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

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

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

David....sorry but I read your lesson about “Comfortably Unhappy” from yesterday and do you realise that was me for a long time before I contacted you, comfortably unhappy? You could use me as a perfect example of how not to do what I did and waste years of your life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather

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

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

They don’t like crises that cause major changes in their life (like divorce!) any more than we do, even though you will see them craving the adrenaline it causes to combat their eternally-tormenting boredom. It is foolish, not to mention catastrophic, to let a little drama convince you that the average woman would destroy her household and her marriage just to get a little adrenaline rush. According to the best information I’ve been able to find, only one in two thousand is that insanely damaged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YOU Can Make a Bad Relationship or Marriage End Well

Sometimes people get into relationships that simply never should have happened and can’t be made to work because the foundation just isn’t there. If you’re in one of these, don’t be afraid of letting go, because life does go on, a lot better than when you’re trapped in a no-win situation.

This is an unpleasant subject for a lot of people, and understandably so, but it’s one that I have to address from time to time because it can’t be ignored. There are a lot of reasons people get into relationships, as well as stay in them, and unfortunately, some of them are really, REALLY bad reasons.

The high and still constantly climbing divorce rates of recent decades bear this out. Couples used to court for a long time to make sure that after the excitement of attraction wore off there was still something for them to base a relationship on, like love, attraction and compatibility, but that has long since past, especially now that premarital sex is the norm rather than the exception.

And I’m not saying that premarital sex is inherently good or bad, or even that it is a cause; in spite of what cleverly misrepresentative statistics suggest, it’s not a cause at all. Indeed, rationally speaking, premarital sex can keep you from marrying someone with whom you are sexually incompatible. Sexual incompatibility is just as big a problem and just as common a cause of divorce as value incompatibility, no matter what your religious affiliation.

Whether or not fornication and divorce are sins and which you would prefer to ask forgiveness for is your concern, not mine. The point I’m trying to make is that people get caught up in the emotions of life, a relationship and sexual issues and make ill-conceived and self-destructive decisions about lifelong commitments that they later find they can’t hold to, because after all that excitement is gone and they have to actually start talking, they discover problems, like their values are diametrically opposed, or their personalities or majority of tastes are at odds, or there is some other compatibility problem that makes for too many points of contention in their life for them to coexist.

It’s a scary feeling when you’re faced with the reality of a bad choice like that, because by the time attraction naturally wears off and a problem is recognized an average of two years has passed, and then another few years are spent trying to overcome problems that are too big to handle and everybody starts being angry at everybody else for not trying hard enough or not being “good enough” to handle it.

That’s utter rubbish, because in reality it’s not about being good enough, but about being compatible enough, but it still causes fights and helps attorneys to get rich getting you out of it, especially when you get with one of the less scrupulous ones who tries to escalate the fighting to create more work and more money for themselves. And there’s a much better way to handle the situation when you realize that, like Andy did:

David, Hello!

I wrote to you many months ago about my ex-wife and how she just walked out on me after 20 years of marriage. She actually did me the biggest favor anyone could ever do, and that I had bought your book to learn what I had done wrong in my marriage! Well things have really changed in my life since I read your book and applied what I have learned!

Your book is a Godsend and it has changed my life! I've met a fantastic woman, her name is Shari. She says that I am the most awesome man she has ever met! She is always coming on to me as if she can't get enough! I've never been so happy in my life! What you teach is so true! A man doesn't have to ever ask for sex, all he has to do is act like a real man!

Thanks for helping me change my life for the better!
Andy

Andy was one of the lucky ones. According to his letters, he and his wife were “comfortably unhappy” for two decades before she left, and when Andy sat down and did a thorough evaluation of what his relationship had been in trying to figure out what went wrong with his marriage, it was clear that it never should have happened to start with. He learned from his mistakes, made a few personal improvements along the way, and now has women chasing him, and is able to pick from all of them the one whom he’ll spend the rest of his life with when she finally turns up, which is what dating is really all about.

Yes, really! Dating is not about trying to “catch” somebody or find somebody that you can make enough compromises with to get them to marry you. It’s about exposing yourself to enough candidates that the right one is finally exposed for you to select! And in the meantime, it’s about learning and having fun, not sitting by the phone wondering if you were “good enough” to get somebody to call you. But…and it’s a big but…

If you don’t feel good about yourself and have the self-esteem, sense of adventure and natural comfort that comes from being happy with yourself, dating is a nightmare scenario, because as these candidates are exposing themselves to you, you’re also exposing yourself, the self that you are not comfortable with, to them. You have to HAVE a life to SHARE a life, right? And you have to love, respect and enjoy yourself before you can love, respect or enjoy anyone else. But as you will see in my book, that’s the easiest part, once you find out how.

So where are you today? Are you happy, or comfortably unhappy? Or are you just plain miserable and scared to death to move on because you think that being unhappy with somebody is better than being unhappy and alone? No matter what shape you’re in, good or bad, it can be better, and as people like Andy will tell you, it doesn’t take much to make it better. Think not? Come to http://www.makingherhappy.com and I’ll prove it to you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lying, Part 3: Lie Detection, a VERY Useful Skill in Relationships and Marriage

Part of determining whether you should attempt to reverse a break-up is determining whether you can trust your partner. Knowing how to detect a lie is a VERY useful skill, even when everyone is truthful!

No discussion of lying in a relationship would be complete without a discussion of lie detection, especially for men, because women are naturally more adept at both lying and its detection than we are; their brain structure makes them more sensitive to “tells” (and are VERY dangerous poker players if they have math skills!) and more creative. It could in fact take years with a woman to determine how her character dictates whether, when, and for what reasons she will lie to you, but chances are that if you are lying to her, you’re already busted whether you know it or not, so let’s level the playing field a bit.

And, by the way, I’m not talking about “leveling the playing field” in the context of helping you to lie, but in determining whether you’re being lied to. Nor am I saying that every woman is a liar and is lying to you; I’m saying that due to brain structure – higher creativity and more advanced communications infrastructure – they are capable of being far better at it than we are. So stop typing that nasty-gram and listen up. ;-)

The following is from an article I first published as part of my crash course in stopping and reversing a break-up, now my “Break-Up Busting 101” free report. I’m reprinting it today both because it gets the job done and because my subscriber list doubles every few months, and many of you have not yet taken advantage of the very valuable information in either of the free reports linked at the bottom of this newsletter or in the right-hand margin of my blog at http://blog.makingherhappy.com/. I strongly suggest that all of you read those two free reports thoroughly; they contain more solid, proven information than a lot of authors’ for-fee products, and they can help you to avoid many of the potential disasters that can befall a relationship as well as start you on the road to recovery if you’re having problems.

Now let’s get into the meat of today’s lesson:

Lie detection is a necessary survival skill in all facets of your life, because unfortunately, there are those who think that lying is a survival skill. It’s not. The truth always ends up coming out, and then on top of whatever mistake you’ve made, you’ve destroyed trust. At best, it's a tactic for stalling the inevitable. The only people who get away with lying in the long term are those who spend their life on the run, bouncing from place to place, customer to customer, acquaintance to acquaintance, and not staying anywhere long enough for anyone to catch them in a lie before they’ve left. That’s not going to work in a long-term relationship, is it?

Gentlemen, the deck is stacked against you from the beginning with regard to lying, because women are better at both doing it and detecting it than men. Both of those advantages come from their more highly-evolved communications infrastructure and skills (as compared to our own). However, since you shouldn’t be lying anyway (statistically, women will tolerate just about anything before they will tolerate a liar, even if they are chronically “factually challenged” themselves), you need only concern yourself with how to detect if and when she is lying.

Making you an expert on the subject would require an entire book, and we only have the space of this article to work within, so I’m going to hit the high spots for you to show you how easy it is if you have good information and then point you to some other very good information which, incidentally, I am not selling. (I am developing a primer on lie detection to include as a free report with my other e-books, and anyone who has purchased “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” at the time of its release will be receiving a free copy if I have your current e-mail address on file.)

First, everyone has heard about how body language can be used to detect lies. That’s true, yet not true. There are many body language clues that indicate both that a person is lying and that they are very nervous about telling an unpleasant truth. When attempting to determine if someone is lying, you must watch for several different indicators and make sure they are all consistently pointing in the same direction.

A person who exhibits a single indication of lying may indeed only be nervous about the truth, have an itchy nose, be trying to cover bad breath, etc., but when the signs start stacking up and you see five or even ten signs that someone is lying, the statistical probability that they are telling the truth becomes such a long-shot that a penny placed on that bet would win you roughly the sum of the world’s oil and currency trade for a day – literally trillions-to-one. So where do you start?

Let’s start with the eyes. The eyes move when the brain does certain things. When a right-handed person attempts to access short-term memory, their eyes will move up and to the left, where if they are lying, which engages a creative center in the brain, they go up and to the right. Oddly, this is reversed in left-handed people. A big clue as to whether someone is right- or left-handed (if you don’t know them well enough to know) is to look for their wristwatch, which will be on the opposite hand, if you can’t get them to write something down for you. (Ask for their phone number, and if they try to hand you a business card, get them to write something on the back like their cellular phone number, business hours, secretary’s name – anything at all will do, just to see which hand wields the pen.)

People also tend to become less animated when they are lying, clasping their hands or crossing their arms when you have observed them “talking with their hands” in most of the rest of the discussion. Liars will also tend to look away from you and even move away from you as they lie, a subconscious effort to try to distance themselves from an uncomfortable situation. Touching the nose and covering the mouth while speaking are classic body language signs, but when you look at these, you’re looking for CHANGE in behavior, not so much the behavior itself. People do sometimes get an itch in their nose, or realize they have bad breath or ugly teeth, or shift their posture because of an aching joint.

It’s because of this that you must realize that it takes several minutes of observing someone to make this determination, not just a quick jab with an incriminating question. You must see enough of how they act when they are speaking normally and truthfully (by getting them to talk about something non-threatening or non-incriminating) before bringing up the subject you think they lied about or before thinking they’ve lied about something they brought up with you. That’s the value of small-talk, something that most men are very, very poor at engaging in because we really just don’t like to talk that much; we prefer to take action. That’s another reason women have such an edge on us; they enjoy small talk and are very good at conducting it, especially in getting to the truth. However…

There are some techniques that can be combined with body language reading that nobody, not even experienced con-artists, can beat. They involve watching for hesitation in response to a question. Let’s say you think your partner was on a date with someone else, and you say that somebody she works with whose name you can’t remember stopped you in the grocery store to say hello and asked how you were getting along after the break-up, and mentioned that they assumed there had been a break-up since she was dating this other guy. If she is innocent, she will immediately protest, because she has no idea what you are talking about, but if she hesitates, it’s because she’s guilty and has to think and make a choice about whether it is safer in that moment to accept that she’s been caught or to try to deny it and bluff through. The hesitation before she speaks, not whatever she says, is what tells the tale.

Another good tactic is a diversionary one. You tell a partner that you know all about something they’ve been doing (that you really are only suspecting), and that you understand how and why it happened and are willing to let that go if they will promise that something lesser won’t be happening again, like hearing it from her friends instead of her. When she agrees to make the promise, which is easier than the confession, she has confessed to the transgression.

Even here, you can still take advantage of hesitation. A person with nothing to confess will immediately deny they did anything, and a person with something to confess looking for an easy way to do it will immediately make the promise or will pause while weighing their chances of getting away with another denial, the only reason for them to hesitate. I don’t care for this particular tactic because it requires lying to detect the lie, but my job is to instruct you, not judge you, and it is highly effective.

People also tend to objectify and generalize when they are lying. A person who really worked late will tell you that they worked until 10:30PM, while someone who is lying is much more prone to say they “worked really late.” Also, they will tend to say, “left MY office” if they were really there, as opposed to, “left THE office” if they were not. Again, this must be weighed with other indicators, as the use of these pronouns can vary because of personality, level of detail-orientation, etc. It’s the change from using words like “my” to words like “the” or the change from speaking actively, like “I did this,” to passively, like “this was done,” focusing on the event or act rather than on them that tells the tale.

There is a book by David Lieberman, PhD, called “Never Be Lied to Again,” that has been on the NY Times Best Seller list and is an excellent book if you really want to dig deep into this subject and become a true expert. I’ve also used a lot of the hand-held lie detection gadgets and computer software that do voice print analysis, but was not impressed; there were too many false positives and false negatives for me to see them as useful tools at the time (the manufacturers’ reports of their own tests indicated that they were proud of numbers like 62% accuracy, which is only 12% better than half the time!). Over time, you can expect these products to increase in accuracy, just as voice recognition software that lets you give input to your computer has improved, but it may not happen until most of us are too old to care.

Communications is a tough subject, even when everyone is telling the truth. There are good and bad ways to ask questions of women, good and bad ways to start conversations, and good and bad ways to end them as well. When you’re already in a stressful situation like a fight or after a break-up, the last thing you want to do is trip over some protocol or miscue that you don’t know about and end up with your foot in your mouth and your signature on divorce papers because of it. Let me help you with that…

Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now, and get with the program. If your relationship is not in crisis, it will show you exactly how to not only keep it from getting there, but how to make it better. If you are in crisis, it will show you how to determine whether you should indeed reverse it or let it go, and if it is a relationship that you should save, it will show you what to do to quickly get things on stable footing and get everyone in a state where they are receptive to working things out and making positive change.

If it shouldn’t be saved, you’ll learn how to turn your combative soon-to-be ex into a cooperative soon-to-be ex who may go so far as to set you up with dates after a non-contested divorce without using control, threats, tricks, or deceit. Seemingly far stranger things have happened to my readers…

I’m sure you’ve heard that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure;” this is about a pound of prevention and it’s worth several tons of cure, and it can be yours for less than the price of a good meal for two, so get it done – or would you prefer to be alone after shelling out that $27,000 that the average contested divorce costs in the U.S.? Or better yet, the $1.8 million paid out over the next seven years and guaranteed with a life insurance policy that I was told about in an e-mail yesterday? I didn’t think so!

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

The REAL Dangers of an Affair Ending Your Relationship or Marriage

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
Maggie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time Is On YOUR Side When Saving a Relationship or Marriage

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

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

Hi David,

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

Buddy G.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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