Rules of Great Relationships and Marriage: Why Making HER Happy Makes EVERYBODY Happy

The explanation of yesterday’s promised “thunderbolt” – Why making her happy makes everybody happy, and what you can easily do to make it happen, automatically and consistently so that BOTH OF YOU enjoy it.

For those who had the bad fortune to miss yesterday’s edition, go back and read it, because it was good and because it sets up today’s edition. We’ve all heard “If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,” (unless some of us have been living under a rock), and we’re all pretty well convinced that it’s a universal truth that will never be disproved. However, have you ever thought about the converse?

If mama is happy, everybody’s happy!

Why would I suggest such a thing? It’s the core of everything I’ve been talking about for a very good reason: it’s incontrovertible reality. Right now, I’m going to help you accept and understand this by explaining why.

It can be quite shocking when you realize how much of how we relate depends upon or is derived from this model (discussed in yesterday’s edition, so once again, if you’ve not read it, go back and do so before continuing here) of “men are hunters, women are gatherers.”

In case you’re not familiar with basic anthropology, here’s the super-short summary: in the earliest days of human existence, before agriculture and for some time after the development of agriculture, men hunted for meat and women gathered fruits, nuts, roots, etc. and raised the children; later, women most likely developed agriculture to have a more convenient food supply. One must remember that during this time, 90% or more of a person’s time was spent in securing a food supply.

We’re talking about a long, long time here, during which women were together, gathering and later farming in groups and learning to communicate, while men were out hunting alone or in small groups that kept very quiet to keep from scaring the game. These activities caused women to evolve to be genetically “wired” to be more social and nurturing, and have more sophisticated communications skills due to their activities causing the more rapid and full development of the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, called the “corpus callosum,” and the right hemisphere of the brain to develop more densely than in men.

They also developed a system of safeguards against nurturing the wrong kind of man. There are biological triggers that turn on this behavior when a woman sees strong alpha male behavior, which causes her to nurture in a manner appropriate to a mate, and in the presence of children; for many women, child-like behavior, such as a “middle-aged adolescent,” causes them to nurture and protect the man as would be appropriate for a mother, taking charge of the man’s life and affairs and attempting to save him in a codependent relationship. So since the process is biological and not logical, it is very difficult for a woman to resist and unfortunately, not foolproof; she can end up nurturing a man who is bad for her, like an alpha male with psychopathic tendencies who beats her, or a middle-aged adolescent with sociopathic tendencies who sucks her dry and moves on to his next host.

Whether you accept evolution as the cause of this difference or not, the difference is there, it’s consistent, and the behavior it creates is consistent; it’s what creates the feminine and masculine aspects of personality and communication skills and style.

Now, the big question: what does this mean to your relationship or marriage?

Generally speaking, women are naturally social, nurturing, and sensitive; men are not so much nurturing as protective. We are naturally loners; even when we’re in groups we often act competitively instead of socially and cooperatively. We are combatants; we tend to deal with problems by trying to overpower them or through other competitive means, not through any nurturing means, often even when it would mean converting an enemy to a friend. And let’s face it, a lot of men are finding out the hard way that women’s natural skill in non-verbal communication makes them superior negotiators and poker players in a great many male-female match-ups.

So how can you put this to work for you?

This is the great secret of relationships that is really no secret at all. If a man will create attraction for his female partner, her response will automatically be to respond with excitement, sensitivity, wife-like (as opposed to mother-like) nurturing, and attractive behavior toward him. She won’t have to put any effort into it, because it will all be triggered by her attraction. It’s biological, and therefore not only automatic, but unavoidable (which is what gets women in trouble with predatory users, abusers, and losers who have mastered attraction tactics and use it mercilessly to attract and hold their victims.) Why?

To fully understand and accept this, you must understand the intensity of attraction. The only good way I can explain this to men is to call your attention to what happens when you start feeling intense attraction, when you reach that point where you MUST have sex with a woman and then MUST experience orgasm with her. It is different for women in that attraction for us is mostly (but not entirely) a matter of visual perception and happens very quickly while for women it is actuated by a combination of a lot of triggers that confirm your status as an alpha male.

It is therefore built much more slowly, but if you can recall the thrill and urgency of that attraction and your desire to maintain access to the woman who creates it, you can then have at least a partially accurate frame of reference for the intensity of what women feel; for them, it is even more intense because those feelings build more slowly and have time to create more excitement. Also note that while our excitement creates an intense urgency that is satisfied after the orgasm, theirs creates less urgency but more emotional intensity, making for a longer-lasting effect.

One other thing that you should note is the effect of the hormone oxytocin (do not confuse this with the pain medication, oxycontin). Oxytocin is called “the cuddle hormone,” and it facilitates a mother bonding with her children and her husband. It is released in small amounts during physical touching, especially stroking the skin, and is released in large amounts after orgasm. It therefore follows that taking the time to build attraction for a woman to ultimately increase her excitement, desire, and arousal to the point where she can then experience orgasm (simple physical stimulation is seldom if ever enough for a woman – attraction must happen first) on a regular basis, she will be more apt to remain happily married.

It also means that not allowing that post-orgasmic cuddle that most women want is a REALLY bad move, guys. REALLY BAD. The woman you love is at that point overwhelmingly driven to snuggle up to you, and if you reject her at that point you might as well just call her some really ugly names and slap her, because it would have the same effect. Besides, in case you’ve forgotten, it actually feels pretty good to have a woman snuggled up to you, remember? So hang around for a few minutes instead of dashing to the bathroom or falling immediately to sleep. You may be surprised at the response that small consideration will bring.

So yes, in spite of what the politically correct would have you believe, sex is indeed a very important part of marriage and of a mentally, physically and emotionally healthy woman’s life (trauma, hormonal issues, chronic pain, etc., can interfere, but this is the exception, not the rule, so never assume this is the problem), and if it slows down or even stops, trouble is coming, if it’s not already upon you.

The bottom line? Make the effort to become the confident, attractive alpha male that will light her fire and keep it lit and you will start a largely self-sustaining chain reaction that will keep the two of you intimate, excited, and happy for years to come. The choice is of whether to have or lose this happiness is yours, so make the obviously good choice, and follow through. Everything you need to know to make it happen is in the pages of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com and get started, because the journey is fun, and the destination is one to live for.

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

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

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


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


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


Dear David,


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


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


Thank you,
Tia


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi David,

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

John T.

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

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

Gary

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

Hi David,

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

Janelle

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

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

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

2. Cancer, especially of the breasts and reproductive organs

3. Allergies and reduced immunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-Term Effects of Health and Hormones on Your Relationship and Marriage

One of your fellow readers, a very sharp physician and personal friend, has an extremely important observation to share on the subject of hormones and female behavior.

Hopefully you read the last couple of newsletters describing the experience of a woman over-dosed on testosterone and her reaction to feeling male drives and experiencing male brain activity. If not, you can read Part 1 and Part 2 to get caught up before moving to the advanced lesson provided by Dr. Frank:

David....the problem goes beyond injections as you know. As young men, our hormones are high and many of us are sexually out of control. However, as we get older, our testosterone wanes and we become more like women. We become less aggressive. We settle down. We look more towards family life. We probably drop our guard in the boudoir.

Women, on the other hand, as their female hormones wane later in life, are faced with increasing testosterone levels relative to their estrogen. Women become more aggressive, more independent, more logical and less emotional to a degree, and, of course, their sexual appetite increases as you can see from your other reader’s letter. Hence, our bodies’ hormone levels and associated behavior are not in sync for most of our lives. This obviously lends credence to the 'seven-year itch (actually, 4-7 year itch). It also supports what we men fear most....that women can actually be just as sexually aggressive as we are...maybe even more as they get older.

It behooves your men to stay with your book so they can navigate this “reversal of fortune,” lest they find that their wives are satisfying their urges elsewhere.

Frank

Frank has thought this through quite logically and thoroughly (I’ve spoken with him several times and his personality is such that irrationality or shoddiness just isn’t within him), and you Gentlemen, and Ladies, should pay attention, and continue thinking, because now that the door is open, I might as well tell you that it goes even farther than this.

Male menopause is no myth; our hormones slow down at mid-life just as women’s. We don’t stop manufacturing sperm cells, but our growth hormones (pituitary and thyroid) and adrenal hormones (testosterone, epinephrine, cortisol – a.k.a., hydrocortisone, androsterone, and others – basically metabolic and gender-influencing) slow more rapidly as we age. Our brain structure does not change, so we do not pick up the female benefits of heightened communications skills and creativity, but we do slowly become more susceptible to the vulnerabilities estrogen creates in women, those of over-driven emotions, irrationality, insecurity, fussiness (even to the extent of drama), and lack of aggressiveness, even when it’s needed.

And as we lose some of the benefits of our masculinity, women gain them without losing some of the benefits of femininity; their communications skills and creativity are due to brain structure caused by estrogen early in life, not by on-going exposure to estrogen. Declining estrogen does not decrease their left-brain density, which facilitates their creativity, nor does it shrink their corpus callosum, the bridge between the hemispheres of the brain that gives them heightened communications skills and other things. BUT…

The change in their balance of estrogen to testosterone does do exactly as Frank described, making them more aggressive and less erratic, more rational, and often MUCH lower-maintenance with regard to drama, so much so that they may get tired of YOUR drama if your testosterone levels fall too far.

And the kicker, their libido will be climbing as your declines. And as they become more aggressive and their libido increases, they will be needing more from you in the bedroom, not less. Diet and exercise can do a lot to help in this regard, as can getting off of statin drugs and soy-ridden foods that raise your estrogen levels. Pregnenolone (the master adrenal hormone that is broken down into all the others), DHEA (the precursor to testosterone, and is a metabolite of pregnenolone), and testosterone itself can also be safely substituted with bio-identical hormone supplements, if required.

For those of you on statin drugs and concerned about stopping them, there is no medical proof whatsoever that statin drugs reduce blockages or heart attacks. Furthermore, high cholesterol is a symptom of low thyroid and/or adrenal output, not heart disease; cholesterol is the root of all the “sterol” (basically the hormones ending in “rone” or “sone”) hormones; too much of it means it is not being converted to the hormones we need, which in turn cause a lot of other health problems in addition to demasculinization.

The blockages associated with high cholesterol are in fact the result of either too little vitamin C in the body causing malformed collagen chains that weaken blood vessels or too much of the amino acid homocysteine eroding the wall of vessels at bends and junctions; each of these problems result in small fissures that hemorrhage and are clogged by LDL cholesterol, just like radiator “stop-leak,” and the bit of cholesterol that protrudes into the vessel collects more cholesterol and minerals that eventually build up to a blockage.

If you stop the hemorrhaging with proper diet that provides sufficient vitamin C and the B vitamins that keep homocysteine levels down and get even a modicum of exercise, high cholesterol is not an issue, let alone a threat, except as an indication of pituitary, thyroid, or adrenal issues, which can be life-threatening, as they DO lead to insulin resistance, and then diabetes, which brings high blood pressure (high blood glucose inflames the lining of blood vessels which decreases their diameter and raises pressure), severely impaired immune system, kidney failure, neuropathy, blood clots, amputations, and blindness, to name a few things. And yes, demasculinization, too.

So what do you do about all of this? We’ll talk about women in a minute, but for your health, I STRONGLY suggest you do not rely on mainstream medicine. Doctors don’t have the time, resources and energy to do their own research, and have to rely on the information provided by the drug companies. The information from the drug companies is SALES information. The studies they conduct on their drugs are to see if they can get it approved, and if it will make enough money to offset the lawsuits. Most doctors realize this to some degree and are willing to discuss treatment if you can bring them better information.

I am about to list the resources I personally use, and I do not have any affiliate or other arrangement with these resources and receive no benefit of any kind for recommending them. First is www.stopthethyroidmadness.com. Read their book even if you think you are the picture of health, because if the symptoms of thyroid problems start showing up, the overwhelming evidence is that your present doctor will NOT be able to treat you; they rely on lab tests that don’t indicate the effectiveness of the treatment and a treatment that provides only one of five thyroid hormones, a storage chemical that is supposed to be converted to the other forms and in many people, is not converted because of any one of many possible problems.

Long-story-short, as goes your pituitary-thyroid-adrenal functions, so goes your health in general, and mainstream medicine is not up to speed, while the doctors, researchers and patients that contribute at www.stopthethyroidmadness.com are compiling real-world results from real-world treatments and sharing the facts of their unsuccessful and successful treatment attempts. I recommend them because they very probably saved my life after spending years using mainstream treatments for an inactive thyroid and gaining weight, becoming diabetic, and watching my blood pressure go to 285/140.

In addition, I subscribe to several relatively inexpensive medical newsletters written by doctors who have dedicated a significant portion of their careers to research and have patient results to watch and report on. First is David Williams, MD, a globe-trotting pioneer and whistle-blower. He sells a lot of supplements to help fund his research, but his newsletter is highly informative and 100% factual. He’s at www.drdavidwilliams.com. I’ve subscribed almost non-stop for 20 years; breaks were mainly caused by being out of the country.

Another is David Brownstein, MD, possibly the world’s single top authority on the thyroid and one of the advisors at www.stopthethyroidmadness.com. His newsletter is excellent, factual, and easy to read. He’s at http://www.drbrownstein.com and has a great blog, newsletter, and several excellent books.

Russell L. Blaylock is another I highly recommend. I have over 60 editions of his newsletters on hand and expect I’ll be continuing this subscription for a long time. Another that is factual, thorough, and easy to read. He’s at http://www.blaylockreport.com.

There are some rather ridiculous blog posts that show up on Google searches of these sources, claiming they are frauds and fakes, but when you dig into them, you find that the people decrying them take issue with them selling supplements, or the fact that they are owned by a politically-leaning magazine, or just about anything else except that they quote and use verifiable studies to come to logical conclusions that make people healthy. In other words, if you’re going to fire a doctor, do so because he’s hurting you or can hurt you, not because you don’t like his politics or the way he dresses. And the same thing goes for keeping one; don’t just keep one because he gives you plenty of prescription drugs; keep him because he makes you healthy, and treats disease as a disease, with a cause to be cured, instead of a deficiency of medication.

One other resource I recently discovered and highly recommend is Jon Gabriel’s book, “The Gabriel Method.” It’s working wonderfully for me and several others whom I know. Even the guy’s story of what brought him to write his book is fascinating, from over 400 pounds to a trim 182, and unlike dieting methods, the longer you follow his program, the FASTER the weight falls off and you get in shape. Catch him at http://www.jongabriel.com.au, where he has a free newsletter, and you can buy his book on Amazon.com for about $11.00, but I bought his whole audio series and a copy of his book and the audio CD’s are great.

Giving total responsibility for your health to a doctor is like giving total responsibility for your safety to a police officer; it’s not their job to accept such responsibility. It’s your body, you live with it, and if you don’t take care of it, you will die. Period. Your health and personal safety are responsibilities that you should never, ever delegate. Be knowledgeable and prepared to handle whatever comes up. That’s what men do, right? And if you hesitated for even a second before an emphatic “YES!” came to mind, you and I really need to talk, because you’re farther gone than you realize.

As for what to do about women as they become older, first, look forward to it. They are far more enjoyable as they mature; indeed, I would not be surprised to find out that is why a lot of men prefer to date and marry women who are older than them. Second, learn all you can about typical male and female behavior. This will allow you to watch yourself for signs that your masculinity is waning so that you can do whatever is required to safely and effectively address the problem, and it will also allow you to be prepared for the evolution of your partner to a more secure and even aggressive woman.

Dr. Frank points out that a lot of men fear sexually-aggressive women. Why? Don’t we spend most of our lives WISHING women were more sexually aggressive? I can tell you from your letters that most of you are WISHING your wives were at least more sexually active and would be thrilled if they were indeed more sexually aggressive. Exciting your wife to the point that she becomes sexually aggressive is one of the cornerstones of what I teach, so if you’re afraid of it, you’d better wake up and get busy, because whether you want it or not, at some point, it’s coming, no matter what.

The good news is that as I’ve been explaining, it is indeed something to look forward to, not something to fear. The worst thing for most of you is performance anxiety, which is treatable with either some knowledge (write to me at tips@makingherhappy.com if you are the least bit dissatisfied or uncomfortable in the bedroom and I’ll point you toward some great resources), some testosterone, or getting your diet and exercise overhauled into something fit for a man instead of a couch potato who lives on deep-fried starch.

The rest of it requires simply knowing yourself, knowing your partner, being sensitive to changes in either, and knowing what to do. All of that is moot if you’re not getting along well enough today to stay together. You can learn about handling all of that from my newsletters, but you’ll find that you can learn A LOT MORE A LOT FASTER if you read MY book, "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," as those who have read it have already found out. And you can see how much I share in these newsletters, so imagine how much is in my book! It’s waiting for you at http://www.makingherhappy.com and every minute you spend without reading it is a minute spent at your own peril, without resolution for everything that has brought you here, so read it today. The clock – analog, digital, biological, or whatever – is ticking, and you can stay ahead of the game or spend ten times the effort playing catch-up. It’s your call, so make it a good one.

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

A Woman Lives Briefly As a Man, and Teaches a BIG Relationship and Marriage Lesson

EXCLUSIVE MUST READ! A female reader gets an accidental overdose of testosterone and spends a couple of weeks feeling what many men feel every day, and there are lessons for all in her experience!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is HUGE. One of your fellow readers, Daphne, whom we’ve heard from before on a couple of occasions, is 40 years old and using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after a total hysterectomy. The strangest thing happened!

For those of you who don’t know a lot about endocrinology, after a hysterectomy or menopause (which are in fact the same ultimate effect, as a hysterectomy causes sudden-onset menopause due to the loss of sex hormones produced by the organs and glands removed), women are often given a cocktail of hormones to try to replace the ones that were produced by the organs that were removed.

Many claims are made about preventing osteoporosis and other things, but the only thing that estrogen HRT has been clinically PROVEN to do is curb hot flashes and some forms of it (especially the one derived from horse urine, called “equione,” which is estimated at 1,000 times the cellular reproductive power of human estrogen) have also been proven to raise a woman’s chance of contracting cancer, especially if her HRT regimen includes synthetic estrogen (like equione) or high doses of natural estrogen.

What is not common knowledge is that testosterone, the male hormone, is also needed and used by women to combat fatigue, heighten libido (it’s the only true aphrodisiac known to science), and actually does help with the formation and repair of bone and tissue. Indeed, estrogen is a metabolite (a by-product of the metabolism of) of testosterone; men metabolize more as DHT and other non-estrogen substances, while women metabolize more as estrogen, which is needed by all for cellular reproduction but in higher doses causes the femininization of the body, including the brain, skin, and other non-sexual organs.

When women have significantly too much testosterone for an extended period, it causes their voice to deepen, facial and other body hair to grow, libido is put into overdrive, and they get more aggressive; a lesser overage will cause minor symptoms like being less creative and more analytical, more calm and less fussy, a more masculine communications protocol (speaking more directly and less in tune to non-verbal messages, among other things), less emotionally-driven, more aggressive, etc.

This woman was given a dose that was determined to be WAAAAY beyond her natural tolerance in an injection, and she describes an experience that you simply must read for yourself. There are multiple lessons, some not so obvious, for both men and women in this letter, but I’m not going to go into those until tomorrow; putting everything in one newsletter or blog post would make it too long for most of you to be comfortable with or have time to read. In the meantime, I challenge you to read this letter and see what lessons you can derive from it yourself, and if you wish to share your observations, simply reply to this newsletter or write to me at tips@makingherhappy.com and don’t forget to indicate whether you want your observations shared with the other readers.

Without further ado, here again is Daphne, with a tale that you really should study, because she has a unique perspective after this experience, possibly the only woman alive who has lived feeling the male drives and testosterone-driven emotions to this degree, and her reaction to them contains the biggest lesson of all:

Dear David,

All my life I have heard people say if you could walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you would not be so fast to judge them. I have to tell you of such an experience that has proven this to me, and this was so serious I felt like I should share part of it with you. I will be giving you only a small portion of what I went through, but I hope it will be enough that you will understand that I really know what it feels like to be a man.

I’m 40 years old, had a hysterectomy twelve years ago, and a few weeks ago I went to see my gynecologist about a problem I was having with my hormone levels. Every time I was tested my hormones were lower than the doctor felt they should be, and he made such a big deal of it that I became concerned and made the choice to let the doctor give me a strong shot to see if this could get me back on the right track. In doing so I was given a very large dose of testosterone, which turned my body totally opposite of what I had ever been before. I started to view life on a whole new level.

It started out with me looking for sex everywhere. I was suddenly looking at every man I saw and some women as possible sex partners, and I had never done this, especially toward women! I thought at first I was going crazy. I would sit and look at them and could play out in my head all the thoughts I was having about them and what I could imagine we could do together.

I was also terribly aggressive and easily angered, wanting to get into fights with people who would piss me off and I never wanted to do that before, ever! For example during all this I was pulled over by a policeman and was given a ticket. Now most of the time I would cry or flirt or do whatever I had to get out of it and for the most part that would work for me, but this time all I wanted to do is punch the cop right in the face for being an ass to me.

There were so many changes in my life I could not possibly describe all of them for you right now. The point I wanted to get across is after I went through days of strange feelings and urges I had never had before I told my best friend about them and he looked at me and smiled and told me that all of what I told him about was what a man went through every day of his life until he got old enough for his testosterone levels to drop severely, which he said was somewhere between the late twenties and early fifties, depending on the man, and could be even later for some men.

I was blown away. I called my gynecologist and told him what my friend said and he confirmed that the dosage may have been too high and that I could be experiencing such side effects for several days, but not to be alarmed because they would stop when the testosterone was used and it returned to a more tolerable level.

Ladies if what I went through just for those few days is what a man goes through every day there is a lot more to being a man than we as women think. All I can say is I hope I never go through anything like this again. If the feeling of gladly passing up food for sex is a small part of how they feel then I say give them sex. I will never again tell my love that I do not feel like it or I have a headache for during that short period of time I got mad at my boyfriend for not giving me all the sex I wanted, and want it I did. With every single breath I took I wanted him, and sometimes not just him. When he did not want to give it to me I would look around and wonder where I could get it from.

Like I said, this is only a small part of what I went through and there is much more I could tell you and I might write it all down and send it to you one day, but I am just now starting to get some of the old me feeling like I should again. The main reason I wanted to write this is so that you woman readers might get a little better understanding of what our men go through all the time. I will promise you this before I ever tell my husband no again I will think about the experience I had and how I felt when he told me that he didn’t feel like it.

Daphne

What a story! I sincerely hope that Daphne chooses to share more of this story with us at sometime in the future, but aside from the drama of spending a few days feeling the urges and emotions that many of us men feel every day, there is a HUGE and significant lesson here for men. As I mentioned above, see if you can spot it, write to me at support@makingherhappy.com about it if you feel like it, and if I get the correct response from five or fewer people, a prize will be awarded, a copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and tomorrow I’ll reveal any winners and the big lesson after you’ve had some time to think about it and possibly win a prize!

Speaking of which, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" is available for download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and if you’ll read it diligently and learn its secrets, you’ll have the same inside-out view of women that Daphne got of men without having to have a large dose of estrogen or experience first-hand any of its side effects – an offer you can’t refuse, right?

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

Beware: What You Eat Can Kill Your Manhood, Relationship and Marriage

There are some foods that should never be in a man’s diet (and probably nobody’s diet) because they block testosterone uptake and make him develop female characteristics and tendencies, as well as kill his libido. Yes, I’m serious, and you may be eating a lot of one of them in particular, the worst offender of all…

Those of you who have read my bio know that I’ve got a strong medical background for a non-physician; I’ve also been an herbalist since my teens and shell out about a thousand dollars a year on subscriptions to the best medical newsletters in existence, most of which are written by doctors and researchers who blow the whistle on the fallacies and frauds of mainstream medicine.

One topic that keeps coming up in ALL of these newsletters is that study after study is PROVING (not SUGGESTING) that plant estrogens attach to testosterone receptors and keep testosterone from being utilized in the male body, which in turn causes men to become less masculine, and in too many cases start becoming feminine, even to the extent of having their voice rise in pitch and developing female-like breasts and lactating in extreme cases. And, since testosterone promotes libido in both men and women and skews the rational/emotional balance toward the rational and easy-going, blocking the utilization of testosterone decreases libido and increases stress and drama! BAD IDEA!

(Plant estrogens do the same thing in the female body, which decreases a woman’s libido, and since she already has all the estrogen her body can tolerate, is also being proven to promote cancer, since estrogen’s main purpose in the body is to cause the proliferation of cells, which is normally is balanced by other chemicals in the body until a surplus is created by overactive adrenal glands – which if healthy, can produce as much or more estrogen than a woman’s ovaries – or ingestion of excess estrogen in food, birth control pills, or hormone replacement therapy, especially that using “equione,” literally horse estrogen and 1,000 times more potent than human estrogens– which has also been proven to promote cancer in too many cases and some doctors are now recommending against. Some tests of an HRT using equione were halted early because of an obscenely high incidence of thickening of uterine walls and the sudden onset of cancers.)

The biggest of all offenders is…brace yourself, especially if you are a vegetarian, SOY! Yes, that funny little green bean that tofu is made from, that is served as a sort of trendy Japanese delicacy called “edamame,” that is used to replace carbohydrates in a lot of low-carb foods (my wife tried the Nutrisystems diet for awhile, and I read the labels and was appalled at the amount of soy protein added), and is erroneously promoted as being more healthful than anything else that you can eat.

Don’t take my word for this. A Google search for “soy and testosterone” will give you over a million pages on the subject, including a most excellent book by Dr. Kaayla T. Daniel, a Certified Clinical Nutritionist, called “The Whole Soy Story,” which really blows all the myths about soy to bits. If your wife is fond of soy and trying to feed it to you for every meal, you can at least bring this to her attention and get her to stop pumping you and your sons full of estrogen. (Now there’s a hard thought, having your son’s voice go UP instead of down in his early teens!)

Gentlemen, I couldn’t be more serious if I tried. The evidence has been solid for several years, and I’ve abstained from writing about it because most people just won’t accept facts when they conflict with “common knowledge,” but there is so much overwhelming factual evidence now that it can no longer be ignored, just like people eventually couldn’t ignore that the Sun didn’t orbit the Earth, or that the Earth was round, or that two objects of different mass dropped from a height will strike the ground at the same time as long as wind resistance is constant across both objects, or that men can’t expect women to get excited about them if they’re acting like a woman instead of a man.

There’s not one word about soy or even your diet in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," but I’ve covered everything else that women want you to know about them, and a lot that many of them DON’T want you to know. So to make yourself everything the woman in your life really wants you to be (if she likes men, that is!) get the soy out of your diet and jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage."

(Or keep doing what you’re doing, and when your wife keeps ignoring you in the bedroom, just double up on the soy and then you can fondle your own breasts! LOL!)

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

Sometimes You Have to Be Tough to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

Sometimes a woman quite literally NEEDS you to get a little tough with her. How do you recognize this, and how do you get tough without being abusive? Think “leadership”…

Yesterday was a really odd day. Everyone I know was having what you would call an “off day” of one kind or another. Allergies, colds, arthritis, lousy weather, vendor incompetence, boss incompetence, employee incompetence, customer incompetence, bad food, bad service, monthly cycle – you name it, somebody was going through it. The oddest thing was what happened with one of my best friends, Daphne.

We met over ten years ago, and when we did, she was a mess. Totally submissive, living for the approval of others, and living under the thumb of a wimpy, manipulative, predatory, wife-beating husband and a highly-controlling and manipulative mother. She asked me one day fairly early in our friendship how I had come to be so tough and independent, and how I could live being self-confident and caring absolutely nothing about what others thought of me. I steered her to some targeted reading, especially some of Ayn Rand’s most excellent work, and we talked about different problems and how to solve them.

She became fiercely independent, ultimately “wearing the pants in the family” (not a surprise at all given her husband’s nature; bullies always capitulate when you call their bluff) and presenting such a strong image to her mother that her mother went from being dominating and manipulative to seeking Daphne’s approval at every turn because she was intimidated by Daphne’s independence. That was about nine years ago, and she’s held the line ever since…that is, until yesterday.

There had been a lot of turmoil over the weekend, including a funeral, a couple of family problems, a severe migraine, etc., and by Monday morning she was so mentally fatigued and her testosterone so depleted (it balances the creative and emotionally-driving effects of estrogen, and too much influence from estrogen makes women – and men – uncharacteristically – or more, for some of them -- erratic, unstable, and agitated, a medical condition known as “estrogen dominance”) that her self-esteem became challenged, and she suddenly started acting like she had when we first met, very dramatic, needy, approval-seeking, etc. As the day wore on, it was getting worse instead of better.

To finish putting this in perspective, Daphne is one of the brightest women I know, with an IQ of around 130-140, very emotionally aware, and extremely competent at self-evaluation. She’s one of the top three women on the support staff who helped with the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and who continue to respond to surveys, questions, reader dilemmas, etc., with useful insight because she can “step in and out of herself” at will and remain entirely objective through the whole thing, which is very unusual among women, who tend to get wrapped up in the emotion of an experience and don’t want to quickly shut it down and analyze it, even when it would be to their extreme benefit to do so.

Do you have the picture now? A smart, fiercely independent woman who is quite adept at side-stepping her own emotions to rationally examine them has reverted to behavior not exhibited in nearly a decade, and as the day wore on, as I tried to point out what was happening, it got worse instead of better. I knew what was coming when she said, “I just feel like I need a good cry.” Why?

She’d been to a funeral and yet she needed a good cry? Danger Will Robinson! Danger! That’s a dependable sign of MAJOR emotional energy build-up looking for an outlet; “needing a good cry” is bad enough, but when a woman has been to a tear-jerking event like a funeral and still “needs a good cry,” well, where I grew up they would say something like, “You ain’t seen trouble yet, but it’s comin’!” Emotional energy is like any other kind of mental energy. Thought is the result of chemical reactions in the brain causing electrical impulses at the nerve synapses. This tells you what?

That the stress of all the emotion from the weekend had put her brain chemistry out of balance. Some women have more of a problem with this than others, but the symptoms are the same; they get weaker and more clingy, then needy, then irritable, and finally they sound like they’re spoiling for a fight, and you can hear the stress and anger start building in their voice looking for an outlet. The big question is “what do you do?”

First, you have to avoid the urge to let her engage you in a fight. If you can spot the “I just need a good cry” stage, suggest to her that she sit down for a chick-flick, and invite a girlfriend over to share it with her if she doesn’t want to be alone, not because you don’t care, but because it would be bad for both of you if you step into the “girlfriend role,” even temporarily. If she can “bleed off” during the chick flick, she’ll be fine. But you can’t always catch her in that state because she may pass through it and be in bad shape while you are apart, such as while one or both of you are at work. If that happens, you’re going to have to deal with it; there’s no escaping it, at least not without extreme risk.

If she gets bad enough to need a fight to bleed off, she’ll say something to put you on the defensive and then jump to get you to jump back; a big clue that this is about to happen is that whatever she seems to be upset about would normally be something trivial, or is even something that she obviously contrived, albeit involuntarily. It’s chemistry, and until you’ve been driven by something like this, it’s hard to understand or identify with it, but a woman will have very little to no choice about starting a fight once they reach this point. (Chick flick, anyone?)

Giving her a good fight will reset her brain chemistry, but it will also create a lot of embarrassment, hard feelings, scars and other aftermath that neither of you really want to deal with, and while she might be able to dismiss the things she says to you, even knowing that she’s in a involuntary predicament due to a chemically-altered state, you may never forgive or forget them, as she may never forgive or forget the things you say to her in response to what she said to you SPECIFICALLY TO PROVOKE THE ALTERCATION. We’ve all seen how things, once said, cannot really ever be taken back, no matter how much they weren’t really meant at the time. You need a confrontation, but not a fight. How do you do that?

Remember the many times I’ve mentioned leadership as a biological trigger for attraction? The chemical balance in the brain is a biological matter. When she finally had things built up to try to start the fight and made a snide remark to try to provoke me, I took a stern tone that she had probably never heard me use before, and said, “Just hold it! You are not going there with me!”

That’s leadership (decision-making), and authority (establishing a boundary), but it’s also a confrontation (denying her the fight and doing so in a stern tone). I thought for a second she had dropped the phone until I heard her breathe, and then continued, “This is not about me and you, or even me or you separately. It’s about all the emotional turmoil that you went through over the last few days, and you’re looking for a fight to sort it all out. There’s a better way to handle this.”

I went on to explain what had happened, maintaining the stern tone of a friend who is verbally roughing up another friend for doing something silly, and gradually softening it as I proceeded over the next couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes of silence as she took it all in, she interrupted me in mid sentence with, “Oh my God! I’ve been doing this all day, haven’t I?”

It was like hearing somebody come out of a daze, and Gentlemen, you MUST understand this, for many women, it really is like coming out of a daze. When they get off balance like that, they are truly in an altered mental state, and may not even remember some things that happen or have an accurate sense of the passage of time. This does not in any way make them inferior, weak, flakey, or insane, any other kind of sexist nonsense. It’s just the way they are, and something that we have to be aware of and work around – NOT SUFFER IN SILENCE OVER -- if we are going to have a long-term relationship with them. It comes with the package, and you can help them though it or be made miserable by it. A pretty obvious choice, huh?

Eventually, after talking for a few minutes (and Daphne making several apologies and sounding very embarrassed), we got back to the point in a prior discussion about her saying that she felt like she just needed a good cry. Sometime before we spoke today, she watched some old sad movie, had a good cry, and was herself when I called this morning to share a reader e-mail with her. This brings up the other VERY important point…

When women say they “need a good cry,” they’re not being prissy little wuss-bags. They know that they are off-balance, and have learned over time that it’s going to take some kind of extreme emotional event that is sustained for a fairly long time (as emotional events go) to get things back in balance. It is VERY difficult to create a positive event that can create this intensity and duration of emotion, so they usually use something negative but inert, like a sad movie, to get them started and keep them going, and by the time the movie is over, they’re bled out, stabilized, and generally okay. Are you with me here?

Women don’t like sad movies because they enjoy being sad, they like sad movies because they provide a needed emotional rush and release that rids them of negative energy and sets their body chemistry right without having to engage us in a fight and damage our relationships. A woman’s life is mostly about managing her relationships, thanks to her brain structure and chemistry that give her the signature social nature of womankind, and they really do try to protect their relationships a lot more than many men. Hence, when your partner wants to watch a sad movie, don’t interfere. You don’t have to sit there through the whole thing, and again, should have her invite a girlfriend over to watch it with her, but…

If there is no girlfriend available or she doesn’t want to do that, you don’t want to be cast in the role of girlfriend because it kills attraction over time. Tell her that you don’t like sad movies and don’t play well in the role of girlfriend, and that you’ll be in another room, but if she gets upset and wants to be held a bit you’ll be happy to “pop in” for a few minutes if she asks. Being a strong shoulder to cry on is a far cry from being a girlfriend sharing in a drama festival. Crying at chick-flicks was part of the bad advice in the 1980’s that got us into this mess, so don’t go there, ever. You will indeed be very uncomfortable in the girlfriend role if you have an ounce of masculinity in you, and you’ll kill attraction and respect in her. There’s just no upside for either of you if you try to substitute for a girlfriend for even a minute.

If you do have to spend a few minutes with her while she watches, monitor her as she does, and if you notice tears starting to form sit down with her for a bit and snuggle her up, then a few minutes after the scene changes and she’s dried up for a few minutes excuse yourself for a bit. She doesn’t need a baby sitter, but it will feel good to have you there holding her when the tears come, and it will be endearing to her to have you tolerate a few minutes of that movie to help her get through it. Don’t feed into it, or egg her on, or start crying yourself. Just sit still, pull her close, and do whatever you do when she doesn’t feel good and you snuggle her up, such as hair-stroking, nuzzling, etc.

Incidentally, this is NOT the time to try to make sexual advances, but if she does, even subtly by holding a kiss longer or advancing from a “love” kiss to an aroused kiss, go with it if you can regularly bring her to orgasm, because that will release energy and reset chemistry just like a good cry for most women, according to those who have answered my surveys. If you can't, adding frustration to what's already bothering her is likely a pretty bad idea.

If she has difficulty with orgasm, or if you just don’t know how to get her there, I can point you to some helpful resources (just e-mail me or follow any of the reader-recommended links in the sidebar of this post), and I’d STRONGLY suggest you avail yourself of them, because no matter how much either of you try to downplay the issue, if she suddenly discovers that somebody else can while you can’t, or even suspects that somebody else can when you seldom or never have, you will have one of the worst of all problems on your hands: a bored wife in whom someone else has created attraction. Attraction is like a foot race, whoever gets there first wins.

Women are like us in a lot of ways, but in the ways they differ from us lie the potential for a lot of misunderstanding and lack of appreciation, not to mention good old-fashioned BIG trouble. They try to tell us what they need, but one of those differences is how they communicate with us, which really throws a wrench in the works. But, there’s help if you’re smart enough to know that you need it and man enough to accept it…

I brought a group of nearly 200 women together to find out what they want from men and life, and then worked with the 118 couples made up of the “attached” women in the first group with their men (about one-third of them were unmarried or divorced) and worked them over nine ways from Sunday to find out what went right and wrong in relationships, how men and women differed, how to communicate with them, and how to make or break that wonderful feeling of attraction, that emotion that women so desperately crave and which truly brings out the best in them when they feel it, so much so that they will literally kill to protect that feeling.

That research was compiled into my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which was given back to the couples for testing and fine tuning, and all of them, as well as everyone who has bought it since (unless somebody has failed to complain and get a refund when they felt like it, and can you imagine that happening today???) has improved their life and/or relationship, and I have more unsolicited testimonials to that effect than you could ever imagine. Some relationships can’t be improved because they never should have been formed in the first place, and this book helps you to identify and exit them peacefully as well. And the best news of all is…

That you can have it now! It’s an instant download, 118 pages in PDF format, single-spaced and optimized for printing on standard letter-size paper, so you can read it on your screen or carry it with you and read it on the train, plane, or your favorite easy chair – YOUR CHOICE. Just choose! Go for it now, so you can start replacing boredom, frustration, and fights with happy times and a higher standard of living and self-esteem, because life is too short to spend it just wondering why things aren’t going so well when they could be going great!

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

What to Do When She Gains a Few Pounds, Keeping the Flame Burning in Relationships and Marriage

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

That’s right, it’s time to shed that winter insulation and get into bikinis, volleyball, backyard barbecues, and all those other fun activities that require baring skin, and unfortunately, exposing your “jelly belly” if you picked one up through the winter. Here’s a typical letter about this most common problem, and a very sticky one to say the least. Meet Tia:

Dear David,

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

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

Thank you,
Tia

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

Get ready guys! Pay close attention, take notes, and make sure you fully understand what you’re about to read. This is some of the most critical information to ever appear in this newsletter and you need to get this down pat and cold, right now, because sooner or later, EVERY woman will experience a bit of weight gain that makes her uncomfortable with her appearance, and consequently, with YOU.

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

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

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

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

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

Concurrently, women started trying to add career aspirations to motherhood and running a household, which added stress. Stress causes the over-production of hydrocortisone, a.k.a., “cortisol,” by the adrenal glands, which causes your body to store fat for hard times. Then we have another idiot at the FDA who determined that a high-carb, low-fat or fat-free diet was healthy, overloading all of us with carbs and making us insulin-resistant and consequently further slowing our thyroids (high blood glucose level impede the conversion of T4, a thyroid hormone that is mostly inert and used to store iodine to T3, the thyroid hormone that enters your cells and causes the mitochondria to burn glucose so they can perform their function, the core of the human metabolism), making us fatter and often diabetic.

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

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

Incidentally, if you are even marginally overweight or there is any possibility that you could have a lower-than-normal (98.6° F. or 37° C.) basal body temperature, slowed metabolism, dry skin, brittle nails, sleep disturbances, the outer third of your eyebrows thinning, thinning hair, dark circles around you eyes, allergies, weight gain, or any type of autoimmune problem, whether or not you are already on thyroid medication, go to the "Stop the Thyroid Madness" web site and order the author’s very thorough, 100% factually-based book on the thyroid and how it is inadequately and inappropriately all over the world using the wrong lab tests (TSH, total T3 and total T4) and the wrong medication (synthetic T4 hormone, a.k.a., “Synthroid,” Levothyroxin, et al). (I receive no commissions or other consideration for this recommendation. I make it because you need these facts to live a healthy and happy life.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Men Can Learn from Women's Problems in Relationships and Marriage

A woman responds to the very recent “Girls and Their Toys” article, saying that she’s tired of suppressing her desire and being insulted for her husband’s inadequacies. Join us, and learn…

I haven’t mentioned it for awhile, but about a third of my newsletter readers and book purchasers are women; this has been surprisingly and delightfully consistent since the beginning. Some women are just curious, others want to keep tabs on what men are being told, some are looking for the drama of an argument, others for validation, and my favorites, the real achievers, are looking at advice to men on how to be the best man to help them form a picture of their own perfect man and develop relationship criteria to use in their own life. If only everyone were that organized and deliberate when it came to choosing a life partner!

These women have provided an endless stream of questions, ideas for research and newsletters, and constant confirmation that what I am advising you gentlemen to do is what will work. I want to thank you ladies for participating, both personally and on behalf of the male readers of my newsletter, blog posts and "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and ask you to not only continue to participate, but to hang a note on “the girly grapevine” inviting your friends to join us.

I mention this because a woman posted a comment on my blog regarding the recent article about girls and their toys. Her comment smacks of irony in a role reversal of stereotypes; she is the dissatisfied one and her husband is being non-responsive and defensive, and it’s a lesson that all men need to learn from. Meet M.:

David,

You hit the mark every time. I wish my husband would read your newsletters. I put him on your mailing list but I can’t make him take your very excellent advice. I'm so totally frustrated with my man, I am at a loss. We have had a few very tough years and I decided to really stick it out. I often wonder what I could do to make him crave me like he once did. We might have sex once or twice a month and it’s not that great. I have really suppressed my wild sex kitten flirty ways because I have been insulted too many times with comments like, "that’s all you care about". What can I do??? HELP!

M.

Gentlemen, watch the “back side” of this conversation and see how much of your own problems and potential solutions might be found here. In what I’m about to tell “M” lie many potential clues to reasons for things that have happened in your own life, and you may well learn more from my advice to M than M does, depending on your situation and experiences.

Hi M.,

I would have answered you privately by e-mail before posting this publicly but the one downside to blogs is that private communication is not possible, and I’m guessing you realized that before posting on a blog. There are a few things we need to talk about.

First, (and this goes for everybody else, too!) don’t sign somebody up for my newsletter or anyone else’s. Aside from ticking them off and having them report the newsletter provider as a spammer, it’s too impersonal, too indirect for a man to appreciate, and it won’t be taken seriously as anything but nagging. If you see something in a newsletter that you want your partner to read, print it, hand it to them, and tell them that you want them to read it because it expresses something that is important to you and that you want them to know but have been ineffective at communicating to them. Highlight or underline the parts that are most important to you to show that you’ve put thought, time, and effort into it.

Don’t walk away, wait for them to finish, even if you have to tell them that you need for them to do it immediately before they begin to read. Remember that men speak and need to be spoken to with what most women would consider downright brutal directness (not mean-spirited, but so bluntly as to leave no room at all for interpretative lee-way) most of the time.

This is not a time that you can do what women normally do and ask a question to make a statement or make a statement to ask a question. It’s one of those times that you must be so direct as you would be with a very small child, not because he’s stupid, but because we men just can’t communicate that way (until we’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage") and your margin for error here is near zero.

That brings me to the next point. He may not be as naturally sexually aggressive as you due to hormone levels, but a man with a low drive can still be excited and enticed into sex if he’s not stressed about it. The insults you speak of are a sign of frustration, and based on encounters with hundreds of couples on this subject, the source of his frustration could very well be from his inability to verbally connect with you when you try to talk to him about this. What to you feels like a discussion, or more likely, a negotiation, feels to him like nagging, because he just can’t hear what you’re saying.

You can’t express to him that you want more intimacy with him by asking him if he thinks everything is okay with your sex life. That’s the way a woman typically tries to enter such a discussion, and when a man hears a question like that, he doesn’t hear your statement that you have a problem that you want to discuss, he hears a request for information. He very likely said, “It’s fine,” or something like that, and left you feeling like he had shut you down and didn’t want to discuss it.

So being a good wife, you let a little time pass, tried to catch him in a better mood, and did it again, same response, same result, except this time he’s already answered the question, and the repeat comes across as a bit insecure and nagging, and the seeds of frustration are sewn. From this point on, the more you tried to talk with him about it, the more frustrated and defensive he got, until he started insulting you to try to keep you from bringing it up any more.

His frustration isn’t that you want sex, it’s that you “nag” him about it – there is never a discussion that resolves anything and brings achievement and closure to the issue, and to a man, that’s a thorn in his side; we live to resolve problems, not explore them. So you see, the problem is most likely not his libido, but your and his combined communications deficit. Neither of you is hearing what the other is trying to say.

Until you can get him to read a book like "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and learn to talk with you and listen to you closer to your own level, you’re going to have to try to talk with him on his, which is easier because it’s more primal, but is unnatural and may feel very odd to you. You have to be very direct with him, asking questions when you want to know something and making statements when you want to say something, because right now, like 99.9% of the men in the world, that’s all he knows and is capable of; it’s what he was born with and has lived with all his life.

And let me be perfectly clear on this point: when I say “very direct” I do not mean stern or in any way belligerent. I simply mean exactly what I said earlier, use questions to ask questions and statements to make statements, just as you would with a preschool child, but do not treat him like a preschool child, nor adopt any kind of motherly tone as you talk. He’s not a child; his communication infrastructure and protocols are simply similar to a child’s, less evolved than your own.

Tell him that you want to talk to resolve a problem that you have not been able to adequately communicate, and you think you can do a better job of it now because you have a better understanding of what his needs may be. Men are all about problem-solving, and you’ll have his attention, especially if he thinks it will put an end to what he perceives as nagging.

DO NOT dramatize. When speaking to a man, saying something once is enough. Nearly all of us get it the first time through, and find repeats very stressful and annoying; it agitates us in the same way that being bored agitates you. Tell him what you want and need, very bluntly, and listen to what he has to say on the subject.

As far as seduction, men are very much visually stimulated with regard to attraction, but we vary somewhat with regard to seduction. Some of us like to take it very slow, almost like women, savoring anticipation, while others like to just be pounced on or like to pounce on our women, playfully and for no apparent reason except intimate fun. What you must find out is what is sexually fun and satisfying to him, and unlike most women, most men will speak very directly about it or very openly and aggressively demonstrate it.

Don’t be afraid to coach him to meet your needs while you’re “in the act,” but don’t do it in a way that makes him feel incompetent or stressed into “performance anxiety.” It’s often easier to do it with gestures than words, guiding his body where you want it. Couples often find that their partner’s excitement makes them excited, so just let it all hang out and see where it takes you. Sex isn’t an act or a destination, but a journey, even a grand epic adventure if you allow it to be so.

Your first step on that adventure is to diffuse your husband’s frustration over your communications problems, because as things are now, he has come to associate sex with nagging and communications frustration instead of the carnal pleasures that your naughty “feline” side wants to give him. Once that is handled, the rest should be easy as long as you can keep the communications lines open and keep your problem-solving in a tone of exploration instead of finger-pointing, because allowing your “sex kitten flirty ways” to come back into the picture will then be exciting for him (and you!) as it once was, although you may have to learn how to present an image of being a little more hard to get to ignite his natural desire to chase you. If you’re too available, you may be taken for granted, just like a man who never gives his wife a chance to rise to the challenge of seducing him.

And incidentally, whatever you do, NEVER ask him why he isn’t erect, or what’s taking so long if he’s having a problem “rising to the occasion.” That is the surest way to create performance anxiety of sufficient degree to ensure that he won’t become erect, and will leave both of you frustrated. If it’s an on-going problem, it may be nothing related to you, his attitude, or any of the obvious causes; it may indeed be declining thyroid or adrenal function resulting in low testosterone levels. Have him see a doctor, and make sure the doctor looks for the cause and tries to cure it instead of just writing him a prescription for a chemical aid for becoming erect.

The hormonal deficiencies that cause that kind of problem have other severe aspects, including weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart attack, so it is imperative that at a minimum his serum testosterone levels are checked, and if they are low, push the doctor to find the cause instead of just prescribing supplemental hormone cream, as it’s all inter-related. I have a thyroid problem, and have had to become and expert on the subject because I have yet to find a physician who is or wants to be. I highly recommend starting at http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com to get the facts, because thanks to the pharmaceutical companies, the physicians of the world don’t have them.

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

So Gentlemen, what could you learn from this lady’s problems?

For starters, how about that women have a lot of the same drives, needs, and desires that we do, and just as much trouble expressing them to us as we have expressing ours to them?

How about that they get frustrated just like we do over the same things that frustrate us?

How about that they know as little about us as we know about them?

How about that our differences can be very complimentary if we learn what they are and how they work and choose to put them to work for our mutual benefit instead of resenting them and competing to see who is going to change to meet the other’s expectations in an all-or-nothing scenario?

How about that your partner may have been trying for years to tell you something that you really want and need to know about her, something that could make your life together truly wonderful, and you never heard it? And because of that, you may have spent years fighting over the same frustrating issues, each of you thinking that the other was just being a nag or an inconsiderate jerk, when in fact you are both “functionally deaf” to each other.

It doesn’t take a lot to fix these problems. Genuine desire, a little patience, and good information will do the trick. And unlike a lot of problems, once these are fixed they are extremely unlikely to come back, because maintaining the solution is fun, enjoyable, and even intimate, and feels so good that you’ll automatically keep doing what works. It’s one of the few ways in which you can make life simpler yet more exciting and enjoyable at the same time!

You provide the desire and the patience, and I’ll provide the information, in my book "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you can download at http://www.makingherhappy.com. It’s been tested and proven, and coupled with your desire and effort, it will get you where you want to go and beyond, so get started right now, because life’s too short to wait.

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

Rules of Great Relationships and Marriage: Why Making HER Happy Makes EVERYBODY Happy

The explanation of yesterday’s promised “thunderbolt” – Why making her happy makes everybody happy, and what you can easily do to make it happen, automatically and consistently so that BOTH OF YOU enjoy it.

For those who had the bad fortune to miss yesterday’s edition, go back and read it, because it was good and because it sets up today’s edition. We’ve all heard “If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,” (unless some of us have been living under a rock), and we’re all pretty well convinced that it’s a universal truth that will never be disproved. However, have you ever thought about the converse?

If mama is happy, everybody’s happy!

Why would I suggest such a thing? It’s the core of everything I’ve been talking about for a very good reason: it’s incontrovertible reality. Right now, I’m going to help you accept and understand this by explaining why.

It can be quite shocking when you realize how much of how we relate depends upon or is derived from this model (discussed in yesterday’s edition, so once again, if you’ve not read it, go back and do so before continuing here) of “men are hunters, women are gatherers.”

In case you’re not familiar with basic anthropology, here’s the super-short summary: in the earliest days of human existence, before agriculture and for some time after the development of agriculture, men hunted for meat and women gathered fruits, nuts, roots, etc. and raised the children; later, women most likely developed agriculture to have a more convenient food supply. One must remember that during this time, 90% or more of a person’s time was spent in securing a food supply.

We’re talking about a long, long time here, during which women were together, gathering and later farming in groups and learning to communicate, while men were out hunting alone or in small groups that kept very quiet to keep from scaring the game. These activities caused women to evolve to be genetically “wired” to be more social and nurturing, and have more sophisticated communications skills due to their activities causing the more rapid and full development of the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, called the “corpus callosum,” and the right hemisphere of the brain to develop more densely than in men.

They also developed a system of safeguards against nurturing the wrong kind of man. There are biological triggers that turn on this behavior when a woman sees strong alpha male behavior, which causes her to nurture in a manner appropriate to a mate, and in the presence of children; for many women, child-like behavior, such as a “middle-aged adolescent,” causes them to nurture and protect the man as would be appropriate for a mother, taking charge of the man’s life and affairs and attempting to save him in a codependent relationship. So since the process is biological and not logical, it is very difficult for a woman to resist and unfortunately, not foolproof; she can end up nurturing a man who is bad for her, like an alpha male with psychopathic tendencies who beats her, or a middle-aged adolescent with sociopathic tendencies who sucks her dry and moves on to his next host.

Whether you accept evolution as the cause of this difference or not, the difference is there, it’s consistent, and the behavior it creates is consistent; it’s what creates the feminine and masculine aspects of personality and communication skills and style.

Now, the big question: what does this mean to your relationship or marriage?

Generally speaking, women are naturally social, nurturing, and sensitive; men are not so much nurturing as protective. We are naturally loners; even when we’re in groups we tend to act competitively instead of socially and cooperatively. We are combatants; we tend to deal with problems by trying to overpower them or through other competitive means, not through any nurturing means, often even when it would mean converting an enemy to a friend. And let’s face it, a lot of men are finding out the hard way that women’s natural skill in non-verbal communication makes them superior negotiators and poker players in a great many male-female match-ups.

So how can you put this to work for you?

This is the great secret of relationships that is really no secret at all. If a man will make the effort to create attraction for his female partner, her response will automatically be to respond with excitement, sensitivity, wife-like (as opposed to mother-like) nurturing, and attractive behavior toward him. She won’t have to put any effort into it, because it will all be triggered by her attraction. It’s biological, and therefore not only automatic, but unavoidable (which is what gets women in trouble with predatory users, abusers, and losers who have mastered attraction tactics and use it mercilessly to attract and hold their victims.) Why?

To fully understand and accept this, you must understand the intensity of attraction. The only good way I can explain this to men is to call your attention to what happens when you start feeling intense attraction, when you reach that point where you MUST have sex with a woman and then MUST experience orgasm with her. It is different for women in that attraction for us is mostly (but not entirely) a matter of visual perception and happens very quickly while for women it is actuated by a combination of a lot of triggers that confirm your status as an alpha male.

It is therefore built much more slowly, but if you can recall the thrill and urgency of that attraction and your desire to maintain access to the woman who creates it, you can then have at least a partially accurate frame of reference for the intensity of what women feel; for them, it is even more intense because those feelings build more slowly and have time to create more excitement. Also note that while our excitement creates an intense urgency that is satisfied after the orgasm, theirs creates less urgency but more emotional intensity, making for a longer-lasting effect.

One other thing that you should note is the effect of the hormone oxytocin (do not confuse this with the pain medication, oxycontin). Oxytocin is called “the cuddle hormone,” and it facilitates a mother bonding with her children and her husband. It is released in small amounts during physical touching, especially stroking the skin, and is released in large amounts after orgasm. It therefore follows that taking the time to build attraction for a woman to ultimately increase her excitement, desire, and arousal to the point where she can then experience orgasm (simple physical stimulation is seldom if ever enough for a woman – attraction must happen first) on a regular basis, she will be more apt to remain happily married.

So yes, in spite of what the politically correct would have you believe, sex is indeed a very important part of marriage and of a mentally, physically and emotionally healthy woman’s life (trauma, hormonal issues, chronic pain, etc., can interfere, but this is the exception, not the rule, so never assume this is the problem), and if it slows down or even stops, trouble is coming, if it’s not already upon you.

The bottom line? Make the effort to become the confident, attractive alpha male that will light her fire and keep it lit and you will start a largely self-sustaining chain reaction that will keep the two of you intimate, excited, and happy for years to come. The choice is of whether to have or lose this happiness is yours, so make the obviously good choice, and follow through. Everything you need to know to make it happen is in the pages of “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage.” Download your copy today at http://www.makingherhappy.com and get started, because the journey is fun, and the destination is one to live for.

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

Learn From These Reader Responses to Emotional Scales and Testing in Relationships and Marriage

Some recent lessons have brought some great comments from readers that you can learn from, so here they are!

We’re going to do something a little different today. Some of my best students have shared comments over the last few days that are insightful and pertinent, but wouldn’t provide sufficient content for a whole newsletter, so I’m going to put them together here for you so that you may share their insights and hopefully have something “click” that may not have occurred to you.

Regarding article on testing from April 11’s newsletter, the following paragraph was embedded in a status report from my top student:

“Great newsletter, by the way - if it isn't one of your “must read” reprints, it should be! The whole subject of testing is so critical that it can't be talked about too much. The key, I think, is to get men beyond the recognition of it [we all recognize it, whether we name it or explain it properly or not], and get us to understand that women aren't to be BLAMED for it, just understood. It would get rid of a lot of anger, but deny comedians a ton of material!

“Of course, it wouldn't hurt women to learn a bit about men and stop BLAMING us for things, either. So much of the relationship advice is of the "what men do wrong" type that it leaves women thinking they have to change their husbands or leave them - no alternatives. What a huge disservice to the women that is, not to mention the men. One of my favorite quotes from you is that people need to be concerned about WHAT'S the issue, not WHO'S to blame. Huge.”

He’s right. Blame is for losers; you NEVER see an achiever of either gender engaging in blame at any time. If you look at the people who are respected on any level in the world, they don’t try, they don’t blame, and they don’t wait. They DO. They simply see a problem, figure out what needs to be done, and get it done. The biggest favor you can do yourself in your entire life is to do the same thing, forget about trying, blaming, and waiting for others to act and take responsibility for what’s happening in your life. It’s only then that you can make it better. One of my favorite movie lines of all time is when Yoda said to Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

That doesn’t mean you should expect to do the impossible; a rational decision must be made about a solution before the solution is implemented. It means that once you’ve identified the problem, you take responsibility for whatever part of the outcome you can influence and you take appropriate action. For example:

You’re in a hypothetical marriage that started off too young and with the wrong person. The two of you have had a great sex life because there is been abundant attraction, but you’ve fought tooth and nail in all other aspects of your relationship because there is no real love, common values, common or shared goals and interests, etc., to give the rest of the relationship substance, and everything other than sex is a point of conflict or competition. Your wife says she’s had enough and it’s time to move on. What do you do?

You take the only rational action available to you, and you take it quickly and fairly. You move on.

You don’t wait for things to get better, because compatibility problems don’t go away over time. You don’t make some heroic attempt to do the impossible, because it only causes more pain and resentment. There’s a reason “the impossible” is called “the impossible,” right? You don’t blame her and go to war and punish her or allow her to punish you; it was a mutual mistake that requires cooperation to get out of without further pain and frustration, not to mention totally unnecessary escalated legal expenses. In a nutshell, you just do what must be done.

Second hypothetical situation: you’ve been married twenty years, your lives have revolved around your children, who left home a year or two ago, and the two of you have love, respect, trust, loyalty, and communicate better than most couples you know. But you’re not having fun. You’re in a rut of watching TV every night while you eat dinner, then the two of you go off to your computers to chat with friends or to other hobbies, and you go to bed without saying “good night” to the other whenever the mood to sleep strikes you. Your sex life amounts to one episode every month or two that can be described as “relief without gratification.” Your neighbor starts making advances toward you. What do you do?

Do you succumb to the temptation of the affair? No, because it’s a stupid move. Too easy for it to get out of control and get you caught. Any other affair has about the same probability of the same outcome. It’s a quick fix that will break more than it will fix. Not a move that an achiever would make.

Do you accept the realization that life could be more fun and hope that things get better? Also a stupid move. When was the last time you saw people ignoring their relationship problems and had the problems just fix themselves? You’ll find that the word “hope” isn’t in the vocabulary of your average achiever, either.

Do you blame your wife for the rut you’re in and wait for her to take the first action in making life fun again? Utterly ridiculous, given that it’s your job to lead the action because you’re wired to do it and she’s wired to respond to you doing it. Do you ever see an achiever waiting on others to initiate action? Of course not.

Do you just break it off and get a divorce? Throwing away genuine love is the most foolish and destructive act a person can inflict upon oneself, except for suicide. Giving up before any effort is made toward an obviously worthwhile goal isn’t something you see achievers doing, ever.

So in a nutshell, you have a whole lot of options, but only one good one: Recognize that you have a great foundation for a lasting relationship, but have indeed fallen in a rut. Take responsibility for the rut, find out what it takes to get out, and get out! You may have to “try” a few things to see what helps get out of the rut, but there’s a big difference between experimenting with potentially fun things to help your relationship and failing to commit to fixing the relationship and following through. If you’re attitude and conviction are where they are supposed to be, you’re “trying” activities and solutions, not “trying” to fix the relationship; you’re FIXING the relationship.

This excerpt is from another of my top students:

“Your newsletters and e-book have helped immensely. I saw that I was a wuss. I couldn’t and wouldn’t make choices for a fear of hurting someone’s feelings. Now I make choices or give options and if someone says doesn’t matter, I make a choice and stand to it. I am still in the learning phase of reading my wife. She is a very independent woman and makes decisions without me. I have to learn how to deal with that. One of her hot buttons is the ‘making a decision’ button. I have learned that when she says ‘it doesn’t matter’, she is testing me and she wants to be led and she wants to follow.”

He’s noticed that some things are simply a matter of choice and attitude, like decision-making, while other require some study. He’s mastered the principles and is now methodically looking everywhere for new opportunities to apply what he knows. Ultimately, he realized that success, self-improvement, and great relationships are not destinations, but journeys that can last a lifetime and take you places that the rest of the world doesn’t even know exist.

From a new student who rapidly went to a seat in the front row of the class, in response to my remark that “I have looked extensively and intensely for a downside to attractive behavior, and have failed utterly to find one”:

“Abso-friggin'-lutely. And we seem to exude that simply by expressing more of what it means to be human; for example, expressing anger or disapproval quickly, but in a calm, controlled, constructive manner...setting boundaries...having self-respect, taking charge, leading, etc.”

I wish I had said that. Really. I’ve been trying to tell men for years, since long before I took up this project, that…

“…being human is something to which one should aspire, not something for which one should apologize…”

And that being an attractive male is all about doing those things that come naturally to men: leading, protecting, being deliberate and competent, not to mention confident, enjoying their life and being able to laugh at themselves and with everyone else, all with self-love and self-respect…

Yes, self-love is required! Those words cause altruists to cringe, but think back through your own life and identify even one person who was self-abusive that you wanted to be around, indeed, felt COMPELLED to be around (unless you were codependent, of course), and I’ll be thoroughly shocked, to say the least. That’s not to say that narcissism is an admirable trait, because it’s not; EXCESSIVE regard for anything is inherently unattractive, but a man must love himself enough to be able to respect himself before others can.

And one more quickie, because this newsletter is getting longer than some of you may have time to read, regarding the crying incident at the dinner party, after which I gave the crying woman a mug of hot chocolate after I…

“…shot some whipped cream on top of it and set it in front of the woman, who I knew to be a ‘chocoholic’ and very sensitive to the serotonin-boosting effects of the polyphenols in dark chocolate."

“Sir - you are a genius. Great newsletter, thanks.”

No, I’m not a genius, I’m just observant, and I take action where action is prescribed. When you know what a powerful comfort food chocolate is and that women respond simultaneously to the smell, taste, and feel of a mug of hot chocolate in addition to the powerful effect is has on the brain, being ready and able to quickly dispense some when there are women around is like keeping versatile tools like a hammer, flashlight, and screwdriver within easy reach in your home, something that every man does because it is his nature to make problems go away.

If you watch women, they have their tools, just like we do. They have things like their treasure box and chocolate to fight melancholia. They have gadgets for painting their faces and curling their hair and eyebrows, not to mention removing hair. They have tools like romance novels and chick-flicks to fight boredom and depression (sounds counter-intuitive, but a “good cry” will often snap women out of a temporarily depressed funk) and help them manage their hyperactive hormone pumps that can mess with their moods at inopportune times. They are masters of communication and social networking because they are driven to engage in it, and you’ll find they always have things like telephones, notepaper, stationery, etc., within easy reach of them, no matter where they are. A good look into a woman’s “tool box” can teach you a lot about women, if you have the sense to raise the lid and look.

There’s more, and I may continue this tomorrow, but I’ve noticed that many of you say you read this newsletter during coffee breaks at work so I make it a point to keep it short enough to be read in five minutes but long enough to make sure you can really learn something that can help you each day, and we’re over five minutes already.

There is one other thing I’d like to point out in closing, and that is that all of my top students have a common characteristic: They seek out solid information and they act on it when they find it. They try different information sources, but they don’t try to make improvements or mix and match methods; they just do it.

Plato said, “Fortune favors the bold,” speaking of men of action, but if you’re like me, you don’t put much stock in “fortune” anyway. However, history is another matter, and while history also favors the bold, it seems to favor most THE PREPARED. And it makes perfect sense: The prepared are those who can be the boldest with the greatest chance of success.

So what about you? Are you blaming somebody for your problems? Or waiting for them to just go away? Or waiting for somebody else to fix them? Taking responsibility sounds tough, but in fact it’s the easiest thing in the world to do, because all it takes is a simple choice to seek appropriate action and take it. The decision is most often harder than the action itself.

So go on and make a choice, right here, right now, to make your marriage or committed relationship better and keep it that way. There’s no sense taking a bad trip when you can have a grand adventure, is there? Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and then join us, the truly happy men of the world who know what men have always wanted and needed to know about women, and make your life one that you want to get out of bed every morning to live.

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

Sometimes You Have to Be Tough to Have a Great Relationship and Marriage

Sometimes a woman quite literally NEEDS you to get a little tough with her. How do you recognize this, and how do you get tough without being abusive? Think “leadership”…

Yesterday was a really odd day. Everyone I know was having what you would call an “off day” of one kind or another. Allergies, colds, arthritis, lousy weather, vendor incompetence, boss incompetence, employee incompetence, customer incompetence, bad food, bad service, monthly cycle – you name it, somebody was going through it. The oddest thing was what happened with one of my best friends, Daphne.

We met over ten years ago, and when we did, she was a mess. Totally submissive, living for the approval of others, and living under the thumb of a wimpy, manipulative, predatory, wife-beating husband and a highly-controlling and manipulative mother. She asked me one day fairly early in our relationship how I had come to be so tough and independent, and how I could live caring absolutely nothing about what others thought of me, I steered her to some targeted reading, especially some of Ayn Rand’s most excellent work, and we talked about different problems and how to solve them.

She became fiercely independent, ultimately “wearing the pants in the family” (not a surprise at all given the nature of her husband; bullies always capitulate when you call their bluff) and presenting such a strong image to her mother that her mother went from being dominating and manipulative to seeking Daphne’s approval at every turn because she was intimidated by Daphne’s independence. That was about nine years ago, and she’s held the line ever since…that is, until yesterday.

There had been a lot of turmoil over the weekend, including a funeral, a couple of family problems, a severe migraine, etc., and by Monday morning she was so mentally fatigued and her testosterone so depleted (it balances the creative and emotionally-driving effects of estrogen, and too much influence from estrogen makes women – and men – uncharacteristically – or more, for some of them -- erratic, unstable, and uncomfortable) that her self-esteem became challenged, and she suddenly started acting like she had when we first met, very dramatic, needy, approval-seeking, etc. As the day wore on, it was getting worse instead of better.

To finish putting this in perspective, Daphne is one of the brightest women I know, with an IQ of around 130-140, very emotionally aware, and extremely competent at self-evaluation. She’s one of the top three women on the support staff who helped with the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and who continue to respond to surveys, questions, reader dilemmas, etc., with useful insight because she can “step in and out of herself” at will and remain entirely objective through the whole thing, which is very unusual among women, who tend to get wrapped up in the emotion of an experience and don’t want to quickly shut it down and analyze it, even when it would be to their extreme benefit to do so.

Do you have the picture now? A smart, fiercely independent woman who is quite adept at side-stepping her own emotions to rationally examine them has reverted to behavior not exhibited in nearly a decade, and as the day wore on, as I tried to point out what was happening, it got worse instead of better. I knew what was coming when she said, “I just feel like I need a good cry.” Why?

She’d been to a funeral and yet she needed a good cry? Danger Will Robinson! Danger! That’s a dependable sign of MAJOR emotional energy build-up looking for an outlet; “needing a good cry” is bad enough, but when a woman has been to a tear-jerking event like a funeral and still “needs a good cry,” well, where I grew up they would say something like, “You ain’t seen trouble yet, but it’s comin’!” Emotional energy is like any other kind of mental energy. Thought is the result of chemical reactions in the brain causing electrical impulses at the nerve synapses. This tells you what?

That the stress of all the emotion from the weekend had put her brain chemistry out of balance. Some women have more of a problem with this than others, but the symptoms are the same; they get weaker and more clingy, then needy, then irritable, and finally they sound like they’re spoiling for a fight, and you can hear the stress and anger start building in their voice looking for an outlet.

The big question is “what do you do?”

First, you have to avoid the urge to let her engage you in a fight. If she gets bad enough, she’ll say something to put you on the defensive and then jump to get you to jump back. Giving her a good fight will reset her brain chemistry, but it will also create a lot of embarrassment, hard feelings, scars and other aftermath that neither of you really want to deal with, and while she might be able to dismiss the things she says to you, you may never forgive or forget them, as she may never forgive or forget the things you say to her in response to what she said to you SPECIFICALLY TO PROVOKE THE ALTERCATION. We’ve all seen how things, once said, cannot really ever be taken back, no matter how much they weren’t really meant at the time. You need a confrontation, but not a fight. How do you do that?

Remember the many times I’ve mentioned leadership as a biological trigger for attraction? The chemical balance in the brain is a biological matter. When she finally had things built up to try to start the fight and made a snide remark to try to provoke me, I took a stern tone that she had probably never heard me use before, and said, “Just hold it! You are not going there with me!”

That’s leadership (decision-making), and authority (establishing a boundary), but it’s also a confrontation (denying her the fight and doing so in a stern tone). I thought for a second she had dropped the phone until I heard her breathe, and then continued, “This is not about me and you, or even me or you separately. It’s about all the emotional turmoil that you went through over the last few days, and you’re looking for a fight to sort it all out. There’s a better way to handle this.”

I went on to explain what had happened, maintaining the stern tone of a friend who is verbally roughing up another friend for doing something silly, and gradually softening it as I proceeded over the next couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes of silence as she took it all in, she interrupted me in mid sentence with, “Oh my God! I’ve been doing this all day, haven’t I?”

It was like hearing somebody come out of a daze, and Gentlemen, you MUST understand this, for many women, it really is like coming out of a daze. When they get off balance like that, they are truly in an altered mental state, and may not even remember some things that happen or have an accurate sense of the passage of time. This does not in any way make them inferior, weak, flakey, or insane, any other kind of sexist nonsense. It’s just the way they are, and something that we have to be aware of and work around – NOT SUFFER IN SILENCE OVER -- if we are going to have a long-term relationship with them. It goes with the territory, and you can help them though it or be made miserable by it. A pretty obvious choice, huh?

Eventually, after talking for a few minutes (and Daphne making several apologies and sounding very embarrassed), we got back to the point in a prior discussion about her saying that she felt like she just needed a good cry. Sometime before we spoke today, she watched some old sad movie, had a good cry, and was herself when I called this morning to share a reader e-mail with her. This brings up the other VERY important point…

When women say they “need a good cry,” they’re not being prissy little wuss-bags. They know that they are off-balance, and have learned over time that it’s going to take some kind of extreme emotional event that is sustained for a fairly long time (as emotional events go) to get things back in balance. It is VERY difficult to create a positive event that can create this intensity and duration of emotion, so they usually use something negative but inert, like a sad movie, to get them started and keep them going, and by the time the movie is over, they’re bled out, stabilized, and generally okay. Are you with me here?

Women don’t like sad movies because they enjoy being sad, they like sad movies because they provide a needed emotional rush and release that rids them of negative energy and sets their body chemistry right without having to engage us in a fight and damage our relationships. A woman’s life is mostly about managing her relationships, thanks to her brain structure and chemistry that give her the signature social nature of womankind, and they really do try to protect their relationships a lot more than many men. Hence, when your partner wants to watch a sad movie, don’t interfere. You don’t have to sit there through the whole thing, and in fact should consider inviting her to invite a girlfriend over to watch it with her, but…

If there is no girlfriend available or she doesn’t want to do that, you don’t want to be cast in the role of girlfriend because it kills attraction over time. Tell her that you don’t like sad movies and don’t play well in the role of girlfriend, and that you’ll be in another room, but if she gets upset and wants to be held a bit you’ll be happy to “pop in” for a few minutes if she asks. Being a strong shoulder to cry on is a far cry from being a girlfriend sharing in a drama festival. Crying at chick-flicks was part of the bad advice in the 1980’s that got us into this mess, so don’t go there, ever. You will indeed be very uncomfortable in the girlfriend role if you have an ounce of masculinity in you, and you’ll kill attraction and respect in her. There’s just no upside for either of you if you try to substitute for a girlfriend for even a minute.

If you do have to spend a few minutes with her while she watches, monitor her as she does, and if you notice tears starting to form sit down with her for a bit and snuggle her up, then a few minutes after the scene changes and she’s dried up for a few minutes excuse yourself for a bit. She doesn’t need a baby sitter, but it will feel good to have you there holding her when the tears come, and it will be endearing to her to have you tolerate a few minutes of that movie to help her get through it. Don’t feed into it, or egg her on, or start crying yourself. Just sit still, pull her close, and do whatever you do when she doesn’t feel good and you snuggle her up, such as hair-stroking, nuzzling, etc.

Women are like us in a lot of ways, but in the ways they differ from us lie the potential for a lot of misunderstanding and lack of appreciation, not to mention good old-fashioned BIG trouble. They try to tell us what they need, but one of those differences is how they communicate with us, which really throws a wrench in the works. But, there’s help if you’re smart enough to know that you need it and man enough to accept it…

I brought a group of nearly 200 women together to find out what they want from men and life, and then worked with the 118 couples made up of the “attached” women in the first group with their men (about one-third of them were unmarried or divorced) and worked them over nine ways from Sunday to find out what went right and wrong in relationships, how men and women differed, how to communicate with them, and how to make or break that wonderful feeling of attraction, that emotion that women so desperately crave and which truly brings out the best in them when they feel it, so much so that they will literally kill to protect that feeling.

That research was compiled into my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which was given back to the couples for testing and fine tuning, and all of them, as well as everyone who has bought it since (unless somebody has failed to complain and get a refund when they felt like it, and can you imagine that happening today???) has improved their life and/or relationship, and I have more unsolicited testimonials to that effect than you could ever imagine. Some relationships can’t be improved because they never should have been formed in the first place, and this book helps you to identify and exit them peacefully as well. And the best news of all is…

That you can have it now! It’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, 118 pages in PDF format, single-spaced and optimized for printing on standard letter-size paper, so you can read it on your screen or carry it with you and read it on the train, plane, or your favorite easy chair – YOUR CHOICE. Just choose! Go for it now, so you can start replacing boredom, frustration, and fights with happy times and a higher standard of living and self-esteem, because life is too short to spend it just wondering why things aren’t going so well when they could be going great!

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

Distant Early Warnings Can Help Save Your Relationship and Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, women like to talk, a lot, right? They like to discuss feelings and events, and many of them have a powerful drive to give an accounting of the events of their day and the people they interact with, even when the parties don’t know each other and really don’t care. (For example, I once had a secretary who would tell me about her cat’s activities and what her aging father had for dinner the night before, knowing full well that I was allergic to cat dander and didn’t like the way her father brow-beat her, and didn’t want to hear about either of them.)

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

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

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

The same goes for headaches, unless there is some kind of migraine or brain tumor issue, or possibly a neck injury. The really bad ones just don’t come that often, and if they do, whomever is suffering them is looking for medical help, not just sitting around complaining, right? It’s just not that hard to pop a couple of aspirin or something, and there really aren’t that many people around who prefer the attention they get from the martyrdom of drug-free endurance of a headache so much that they’d actually do it. There’s no logic to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi David,

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

John T.

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

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

Gary

(Note: birth control pills contain estrogen and progesterone, so this is not a surprise.)

Hi David,

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

Janelle

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

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

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

2. Cancer, especially of the breasts and reproductive organs

3. Allergies and reduced immunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I said boredom, and if you don’t believe me, just ask one of them! Then jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy and get started on kicking your relationship up to notches unknown!

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

A Woman Lives Briefly As a Man, and Here Is the BIG Relationship and Marriage Lesson For All to Learn From Her Experience

Part 2 of 2: EXCLUSIVE MUST READ! A female reader gets an accidental overdose of testosterone and spends a couple of weeks feeling what many men feel every day, and there are lessons for all in her experience! Yesterday we studied the letter, and today I show you what you should have seen…

I’ve waited as long as I can to publish this edition because I was really hoping to hear from someone who saw the most important lesson to be had here, but I’ve not yet. However, I will say that based on the answers to surveys and other questions, many editions, even the ones marked “urgent” or “must read,” don’t get read for several days or until the weekend because we’re all getting too busy for our own good, so I’m not going to construe this to mean anything more than that the majority of people simply haven’t had the time to read and think about it yet.

In case you missed yesterday’s edition, here’s a letter from a reader who, in a nutshell, got an accidental overdose of testosterone in her hormone replacement therapy dosage and got to spend several days being influenced by it as a man does, especially young men, and there is a glaring lesson for all men embedded in her response. If you’ve already read it, skip past it to the commentary that follows to discover one of the most important things you’ll ever learn about women.

Dear David,

All my life I have heard people say if you could walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you would not be so fast to judge them. I have to tell you of such an experience that has proven this to me, and this was so serious I felt like I should share part of it with you. I will be giving you only a small portion of what I went through, but I hope it will be enough that you will understand that I really know what it feels like to be a man.

I’m 40 years old, had a hysterectomy twelve years ago, and a few weeks ago I went to see my gynecologist about a problem I was having with my hormone levels. Every time I was tested my hormones were lower than the doctor felt they should be, and he made such a big deal of it that I became concerned and made the choice to let the doctor give me strong shot to see if this could get me back on the right track. In doing so I was given a very large dose of testosterone, which turned my body totally opposite of what I had ever been before. I started to view life on a whole new level.

It started out with me looking for sex everywhere. I was suddenly looking at every man I saw and some women as possible sex partners, and I had never done this, especially toward women! I thought at first I was going crazy. I would sit and look at them and could play out in my head all the thoughts I was having about them and what I could imagine we could do together.

I was also terribly aggressive and easily angered, wanting to get into fights with people who would piss me off and I never wanted to do that before, ever! For example during all this I was pulled over by a policeman and was given a ticket. Now most of the time I would cry or flirt or do whatever I had to get out of it and for the most part that would work for me, but this time all I wanted to do is punch the cop right in the face for being an ass to me.

There were so many changes in my life I could not possibly describe all of them for you right now. The point I wanted to get across is after I went through days of strange feelings and urges I had never had before I told my best friend about them and he looked at me and smiled and told me that all of what I told him about was what a man went through everyday of his life until he got old enough for his testosterone levels to drop severely, which he said was somewhere between the late twenties and early fifties, depending on the man, and could be even later for some men.

I was blown away. I called my gynecologist and told him what my friend said and he confirmed that the dosage may have been too high and that I could be experiencing such side effects for several days, but not to be alarmed because they would stop when the testosterone was used and it returned to a more tolerable level.

Ladies if what I went through just for those few days is what a man goes through every day there is a lot more to being a man than we as women think. All I can say is I hope I never go through anything like this again. If the feeling of gladly passing up food for sex is a small part of how they feel then I say give them sex, I will never again tell my love that I do not feel like it or I have a headache for during that short period of time I got mad at my boyfriend for not giving me all the sex I wanted, and wanted it I did. With every single breath I took I wanted him, and sometimes not just him. When he did not want to give it to me I would look around and wonder where I could get it from.

Like I said, this is only a small part of what I went through and there is much more I could tell you and I might write it all down and send it to you one day, but I am just now starting to get some of the old me feeling like I should again. The main reason I wanted to write this is so that you woman readers might get a little better understanding of what our men go through all the time. I will promise you this before I ever tell my husband no again I will think about the experience I had and how I felt when he told me that he didn’t feel like it.

Daphne

Okay guys, does anybody see it? It’s staring at you from within the next to last paragraph:

“Ladies if what I went through just for those few days is what a man goes through every day there is a lot more to being a man them we as women think. All I can say is I hope I never go through anything like this again. If the feeling of gladly passing up food for sex is a small part of how they feel then I say give them sex, I will never again tell my love that I do not feel like it or I have a headache for during that short period of time I got mad at my boyfriend for not giving me all the sex I wanted, and wanted it I did. With every single breath I took I wanted him, and sometimes not just him. When he did not want to give it to me I would look around and wonder where I could get it from."

Women have the capacity to understand what it feels like to live with the burning drive of testosterone all day every day, and will respond to that understanding with the same nurturing behavior they exhibit for us regarding any needs or desires we have, IF THEY ARE PRESENTED WITH THE INFORMATION CORRECTLY.

What constitutes correctly? Think about it. What do girls grow up hearing about boys, and women continue to believe about men? That ALL WE THINK ABOUT IS SEX, and will lie, cheat, steal and rape if necessary to get it. But that’s not true, is it? We don’t choose to be driven to think about sex as often as we do, and in fact, we don’t THINK about it often at all. We desire it, and often need it, when something sexual is in front of us. It’s a subconscious eruption or a reaction to a stimulus, not something we contemplate. But that’s not what women grow up and live believing.

They grow up hearing from their parents and each other that “guys just want to get into their pants,” and it’s said as something dirty, demeaning, diabolical, and deceitful. When they grow up, they are surrounded by a bunch of pushy, grab-asstic boys who don’t care who they insult or hurt and by a bunch of socially-inept wusses who never learned that neither women nor sex is scarce and are under the influence of myths like "women don't like sex," “women want a nice guy,” and “a guy has to be considerate and let the woman make all the decisions.” So how would you expect them to react?

The lesson is that if you can really talk with your partner about how things really are in your life, openly, honestly, and in detail, help her to understand how things are, and show her the same courtesy and respect by listening when she tells you how things really are in her life, world, etc., or how she feels about how things are in your life or hers, it comes across far differently than if it is presented as some sort of demand on her (“I’m your husband and it’s your duty to have sex with me”) or as some sort of wussy plea of need (“I just can’t help myself, and if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll feel bad about myself and it will be all your fault,” or the classic wuss-out, “A man has needs, you know…”). Understanding of needs and conditions motivates a woman to nurture to deal with the situation, while bullying, badgering, whining, and sulking motivate her to separate herself from the situation, and YOU!

This doesn’t just apply to sex, or even just to intimacy in general. It applies to everything that goes on between the two of you. If you have goals that you want your wife to help you meet somehow, or even just goals that you don’t want he to resent or resist, explain to her what these goals are, and why they are important to you, and tell her that she can help if she wants and it will be appreciated if she does, instead of demanding that she “get her ass in gear and get with the program,’ telling her to keep her nose out of your business, or whining about how you never got a break and the system is against you and that she owes it to you to pitch in and cover your ass. Invite her to tell you about her goals and interests as well. And listen with interest as she responds with how she feels about what you’ve told her and what she’s told you. That simple act will do more for your trust, respect, and intimacy than you can imagine until you see it in action.

There is no way that two people in a committed relationship can ever know too much about each other’s goals, desires, needs, preferences, etc., and talking openly and honestly about them is by far the best way to make things understood. Aside from the obvious benefits of the building of trust and friendship as these things are discussed, there will also be the building of intimacy and excitement as you come closer together and celebrate your victories together. It’s as automatic as the rising and setting of the sun.

Oops! All that talking and listening requires bridging that inter-gender communications gap that we’re all born into and few of us ever find out way across. What’s the old cliché, “Drat! Foiled again…”? Well, no, not this time…

You guessed it: It’s all in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which is available for download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com, and once you’ve learned what it has to offer, you’ll be having frequent picnics on that inter-gender communications bridge you’re going to quickly build. Could life get any better? Sure, and you’re going to make it so, if you start now…

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

A Woman Lives Briefly As a Man, and Learns a BIG Relationship and Marriage Lesson

EXCLUSIVE MUST READ! A female reader gets an accidental overdose of testosterone and spends a couple of weeks feeling what many men feel every day, and there are lessons for all in her experience!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is HUGE. One of your fellow readers, Daphne, whom we’ve heard from before on a couple of occasions, is 40 years old and using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after a total hysterectomy. The strangest thing happened!

For those of you who don’t know a lot about endocrinology, after a hysterectomy or menopause, women are often given a cocktail of hormones to try to replace the ones that were produced by the organs that were removed. Many claims are made about preventing osteoporosis and other things, but the only thing that estrogen HRT has been clinically PROVEN to do is curb hot flashes and some forms of it (especially the one derived from horse urine, called “equione,” which is estimated at 1,000 times the cellular reproductive power of human estrogen) have also been proven to raise a woman’s chance of contracting cancer, especially if her HRT regimen includes synthetic estrogen (like equione) or high doses of natural estrogen.

What is not common knowledge is that testosterone, the male hormone, is also needed and used by women to combat fatigue, heighten libido (it’s the only true aphrodisiac known to science), and actually does help with the formation and repair of bone and tissue. Indeed, estrogen is a metabolite (a by-product of the metabolism of) of testosterone; men metabolize more as DHT and other non-estrogen substances, while women metabolize more as estrogen, which is needed by all for cellular reproduction but in higher doses causes the femininization of the body, including the brain, skin, and other non-sexual organs.

When women have significantly too much testosterone for an extended period, it causes their voice to deepen, facial and other body hair to grow, libido is put into overdrive, and they get more aggressive; a lesser overage will cause minor symptoms like being less creative and more analytical, a more masculine communications protocol (speaking more directly and less in tune to non-verbal messages, among other things), less emotionally driven, more aggressive, etc.

This woman was given a dose that was determined to be WAAAAY beyond her natural tolerance in an injection, and she describes an experience that you simply must read for yourself. There are multiple lessons, some not so obvious, for both men and women in this letter, but I’m not going to go into those until tomorrow. In the meantime, I challenge you to read this letter and see what lessons you can derive from it yourself, and if you wish to share your observations, simply reply to this newsletter, and don’t forget to indicate whether you want your observations shared with the other readers.

Without further ado, here again is Daphne, with a tale that you really should study, because she has a unique perspective after this experience, possibly the only woman alive who has lived feeling the male drives and testosterone-driven emotions, and her reaction to them contains the biggest lesson of all:

Dear David,

All my life I have heard people say if you could walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you would not be so fast to judge them. I have to tell you of such an experience that has proven this to me, and this was so serious I felt like I should share part of it with you. I will be giving you only a small portion of what I went through, but I hope it will be enough that you will understand that I really know what it feels like to be a man.

I’m 40 years old, had a hysterectomy twelve years ago, and a few weeks ago I went to see my gynecologist about a problem I was having with my hormone levels. Every time I was tested my hormones were lower than the doctor felt they should be, and he made such a big deal of it that I became concerned and made the choice to let the doctor give me strong shot to see if this could get me back on the right track. In doing so I was given a very large dose of testosterone, which turned my body totally opposite of what I had ever been before. I started to view life on a whole new level.

It started out with me looking for sex everywhere. I was suddenly looking at every man I saw and some women as possible sex partners, and I had never done this, especially toward women! I thought at first I was going crazy. I would sit and look at them and could play out in my head all the thoughts I was having about them and what I could imagine we could do together.

I was also terribly aggressive and easily angered, wanting to get into fights with people who would piss me off and I never wanted to do that before, ever! For example during all this I was pulled over by a policeman and was given a ticket. Now most of the time I would cry or flirt or do whatever I had to get out of it and for the most part that would work for me, but this time all I wanted to do is punch the cop right in the face for being an ass to me.

There were so many changes in my life I could not possibly describe all of them for you right now. The point I wanted to get across is after I went through days of strange feelings and urges I had never had before I told my best friend about them and he looked at me and smiled and told me that all of what I told him about was what a man went through every day of his life until he got old enough for his testosterone levels to drop severely, which he said was somewhere between the late twenties and early fifties, depending on the man, and could be even later for some men.

I was blown away. I called my gynecologist and told him what my friend said and he confirmed that the dosage may have been too high and that I could be experiencing such side effects for several days, but not to be alarmed because they would stop when the testosterone was used and it returned to a more tolerable level.

Ladies if what I went through just for those few days is what a man goes through every day there is a lot more to being a man than we as women think. All I can say is I hope I never go through anything like this again. If the feeling of gladly passing up food for sex is a small part of how they feel then I say give them sex. I will never again tell my love that I do not feel like it or I have a headache for during that short period of time I got mad at my boyfriend for not giving me all the sex I wanted, and want it I did. With every single breath I took I wanted him, and sometimes not just him. When he did not want to give it to me I would look around and wonder where I could get it from.

Like I said, this is only a small part of what I went through and there is much more I could tell you and I might write it all down and send it to you one day, but I am just now starting to get some of the old me feeling like I should again. The main reason I wanted to write this is so that you woman readers might get a little better understanding of what our men go through all the time. I will promise you this before I ever tell my husband no again I will think about the experience I had and how I felt when he told me that he didn’t feel like it.

Daphne

What a story! I sincerely hope that Daphne chooses to share more of this story with us at sometime in the future, but aside from the drama of spending a few days feeling the urges and emotions that many of us men feel every day, there is a HUGE and significant lesson here for men. As I mentioned above, see if you can spot it, write to me at support@makingherhappy.com about it if you feel like it, and if I get the correct response from five or fewer people, a prize will be awarded, a copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and tomorrow I’ll reveal any winners and the big lesson after you’ve had some time to think about it and possibly win a prize!

Speaking of which, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" is available for download right now at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, and if you’ll read it diligently and learn its secrets, you’ll have the same inside-out view of women that Daphne got of men without having to have a large dose of estrogen or experience first-hand any of its side effects – an offer you can’t refuse, right?

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

Believe It Or Not, Your DIET Can Destroy Your Relationship and Marriage

There are some foods that should never be in a man’s diet (and probably nobody’s diet) because they block testosterone uptake and make him develop female characteristics and tendencies, as well as kill his libido. Yes, I’m serious, and you may be eating a lot of one of them in particular, the worst offender of all…

Those of you who have read my bio know that I’ve got a strong medical background for a non-physician; I’ve also been an herbalist since my teens and shell out about a thousand dollars a year on subscriptions to the best medical newsletters in existence, most of which are written by doctors and researchers who blow the whistle on the fallacies and frauds of mainstream medicine.

One topic that keeps coming up in ALL of these newsletters is that study after study is PROVING (not SUGGESTING) that plant estrogens attach to testosterone receptors and keep testosterone from being utilized in the male body, which in turn causes men to become less masculine, and in too many cases start becoming feminine, even to the extent of having their voice rise in pitch and developing female-like breasts and lactating in extreme cases. And, since testosterone promotes libido in both men and women, blocking the utilization of testosterone decreases libido! BAD IDEA!

(It does the same thing in the female body, which decreases a woman’s libido, and since she already has all the estrogen her body can tolerate, is also being proven to promote cancer, since estrogen’s main purpose in the body is to cause the proliferation of cells, which is normally is balanced by other chemicals in the body until a surplus is created by overactive adrenal glands – which if healthy, can produce as much or more estrogen than a woman’s ovaries – or ingestion of excess estrogen in food, birth control pills, or hormone replacement therapy – which has also been proven to promote cancer in too many cases and some doctors are now recommending against.)

The biggest of all offenders is…brace yourself, especially if you are a vegetarian, SOY! Yes, that funny little green bean that tofu is made from, that is served as a sort of trendy Japanese delicacy called “edamame,” that is used to replace carbohydrates in a lot of low-carb foods (my wife tried the Nutrisystems diet for awhile, and I read the labels and was appalled at the amount of soy protein added), and is erroneously promoted as being more healthful than anything else that you can eat.

Don’t take my word for this. A Google search for “soy and testosterone” will give you a little over a million pages on the subject, including a most excellent book by Dr. Kaayla T. Daniel, a Certified Clinical Nutritionist, called “The Whole Soy Story,” which really blows all the myths about soy being healthful to bits. If your wife is fond of soy and trying to feed it to you for every meal, you can at least bring this to her attention and get her to stop pumping you and your sons full of estrogen. (Now there’s a hard thought, having your son’s voice go UP instead of down in his early teens!)

Gentlemen, I couldn’t be more serious if I tried. The evidence has been solid for several years, and I’ve abstained from writing about it because most people just won’t accept facts when they conflict with “common knowledge,” but there is so much overwhelming factual evidence now that it can no longer be ignored, just like people eventually couldn’t ignore that the Sun didn’t orbit the Earth, or that the Earth was round, or that two objects of different mass dropped from a height will strike the ground at the same time as long as wind resistance is constant across both objects, or that men can’t expect women to get excited about them if they’re acting like a woman instead of a man.

There’s not one word about soy or even your diet in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," but I’ve covered everything else that women want you to know about them, and a lot that many of them DON’T want you to know. So to make yourself everything the woman in your life really wants you to be (if she likes men, that is!) get the soy out of your diet and jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage."

(Or keep doing what you’re doing, and when your wife keeps ignoring you in the bedroom, just double up on the soy and then you can fondle your own breasts! LOL!)

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

So She Needs a Good Cry or Is Spoiling for a Fight? Knowing When and How to Get Tough in Relationships and Marriage

Sometimes a woman quite literally NEEDS you to get a little tough with her. How do you recognize this, and how do you get tough without being abusive? Think “leadership”…

Yesterday was a really odd day. Everyone I know was having what you would call an “off day” of one kind or another. Hay fever, colds, arthritis, lousy weather, vendor incompetence, boss incompetence, employee incompetence, monthly cycle – you name it, somebody was going through it. The oddest thing was what happened with one of my best friends, Daphne.

We met over ten years ago, and when we did, she was a mess. Totally submissive, living for the approval of others, and living under the thumb of a wimpy, manipulative, predatory husband and a highly-controlling and manipulative mother. She asked me one day fairly early in our relationship how I had come to be so tough and independent, and how I could live caring absolutely nothing about what others thought of me, I steered her to some excellent reading, especially some of Ayn Rand’s work, and we talked about different problems and how to solve them.

She became fiercely independent, ultimately “wearing the pants in the family,” and presenting such a strong image to her mother that her mother went from being dominating and manipulative to seeking Daphne’s approval at every turn. That was about nine years ago, and she’s held the line ever since…that is, until yesterday.

There had been a lot of turmoil over the weekend, including a funeral, a couple of family problems, a severe migraine, etc., and by Monday morning she was so mentally fatigued that her self-esteem became challenged, and she suddenly started acting like she had when we first met, very dramatic, needy, approval-seeking, etc. As the day wore on, it was getting worse instead of better.

To finish putting this in perspective, Daphne is one of the brighter women I know, with an IQ of around 130-140, very emotionally aware, and extremely competent at self-evaluation. She’s one of the top three women on the support staff who helped with the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and who continue to respond to surveys, questions, reader dilemmas, etc., with useful insight because she can “step in and out of herself” at will and remain entirely objective through the whole thing (except on unusual occasions when she gets uncharacteristically hormonal), which is very unusual among women, who tend to get wrapped up in the emotion of an experience and don’t want to quickly shut it down and analyze it, even when it would be to their extreme benefit to do so.

Do you have the picture now? A smart, fiercely independent woman who is quite adept at side-stepping her own emotions to rationally examine them has reverted to behavior not exhibited in nearly a decade, and as the day wore on, as I tried to point out what was happening, it got worse instead of better. I knew what was coming when she said, “I just feel like I need a good cry.” Why?

She’d been to a funeral and yet she needed a good cry? Danger Will Robinson! Danger! That’s a major sign of emotional energy build-up looking for an outlet. Emotional energy is like any other kind of mental energy. Thought is the result of chemical reactions in the brain causing electrical impulses at the nerve synapses. This tells you what?

That the stress of all the emotion from the weekend had put her brain chemistry out of balance. Some women have more of a problem with this than others, but the symptoms are the same; they get weaker and more clingy, then needy, then irritable, and finally they sound like they’re spoiling for a fight, and you can hear the stress and anger start building in their voice looking for an outlet. The big question is “what do you do?”

First, you have to avoid the urge to let her engage you in a fight. If she gets bad enough, she’ll say something to put you on the defensive and then jump to get you to jump back. Giving her a good fight will reset her brain chemistry, but it will also create a lot of embarrassment, hard feelings, scars and other aftermath that neither of you really want to deal with. We’ve all seen how things, once said, cannot really ever be taken back, no matter how much they weren’t really meant at the time. You need a confrontation, but not a fight. How do you do that?

Remember the many times I’ve mentioned leadership as a biological trigger for attraction? The chemical balance in the brain is a biological matter, is it not? When she finally had things built up to try to start the fight and made a snide remark to try to provoke me, I took a stern tone that she had probably never heard me use before, and said, “Just hold it! You are not going there with me!”

That’s leadership (decision-making), and authority (establishing a boundary), but it’s also a confrontation (denying her the fight and doing so in a stern tone). I thought for a second she had dropped the phone until I heard her breathe, and then continued, “This is not about me and you, or even me or you separately. It’s about all the emotional turmoil that you went through over the last few days, and you’re looking for a fight to sort it all out. There’s a better way to handle this.”

I went on to explain what had happened, maintaining the stern tone of a friend who is verbally roughing up another friend for doing something silly, and gradually softening it as I proceeded over the next couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes of silence as she took it all in, she interrupted me in mid sentence with, “Oh my God! I’ve been doing this all day, haven’t I?”

It was like hearing somebody come out of a daze, and Gentlemen, you MUST understand this, for many women, it really is like coming out of a daze. When they get off balance like that, they are truly in an altered mental state, and may not even remember some things that happen or have an accurate sense of the passage of time. This does not in any way make them inferior, weak, or any other kind of sexist nonsense. It’s just the way they are, and something that we have to be aware of and work around if we are going to have a long-term relationship with them. It goes with the territory, and you can help them though it or be made miserable by it. A pretty obvious choice, huh?

Eventually, after talking for a few minutes (and Daphne making several apologies and sounding very embarrassed), we got back to the point in a prior discussion about her saying that she felt like she just needed a good cry. Sometime before we spoke today, she watched some old sad movie, had a good cry, and was herself when I called this morning to share a reader e-mail with her. This brings up the other VERY important point…

When women say they “need a good cry,” they’re not being prissy little wuss-bags. They know that they are off-balance, and have learned over time that it’s going to take some kind of extreme emotional event that is sustained for a fairly long time (as emotional events go) to get things back in balance. It is VERY difficult to create a positive event that can create this intensity and duration of emotion, so they usually use something negative but inert, like a sad movie, to get them started and keep them going, and by the time the movie is over, they’re bled out, stabilized, and generally okay. Are you with me here?

Women don’t like sad movies because they enjoy being sad, they like sad movies because they provide a needed emotional rush and release that rids them of negative energy and sets their body chemistry right without having to engage us in a fight and damage our relationships. Hence, when your partner wants to watch a sad movie, don’t interfere. You don’t have to sit there through the whole thing, and in fact should invite her to invite a girlfriend over to watch it with her, but…

If there is no girlfriend available or she doesn’t want to do that, you don’t want to be cast in the role of girlfriend because it kills attraction over time. Tell her that you don’t like sad movies and that you’ll be in another room, but if she gets upset and wants to be held a bit you’ll be happy to “pop in” for a few minutes if she asks. Being a strong shoulder to cry on is a far cry from being a girlfriend sharing in a drama festival. Crying at chick-flicks was part of the bad advice in the 1980’s that got us into this mess, so don’t go there, ever. You will be very uncomfortable in the girlfriend role if you have an ounce of masculinity in you, and you’ll kill attraction and respect in her. There’s just no upside for either of you if you try to substitute for a girlfriend for even a minute.

If you do have to spend a few minutes with her while she watches, monitor her as she does, and if you notice tears starting to form sit down with her for a bit and snuggle her up, then a few minutes after the scene changes and she’s dried up for a few minutes excuse yourself for a bit. She doesn’t need a baby sitter, but it will feel good to have you there holding her when the tears come, and it will be endearing to her to have you tolerate a few minutes of that movie to help her get through it. Don’t feed into it, or egg her on, or start crying yourself. Just sit still, pull her close, and do whatever you do when she doesn’t feel good and you snuggle her up.

Women are like us in a lot of ways, but in the ways they differ from us lie the potential for a lot of misunderstanding and lack of appreciation, not to mention good old-fashioned BIG trouble. They try to tell us what they need, but one of those differences is how they communicate with us, which really throws a wrench in the works. But, there’s help if you’re smart enough to know that you need it and man enough to accept it…

I got a group of 118 couples together and worked them over nine ways from Sunday to find out what went right and wrong in relationships, how men and women differed, how to communicate with them, and how to make or break that wonderful feeling of attraction, that emotion that women so desperately crave and which truly brings out the best in them when they feel it, so much so that they will literally kill to protect that feeling.

That research was compiled into my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which was given back to the couples for testing and fine tuning, and all of them, as well as everyone who has bought it since (unless somebody has failed to complain and get a refund when they felt like it, and can you imagine that happening today???) has improved their life and/or relationship. Some relationships can’t be improved because they never should have been formed in the first place, and this book helps you to identify and exit them peacefully as well. And the best news of all is…

That you can have it now! It’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, 118 pages in PDF format, single-spaced and optimized for printing on standard letter-size paper, so you can read it on your screen or carry it with you and read it on the train, plane, or your favorite easy chair – YOUR CHOICE. Just choose! Go for it now, so you can start replacing boredom, frustration, and fights with happy times and a higher standard of living and self-esteem, because life is too short to spend it just wondering why things aren’t going so well when they could be going great!

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

Being Tough When Women Need It, a Survival Skill in Relationships and Marriage

Sometimes a woman needs you to get a little tough with her. How do you get tough without being abusive? Think “leadership”…

Yesterday was a really odd day. Everyone I know was having what you would call an “off day” of one kind or another. Hay fever, colds, arthritis, lousy weather, vendor incompetence, boss incompetence, employee incompetence, monthly cycle – you name it, somebody was going through it. The oddest thing was what happened with one of my best friends, Daphne.

We met over ten years ago, and when we did, she was a mess. Totally submissive, living for the approval of others, and living under the thumb of a predatory husband and a highly-manipulative mother. She asked me one day fairly early in our relationship how I had come to be so tough and independent, and how I could live caring absolutely nothing about what others thought of me, I steered her to some excellent reading, especially some of Ayn Rand’s work, and we talked about different problems and how to solve them.

She became fiercely independent, ultimately “wearing the pants in the family,” and presenting such a strong image to her mother that her mother went from being dominating and manipulative to seeking Daphne’s approval at every turn. That was about nine years ago, and she’s held the line ever since…that is, until yesterday.

There had been a lot of turmoil over the weekend, including a funeral, a couple of family problems, a severe migraine, etc., and by Monday morning she was so mentally fatigued that her self-esteem became challenged, and she suddenly started acting like she had when we first met, very dramatic, needy, approval-seeking, etc. As the day wore on, it was getting worse instead of better.

To finish putting this in perspective, Daphne is one of the brightest women I know, with an IQ of around 130-140, very emotionally aware, and extremely competent at self-evaluation. She’s one of the top three women on the support staff who helped with the development of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and who continue to respond to surveys, questions, reader dilemmas, etc., with useful insight because she can “step in and out of herself” at will and remain entirely objective through the whole thing, which is very unusual among women, who tend to get wrapped up in the emotion of an experience and don’t want to quickly shut it down and analyze it, even when it would be to their extreme benefit to do so.

Do you have the picture now? A smart, fiercely independent woman who is quite adept at side-stepping her own emotions to rationally examine them has reverted to behavior not exhibited in nearly a decade, and as the day wore on, as I tried to point out what was happening, it got worse instead of better. I knew what was coming when she said, “I just feel like I need a good cry.” Why?

She’d been to a funeral and yet she needed a good cry? Danger Will Robinson! Danger! That’s a major sign of emotional energy build-up looking for an outlet. Emotional energy is like any other kind of mental energy. Thought is the result of chemical reactions in the brain causing electrical impulses at the nerve synapses. This tells you what?

That the stress of all the emotion from the weekend had put her brain chemistry out of balance. Some women have more of a problem with this than others, but the symptoms are the same; they get weaker and more clingy, then needy, then irritable, and finally they sound like they’re spoiling for a fight, and you can hear the stress and anger start building in their voice looking for an outlet. The big question is “what do you do?”

First, you have to avoid the urge to let her engage you in a fight. If she gets bad enough, she’ll say something to put you on the defensive and then jump to get you to jump back. Giving her a good fight will reset her brain chemistry, but it will also create a lot of embarrassment, hard feelings, scars and other aftermath that neither of you really want to deal with. We’ve all seen how things, once said, cannot really ever be taken back, no matter how much they weren’t really meant at the time. You need a confrontation, but not a fight. How do you do that?

Remember the many times I’ve mentioned leadership as a biological trigger for attraction? The chemical balance in the brain is a biological matter, is it not? When she finally had things built up to try to start the fight and made a snide remark to try to provoke me, I took a stern tone that she had probably never heard me use before, and said, “Just hold it! You are not going there with me!”

That’s leadership (decision-making), but it’s also a confrontation (denying her the fight and doing so in a stern tone). I thought for a second she had dropped the phone until I heard her breathe, and then continued, “This is not about me and you, or even me or you separately. It’s about all the emotional turmoil that you went through over the last few days, and you’re looking for a fight to sort it all out. There’s a better way to handle this.”

I went on to explain what had happened, maintaining the stern tone of a friend who is verbally roughing up another friend for doing something silly, and gradually softening it as I proceeded over the next couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes of silence as she took it all in, she interrupted me in mid-sentence with, “Oh my God! I’ve been doing this all day, haven’t I?”

It was like hearing somebody come out of a daze, and Gentlemen, you MUST understand this, for many women, it really is like coming out of a daze. When they get off balance like that, they are truly in an altered mental state, and may not even remember some things that happen or have an accurate sense of the passage of time. This does not in any way make them inferior, weak, or any other kind of sexist nonsense. It’s just the way they are, and something that we have to be aware of and work around if we are going to have a long-term relationship with them. It goes with the territory.

Eventually, after talking for a few minutes (and Daphne making several apologies and sounding very embarrassed), we got back to the point in a prior discussion about her saying that she felt like she just needed a good cry. Sometime before we spoke today, she watched some old sad movie, had a good cry, and was herself when I called this morning to share a reader e-mail with her. This brings up the other VERY important point…

When women say they “need a good cry,” they’re not being prissy little wuss-bags. They know that they are off-balance, and have learned over time that it’s going to take some kind of extreme emotional event that is sustained for a fairly long time (as emotional events go) to get things back in balance. It is VERY difficult to create a positive event that can create this intensity and duration of emotion, so they usually use something negative but inert, like a sad movie, to get them started and keep them going, and by the time the movie is over, they’re okay. Are you with me here?

Women don’t like sad movies because they enjoy being sad, they like sad movies because they provide a needed emotional rush and release that rids them of negative energy and sets their body chemistry right without having to engage us in a fight and damage our relationships. Hence, when your partner wants to watch a sad movie, don’t interfere. You don’t have to sit there through the whole thing, and in fact should invite her to invite a girlfriend over to watch it with her, but…

If there is no girlfriend available or she doesn’t want to do that, you don’t want to be cast in the role of girlfriend because it kills attraction over time. Tell her that you don’t like sad movies and that you’ll be in another room, but if she gets upset and wants to be held a bit you’ll be happy to “pop in” for a few minutes if it gets rough for her. Being a strong shoulder to cry on is a far cry from being a girlfriend sharing in a drama festival.

Monitor her as she watches, and if you notice tears starting sit down with her for a bit and snuggle her up, then a few minutes after the scene changes and she’s dried up for a few minutes excuse yourself for a bit. She doesn’t need a baby sitter, but it will feel good to have you there holding her when the tears come, and it will be endearing to her to have you tolerate a few minutes of that movie to help her get through it. Don’t feed into it, or egg her on, or start crying yourself (perish the thought – that was the beginning of the end of masculine men back in the 80’s!). Just sit still, pull her close, and do whatever you do when she doesn’t feel good and you snuggle her up.

Women are like us in a lot of ways, but in the ways they differ from us lie the potential for a lot of misunderstanding and lack of appreciation, not to mention good old fashioned BIG trouble. They try to tell us what they need, but one of those differences is how they communicate with us, which really throws a wrench in the works. But, there’s help if you’re smart enough to know that you need it and man enough to accept it…

I got a group of 118 couples together and worked them over nine ways from Sunday to find out what went right and wrong in relationships, how men and women differed, how to communicate with them, and how to make or break that wonderful feeling of attraction, that emotion that women so desperately crave and which truly brings out the best in them when they feel it, so much so that they will literally kill to protect that feeling.

That research was compiled into my e-book, "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which was given back to the couples for testing and fine tuning, and all of them, as well as everyone who has bought it since (unless somebody has failed to complain and get a refund when they felt like it, and can you imagine that happening today???) has improved their life and/or relationship. Some relationships can’t be improved because they never should have been formed in the first place, and this book helps you to identify and exit them peacefully as well. And the best news of all is…

That you can have it now! It’s an instant download at http://www.makingherhappy.com, 118 pages in PDF format, single-spaced and optimized for printing on standard letter-size paper, so you can read it on your screen or carry it with you and read it on the train, plane, or your favorite easy chair – YOUR CHOICE. Just choose! Go for it now, so you can start replacing boredom, frustration, and fights with happy times and a higher standard of living and self-esteem, because life is too short to spend it just wondering why things aren’t going so well when they could be going great!

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

Understanding Emotional Scales: Key to Great Relationships and Marriage

MUST READ: Men’s and Women’s emotional scales are calibrated very differently, and understanding how can literally make the difference in being happy and being divorced.

You know how seldom I put the words “MUST READ” in a title or summary, and I promise it will be worth your time to read this time, too.

If I could teach everyone on this planet only one thing above all others to help them get along better, not just in intimate, committed relationships, but in ALL inter-gender relationships, it would be a hard choice between our difference in communication skills and protocols and the difference in the structure our emotional scales. Both are critical to getting along well, and if I had to choose one, I’d feel like I was being asked by King Solomon to cleave and split a child between two mothers, because the two are so indispensable; the absence of either spells disaster.

I’ll discuss communication protocols again sometime this week, but today I want to focus on these emotional scales. One you your fellow readers contacted me in crisis a few weeks ago and now has his situation under control, thanks mainly to the understanding of these two points. (His attraction skills were already fairly strong and needed only minimal improvement once he realized he had let them slide.) He’s agreed to allow me to share excerpts from our discussions to help explain both the concept and how important it is to any relationship.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his status reports:

...It quickly rolled into the "emotional scale" speech, which she seemed to really listen to - I think it's starting to sink in, and makes sense to her. Taking it slow has allowed her to process that and buy-in piece by piece. Honestly, David, if that were your sole contribution to the world, you should be famous for it. I'm not sure of its origins, but it's absolutely brilliant. Applies to all men and women, and the only trick to applying it is to understand that each woman has different levels of tolerance and varying coping abilities. I was able to give her an awesome example for evidence - a fight we had years ago - that also included a basic communication problem as well, and one where she's always ‘fought to win,’ and never admitted her role in the thing. Tonight, her silence told me she's seeing it, or admitting it to herself. There were a few instances of her processing those things and allowing that she was partially at fault. Big step for her lately - she used to do it, but hasn't at all lately.

An excerpt from my response, just for clarity:

As for the emotional scale thing, that was my own, something I've noticed in working with all these women. I looked for weeks on Google and everywhere else for any mention of it, and never found it. I find it utterly absurd that the psychological community has either missed or ignored it, but the psych community is academian and mostly liberal by nature, and it's been a long time since pointing out any differences in men and women was "politically correct.”

(That’s not a political slam against liberals, just a statistical view of relevant environmental conditions, so if you feel your buttons being pressed, stop; the comment is entirely benign.)

And here’s “the emotional scale speech,” as he called it, a suggestion for explaining to his wife why she had done some things that she was feeling very guilty for and why he had failed to recognize her problem and do something about it:

I just read a thing about the difference between how men and women build, process, and prioritize emotions, and it sounded weird at first, but after looking back it makes a lot of sense. Our emotional scales are different, at least with regard to what we need to feel to be comfortable. My emotional scale or range runs from extreme negative to extreme positive, with neutral being in the middle of the scale.

The female scale or range runs from neutral, or emotionless, to extremely emotionally charged, overwhelmed even, with little to no discrimination between positive and negative emotion. Both of us are most comfortable when we are just slightly 'to the right' of the middle of the scale, me feeling a little positive (too much positive makes a man irrational and silly) and you being just a little more emotionally charged than the center of your emotional range (too much emotion, positive or negative, with no way to vent it overloads you as well.)

What's really interesting is that we act similar when we are at the same place on our scale. Being bored to you feels the same as being scared or angry feels to me: agitated, desperate, ready to do anything, even if it's wrong, to change the situation, and potentially irrational. We’re both very comfortable just a little to the opposite side of the center of the scale, and at the far right, we get irrational, overwhelmed, and don't know what to do next, and have a strong tendency to do the wrong thing because our inhibitions and discipline go right out the window.

One of the points it brought out of that is that men are naturally a bit comfortable with emotional neutrality, at least for a short time, while it is downright torturous for a woman. I never realized it was such an issue until I read that, and now that I know, I'll never let a woman be bored in my presence again, because I won't see someone tortured like that.

A couple of weeks have passed since that discussion, and it has apparently really produced understanding, some forgiveness, and cooperation where none was possible before. His last comment follows:

You've really, really got to get that "emotional scale" idea out there - everyone will steal it, but if you put some marketing behind it, you can retain credit as the source. Maybe there's a visual you could create so it instantly made sense to those who see it.

That’s quite an accolade, having a reader see something as so important as to want to protect the author’s ownership of a concept that he paid to learn. Think about that for a minute…it would take some pretty significant results to convert a “reader” into a “disciple” in any case, would it not?

Learn this concept and keep it in the front of your mind at all times. Recognize when the women in your life are bored, and try to do something about it whenever and however it’s appropriate. You’ll find yourself attaining a sort of hero status among them, and triggering a lot of appreciation, cooperation, and nurturing. A coworker will watch your back and try to help you out, a friend will be more attentive and supportive, and your partner will reward you with the relationship of your dreams, as long as you don’t blow it by engaging in wussy, deceitful, or abusive behavior.

How do you do something about it? Sometimes a kind or funny word or two will do it, sometimes a smile, sometimes a surprise or even an adventure. It varies from woman to woman, mood to mood, and setting to setting, and there is no laundry list that will get you through. If you need a rule of thumb that will fit all situations, here it is:

“Attraction is any and every woman's ultimate salvation from boredom.”

There is nothing bad that can come from just being a confident, fun leader at any time and many great things that can come from it, so if you’re doing what you should be doing as a man, no woman will ever be able to be bored while you’re around. But your partner deserves more, right? She’s the one you share everything with, and the one you’re trying to fix things for so you can spend the rest of your life with her. For her, you must learn more about women: what they want, what makes them tick, how to listen to and understand them, how to speak to them, and what flips their attraction switches, among other things.

Are you a guy who likes a single source to fill in a whole lot of gaps? I certainly do; the older I get, the more I try to find ways of simplifying everything. If simplifying your life sounds good to you – and you won’t believe how much having a great relationship with your partner will simplify your life until you actually experience it – then you need to jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and get up to speed, fast and easy, and start clearing some of the relationship clutter, nuisances, and even disasters out of your life.

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