hurting each other, breaking up, divorcing, being lonely, etc., and I could see that those who listened to depressing music were depressed. That made me wonder which was the cause and which was the effect. I learned later in college that it goes both ways, and once in the rut, it forms a feedback loop that sustains and even amplifies itself.

Even if you’re not choosing what you listen to, as in cases where you have piped-in music in your office that someone else chooses, or have a partner or a child that tends to dominate the household music listening (which luckily isn’t as bad these days since personal computers and I-Pods make private listening much easier), you may consciously just ignore it, but your subconscious mind ignores nothing. Hence, the music you expose yourself to, at least with regard for helping you to maintain a positive attitude and good self-image, needs to be fun, uplifting, motivating, etc., providing at least some positive influence; at worst, it should be attitude neutral, like some form of light instrumental or dance music.

What about television? Do you watch informative shows that help you feel better-prepared to achieve? Comedies to help break the tension? Heroic adventures to see the good guys kill the bad guys and go home with the girl for “gratuitous whoopee”? Or do you watch sad stories, a.k.a., “human interest” stories, where the object is to pull you in to feeling sorry for the subject? Or nothing but news, which tends to be negative because disaster gets better ratings that acts of heroism? Being informed is necessary, but you have to be careful of the source. How can anyone expect to have a good outlook on life if a good portion of what they see every day is negative? There is obviously a lot you can’t choose, but there is also a lot that you can, so choose well.

Speaking of what you see in the workplace, how is your job affecting your outlook on life? Are you well-suited to your chosen profession and advancing through achievement? Are you appreciated and rewarded by your current employer? Do you enjoy getting out of bed in the morning to start your work day or do you leave home at the last possible minute and arrive a few minutes late every day because you just really don’t want to be there?

High self-esteem comes from achievement and no other source, and in every day life, that means mainly from success at productive work. If your work conditions keep you from feeling like you are accomplishing anything, either in your job or your career, or if it’s swallowing you (as seems to be frequently portrayed on police dramas like “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” or any of the various flavors of “Crime Scene Investigation” where the officers are constantly exposed to the worst elements of human behavior and cannot avoid it because their job is to deal with it), depression and unattractive behavior is virtually inevitable.

Take a hard, objective look at your job and your career, and if it is not satisfying you, talk with a professional headhunter or placement agency, no matter what you do now or think you may be capable of doing. They stay in business by competently matching people with good jobs, and often have aptitude tests and other placement aids they will be glad to offer you on the chance that they may be able to pick up a commission by placing you in a good job. And don’t let the idea of a career change scare you into failing to act. You may be surprised at how radical a career switch you can make but still be able to leverage your experience and be able to make more of a lateral – or UPWARD LATERAL! --move instead of having to start over at the bottom of another career path.

Another huge influence, and the last one I’ll speak about today, are the people around you. Achievers will influence you to achieve, and miscreants of every flavor, being unwilling to do what is necessary to achieve, will seek justification and validation by spreading their defeatist attitude around like a virus.

You know them, the people to whom you announce good news and they insist that all good fortune is either fleeting or something bad must happen to you to pay for your good fortune, and they’re always blaming their sorry life and lack of achievement on limited opportunities and some oppressive entity or system instead of doing what achievers do to make their own opportunities. You may include these people in your circle of “friends,” but they are not friends. Friends don’t try to impede the happiness of friends by trying to negate everything good that comes their way. If you have any of these people around, even if they are blood relatives, get them out of your life before they take you down with them; if they had any interest in climbing out of their funk, they would have done something about it already.

Once you find and eliminate all these negative influences from your life, you’ll find it much easier to maintain that confident, “can’t touch this” attitude that women find so irresistible, not to mention finding your life a whole lot simpler and more enjoyable. When you couple that attitude with a solid working knowledge of how to evaluate relationships, how to effectively communicate with women, and what they automatically respond to with curiosity, excitement, and desire, a great relationship with a great woman is a foregone conclusion, even if you’re not currently with one!

What you need to know about all of that is waiting for you in a single source, my e-book, “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, fully tested and guaranteed to work -- and for less than the cost of a good meal for two at a nice restaurant! Can you afford to ignore such information? NO! Can you use such information? YES! So get clicking, Bub, because life’s too short to waste it feeling lousy about your life, job, and marriage! ;-)

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

Reader Response to Yesterday's "Walking the Matador Walk to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage"

Once again, a student rises to become the teacher, pointing the way to success in all things, including relationships and marriage…

I received this e-mail several days ago. Rick is one of my brightest and most motivated readers, and it's just his nature to hawk something when it works, so excuse the brazen plug for my book. He's results-oriented and achievement-driven, and I can think of very few of you who present such a great example for the rest to follow, so "brazen plug" and all, here's Rick again, commenting on my September 11, 2008 edition about expecting success in your relationship in order to achieve it -- read and learn:

Hey David,

You have no idea how dead on you are with this particular newsletter. This is one of the greatest secrets of life, and for Marcus's sake, I hope he benefits from that revelation.

When you mentioned Maxwell Maltz and his book Psychocybernetics, that really struck a chord with me because I recently read that book, and it's a part of my library. That book is pure genius, and I'm not surprised you met him.

Let me tell you what happened to me: On Saturday, I got a message saying that my temporary work assignment was ending effective immediately. I admit, it was a blow, but I kept my emotions in check. On Monday, I went to my recruiters office to talk about the situation. She was sorry that it happened, had never saw it coming, and said she could send my resume to another company, and I told her to do it [showing authority].

Yesterday I hit the online job boards and called other recruiters on job placement. This morning I talked with the recruiter I spoke with on Monday, expecting her to give me some good news. As it turns out, she set up an interview for me next Tuesday. She also said they usually start people right away and I negotiated a higher salary than my last assignment.

Like your newsletter said, I walked the matador's walk, seeing myself already victorious and I was. Whether it's my job, or any other part of my life, I can sum this up in three simple words: I heal fast. If anyone's reading this and hasn't yet purchased David's book, or is sitting on the fence, I'm telling you: get it NOW. Learn it, love it, & LIVE IT.

Live strong, be well, laugh often, and love much.

Rick.

When you expect good things, your confidence carries you through and inspires others, including irate spouses, to work with you instead of against you. It’s really just that simple.

There's not a lot I could add to that if I tried, so today I'll just let the student be the teacher and leave you to ponder the lesson. And if you decide to take Rick's advice, start at http://www.makingherhappy.com with your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Relationships and Marriage."

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

Walking the Matador Walk to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

Your attitude toward your life, your relationship, and everything else may be more of a determinant of how well they go than the actual effort you put into them. Understand this thoroughly before doing anything else, because you can program yourself for failure even easier than you can program yourself for success, especially in your relationship, because it’s the most emotional issue most of us face every day.

I hope you are enjoying your day, safely of course, but with gusto! Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, I hope you are doing it well and enjoying it, expecting it to work out for you.

Speaking of which, a letter caught my eye last night that triggered a huge rush of analysis and coaching, and I need to share it with you. Meet Marcus:

Good evening David,

I just finished reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and I must say I see many things that I can improve on. It certainly looks like you’ve done your homework, and now I have to do mine and make things happen. Wish me luck, because if this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!

Thanks so much!
Marcus

That last sentence set off alarms and started red flags waving immediately. I wrote the following to Marcus to help him get things in perspective and keep him from tripping himself up:

Hi Marcus!

Congratulations on making it this far; so many people know they have problems but wallow in them instead of fixing them for a variety of reasons, none of them good. If you see what you have to do, you’re already way ahead of the game, because many people’s first reaction is denial; they don’t want to accept that they have caused their problems through the choices they’ve made, which keeps them from realizing that fixing their problems is also a matter of choice and entirely within their control.

I needed to write to you to warn you about something that you did that may seem trivial at first glance but is indeed self-destructive. In the last sentence of your letter, you said to me, “Wish me luck, because if this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!” Take a closer look at this with me…

First, you don’t need luck. You’ve recognized your problem, sought and found help, defined the various components of your problem and have solutions to apply to them that have worked for many other people under similar circumstances. In short, you have the tools, and now must simply use them to enjoy success.

Next, and possibly even more important, is the phrase “If this doesn’t work, I’m screwed!” Do you realize what you’re saying here? First, you’re focused on the possibility of failure instead of the likelihood of your success. Then, to make matters worse, you’ve violated the first rule of self-programming: never use negative language when talking about yourself or your life. Why is that important?

One of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, Maxwell Maltz, wrote about it in his most excellent book, “Psychocybernetics,” in which he describes a subconscious mechanism that automatically and constantly works to move you toward whatever you are focused on. Whether you focus on failure or success, that’s where it takes you. And there’s an even uglier part of that at work here…

The subconscious mind does not process negations! For instance, if I say, “I must not fear,” the subconscious processes that as “I must fear;” hence what you should say in that case is “I must be brave.” Now look at what you said: “If this doesn’t work, I’m screwed.” Your subconscious hears that as “If this DOES work, I’m screwed!” That’s a pretty nasty thought, isn’t it?

You have the tools, and you know they’ve worked for many others. Use them with the expectation that they will work for you, too. If you’ve ever watched a bullfight, even in a movie, you will have noticed how the matador always walks around the ring with the bull acting as if he has already won. Walk the matador’s walk! Know that you will succeed because there is no other possible outcome if you merely apply what you have at your disposal.

In your case, it’s a fixed fight, because what you are working with are triggers to involuntary behavior in her and the scoop on all her best-kept secrets, all the things that she talks about with her girlfriends behind your back and more! All you have to do is learn, think things through, and then follow through.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

Well, Gents, there’s very little that I could add to that, so I will simply invite you to join Marcus and many others in learning and employing the knowledge in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you should download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, because if you’ll look at the calendar, summer is almost gone (for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and the winter holidays are fast approaching. What better gift could you give both yourself and your wife than a new and improved YOU???

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

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

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

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

Hi David,

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

Dane

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

What’s really sad is that the answer to their question is almost always included in their letter, and they’re too emotionally amped up and therefore mentally blind to see it: Dane doesn’t know that it will work for him or that he can do it precisely because he can’t see himself doing it! One of the greatest and most motivational things I have ever heard in my life is, “What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve.” It’s been quoted so many times that I can’t verify for you who first said it, but that doesn’t make it any less true; if you can see yourself doing it, you can make the choice to follow through and get it done, like these guys:

Hi David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
MV

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

David,

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

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

Thank you so much,
Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Thank You Notes with Great Lessons on Relationships and Marriage

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

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

Hi David,

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

Much appreciated,

Karl.

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

Hi David!

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks David,

Dave

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

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

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

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

Do You Want to Be RIGHT, or HAPPY? 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. That’s bad enough when at a social gathering, even worse at work, but what if it’s going on 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. But before I get into that, I have a really great announcement:

I’m in the process of installing and configuring forum software to support this blog and newsletters, where all of you can discuss with me and each other what’s happening in your life, what you’re doing about it, ask questions, get help, etc. It’s a bit more involved than I was told, but it’s looking very promising, so stay tuned for the announcement that all is operational and ready for you to use.

Now back to today’s lesson…

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 question 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, 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 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 to see if there might be a way to fine tune them for acceptable performance, 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 four years, and both were the result of some misunderstanding about the purpose or content of the book (one of which has purchased the same book twice and wanted one of them refunded!). I also have 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 under 0.01%.

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 thoroughly read, is wrong and then asking me for help. Spare me!

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. 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. 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 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 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 marriage out of the jaws of a divorce, his wife is back home, and they’re making long-term career and family plans now. Go back and read the book again, 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 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. 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??? 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 to 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 got the hook-up for ya,” 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 hundreds 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’ve got 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

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

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

Today (July 4th, as I write this) is a holiday here in the United States. I’ll spare you another speech about its significance because I said all that can be said about it in yesterday’s lesson, but we celebrate it by gathering together as family and friends, and the guys do lots of “guy things,” like cooking animal flesh over fire while drinking and swapping stories, and at nightfall we throw everybody in the cars and trucks and head for the nearest fireworks show (many thanks to our Chinese brothers for inventing and continuing to manufacture them!).

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

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

The first thing I saw was a notice that a reader named Ryan had ended his subscription to this newsletter. Ryan had subscribed about two weeks ago, on June 23, and his comment describing his reason for cancelling read:

“NOTHING OF VALUE”

Just below it was an e-mail from another reader, and I about laughed myself sick when I looked up his subscription date and found that it was also June 23, and he submitted the following:

Hello David,

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

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

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

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

Rock on Dude,

Mike

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

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

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

I’m hyper-analytical. You could probably count the original thoughts I’ve had in my life on both hands and a foot, but I can extract the cause and effect equation from any situation quickly and accurately, and it’s painfully automatic. Everything I see or hear first causes me to visualize, then analyze, then look for parallels once the cause and effect is known and logical deductions and projections that can be made from them. (That’s why you never find opinion or theory in my newsletters or books!)

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

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

Do you have any idea how many missed opportunities to deepen and improve your relationship and your life occur as a result of that? Or how many affairs are started because of that? How many misunderstandings it generates?

Don’t be like Ryan. If there’s something lacking at home, don’t go outside to find it before making absolutely sure that it’s not sitting there undiscovered right under your nose at home. Talk to your partner, and listen – or are you able?

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

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

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

I don’t want to get too carried away with coincidences, but if you want to be “like Mike” (to those of you who saw the movie, I swear that’s his real name!), just do what he did. Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your own copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get busy. It took him from June 23 to July 4 – 11 days – to write that letter. How quickly can you turn your life and relationship around?

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

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 14, 2007 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 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. Whining about being over-worked is entirely different from saying that you've assessed risk and it will be in everybody's best interest to bring more resources to bear on the project, so don't think that you're telegraphing weakness by saying that you need something if you really need 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 or the warden at the jail.

Balance may not be the key to all things in the universe, 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 problems 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 especially the children (which many women are unfortunately VERY prone to do) 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 this subject 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 fo 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…

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

How to Program Your Very Own Wuss and Sabotage His (YOUR) Relationship and Marriage

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it’s late in the day before I find inspiration for the content of this newsletter; I prefer to do it as the very first thing after responding to whatever reader e-mails are in my Inbox when I first sit down at my computer in the morning, but the world doesn’t always work the way I want it to. Sometimes I can receive as many as 200 e-mails from readers and not be able to use anything out of them for a newsletter, either because of the appropriateness of the content or not being able to obtain permission to reprint their letter in time (I a stickler for reader privacy).

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

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

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

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

Now here’s the important part. For everyone who didn’t know the difference between a “semi-automatic” and “fully automatic” firearm, they thought that the fully automatic sub-machine pistol shown spraying bullets all over the building was semi-automatic, which is simply the pistol that most police officers carry in their holsters, because the CSI officer erroneously said that's what it was.

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

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

Yes, that lie has been told for decades. Look at what you see on television today. Stunningly beautiful women running around with hopeless wusses and acting like they’re “Studly Do-Right,” totally ignoring the fact that the guys are dressed sloppily, don’t project an ounce of intelligence, sense of humor, social skills, leadership skills, or most importantly, self-respect. Men are consistently shown as being sub-average, bumbling jackasses who can’t make a decision to save their life, and yet they still get the girl at the end of the show, and to beat it all, they cry for joy and thank her for the privilege of being seen with her. (I’m so sick of those commercials for Sonic restaurants making men look like idiots that I joined John Alanis long ago in boycotting Sonic, and wrote them a letter telling them so.)

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

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

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

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

No, they don’t have to be filthy stinking rich to be successful. Wealth is not always a man’s goal. Some men prefer to succeed at fishing, hunting, wood or metal working, rebuilding cars, throwing darts, collecting stamps – you name it. But a man who succeeds at one thing will generally succeed at many things, because he has the formula – and he can demonstrate it to you simply by you being around him.

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

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

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

I asked a bunch of women!

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

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

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

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

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

Can You Ever Be Too Prepared for a Great Relationship and Marriage?

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

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

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

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

Hi Brad!

I’m glad you’re finding my book useful. I’ve had quite a few readers comment that they wish they had been able to read something like that before they ever got into a relationship, and others go so far as to say that it should be required reading in high school. Do yourself a HUGE favor and don’t skip the first part of the book, the part on evaluating relationships. That part works wonders in mature relationships to make sure they have a foundation sufficient to warrant improvement, and it also really shines if you use it as you see a relationship starting to develop and do your validation as you go in and as the relationship develops, so you can get out early if you start seeing red flags. An ounce of prevention is worth several tons of cure when it comes to relationships and marriage!

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

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

David Cunningham

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

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

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

That doesn’t mean it’s too late for any of you. Unlike in Brad’s world, where windows of opportunity are very small, perhaps only seconds long, and the window tends to get slammed on your fingers because there are so many possibilities and little or no vested interest in a relatively new relationship, couples that have been together a couple years have a vested interest (“sweat equity,” kids, real estate, time, life, etc.) in continuing the relationship and will only let it go as a last resort.

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

It’s not hard to do; indeed, much of it is quite natural, and the part that isn’t all that natural is still a lot of fun. Imagine, after all those years of telling those jokes about the genie who could build a bridge from Los Angeles to Hawaii but couldn’t grant a man’s wish to know everything he needed to know about women, you suddenly knew! How would that change your life? No matter how much you think it will, based on the history of my readers, I’ll bet it will still be more than you think, and for the better.

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

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

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

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

A Reader Shows How Small Things Make Big Differences in Relationships and Marriage!

A reader says in this success story that improved communications and noticing the little things, along with a good dewussification, were the keys to saving his relationship and making things hot and fun again. You can do this, too!

I’m getting a lot of success stories daily, which I’m loving because while making a living is the reason I work, helping people make their lives better is the reason I chose this particular pursuit, and it’s still increasing daily. Meet Jason, who first wrote me with some of the most bone-headed questions I’ve had from any reader, took my advice and made an investment in his future, and now he’s one of “us,” a guy who really “gets it” when it comes to having a great relationship the easy way. Check him out:

Hey David,

Well dude I’ve got to tell you that your book was well worth the money I paid for it. Compared to half of all I own, the price of the book was a bargain! As you know, my wife has always told me I was a real jerk, but until I read your book I didn’t know how right she was, she was dead on.

Looking back I’ve made some whopper mistakes in my marriage and am surprised that my lovely wife Daphne lasted 4 years with me much less still loves me. I never thought of myself as a wuss, but looking back I’m surprised my wife didn’t just shoot me and get me out of her misery.

You might remember there were so many problems in my marriage I wouldn’t even know where to begin. The one thing I really regret though is how I treated my wife by simply ignoring the basic things she needed from me. Yeah, I could tell her I loved her, but I never showed her just how much I really did love her.

Thanks to what I’ve learned from your book on how to pick up on those hints and her body language I’m batting near a thousand every day now. Popping up occasionally at home on my lunch break just so I can spend a few extra minutes with my wife is great and she loves all the little extra things I do to give her some special attention.

I can’t imagine how anyone could spend one more day without knowing all they can about the one they love. I know that thanks to your book I’ve gone from first class wuss to a real man and one that turns my wife on just by walking through the door. She loves it when I let out my inner beast because that lets her feel free to turn hers loose as well and when they are both out there is no limit to what can happen.

Thanks again for showing me what a real man can do and how it makes a real woman come alive again.

Jason

Shoot you and put you out of HER misery? Everybody loves a smart-ass!

Seriously, congratulations! Making an investment in your future always pays off as long as the information is good. Apparently this information is, because the 118 couples who helped to test it all kicked their relationships up to notches previously unknown, and readers are writing daily about how much it is helping them.

Women seem like complex creatures, but their needs are not so complex; if they were, humankind would have been extinct long ago. While I’m thinking about it, kudos to your wife for holding out and proving once again that women often give their men ample opportunity to straighten up when they drift off down the wrong path.

Personally, when all these women taught me what makes women tick, and what they want, I was shocked, and for awhile I really thought they were hiding something for some reason, because it just wasn’t so mysterious as what the poets, songwriters, and playwrights have led us to believe over the years, and Gentlemen, I must tell you, they are sick to death of being handled with kid gloves or dismissed as just being bundles of uncontrolled emotion.

They’re different from us, but not so different as you might think…

Women are tough, and while they do get emotional, there is a logic, or at least a predictable rhythm, to their behavior, and once you understand it, they are neither hard to get along with nor hard to live happily and play with. They’re wonderful and fun, especially when you bring out their playful, naughty side by being playful and naughty yourself, in the right amount and at the right times, of course.

Indeed, you may remember when you were first dating the woman you love, how much more exciting and fun things were. How would you like to bring that back?

You can do better than bring it back, you can exceed it, and men are doing it daily with “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” It’s waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com, an instantly downloadable e-book in PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader) format, for less than the cost of a good meal for two at a good restaurant, and as Jason says, that’s a lot cheaper than giving up half of all you own and adding to that legal fees, alimony, etc., especially when you love the woman and want to stay with her to start with!

Download it and get started now and give it your best shot, because no matter where you are in your life, starting over is a royal pain in the butt, and can be a costly one, too! Even if you’ve just lost some of the edge, there’s plenty in there for you, and it’s all easy and fun to do.

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

Learning from Our Ancestors: The Value of Anticipation in Building Attraction and Preventing Boredom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do NOT read past this point until you have full ownership of this concept, Gentlemen: for us, orgasm is the whole purpose of sex. For women, it’s merely the end of it. I cannot overstress how important to your sex life it is, and will remain, for you to prolong the pre-orgasmic activities of sex for your partner to enjoy, because if you don’t, you’ll be done quite literally before she gets started, and it doesn’t take too many unfulfilling and frustrating episodes of that before she shuts down entirely. It would be the same frustration and lack of fulfillment as a woman leading you up to the point of orgasm and then stopping, time after time. You would be missing what you see as the whole point of the encounter, just as she does if you move through it too quickly. And you know what happens when such an itch goes unscratched; sooner or later, somebody has to scratch it.

Never make the mistake of assuming that a woman enjoys the same things you do, especially in the same ways that you do, nor that she doesn’t. They like being naughty like we do, and they like sex as much as we do, but in general they go about it in a very different way for maximum pleasure. For the umpteenth time, communicate, experiment, and find out what works with your partner! Prepare yourself for the greatest revelation you will ever have, a proverbial thunderbolt, and you’ve heard it a million times before:

If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy.

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

If mama is happy, EVERYBODY’S happy!

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

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

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

How’s Your Attitude, and How Is It Affecting Your Relationship and Marriage?

BIG HINT: attitude directly affects relationships of all kinds. Find out what you can do for yours, easily, and why you should bother…

Let’s talk about attitude today, especially how it can affect attraction and your relationship. The vast majority of the women who keep me honest in giving you advice on female perspective have shown me that a positive attitude can create massive, overwhelming attraction FAST, especially when coupled with fun, playful behavior. Conversely, a poor attitude can kill it instantly to such a degree that it can be hard to impossible to bring back until she’s had time to forget it.

Let’s be clear here, I’m not talking about ruining your relationship by coming in once in six months frowning and saying you’ve had a crappy day. Everybody has a crappy day now and then. It’s no license to be abusive to others around you (and that’s another discussion we’ll have soon), but nobody expects you to be “up” 24/7/365. That’s an event, not the by-product of an attitude. What I am talking about is having and keeping the kind of attitude that causes you to treat a crappy day for what it is, just a day when things were difficult to some degree, and expect things to get better and be better because you deserve better and are capable of making them better.

People of both sexes love to be around an achiever, because achievers are at heart romantics: they look inside themselves and around them for the biggest, best and most beautiful that can be found, and they recognize it. Among the several definitions for “romance” found in “The American Heritage Dictionary” are these:

2. A mysterious or fascinating quality or appeal, as of something adventurous, heroic, or strangely beautiful.

3. a. A long medieval narrative in prose or verse that tells of the adventures and heroic exploits of chivalric heroes: an Arthurian romance. b. A long, fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events. c. The class of literature constituted by such tales.

Life for the achiever is about the big, the heroic, the beautiful – about what CAN be done and not what can’t -- and hence the attitude is one that women (and men, in case you’re one of those guys who doesn’t have any friends or a woman who has a hard time attracting a guy!) find exciting and fun to be around, because when things get bad, they’re still looking for improvement, and often looking for a way to make it happen themselves, which involves things like leadership, courage, self-assertion, etc., that women also find incredibly sexy. They keep their wits and sense of humor about them, something women also find incredibly attractive, whether sexually, professionally, or casually.

Really, do you even want to sit at a bar or in a coffee shop or waiting area and try to have a beverage or think while sitting next to some moron yapping about how “the system” is against him? Not just no, but hell no! Neither does anybody else. They gravitate toward that “life of the party sort,” who is the life of the party because they have that positive, attractive attitude that draws people to them like bees to flowers.

Now, what about the other side of the coin? How sexy do you think whining and complaining is? Indeed, chronic complaint is taught by a great many relationship experts as a HUGE red flag. Why? BAD ATTITUDE! Chronic complainers don’t make things happen, they gripe about what others make happen. How sexy can that be? How much fun is such a person? Such a display of bad attitude is an instant turn-off to everyone around, not just members of the opposite sex. You’d better do a quick reality check and make sure this isn’t you!

The most pathetic of all the complainers is the paranoid, the person who, no matter what happens, thinks it’s directed at them if it’s bad and away from them if it’s good. You’ll hear them say the most ridiculous things, like when approaching a traffic light, “That light just turned red because I’m in a hurry,” and when somebody has something good happen to them, says, “it would never turn out that way if I tried it, because good things just can’t happen to me.” Guys, I kid you not, this kind of behavior can make a woman want to live somewhere besides your house about as quickly and as vigorously as finding you in bed with her sister!

A close second (and parallel) to the paranoid is the guilt-ridden, the guy who has mucked up his life and/or career by being deceitful, and projects his own deceit onto those around him. He differs from the generally paranoid because the closer you are to him, he more he expects you to do to him what he’s already done to you and others, i.e., the guy who has had an affair and is constantly in fear that his partner is having one, either on the premise that she’s doing it to punish him or the uglier premise that since he can’t be trusted, nobody can be trusted.

What to do? I hope it’s obvious. Get, and keep, a good attitude, no matter what it takes. Find reasons to succeed and enjoy your life instead of reasons to fail and hate it. If you have self-esteem issues, tackle some things you can accomplish and start building some self-esteem. Achievement builds both self-esteem and character like nothing else can, and once you see that you don’t have to live in a rut and can get things done, it’s much easier to expect that kind of performance of yourself.

If you’ve had a bout with clinical depression and fallen into a habit of griping and keeping a bad attitude, break the habit. If you are currently depressed, find some competent professional help to determine if it is chemical/physiological or a matter of habit/attitude, and get it fixed. Life is too short to spend it roaming around whining and complaining, and it’s too short for the woman (and everybody else in your life) to spend it sitting around listening to you doing it.

You don’t have to be in the Army to be all you can be, and when you’re doing it, and walking into the room with your head up, shoulders back, and sense of humor locked and loaded, it won’t matter if you’re tall, short, hairy, bald, too thin, too fat, or whatever; the woman in your life will see that self respect and respond to it, because in her eyes, you’re the perfect man and you’re hers.

The information and steps you need to be you can be, especially in your relationship, is in the 118 pages of high-quality, tested and proven advice in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It’s an instant download and will fix what ails your marriage or relationship, so go for it! Give yourself and your partner the gift of a better life together, because it’s there for the making, for nothing more than a little time and effort, and it’s fully guaranteed for a year from purchase. It just doesn’t get any better than that, so get to it!

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

Are You Looking for Success or Attention? Being a Man in a 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, 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.

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. I’ll explain…

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 at