THE Man's Blog for Relationship and Marriage Help

Shopping Together As Foreplay? If Done Properly, It Can Really Boost Your Relationship and Marriage

2009-07-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

Attraction is about flipping primal, biological switches that ignite the urge to procreate, or at least go through the motions of mating. Leadership and authority will flip them because it invokes feelings of power and protection; will shopping awaken these primal urges as well? My research and others’ says, “Oh yeah!” but it’s not retail therapy that does the trick…

Strap yourself in, because we’re going for a ride. I’ve written many times about how attraction and flirting are dying arts that are slowly being revived as desperate singles and bored couples seek out people like myself, Shelley McMurtry, John Alanis, and others and learn what it’s all about. I’ve also advised quite a few people to look back to the actions of their parents and especially grandparents, old movies, etc., for visual examples of things that they did then that most people don’t do now but are crucial for relationships. Why?

A lot of that old school, gender-stereotypical behavior that made for manly men and girly girls was obliterated in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s by idiotic ideas like “men should be sensitive instead of manly” when all women wanted was for manly men to continue to be manly men, but be a little more sensitive to things like a woman’s emotional state and her sheer dread of boredom. Incidentally, note that divorce rates began climbing exponentially through those years as well.

I was talking to my dad a few days ago and he mentioned how different things were now from when I was a child, and I asked him about what couples did for fun in the 50’s and 60’s that he no longer saw them doing. The first thing out of his mouth was a revelation: “Well, when you’re mother and I got married and until you kids were pretty much either gone or old enough to be gone, we nearly always did the grocery shopping together. Your mother would get all frisky and cuddly in the grocery store every time we’d go, even if she was ticked about something when we got there. Didn’t you notice that you kids were often put to bed a little early when we went to the store?”

No, I didn’t notice, but it sure makes sense now!

The act of hunting down and procuring food, and returning home with it is very primal, making the evening meal somewhat celebratory in a primal sort of way. He also talked about having other couples over for card games, and being accused of cheating because he and my mother were playing footsy under the table during the game and stuff like that, which was also primally attractive because of the competition and celebration involved, but I couldn’t get the grocery store thing out of my head. This had to be checked out, because my parents stayed married for 33 years and had five kids on little more than attraction; their divorce happened after deep compatibility problems finally wore them down and out. (And to this day, I don’t know if they even understand that, because they won’t talk about it, but it was there for anyone with eyes to see.)

I’ve spent several hours each day for the last few days wandering around grocery stores and lurking in the parking lot watching for couples to show up (I was accosted by one store manager who thought I was acting suspicious until I explained what I was doing, at which time he took me to the security booth and we both watched the security cameras and tapes, which was a lot of fun for both of us!), and the results were more than impressive. They were downright awe-inspiring!

Couples would come in chatting, arguing, not speaking, even obviously pissed off at each other, and none of them seemed to make it more than about three aisles before they were walking closer together, him pushing the cart and her hand in the crook of his arm, or holding hands, or her stroking and caressing his back and shoulders, and the smiles and other body language was very clear. I also recall similar experiences with the women I’ve been involved with in my adult life, and it went right over my head at the time, as it may be going right over everybody else’s heads today. I wish my grandparents were still alive today so that I could pick their brains about a lot of things; they were married for 66 years, and I’m quite sure they could have told me about a lot more of these kinds of things if they were still around.

So guys, how do you put stuff like this to work? Start by understanding the underlying elements of creating attraction: leadership, protection, mimicking primal survival behavior, decision-making, competition, etc. Now, let’s build an evening out of it.

I’d suggest starting by planning at least an evening meal, and take your partner with you to get the groceries. Take your time and have fun perusing the aisles in the grocery store instead of just rushing straight to the things you want and grabbing them. Turn on a little of that naughty charm and steal a kiss or two, a playful pinch or grope, conducted covertly and intimately, as if you’re a couple of naughty kids getting away with something.

Go home and cook dinner for her, or for her and a guest couple. If you can’t cook, stay in the kitchen with her while she cooks and lead conversation about anything, even how to do what she’s doing. Women adore it when men ask open-ended questions about anything that interests the woman or that she does competently just as much as they like asking men the same things. And I’m not talking about “chit-chat.” I’m talking about real conversation. There’s no emotion or engagement in chit-chat; it’s just a time-filler.

Continue to ramp up the fun and tension after dinner through a movie (yes, a funny one, or one that if filled with action, authority, and some mystery!) or some other activity, like a sunset walk, or if you have the other couple over, engage in something fun and competitive like parlor games or card games, and occasionally when she gets up from the table to get something for herself or the guests, get up to help or suddenly think of something you need to remind her of (don’t worry about being rude, as they may be getting caught up in the energy and wanting to steal a kiss or a grope themselves!), and push the naughty envelope a bit while you’re out of sight of the guests. That “ramp it up and draw back a bit” play builds a delightful tension that women will savor for hours, and when the guests finally leave, she’ll lock the door and probably be tearing at your clothes if you did a good job at ramping up and pulling back.

By the way, DO NOT confuse procurement of needed items with “retail therapy.” Retail therapy, the act of buying things for the thrill of the purchase with no real need or desire for some benefit of ownership, is something that people do when they are bored or suffering from some kind of self-esteem crisis, and make no mistake, it is damaging to a relationship or marriage. It creates financial strain, storage problems, and a lot of stress. Keep your shopping dates to things you know you need or have discussed and decided that you want to own and benefit from ownership, and avoid just grabbing stuff for the thrill of hearing the cash register bells; those bells are for the shopkeeper to celebrate, not you.

I’ve told you guys too many times to count that the object is not to seduce your wife, but to actively induce your wife to seduce you by leading her to her sexy side. This is how you get that done, and I shudder to think of how many such secrets our parents and grandparents took to their graves. If yours are still alive and you’re comfortable doing so, you might ask them about their dating days and the early years of their marriage. You might be surprised at how eager they are to share with you.

However, not everybody’s parents and grandparents will have been good at playing the attraction game. More men and women understood it 50 years ago, but that’s a far cry from being able to say that ALL men and women understood it fifty years ago.

Before you start pumping the older folks for the advanced techniques of their day, you really need a good command of the basics so you can distinguish between something great that can add spice to your life and a mistake that an ancestor made that will haunt generations to come if they don’t know any better than to repeat the mistake. Oops! Where do you go for that?

Glad you asked! Download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," where you’ll find all the basics and then some, on attraction, effective communications, evaluating and renewing relationships, and even how to gracefully end bad ones with cooperation and dignity. Yes, really! Here are a few choice excerpts from a reader letter I received today:

“...I think she is missing me more than she will admit and it’s because of the ATTRACTION that YOUR BOOK has helped me instill back in her...”

“...things are progressing back to getting the woman I love back completely...”

“...the thing I like the MOST is SHE is CALLING ME .... NOT Me calling HER...so I must be doing something RIGHT LOL...”

“...have a great day and thanks if for no other reason for making me a better man...”

This guy described himself as “the wuss from Hell” in his first letter to me, and was afraid he was too late to do anything about it; he mentioned in one of his letters that they’d been separated for a couple of years and she had told him that under no circumstances would they ever be together again, yet they’re dating, she’s chasing him, they’re getting totally intimate, and she’s fighting tooth and nail the whole way, testing him to make sure it’s not just some phony act he’s putting on and that this new man before her is here to stay.

He is, he’s getting results, and if a self-proclaimed “wuss from Hell” can have an ex of two years pulling him back into the bedroom after she declared that donkeys would fly through a frozen Hell before she’d ever sleep with him again, you have no choice but to accept that this information works, and you need to get with the program, NOW! (Right, “Michael” K.?)

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

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

2009-07-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

“NOTHING OF VALUE”

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

Hello David,

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

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

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

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

Rock on Dude,

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasure or Pain: More on Horseplay and "Picking" in Relationships and Marriage

2009-07-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of the women takes issue with being picked on the wrong way, and rightly so. If you’re going to do it, you’d better do it the right way, or you’ll be paying for it later. Understanding our differences makes it easy to get it right…

Happy Independence Day America! Take a minute and remember what bought the liberties you enjoy today, a great many human lives over the course of two centuries, and resolve yourself to start doing a better job of protecting those freedoms before all the special interest groups end up stealing them right out from under your nose. Indeed, take a minute to read this Facebook post about what happened to the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.

It will put things back in perspective for you. And by the way, that’s my Facebook profile, so if you’d rather follow me on Facebook, just do a friend request. My daily lessons are posted there every day, along with MySpace, Twitter, WordPress, and blog.makingherhappy.com. Write to me at support@makingherhappy.com if you can’t find me on one of the above and I’ll hook you up.

And for those of you not in America, whatever freedoms you enjoy were bought with blood, too, and may be disappearing right under your nose, like the frog in the pan of cold water who won’t jump out before being boiled to death because he doesn’t notice the change. So be vigilant, and do what you can to earn more freedom instead of being disinterested, disenfranchised, and disinvolved while the disingenuous usurp control over your life.

Yesterday’s newsletter on picking and playing touched off a barrage of “Amen’s” from the women whose husbands shied away from playing, but there was one that was on a different plane that we need to discuss. Her husband tries to play, but he goes about it all wrong. Meet Gina:

Hi David,

I loved this and all of your e-mails. I wish you could get my husband to understand this. He’s constantly making mean remarks about me, thinking that he’s being funny. He demeans me in front of his friends and family, my friends, family, and coworkers, and he’s embarrassed me to tears more times than I can count. He’s a good man, attractive, very alpha male, and keeps me moving, but when he does this I could just kill him, because it really hurts.

He tells everybody I’m always late everywhere I go; it’s true. We have four kids and I have a hard time getting all of them ready to go anywhere. I have a hard time keeping my weight under control because I tend to eat more when I’m stressed, and I’m always stressed, and he’ll point out to people when I’ve gained weight or my clothes are too tight. He makes fun of me when I make any mistake, and makes it his mission to point it out to everyone for a week or more after.

I can’t get him to understand that this isn’t funny and it hurts badly, and I’ve about had all I can take of it. When I told him that, he made fun of me for being dramatic! I love him with all I have, but I’m starting to feel like a verbal punching bag and to be honest, the main reason I’m always stressed isn’t our four kids, it’s living in fear of what he’s going to say next to mortify me! Can you help?

Thanks so much,
Gina

I handled Gina’s request for help by private correspondence because there were some specific issues and instructions that I don’t want to go into here for several reasons, among them her privacy, but we do need to talk more about this.

I have a good friend who also does this, and his name is Rick. He’s an alpha male from the ground up: retired cop, now consulting in law enforcement, sharp, articulate, and one of us guys who enters a room and everybody just turns and starts moving in that direction because they can sense leadership from across the room.

He loves his “wife” (they never had a wedding, but have been together since dinosaurs roamed the Earth and regard themselves and conduct their lives as if they are married), and she both loves him and is wildly attracted to him, even after years of putting up with his sense of humor, but it is indeed a problem. He sounds just like Gina’s man, making fun of things like her weight that she is really sensitive about, and nobody, myself included, can get him to understand that he’s hurting her. He says she’s as tough as he is and that’s why he loves her.

She’s tough as nails, but she’s also a woman, and even the toughest women have their hot buttons, just like men. She lives in constant torment of loving and being attracted to a man who inadvertently hurts her every other time he opens his mouth, and I really don’t know how much more of it she’s going to be able to take.

Being tough doesn’t mean that nothing hurts; it means you go on with your life in spite of hurting, just like being brave doesn’t mean you’re never scared, it just means you do what you have to do in spite of being scared. And if something hurts too much for too long, most people will remove the cause, or remove themselves from the cause.

What’s escaping Gina’s husband, my friend Rick, and a lot of other men I know is that this is an area where men and women are fundamentally different. Men jab at each other’s vulnerabilities to play and to help each other toughen up, and to challenge each other to do something about our vulnerabilities. We poke each other in the stomach when we notice a few more cheeseburgers and beers collecting around the belt line and make a crack like “Expanding the shed to keep your tool from rusting there, Bob?” There’s no telling how many thousands of years we’ve done it, and it’s a ritual of strengthening, and bonding, a sort of intimacy that only our friends are allowed to engage in with us.

With women, it’s different. The only time you will hear a woman bring up another woman’s vulnerability to her face is if she is on the offensive. They only do it to hurt each other when they are being competitive or vindictive, and it hurts them badly when we do this. They may even try to excuse it as just us being us, but there’s that subconscious link to their communications infrastructure that still eats at them as if we had been a woman when we said something about their weight, or their feet, or a mole, or a gray root on a hair. It’s rejection, or an attack, not a joke, in their book.

In our world, any minor flaw is something to rib your buddy about; in their world, it’s ammunition for the big guns. For us, mentioning our flaws is like a slap on the back and gets a laugh, while in theirs, it’s a slap in the face. That’s why I’ve said in previous newsletter that you can only say something in that kind of play if it’s plainly an exaggeration, like telling her she has a big butt if she has a very skinny butt and knows it, or call her “Bigfoot” when she has tiny feet, something so absurd as to be obviously a joke. Once you’ve established that baseline, you can push the envelope a VERY little at a time and gently find out where her limits are, and then push the envelope a bit, but start in the safe zone so that everybody has fun.

We’re alike in many ways, and it often deceives us into thinking that we are alike in ways that we are entirely different, even opposite. It is these deceptive differences that make us unwittingly hurt each other when hurting each other is among those things that we indeed NEVER want to do.

Not knowing about them – simple ignorance – is very treatable; it takes only a little knowledge. Not caring about our differences and not trying to learn about them and avoid hurting each other with them – apathy – is also treatable, but it takes more drastic measures, like a pitcher of ice water on the crotch, an iron skillet to the head, or in extreme cases, a divorce, or even a bullet or worse; Google “Lorena Bobbitt” if you need an example.

The question you have to ask yourself is which ailment do you have, ignorance or apathy, and how is your ailment going to be treated?

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m going to guess that if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be reading this, so we’re going to treat ignorance. That’s easy, fun, and dirt cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can thank me later… LOL! If you’re here looking for validation of your mistakes instead of a fix for your problems, that’s not going to happen here. There are a bunch of people calling themselves a “support group” somewhere waiting for you with open arms and a big ol’ sob story just like yours if that’s what you’re after. (Yes, I know there are legitimate support groups who really help people, too, and so does everybody else, so hold the hate mail if you’re in one of them.)

For right now, just concern yourself with getting the knowledge to fix this condition, and any others you may have, into your head and into practice, while your problems are still easy to fix. You can do it when they get hard, too, but it takes longer and everybody hurts a lot more in the meantime. Taking care of it NOW is your best bet.

If you’re smart enough to see that, and want to fix your problems before they get any worse, and even go on to make everything better than it’s ever been, start by going to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and downloading your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you’ll see what those before you have already found: it’s solid, tested, proven knowledge and advice, and if you can put your pants on in the morning instead of offering them to a passer-by, you can do what needs to be done and enjoy it, for the rest of your life.

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

What to Do When She's "Mean" to You: Horseplay and "Picking" in Relationships and Marriage

2009-07-02T17:34:00.000-07:00

Men frequently write to me complaining that their wives pick at them, needle them, push them to do things they don’t want to do, etc. How are you supposed to handle this? The answer might surprise you…

I get a lot of letters like the following, and I’ve addressed the issue in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," but the frequency of these letters is scary. There are too many men who don’t recognize what this issue really is and how to deal with it, and families are literally coming apart at the seams because of this simple misunderstanding. Meet Jeff:

Hello David,

I need help. I haven’t yet read your book but I’ve been reading your newsletters for awhile and I think you can tell me this. My wife has picked up a bad habit of picking on me, making fun of me, being a smart-ass in front of our friends, etc. It’s really abrasive and embarrassing, and getting worse by the day. The more I ask her to stop, the more she does it, like she’s trying to push me into a fight. How can I stop it?

Thanks,
Jeff

Well Jeff, you slacking cheapskate, if you’d read my book you’d know! Just kidding! LOL! Seriously, she’s not trying to start a fight at all. She’s trying to get you to play with her! You’re boring her to tears, and she’s trying to bring you out of your shell.

Women like challenge, and they like a man to act like he “has a pair.” She’s challenging you to a verbal “joust” to have some fun. What she’s expecting from you is that you pick back at her, not in a mean, nasty, insulting way, but in that fun, naughty, pranksterish way as you probably cut up with your friends, at least at first, escalating it to get into chasing, tickling, playful pinching or spanking – you know, that kid stuff that you used to do when you drove her wild!

What’s happening now is that she’s trying harder and harder to provoke you into showing that you have reproductive glands and a sense of humor, which is effect punishment for not doing so all along. If you don’t do it, you’ll find her losing interest in you pretty soon, so you’d better be finding your sense of humor, fast.

And we are talking about humor here, no matter how pissy you might think she’s being. If she makes a smart crack about your big feet, make a smart crack about something that obviously IS NOT a problem; i.e., only make a remark about her big butt if she DOES NOT have a big butt and doesn’t obsess about having one. Find something to exaggerate to crack wise about so that it’s obvious that you’re playing, else you may strike a nerve and end up starting a fight while trying to play.

I cannot overstress how you need to exercise a little sensitivity here. If she stubs her toe and is limping around but not seriously injured or embarrassed about the accident, then calling her “gimpy” is fair game, but if she is crippled, or if there was something embarrassing about the injury, like she was in a public place, stubbed her toe and ended up dumping a cup of coffee on a white blouse in front of her boss because of it, “gimpy” is off limits, at least until you see that she’s over the embarrassment, which will usually be if and when you see her smile or laugh a bit when talking about it with a girlfriend. The idea is to be obviously fun with your picking to give her a giggle and demonstrate that you are a playful guy, not some wuss who can’t take a joke and is afraid to dish one out for her or a jerk who is retaliating and being a mean bully instead of going along with the joke.

Women don’t really want that much from us, Gents. It’s just that what they want is stuff that almost nobody is teaching these days, as we talked about with the Superman example yesterday; they’re politically incorrect for wanting it, and we’re politically incorrect for giving it to them. However, I am teaching it, after learning it from some gurus before me and adapting and expanding that by working with several hundred married women and their husbands, and I’ll teach you if you want to learn. Screw political correctness. It wasn’t in my wedding vows; was it in yours?

So how about it? Are you ready to learn what may turn out to be the most valuable lessons of your life? Remember all those jokes you cracked about nobody ever being able to understand women, or know what they want, or what they’re saying, or how to pass all those damnable tests and traps they’re always laying for us? I could give you the old “be the first kid on your block to own it” spiel, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re first. What matters is that you’re successful, as quickly as you can get there.

The quickest path to lasting success in your relationship is to go to http://www.makingherhappy.com/ and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and then just reading it and putting it to work. You’ll not find too many opportunities where you can have so much fun being so successful, if you find any at all like this one, so get busy.

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

Lessons From the Past About Women, Relationships and Marriage

2009-07-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Many lessons from the past, before the feminists and media decided to attempt the castration of our gender, are being lost, things that our fathers and grandfathers knew from childhood about women and keeping them happy. Tune in to see a biggie…

One of your fellow readers, truly one of the sharpest of you, sent me this little pearl of wisdom:

You might point this out to your readers someday - an idea I got from one of my son's movies:

Clark Kent and Superman are the same guy, but Lois Lane is only attracted to Superman - Clark is someone she can only see as a friend. A little story we all learned so young it's permanently part of our thought process!

How profound! And how sad, that we’ve seen that story and that double image for so long and so many of us have been unable to make that connection until this moment. Superman acted as he did in the guise of Clark Kent to kill Lois Lane’s attraction for him. Think about that!

He was nice, agreeable, indecisive and ultimately left decisions up to her, never assertive, never took the lead on anything, never initiated conversations – the consummate wuss! And he was the same guy as Superman, the guy she couldn’t stop thinking about.

“Oh, but that was a comic strip,” you say! Sure it was, written by men of the early and middle 20th century, before the wussification movement of the late 60’s through the present. These men who wrote that comic strip and did those shows (it was in black and white for a long time, and if memory serves, was on radio long before it was ever on television) knew about attraction because it wasn’t politically incorrect at that time to acknowledge that there are distinct and delightful differences between the sexes that can enrich any relationship if the partners in that relationship understand them.

Decisive man of action, or nerd who talks to his feet through his hand – which one do you think any woman would go for? It sickens me to think about the hero images being painted for our kids today. We had Superman, the Lone Ranger, Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig, The Green Hornet, The FBI Guys, James Bond, etc., and what do they have? Barney, the Teletubbies, and that man’s man of the world, Sponge Bob Squarepants. Gender-neutral at best.

And it doesn’t get any better if you look at films for people our age. You may recall from the editorial in the “Where Have All the Real Man Gone” editorial quoted in my free “Break-Up Busting 101” report that Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, etc., have been replaced by Demi Moore and Angelina Jolie, with our gender being represented by Will Farrell, Hugh Grant, etc. Real fine examples of attraction-building heroes, huh?

Gents, it’s like this: A woman’s greatest enemy in the world is boredom, bar none. Wussy men who won’t act like a man, take the lead, make decisions, etc., are boring. When she gets bored, she picks fights, then has affairs, then leaves if you don’t finally get the message. It’s really just that simple, and Ladies, please feel free to comment on this to help me get these men to see that this is as big an issue to you as their job security is to them!

You need to know how this works, and you need to know how to listen to and speak “girly-ese” so that when your partner starts trying to tell you that you are boring her (and you can bet the farm that she will, whether she wants to or not!), you can respond appropriately in a timely manner and head off the trouble that is going to follow. And most of all, you need to know that being the kind of man that every woman enjoys is a whole lot easier and more fun than being the one they merely tolerate, or dismiss as a wuss.

I can and will teach you, as hundreds of women have voluntarily taught me, if you’ll jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." It’s easy, it’s enjoyable, it’s easily affordable, and it’s guaranteed, so you have no excuse. The earlier you stand up and take action, the easier it is, so stand up and do it now, or maybe you’d prefer to continue making life hard on yourself…

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

It's Never Too Late to Fix the Problems in YOUR Relationship or Marriage

2009-06-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

A reader who has been married for forty years demonstrates that it’s never too late to fix common relationship problems, even forty-year old problems, if you know what to do and just do it.

There have been a lot of new readers sign on lately (welcome aboard!), so for the benefit of you newbies, I want to start by saying that while I get a lot of e-mails with success stories, I don’t share them with the rest of you unless there is some specific lesson that you can learn from it. I never liked receiving such e-mails (or reading blog posts) that said nothing more than, “So-and-so did good and you can too if you buy now,” and I’m not going to bore you with them either. Yes, I have a book to sell if you need it, but I have a lot to teach you outside of that book, too.

I also want to urge you to grab my free browser toolbar to have instant access to blog posts, flash messages, a reader chat room, great stuff like pop-up blocking and Internet radio, games and gadgets, and other goodies. Some of us are having a lot of fun with it, and you should join us.

This story started in April 2006 when “Roger” (name has been changed to protect his privacy) subscribed to this newsletter and in early June 2006 bought a copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," a few days after that. He had a little trouble downloading the e-book because of Windows security features (128-bit SSL for you computer geeks) that had not been installed on his computer, and in the course of getting it straightened out he dropped a few details of his situation. I’ll quote some of them here to give you a feeling for where he started at the time of his purchase:

Hi David

Many thanks for your help in this. What little I saw indicates it is going to be a very useful reference book and answer some questions concerning things that happened years ago. We have been married for 40 years this year, but it has been a rocky road and still is occasionally.

Regards,
Roger

Hi David,
Your recent letter concerning your friend Matt has made me realize just how common such a situation can be. I have been married for almost 40 years with two daughters and three grandsons and for as long as I can remember, I have never been able to please her; always there is something else that she wants me to do. I realized this many years ago and now always make a joke of it. So as fast as I complete one project, she will have the next ready for me, sometimes before the first was finished! I just add them to my list of tasks these days, some will get done, some will never be done. My problem is that she has a real knack of making me feel guilty.

This is not just about projects, it could be a social event or something she simply does not approve of, but always I have a guilt feeling when I refuse. The feelings haunt me and I end up doing what she wants sooner or later in most cases. If I argue or try to discuss, I am accused of always wanting to control her. I am driven to succeed because I want the quiet life and the brownie points that come from approval. I am told she sings my praises to others, but never to me.

To give you some idea how it works, she wants me to tidy the garage so it can have a workbench, all the machines and space for me to work. She tells everyone how it will improve things for me, but she also wants me to move all the items stored in the garden shed to the garage so that I can demolish the shed. Then I am expected to build her a summerhouse in the space, not a prefabricated one, a purpose-built brick and tile fantasy!

In my spare time I am expected to remodel and transform the gardens, paint the house, build a new two-level deck across the back, turn the second bathroom into a "wet" room and keep the maintenance of our other two houses up to scratch! I must finish the kitchen sometime too! In all this she has ignored the plans we had to convert the garage into a dining room whilst we built a new garage with attached workshop. Maybe this is because her new greenhouse currently occupies the site?

David, I am tired! I work a 9-hour shift, six days per week and generally get just one day off. I cannot afford to pay someone else to do the work as I am still clearing debts from a failed business venture and I am earning just a tad above the minimum wage. I am reading the book you kindly emailed to me after it got lost in transit when I downloaded, but have yet to put it into practice.

Recently she took a vacation with my daughter and grandsons at one of our cottages. It was tiring, but different and the boys were easy, spending their time surfing. What was I doing? I spent my evenings and a rare weekend off work, repairing and painting the beach hut! Trying to please her again! My own vacations are limited and restricted to the extent we cannot have time together and if I take time off without her, I am expected to work on one of the projects!

I am considering building her a dungeon! :-))

There is a lot more to this than meets the eye, but I will not bore you with all the details of the problems in our marriage. I do not give up easily, but there are times when I seriously consider cutting my losses. Divorce is out of the question as we both feel it might make the other happy!

Any advice you can offer would be appreciated. I simply want time to complete a few things on the list without her adding items faster than I can delete them! I can live without the approval for completed projects, but it would be nice if the feelings of guilt could be stopped too.

Thanks for listening
Kind regards,
Roger

Do you see what’s been going on here? Roger’s been married to this woman 40 years, and has been tested and tested and tested to see if he’ll stand up to his bratty wife’s whims. Think about this: If they’ve been married 40 years, he’s around 60 years old, still working a 54-hour work week, and she’s dominating every free minute he has. When he tries to stand up to her, she guilt-trips him into complying anyway.

I sent Roger a brief bit of encouragement, pointing out that she could only make him feel guilty if he allowed her to do so, and that from his description of his situation, he could easily take charge and turn things around after he had finished reading "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and knew how to position himself and interpret his wife’s words and actions to separate the whims and tests from the legitimate issues that she really expected his full attention and cooperation on.

Three weeks passed, and then I receive this in response to the lesson on attitude (the reader who chastised me and ended his subscription because I was boring him by providing TOO MUCH valuable information free of charge):

Hi David,

The guy who wrote complaining you were too verbose, is never going to listen to women! He has missed the point completely and seems ill-educated concerning a number of matters, which makes you wonder why he signed up in the first place. As you say, the winners listen, read and learn.

I am putting some of the advice contained in your book into practice, with some spectacular results and a lot of amusement. There is a long way to go, especially after 40 years, but I can feel the difference.

I thought you might also be amused by a couple of little anecdotes. The first concerning the first time I listened as she went around the house, to tell me about her day. Instead of requesting that she comes to the point, I allowed her to ramble on as she wanted, I asked occasional questions, nodded now and then, made comments and all the time I was making eye contact. Not once did I try to fix anything and after about 30 minutes of this, she suddenly stopped speaking and stared at me. I asked what was wrong, only to be told that I was behaving strangely and had not walked off when I got bored because she did not come to the point!

I simply grinned at her and said I was simply listening to her experiences of the day!

Since then, I have repeated this procedure and it has resulted in her being much more relaxed and a lot more helpful to me.

I also spotted a recent test of my resolve following which she behaved like a spoiled brat. I forget now what it was about, but I know I explained my reasoning and asked if she had any other thoughts, but warned if she continued to behave like a spoilt child I would put her across my knee and give her a good spanking! I then grinned and made a grab for her, but she was too quick and ran off laughing! Not long ago this would have degenerated into a full blown row.

As I said a long way to go and a lot more to introduce, but results are coming faster than anticipated. Thank you.

Enjoy your day
Regards
Roger

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, heading off even one spoiled brat tantrum and turning it into an attraction-building exercise like that would be worth the time and effort to read a whole encyclopedia of e-books, and he only read one! That’s two to four hours, depending on how fast you read. And what’s really cool is that Roger will now be able to do that every single time the situation arises, and will be able to take charge when real issues arise and get through them with respect and cooperation instead of a “full blown row” as well! Knowledge is indeed power, Gentlemen, the power to shape your environment, your day and your destiny.

Now, get this into perspective. Forty years of bad behavior creates a lot of inertia – the strong tendency of things to keep doing what they are doing until acted upon by an opposing force of equal or greater magnitude. In behavior, we call it habit. Roger’s wife has a forty-year old habit of being a brat and pitching a fit. Roger HAD a forty-year old habit of putting up with it to keep the peace. In under three weeks, he learned and improved enough to break a forty-year old pattern of bad behavior and turn it into a positive event (that had SERIOUS positive repercussions in the bedroom that night – and there’s another thing for you to ponder: a healthy and fun “intimate” life at age 60 after being together 40 years! Can you imagine?).

The lesson? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a wuss, or thought that giving in to all your wife’s whims was what you needed to do to get along, or how long you’ve been going about communicating with her the wrong way, it’s all correctable, if you know what to do.

You don’t have to live out the rest of your life having someone you love drive you nuts with control issues, bratty behavior, dramatic fits, talking for hours and seemingly saying nothing, treating you like a child instead of a husband, being bored with your bedroom life (or having none at all), or any of those common problems (other than incompatibility, which unfortunately can only be fixed by divorce) that established couples complain of so commonly that they’re all as cliché as the image of a knight in shining armor on a white horse.

Just learn what to do, then do it. Roger’s no dunce by a long shot, but you have to agree that if Roger can overcome 40 years of bad behavior in a few weeks, while working that 54-hour work week and doing everything else he has to do, the odds are pretty good that anybody, including you, can do it in your own relationship or marriage, no matter how long you’ve been together.

So give it a shot! Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and learn what you need to know to fix what needs fixing, and just do it! (Nike really struck gold with that slogan, didn’t they? It’s a powerful statement, and an even more powerful attitude, one every real man has and every man and woman alive should have.)

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

Emotional Pain and Clear Thinking Don't Mix, Especially in Relationships and Marriage

2009-06-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

A reader’s letters over a three-month period demonstrate how the pain and stress of a troubled relationship or break-up can kill your ability to think clearly and make you very vulnerable to having your buttons pressed by people trying to help you, and how you can recover if you choose to.

I want to get away from the subject of break-ups for awhile, but I have to give you this one last lesson before we get completely away from the subject, because this level of stress may happen to you someday and I need to prepare you for it.

Fair warning, this is a little longer than usual because I’m quoting several e-mails, but men and women alike can learn a lot from this if you’ll take a few extra minutes to read it.

Fights, fear, insecurity about your future, etc., those things that eat at you when your relationship isn’t going well or has ended, are a lot more destructive than most people imagine. Yes, it’s obvious that it hurts and makes you lose sleep, but the degree to which it can inhibit logical thought and even make you lash out at those who want to help you through tough times is not so obvious.

I’m going to share with you three letters, all written by the same reader, two of which were written within less than a week of his subscribing to this newsletter, and the third one today. Bear with me, as the point will become very clear toward the end. Meet J., a man who has been in a lot of pain but is obviously finding his way out of it and back to mental clarity and stability:

(His first letter, captioned “ohmigod,” received after he had read only one issue of this newsletter:)

astounding

does anyone actually believe any of this?

so - if your partner is bored of you, its your fault

my parents told me that only boring people get bored

its you, the man's job, to dance attendance on her and make her feel special

just what kind of relationship do your readers have with their women - and what kind of woman is it who lounges around like a spoiled teenager expecting to be "swept off her feet" by her man

maybe if she made an effort to find stimulating shared experiences and PUTTING SOMETHING INTO the relationship, instead of seeing her husband as some kind of personal satisfaction service, she might not be quite the miserable self-centered bitch you think all women are

holy cow, get a grip - if you REALLY think this kind of woman is the best a man can get you're lost lost lost buddy

kind regards,

J

Kind regards, huh? I didn’t know it until later, but he had just come out of a bad relationship, and pretty much got the meaning of the newsletter he read entirely backwards, as any of you who have been reading my newsletters longer than a couple of days already realize. It was pretty obvious that he was angry and in pain, especially in the level of sarcasm in his writing, but I wasn’t yet sure that it was a relationship at the core of his problem.

I wrote back to tell him so, and not realizing that he had just been through a break-up and was looking for an outlet to ventilate, replied with a fairly short and demure response:

Good morning, J.,

I'm sorry, but you have taken whatever it is that you're responding to so far out of context that I can't even determine what post or newsletter you might be speaking of. I don't ever speak of fault, except to tell men and women not to preoccupy themselves with fixing fault and blame, and to take responsibility for whatever they may be able to improve in their relationship instead.

As for being part of the problem, yours is the first negative comment I have received from anyone since I began this, and I can forward you hundreds of e-mails from readers of both my newsletter and my book where these people are telling me that they have turned their relationships completely around and that they are now better than they have ever been, including their original honeymoon period. I can only guess that you either have a hot button that was pressed by something you read or that this is yet another case of two peoples being separated by a common language.

I appreciate you taking the time to write, but frankly, I might have been a lot more interested in what you have to say had you exercised a bit of tact in lieu of sarcasm about how I write and where I live. I hope you find whatever it is that you are missing, because you are obviously not a happy man.

Regards,
David

…and he replied with the following, captioned “OK” the next day:

read your latest contribution with interest

of course men shouldn't habitually complain about how little support they get from their wives

but its my experience that men are caught in a double bind, their women are allowed to be behave like dependent irrational little girls and be as assertive and independent as they like - they are encouraged to be both - "girls" and "women" - and woe betide any man who questions their right to be which they want to be at any given time

men on the other hand are expected to be supportive and independent at the same time, and find their support away from the relationship - "Big Guys"

support, unfortunately, is often needed at inconvenient times

so men are screwed, not by women, but by blogs like yours which tells them to stop being a "wuss" and insists that its their fault that they can't be superheroes and not have ordinary human needs like everyday love

well, buddy, you seem to be part of the problem and not the solution

and you use 10 words (badly written American corporate-speak at that) where one will do

keep up the good work!

kindest fraternal greetings

J

"Keep up the good work!" and "Kindest fraternal greetings"??? At this point it was pretty obvious that he’d been through a break-up or two, was awash in a sea of negative emotions, and needed somebody to rough him up a bit to wake him up to the fact that he was indeed reacting emotionally and needed to pull back and look at what he was doing, attempting to alienate me with sarcastic remarks and possibly others who were interested in helping him.

I hate having to “read somebody the riot act” as the saying goes, but every man knows that there’s nothing like getting stomped on a bit to make you realize that somebody does care about what’s going on with you, else they would just leave you, exposed and vulnerable, to wallow in pain and self-pity, so I sent him the following:

J.,

You'd probably be a much happier person if you spent a little more time listening and learning and a little less time trying to argue with people to defend the mistakes you've made in your life. People use all of this, every day, and they write letters to confirm how well it works. Before it was ever published, it was tested on over a hundred couples with complete success. The information I use concerning attraction is based in part on information that people like John Alanis, David D'angelo, F.J. Shark, and Ross Jeffries (dating gurus) proved effective as much as ten years or more before I ever took it up and adapted it for use by people in committed relationships.

I couldn’t care less what your parents taught you. Mothers teach their sons to be "nice guys" and kiss women's behinds, try to buy their affection, and dump all the decisions in their laps with regularity, because it's what they think they want, but when they get it, it turns them off completely. Making a woman feel special is done by listening and responding, and by acting like a man, not by "dancing attendance on her" or any other form of serving her.

I have no idea where you get this idea that I said anything about a woman lounging around like a spoiled teenager. Women do day-dream frequently throughout the day about feeling sexual attraction. It's why they read romance novels, and why they start fights when men ignore them. It’s how they prevent boredom if left to their own devices, and is far preferable to affairs and such. Women do try much harder than men to put something into relationships, but it usually comes after attraction is triggered and after they feel commitment. I don't know of any mentally healthy women who see their husband as some sort of personal satisfaction service, and I see no evidence of them being miserable or self-centered.

This is the last time I'm going to waste my time writing you. You've read one of my newsletters, apparently half-assed because you have no clue what I am telling people, and you're trying to argue with me that what I'm teaching doesn't work when (a) you don’t even know what I'm teaching, (b) if you were such an expert, you wouldn't be reading anything I've written to start with, you'd be getting rich selling what you know, and (c) everybody who has and is using it is doing so with outstanding success. Nobody who has ever used my information has ever said anything about it except how well it works, and nobody who has ever used it has asked for a refund, and I extend a satisfaction guarantee for a full year after purchase, so if they wanted to do so, they would have. That speaks for itself, as does the reality of the results that my material is giving those who use it.

Your options now are to either read and learn or argue with somebody else, because I don't really care what you think, what you agree with, or what your parents told you, and until you understand what I'm saying and have tried it, you're not in any position to criticize it. What I'm teaching came straight from working with hundreds of women to find out what they respond to, and then working with their men to make sure that men can understand and do what is required. It's reality, there is no arguing with it, and if you don't like it, you can sod off and be miserable while the rest of us are enjoying a great relationship with our wives and girlfriends. I don’t deal in opinions and have no time for armchair pundits; either get in the game or get off the field.

David

I didn’t hear back from J. for awhile, and he did exactly what every real man does when confronted with such a wake up call. He dug in, paid attention, found his way out of the pain and frustration, and put his brain back in charge of his well-being, proving to himself and the rest of the world that the pain of even the worst break-up can be very temporary if you can keep your wits about you, with or without the help of friends and other concerned parties. This message was received captioned “from your (former) tormentor”:

Hi David,

Remember me? I was the guy who pissed you off a few months ago.

Well, I still haven't read your book, but I have been reading your daily emails and I am not too proud to admit when I have made a misjudgment. I'm looking forward to reading your book, but a lot of what you say in your emails makes rock solid sense to me (and at 41, I've had enough unhappy girlfriends/bad relationships to realise that I must be getting something wrong).

I'm going to recommend your project to friends, read your book and come back with some constructive comments (I am presumptuous to say). I think you come from a good place.

I latched onto "makingherhappy" in a bad way, because, in my last relationship, I spent a huge amount of energy trying to make an immature girl happy and made myself very unhappy and ill in the process.

Here's a thought though: I have to go into a workplace where this girl will be. Ex-partners and work, now there's a thorny issue. Maybe not for you, but it’s a tricky one nonetheless.....

with all good wishes,

J

So, J., no, you didn’t piss me off, and this time I believe you when you send “best wishes.” And you’ll know how to handle the girl in the workplace after you’ve read "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," so don’t worry.

You see, Folks? When you’re having relationship troubles and feeling like your guts are being ripped out at every turn, you need a release for that frustration, and the most likely and unfortunate outlet is someone who is trying to help you precisely because you have their attention. Remember that, and guard yourself against it, because not everyone is able to recognize that an outburst is an act of reaching out for help, and you have to admit that it’s a very poor way to ask for help in any case.

What I recommend when anyone is having relationship or other problems that breed frustration, fear, pain, etc., is ACTION! Don’t sit back wondering what will happen next and waiting for it to happen. Dig in and find the cause of the problem and do something about it. It’s an excellent outlet for all that negative energy because it converts it into something constructive, achievement and stress relief, and it has the added benefit of MAKING THE PROBLEM GO AWAY! You can’t beat that with a stick, can you?

Whether you’re facing nuisance or disaster, the key to making it go away is two-fold: knowing what to do and then doing it. “Think things through, then follow through,” was famed U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager’s “six-word formula for success,” and it works. “Thinking things through” in your relationship requires a sense of reason and a solid working knowledge of what you and your partner want and need and how you can best communicate.

Yep, that’s in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," which you will find at http://www.makingherhappy.com. The best news is that if you read it before you have problems, you’ll likely never have any because you’ll work together to keep them out of your relationship, but if you do have problems, you can fix them. Just don’t alienate everybody you know while you’re trying to get through it.

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

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

2009-06-28T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

I’m not like most of today’s “relationship guru’s.” I won’t tell you that all relationships can or should be salvaged, and have no respect for those who would. That’s why you’ll find the list of other relationship gurus I do respect and endorse very short. I maintain a list of those who have been recommended to me by my readers in this newsletter and in the margin on my main blog at http://blog.makingherhappy.com, and those are the only others offering advice on the emotions and issues of relationships that I would have any of you read, because they do embrace this self-evident truth instead of trying to convince you to buy what they are selling to have you save that which should not be and ultimately cannot be saved.

Notice that’s a very short list of resources taken from a very large pool of authors. Sad, isn’t it? And by the way, feel free to help me add to it by letting me know if you have had a positive result with any product. Word-of-mouth isn’t just the best advertising; it’s also the best way of weeding out the charlatans and bad ideas that sound good “on paper” but don’t work in the real world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contrary to how it often appears, relationships and marriages very seldom fail after ten or twenty years or more. What really happens is that they fail at their inception due to bad choices and that failure isn’t conceded until years later, when every option has been exhausted, there is no longer anything to hide behind (like children), and both partners have become miserable spending so much time and effort trying and failing. If you have a good foundation for a relationship, it’s not hard to tell; there’s little if anything fundamental and significant that you’d want to change about your partner, such as their values, political leanings, etc. You can talk and get along, and have probably just become a bit bored because attraction is waning. That’s fixable.

But…

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

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

There you have it, the dark side of relationships and marriage. It is my sincere desire that you never have to go through a break-up, and that if worse comes to worst and you do have to go through one, that you can get through it with your dignity (and assets) intact and help each other to move on to a better life with someone better matched to yourselves by understanding what it is that you’re fighting: the basic human tendency to try to make the best of even the worst situation, no matter how inappropriate or even self-destructive it might be, not each other.

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

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

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

2009-06-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

Dear David,

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

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

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

Thanks,
Troy

My reply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care, and keep in touch,
David

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

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

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

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

2009-06-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

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

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

Note to Self:

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

~~~~~~

Hi David,

Damn. That is scary. And VERY instructive.

Thanks, - H.

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

Note to H.:

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

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

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

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

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

Take care, and keep in touch!
David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangerous Words That Can Kill Relationships and Marriage

2009-06-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay (male):

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

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

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

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

Sure (male):

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

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

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

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

Okay (female):

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

Fine (female):

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

Sure (female):

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

Whatever (female):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, sure, fine! WHATEVER!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Happens When Women Don't Get What They Really Want in Relationships and Marriage

2009-06-24T15:52:00.000-07:00

In case you might be thinking that everything at home, while mundane and boring, is really going okay, take a look at what may be happening behind your back if you failed to listen when you had the opportunity…

You might remember in the June 20, 2009 edition, my buddy “Rick” sent us something that one of the ladies on his dating site had sent him, which demonstrated perfectly how women want a real man. Well, he’s sent me another, and this one is equally revealing, as you will see:

Hey David,

Thank you so much for featuring my email in your newsletter. It's an honor and a privilege to help get the truth out.

Please accept the following as a symbol of my appreciation as well as education for your readers:

I had another woman look at my online profile. What makes this one different is that she's a not-so-happily MARRIED woman. Look at how she describes herself:

"I am a mother of two small children and a wife of 6 years. Hubby acts like he is not interested in me because he is always online when he is not at work. I enjoy reading, cooking, baking and spending time with my children. I also enjoy the few private times I have with hubby."

As bleak as this looks, this is a double feature. Now look at what she wants from a man (you may have to edit this!):

"I am looking for someone who will make me feel as if I am a woman and not just a mother and housewife. I would like to find someone who will make me blush and get all hot and wet at the same time. Someone who will help me find out what really turns me on and who is willing to quench the flames of a horny and over-sexed woman. I am at the age where hubby can not keep up with me and my demands...Can you?"

Looks like she wants an Alpha Male to me! David, this is a textbook example of what you said about how a woman feels, and what she'll do if she gets bored and loses her attraction. As you know all to well, this happens a lot more than it should. The overriding lesson here is the same in your daily newsletters: be a MAN, and learn how to satisfy your woman! If you don't you'll pay a heavy price down the road. This is about a lot more than just sex, this is your life! Make the most of it.

Thanks again, and keep spreading the truth.

Sincerely,

Rick

Any questions? I have a few! Starting with “Do you think this woman’s husband has any idea that she’s advertising on a public web site saying that she wants the attention of another man because he ignores her for his computer and can’t keep up sexually?

How many times do you think she tried to tell him it was coming to this and he either didn’t understand or didn’t take her seriously?

And when she succeeds in finding someone else and he finds out about it, who will he blame?

And then what will happen?

Gentlemen, every woman reading this today will vouch for every word I’m telling you. If you’re spending all your free time with your computer, your car, your job, your buddies, or anything else and she’s not getting any of it, she’s not happy. And if she’s not saying anything to you about it, she’s tired of being ignored and has given up. She’ll be looking soon if she isn’t already.

What’s that? You don’t ignore her? Well, if most of your time is spent without her, I beg to differ, but even if you don’t, she may be feeling ignored because she’s tried to tell you that something was missing and you didn’t get it.

No, she wouldn’t just come out and say, “Something’s missing and I’m not happy.” Women don’t do that. She would have ASKED, “Are you happy with the way things are between us?” or something along those lines, which for a woman is more of a statement than a question. And if you assumed it was only a question and just said, “yes,” without asking her if SHE was happy, you just shut her down and ignored her without even knowing it.

That’s one of a thousand pitfalls that can lead to affairs and divorce; a missed signal, a misunderstood look, phrase, or protocol, a question taken as a question instead of the statement made by asking the question, for example, are all very small things with a very big and very negative impact to a relationship or marriage.

But how would you know? Or her? Neither of you are born knowing that men and women use the same words to communicate but use them in entirely different ways with very different protocols. And there are not many people around who have figured this out, and of the few of us who have, very few of that number have ever written it down and offered it to the public. Of the few of those who exist today, and I’m talking about a scant handful, most offer a bunch of opinion and theory without having ever really tested their advice on a large scale.

So the information supply is small, the majority unreliable, and most people, especially men, don’t even know they need it. I recently read a statement by a professional counselor, directed at me, stating that he thought that deception was the basis of a good relationship, because in lying to his wife he had made up for her disrespecting him. Can you imagine?

I know some of you who frequent a particular anti-divorce web site have seen it, too. He’s the same one who says I can’t be an effective or competent counselor because I give SPECIFIC advice instead of the nebulous vagaries he and his peers use to run up a bill. I'll put my success record up against his or anybody else's any day. And yet our species continues to multiply. It’s just that the divorce rate continues to increase faster than the population size.

So let’s get back to you. Do you know what your wife is doing when she’s on the computer and you’re not around? Do you know what she’s doing when she’s out of the house and you’re not around? I know exactly what mine is doing at all times. She’s looking forward to being with me! And if you’ll ask any of my readers who haven’t found themselves faced with gross incompatibility problems and had to leave a bad marriage that couldn’t be fixed, you’ll find that they will give you the same answer.

So what can you divine from that? Two things. First, that my book will help you determine whether you are in the right or wrong marriage, and second, if you’re in the right one, it will help you make it better than it’s ever been and you’ll always know what your wife is doing every minute that she’s away from you, looking forward to the next time she’s with you, not looking for someone else to fill the void that you have left.

Where do you start? Start at http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage." Read it. See where you’ve made mistakes and then take the information provided and fix them. And then watch what happens as you and your wife start looking forward to every minute you spend together. It’s a feeling like no other.

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

An Accurate Barometer of Your Relationship or Marriage Status

2009-06-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Hey David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-06-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

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

Gentlemen, I hope you realize how privileged you are to have access to the experience and input of the women on this mailing list and my blogs. They frequently provide extremely valuable insight anonymously, to you as a stranger, that you might not ever hear from a woman you know. Take full advantage of this and use it to make your life and relationship better, because their knowledge and experience has been paid for with pain, embarrassment, frustration, etc., and although some women obviously thrive on drama and reliving bad times, not all of them do, and in fact may be having an emotionally-difficult time relating all of this just to help you out.

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

Dear David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tail swings both ways.

Sincerely,
Thanks, but no thanks

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

Sex is the strangest weapon in existence. It’s devastating, yet no real victory can ever be won by using it; in any contest where it is deployed, everybody loses, at best, winning a battle to lose the war.

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

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

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

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

Sex As a Weapon In Relationships and Marriage, Part 1

2009-06-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

So you think you’ve never paid for sex just because you haven’t visited a prostitute? If you’ve ever let a woman become even a little bored with you, you certainly have. Indeed, sex has been the weapon of choice for many women since the dawn of humankind because they can wield it so effectively, IF we let them…

You might remember Hannah, whose “ladies’ book club” had the contest to see who could entice their husbands to buy the most extravagant gifts for them just because they were bored, which you can review in yesterday’s edition, and I would strongly suggest that you do, because it was a “must read” issue. Hannah, a real “whistle-blower,” wrote with another account of something that many women have been known to do that men never suspect, and this one is a real “zinger”!

David,

You might remember my group of friends that meet a couple of time a month for time away from the family and husbands, our book club, but there were time that we did invite the men to join us. At one of the dinners we had one of the men stated that he had never nor would he ever pay for sex. Of course all the women at the table laughed and the men for the most part could not figure out why we though it was so funny. I think that they just thought we believed he was lying to us. The truth was we know all men pay for sex if they are in a relationship, or in his case married for 12 years to one of us. LOL!

His own wife, Carol, had just snookered him out of a pair of Chanel sunglasses that cost a couple hundred bucks. She liked to shop only in the best places. No Walmart for her, only specialty shops where they cater to you every need, in spite of the fact that she didn’t work and her husband was working two jobs most of the time to keep up.

She called her husband to tell him she was shopping and wanted those sunglasses and he told her that to spend that kind of money on sunglasses was crazy and this was one time he was going to say NO. Well you know how that went over and that night Carol did what most of the girls I ran with did when we really wanted something and were denied.

That evening after her shower she dressed herself up in her best and sexiest nightie and made sure he saw her every time she walked past him. That night she told him to go on up to bed that she was not really that tired and thought she would watch some TV and would be up later on. Later that night she crawled into bed next to him and made sure he knew she was there, but wouldn’t let him get close, teasing and tormenting him to death.

A couple of hours passed of her brushing against his leg in bed and she stated how hot the room was and takes off her clothes and climbs back into bed under the sheet once again making sure to wake him just enough to know what was going on. This time he made sure she knew he was there and as he started making advance toward her for some early morning naughtiness she did what some of us women do best. She reminded him of the sunglasses she had wanted and how much more she would be in the mood if only she could have those sunglasses so she could look good for him all the time.

As they lie together in what she described as :the after glow of getting her way,” she told him, “Now wouldn’t it have been much easier to let me have the glasses yesterday and you could have had me all you wanted last night.” As I listened to her tell her story and then show all of us her new shades, I could not help to remind all of my friends that this was the same man that only a few nights before had bragged to all of us he never paid for sex and never would.

I would like to state for the record I am no longer a part of that group and have since learned what it is like to take pride in earning what I get, and am so grateful I have a wonderful man now that took years out of his own life to teach me a very valuable lesson on such craziness. We have sex when we want it, which is often more than once each day, because we have both earned the right to have each other at anytime.

I wanted to share this with you because I thought you might get a kick out of it.

Take good care,
Hannah

When I read that, I was thinking, “not just ‘damn’ but ‘DAY-UM!” (That’s “damn!” with a strong southern U.S. accent, about two steps beyond “hot damn!” for those of you unfamiliar with the dialect!) There might be a lot of ticked-off men around when this hits the press!

But wait a minute. I don’t like to talk about “fault” because it’s usually pointless, but an issue of RESPONSIBILITY we can address is what really brought these two to where they are? He’s doing all the work, she’s spending all the money, and since she has no real interest in or appreciation of their sex life, feels free and apparently justified in using sex to get her way and put undo strain on the family finances. That can only be because he’s a pushover – WUSS! – and she’s bored with him and using retail therapy to get her kicks.

Yes, we can divine that from the situation, because even if she had childhood issues with material deprivation, if she were feeling the attraction that a woman should be feeling in a healthy relationship, she’d be finding other ways to arrange fulfillment of her material desires. So guys, brace yourself for a terrible truth:

If you have let your wife or girlfriend get bored, you are paying for sex. If you’re having any, that is. There’s no other conclusion that can logically be drawn.

Yes, that sucks. Out loud. Through a straw. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you were trying to get a woman’s phone number or a date with her and blew the attraction, you’d be done, but if you’ve been together for awhile or have married, there’s a level of emotional investment there, for both of you. And that buys you some time to reignite the attraction and some motivation on her part to let you, and even help you! (Unless, of course, another man has unleashed the awesome power of attraction in her, rendering you pretty much a non-contender – it’s a double-edged sword.)

But you’re not going to reignite her attraction for you by letting her lead you around by the nose and trade you sex for expensive sunglasses – or anything else, of course. You’re going to have to take a good look at your life, figure out where the attraction was lost, figure out how to get it back, and learn enough about women in general and your woman in particular that you don’t ever screw it up again. Can you do that right now?

Not likely. If you could you would have already. Most of us simply aren’t born with what we need to get the job done. But there are a few of us who have the kind of personality that makes women like to talk with us and teach us things about themselves, and unlike most of the others, I chose to write a book for you about what literally hundreds of women have taught me so you wouldn’t have to try to figure it all out on your own.

They taught me about how to really evaluate a relationship, how to talk with and listen to a woman (which is a lot more science and a lot less art than we have been led to believe), and how women think and act, according to both what is important to them and their involuntary reactions to biological “triggers,” such as leadership, authority, mystery, humor, adventure, etc. They also showed me how their emotional scales are entirely different from ours, and how they can get in such bad emotional shape that they can internally justify any thought or action, no matter how strange or destructive, to get themselves back into their comfort zone.

That’s a lot, and it’s a big book, too. But get this: It’s working for everyone who is using it. That’s because it’s not just a bunch of theory and opinion. It’s a collection of facts that have been put together and tested, refined, retested, and ultimately proven. And among the many testimonials for its effectiveness that readers have sent me are some that I can’t even reprint because they’re too steamy for some adults to want to read and for any to want their children to see. That’s success, because that kind of intimacy doesn't happen in mature relationships that aren't working!

So whether you just realized that you’ve been paying for sex, you’re tired of fighting all the time, you’re sick of fearing – or seeing – affairs, or things have just cooled off a bit and you’re ready to kick them back up and save yourself the pain and aggravation of problems, this book is for you. So go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and get started. The longer you put it off, the worse it’s going to be, so the sooner you start, the easier and better it will be.

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

Boredom: Just How Far Will a Woman Go to Escape It? Far Enough to Wreck Your Relationship and Marriage!

2009-06-20T14:43:00.000-07:00

MUST READ! I’ve talked a lot about how much of a problem boredom is for women, and why, but the obvious examples of boredom, affairs and dramatic outbursts, don’t hold a candle to what this woman reveals!

I hope you’re ready to have your world rocked, because it’s about to happen.

Anybody who has been reading this newsletter very long knows that I rarely use the words “MUST READ” in a title or summary, quite simply because I want to maintain credibility for the few times when I really send you a true “MUST READ” issue. This is one of them. Why?

The letter I’m about to show you left me speechless for several minutes, a feat I’m sure many of you may perceive as bordering on impossible. I had heard of such things happening, but never with such destructive and self-destructive force and disregard for the consequences. Meet Hannah:

Dear David,

I have something to share with you and your other readers that I think will shock some and make some say “My wife would never do something like that, “ but it happens and I think its about time that a lot of eyes were opened. After 18 years of marriage I recently was divorced and could not for the life of me figure out why, that is until I looked back at our marriage and what went on year after year. What I found was not pretty, but until I faced it I knew I could never have a successful relationship ever again.

For years I and a group of very close girlfriends had what we always called a book club. We would meet twice a month to discuss what the latest book we were supposed to have read. Key words here are “supposed to have,” because we never turned the first page of any book at all. This was our excuse to get out of the house and have a few drinks and really think of ways to cause major damage to our marriages.

At the time, major damage to our marriages was not at all what we intended, but the truth is we were kidding ourselves. Actually lying is what we were doing, but we were too busy calling it a contest to make it seem as if we were only playing around, not hurting our husbands and dooming our marriages.

We were horribly bored, because our husbands left us alone constantly to keep house and watch the kids while they worked late (whether they really worked or had an affair), played golf, worked on their cars, went fishing together, etc. We got one night every two weeks and they got the other 13, so on our one night, we made up for lost time with too much booze and drama.

We were also immature and honestly, in need of male leadership that wasn’t there, and two of our group ended up being alcoholics from trying to drown their boredom in vodka. One ended up with a “disease” from one of her affairs, and several of us are now divorced.

I guess I need to explain in detail what the contest are and the rules of the game. This way you can better understand what took place and how some of us are now alone and why at 40+ years old we are looking for jobs to put food on the table and clothes to wear.

It really started out that I did not have the ability to keep my big mouth shut when I should have sit quietly. One night after a few drinks I bragged to my friends that I could get my husband to do anything I told him or buy me anything I asked him too. That was all it took for the idea of the contest to be born and as time went by you will see what happened.

The contest, as we called it, was just simply a cruel way to see who could get the biggest and best thing from their husband, money be damned. Each woman in the group took turns thinking of what outcome would make one the winner of the contest. There was no prize to be won except for bragging rights until the next contest.

The first contest was actually pretty mild compared to what was going on when my divorce papers were delivered. We went from seeing who could get their husbands to pay for girl’s nights out to who had the biggest and best house, car and the most expensive jewelry. At first is was so easy to pull off without the worry of the husbands finding out, but as you can guess with each bigger and better thing we wanted it would take endless hours and sometimes days to make sure all the tracks were covered and secret details of the truth hidden.

We lied to ourselves and husbands so much that we actually believed that no harm was being done and it was something they really wanted to do for us. When the truth was we were pulling string that would come back to bite some of us in the very purse we were depending on for our very lives.

I can not remember when the first contest even started. What I can tell you is that after I shot my mouth off bragging it started with a few partially drunk women claiming to have the most control over their husbands. It was simply to have a new credit card with the highest spending limit before the next meeting of the book club. To some that is no big deal, just get the card and just not use it, right? Well, that is what a smart and sane person would do, but we were bored women who were only interested in treating our boredom by seeing what we could get out of a man.

The second contest was not so easy. It was decided at the next meeting that we needed something a little harder to get something that the men would really have to work harder to make happen for us. Mindy thought we should see who could talk their husbands into a new car. Now that did not mean it had to be brand new off the show room floor, just new to us, and with the biggest price tag. On this contest I was not the winner, but I did score a new car only a few months old. The winner of this contest if you are interested scored a brand new Lexus fully loaded with a sunroof. Even at this we still were not satisfied we all wanted to win at least once.

The third was a house if you did not already own one. This contest to some of us was nothing because we already owned homes and I knew that we had already bought the biggest and best house we could afford on his salary and I did not really participate in this one.

The next one was a new set of wedding rings with at least a $4,000 price tag. This one I took with a 4 carrot set of diamond wedding rings that it took my husband maxing out one credit card and taking out another one just to pay for my rings. These rings did not mean anything to me and I later sold them at a loss just to get rid of them. The truth is that I really did not like them from the start they were just something to put me on the top of the game for once.

Over the years there were many other contests and some I won and some I did not and with each loss I worked harder the next time to be the one on top. Soon this was a way of life for the women of the book club. Since our husbands weren’t giving us anything constructive or exciting to think about, all we could think about was the competition, and being women, it was fierce to say the least. For some of us it seemed like the best time of our lives, but it was really the cancer that consumed our marriages.

This is still going on with some of the women. I received an e-mail a few days ago telling me that this year there was to be a Christmas contest and the rules were that it had to be a diamond of at least one karat in a solid gold setting. The winner would be the one with the biggest price tag.

I know what I did was cruel on some level, but I can’t say that I feel bad about it, or that I will take the blame for the divorce. I was ignored to the point of not being able to love or be loved, and I was so bored that I would have done anything for a thrill. I guess we are all lucky that much worse damage wasn’t done. I will tell you this: there are times that a woman can be her own worst enemy. So be careful with the action you take and be smart. Know if you are the one being cast in the part of the fool of your marriage.

I hope that is something you can share with your readers, this was my real life and I hope others can learn from it. I’m having to restart my life at the age of 40, so you figure out who was really the one with control of the marriage in the end and who, if anyone, were the winners of any contest.

Sincerely,
Hannah

Gentlemen, I know that I talk about this a lot, and I do it because this is so much more critical an issue than what we have any frame of reference to understand or empathize with. When we get bored, we just do something goofy, grab our tools, flip on a ball game, or play grab-ass. Women can’t be satisfied with that, because their need for emotional energy is so much higher than ours.

By the time they take radical enough action to alleviate their boredom, they’ve already reached a point where rational thought, self-control, and even compassion are no longer possible, because they are truly desperate for relief. I’m not at all saying that they should never be held accountable for their actions, but I will point out that it is a whole lot easier for you to alleviate their boredom than to clean up the aftermath of them doing it themselves.

What’s really sad is that not only do women give off all kinds of signals that we could read to know when they’re in this kind of trouble but don’t know to look for them, they also tell us, but not in ways we are born to understand. For example, she doesn’t ask you if you think everything is alright to find out what you’re thinking, she asks to try to tell you that she has a problem, but you have to recognize the attempt and invite her to open up, proving that she has your attention and you care enough to listen, before she will spend the time to and effort to try to talk with you about it.

Regardless of who is ultimately responsible for a woman’s actions, there’s no denying that we can do a better job of positively influencing both their actions and our lives together. You tell me, would you rather see your wife smile because you just surprised her with a cute note or a subtle pinch or pat on the behind or see her angry and frustrated, rolling her eyes and walking out of the room? Either one is your choice, possibly even more than her own, and equally easily-achieved.

It’s not that we are responsible for a woman’s happiness, but we can help facilitate it much easier than they can themselves in a lot of ways. We can lead, we can share, we can protect, validate, and help to justify and celebrate their achievements. They are capable of many things, including many of the same things of which we are capable, but being far more social in nature than we are, they need a degree of social reinforcement to feel worthy of their happiness. Men generally look inside themselves for feelings of self-worth, while women are often compelled to look to others for such feelings.

The bottom line is that everything in your life needs attention, preventive maintenance, if you will. If you gas up your car and drive it until it breaks down, it will break down a lot faster, will it not? The same thing goes for your relationship and marriage. There are things you need to know and do that will keep your life together running smoothly, and it will break down quickly if you don’t know and do them.

So, you want me to give you an owner’s manual for your marriage? Sounds weird, but okay, here you go. Go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and make sure that you’re not the guy going to the poor house and divorce court because you couldn’t recognize the red light on your wife’s dashboard.

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

Reader Responses: Women REALLY Want the Alpha Male in Their Relationships and Marriages

2009-06-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

The “spin machine” is turning out articles on “beta males” and other forms of wussy guys right and left, and they seem to be ignoring the only factor that matters: What women REALLY want! Keep reading…

For some time, I’ve been receiving letters from readers asking about the popularity of so-called “beta males” in the popular press; soft, jelly-legged figures like Al Gore gaining the spot light while real alpha male leaders are deemed “alpha dogs” and anachronisms. Nice try, press guys and screenwriters, but you forgot something…

Women hate that crap! Yeah, they might listen, they might empathize, they might feel some emotional connection that wins a vote or makes them buy a movie ticket, but that’s the kind of guy they want to SHOP WITH, not be led by, not have heading their household (and sorry feminists, but alpha males DO head the household, and men who do not are punished as their wives’ boredom mounts and brings discord, affairs, and finally divorce), and certainly not wanting to have sex with!

Think I’m kidding? Check out what one of your fellow readers has reported in the last 24 hours:

Hey David,

Wanted to respond to your recent series of emails. Great reading for sure. I wanted to provide proof to everyone that what you say is true.

I had a woman look at my online profile recently. What caught my attention is what she said her ideal mate was. Take a look :

"I'm looking for power... strength of mind, body and soul... Someone comfortable with themselves and knows they have nothing to prove, but proves everything with the way they carry themselves. That's someone special. Is it you?"

This is a nutshell version of an alpha male if I ever saw it. It's even better if women can articulate it like this one has.

Take care and keep up the great work,

Rick

Any questions? And no, this is not an isolated response. You can see this desire as a common thread on any local version of Craig's List or any other dating or marriage site where women are leaving personals ads or speaking openly about their needs, desires or dreams. Indeed, I interviewed 208 women for the research for the first draft of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and of the 188 who were in the couples who completed that research, ALL of them gave the same basic description of the man they wanted. The other 20 were single, and along with this same description, they also had a few romantic notions of adventure, etc., that were still fresh on their minds because they were in the dating world and looking for it.

So not just “no,” but “Hell no!” This isn’t isolated, nor is it non-representative. The only women who are wanting beta males are those who are so predatory or otherwise screwed up that they want to CONTROL a man, not love and respect him.

So who are you going to listen to? A bunch of reporters and fiction writers with an agenda of grabbing attention? Or a bunch of women who not only know what they want but incidentally agree 100% in a crowd that they ALL want it, and whose agenda is full disclosure so they can have a better man???

I STRONGLY suggest you listen to the women. Especially now that there are slight stirrings in the press by female readers referring to the advent of the “retrosexual,” a cry for the return of strong leading men on the screen (such as the recent return of Indiana Jones!) and alpha males in their lives, the way it used to be before an ill-fated wave of wussitude swept across the world and castrated most of our gender.

And I’ll make it easy for you, almost TOO easy. What they said, and what we later proved they really wanted, not to mention how to give it to them without kissing their butts and turning them off, is presented in my book, "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," and you can download your copy at http://www.makingherhappy.com right now with a few mouse clicks. Take advantage of the facts while you have them available, before the popular press manages to obscure them and leaves you with one of those bad ideas like that nonsense of crying at chick-flicks like we did in the 1980’s. Life is short, so set yourself up to enjoy it.

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

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

2009-06-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking Out of a Rut Can Save Your Relationship or Marriage

2009-06-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

Readers frequently talk about “getting into a rut,” whether it’s personal, at work, or in their relationship. What do you do?

I’ve alluded to this problem on occasion, but never really addressed it because the solution has always been so obvious to me, but judging by the number of e-mails I’ve received on the subject, apparently it’s not so obvious for everyone else: How to deal with getting into – and especially OUT OF – a rut.

For men, getting into a rut is just a little too easy. Where women’s emotional scales run from zero to infinity, meaning that boredom is as bad as it gets and both positive and negative emotions will often fit the bill equally, our emotional scale runs from negative to positive, with neutral (boredom) being in the middle. We prefer boredom to problems, and our first priority in any crisis is to return things to that boring norm before trying to move on to great things. Indeed, for a significant number of men, success is as undesirable as failure, because it means shaking things up, deviating from the safe zone around boring, and going to what for them is a stressful extreme.

Fortunately, most of us don’t strive to be bored, but for many of us it does have a way of growing comfortable (see this article on being “comfortably unhappy” and this one for a reader's confession of her own comfortable unhappiness to get up to speed on this crucial concept). We fall into habits, and we hold there, taking a break from all the excitement in case we need extra energy to weather some new crisis that may jump up.

Guys, this is bad. If you want to experiment with peace and quiet and find out what words like “solitude” and “mundane” really feel like, plan on doing that during your retirement; it will most likely happen to you then anyway. While you are young and healthy (and by young, I mean any age under 70), habits that make you just cruise along without incident from day to day make you “dry up on the vine.” If you can look at your life over just the last month or two and see yourself doing the same thing every workday during that time, and spending your weekends the same way, like vegetating on the couch in front of the TV with a beer and snacks, you’re killing yourself, and likely damaging your career and your relationship as well.

How?

Glad you asked. Settling into that kind of routine and creating that kind of comfortable boredom makes you uninteresting, and often will make you unmotivated as well – being bored makes you boring to those around you. If you and three other people are up for a promotion, skills and experience are equal, and you’re boring and the other three are not, who do you think will be the first one dropped from the running just to narrow the focus on the evaluations? You guessed it. And unless you’re brand new to this newsletter, you already know that “boring” is the absolute worst label that a woman can ever put on you, because you are then at the most negative end of her emotion meter. If this is you, what do you do?

Break out! Do something different; not necessarily dangerous, wild, or crazy, but something fun or interesting that you haven’t done recently, or haven’t ever done. I strongly suggest taking on at least one mental and one physical self-improvement project (like taking up Sudoku, logic problems, speed reading or a foreign language to stimulate your brain and losing 5-10 pounds or taking up some kind of exercise regimen or sport) to give you a quick self-esteem boost plus a hobby to keep you away from the television.

It’s a huge bonus if the hobby can be some kind of relationship enhancer, something your partner will see you doing and be stricken with new-found attraction from having seen you exhibiting distinctly male behavior. Flood yourself with new and exciting things to do for a week or two just to see what really grabs your attention and breaks you out of old habits, then stick with the two or three things that really do interest you. That’ll get a personal or even a work slump (with a minor modification) handled, but what about a rut or slump in your relationship?

Same thing! Mix it up! Shake it up! Do something fun. Go to a new restaurant. Do something neither of you have ever done, or at least never done together. Take up something interesting and invite your partner to join you. Even if they are in the rut with you and resistant to breaking out, there isn’t a woman alive who can see a man having fun without her and not want a piece of the action. If you invite her to do something fun and she declines, do it yourself.

She’ll either join in or you’ll know for a fact that she detests whatever it is you’re doing. Women hate feeling left out of anything that might be even marginally fun, interesting, adventurous, or mysterious! Just keep doing fun and interesting stuff, day after day, get good at it, gain the confidence that comes from competence in your new pursuits, and she’ll come around pretty quickly. Like I said, there’s not a woman alive that can stand being left out of the fun for very long.

For most people, a great relationship is one of the most rewarding things in life, and devastating when it goes sour. BUT! Getting into a rut doesn’t have to end your relationship, even though it’s the root cause of more break-ups and divorces than anything else. It takes being fairly well-matched with a good partner, being able to communicate well with each other (which isn’t easy until you learn the differences in how men and women go about it), and keeping it fresh and fun and the sparks flying. That in turn will make the rest of your life improve, because a happy home life is for many of us the foundation for all other happiness; it makes a great career and everything else much easier to achieve because home-front stresses detract from everything else in your life, robbing you of capacity for and motivation to achieve.

You’ll find that if mama’s happy, everybody’s happy, especially YOU! That’s the cornerstone of the “Making Her Happy” philosophy. When your partner is happy, those wonderfully fun and nurturing things that come naturally for virtually all women get stirred up and she goes on auto-pilot doing the things that make you feel just as wonderful as she does. It’s not hard, and doesn’t involve putting on some act or memorizing a bunch of catchy jokes or lines, just learning a few things about her and yourself and putting them to use. Any man that is worth a hoot for anything can do it, and enjoy doing it as well. All you need is the know-how…

It’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” tried, proven, and ready to work for you. Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, because opportunities like this don’t come along often, and they can disappear in the blink of an eye…

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

Boredom Can Creep in After YEARS to Destroy Your Relationship or Marriage

2009-06-16T16:34:00.000-07:00

It may only take a few weeks, or it may take years, but sooner or later virtually every couple falls prey to boredom, unless you understand a few basic things about attraction and intimacy and can avoid it. Once lost, you can get it back if you act in time, but it’s far easier and loads more fun to keep it going, like an eternal honeymoon, instead of watching the slow decay of something wonderful and then having to go through heroic efforts to heal the wounds.

This edition could rightly have been part of my “Want Women Want” free report, because one of the biggest things that women really want is to avoid being bored, but the issue and message here is bigger than that. In case you’ve only been following for a short while, boredom is a woman’s most dreaded state, and is at the most negative end of her emotional range, like fear, anger, and frustration are at the negative end of men’s emotional range.

Interestingly enough, the physical manifestations of either gender being at the negative end of their emotional range are the same: extreme agitation, tendency to be entirely illogical and act out of desperation, physical symptoms like sleeplessness, nausea, tremors, etc.

Boredom’s effect on women is grossly misunderstood by most men (and some women as well) because it doesn’t affect us the same way, so for future reference, Gentlemen, imagine the feelings you would experience in losing your job, having difficulty getting another, watching the bills pile up, and suspecting that your wife is about to leave. Those feelings build up over time and eventually can make you entirely unstable. Those sensations of depression, desperation, fear, agitation, etc., that you would feel under those circumstances are what a woman feels as she gets more and more bored.

Borrowing from medical terminology, “acute boredom” is a short-term severe problem with an immediate symptomatic cure usually gained from radical treatment: a fight, usually over nothing. “Chronic boredom” is a bigger problem. It develops over months or even years of very gradual decline in the excitement level in a woman’s life caused by routine, lack of “adult time,” career stagnation, and watching her partner grow apathetic, fat, lazy, and desirous of spending evenings drinking and channel surfing too much and talking with her too little. Yes, months or even years, and when it builds up enough pressure, fights won’t cure it, and affairs and divorce start slipping into the picture as options, options that look dangerously alluring and even rational when a woman gets too far gone.

The following letter caught my attention, not because of the decay of the relationship or its resurrection after reading and applying what’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” but the amount of time it took for the relationship to fade! Meet Karen:

Dear David,

I have been in a love relationship with my best friend for seven years now. I have always tried to take care of myself and be attractive to him. Last year I began to think that maybe we should have just stopped our relationship at being friends and never become lovers. I found myself looking at other men and wishing that Jack had some of the qualities I found so attractive in them. I made one last attempt at talking and trying to tell him that we were no longer attractive to each other and one way or the other something would have to change or we were over.

He came across your website and bought your book a short time later. Within a few days I noticed a big difference and within a month I was not living with the same man I was thinking of leaving the month before. I was living with the guy I fell in love with 7 years ago! No one could prepare me for the changes not only in Jack, but myself as well. “Taking it to the next level,” whatever that would be, wouldn’t begin to cover what happened to us over the next couple of months, and we’re getting married this weekend, after living together seven years and almost losing it all!

I can not understand why anyone would pass up the chance to have the kind of relationship like what we have after reading your book. The words “thank you” seem so little compared to what your book as done for us. My whole life is right out the dreams I had as a young woman.

Karen B.

Well Karen, dreams do come true, but you usually have to take charge of making it happen like you and your husband-to-be did, and congratulations for doing so!

Folks, what kills me about this letter is that most relationships die of boredom somewhere between a few minutes and two years, yet this one survived six years before the couple started drifting. Some would blame something once known as “the seven year itch,” and I couldn’t argue with that, but these days I mostly see people who either make it or don’t very early in the relationship.

Indeed, I’ve been working with couples who have been together as long as 57 years, and the most common thread in all of them is boredom. What’s shocking is how quickly a woman can build up a head of steam after all that time and start moving for separation; one went from “status quo” to out of the house in four days!

I spoke with her in a counseling session, and she said that she still loved her husband deeply, but after 37 years of marriage, the idea of him disappearing into his study to spend the remainder of the evening with his carving hobby until bedtime even one more time was too much to bear, and at 61 years of age, she was ready to start over if that was the only way to escape the nightly abandonment and boredom. I will never forget her saying that she felt like she was already a widow. The problem has been resolved and they are again happy and reengaging one another, but it was a VERY close call.

Let me be clear; I’m not saying divorces happen that fast, it’s that couples report settling into routine, losing excitement, get lazy, and the magic goes away that fast, even though they may remain committed to each other (or the institution of marriage, the kids, or whatever they cling to in order to hold it together) for decades, like my grandparents did. Karen says they had fun and excitement for six years, and then trouble started.

Boredom is insidious, covert, unpredictable, and deadly to your relationship, and it can slip in unnoticed the minute you drop your guard, just as it did with this couple. The trick is to know the opponent, and know how to guard yourself against it, which in this case is by remaining aware of each other’s needs, lives, excitement level, and having fun and growing together in ways that keep you close, intimate, excited, etc.

As Karen said, what’s in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” is information for men about women, but a lot of it is also information that women aren’t aware of about themselves and men! It can do you both a world of good to read it, because it will let you keep the home fires burning bright instead of having them go out and having to rebuild and reignite them in the dark and under duress later. Do yourself a favor and go to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy right now, because life is definitely too short to spend it bored and doing all the ridiculous things people do to fight boredom (like affairs, or weekends in a therapy retreat!), especially when you have such an option that is so easy and affordable as this.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 5, The Alpha Male

2009-06-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

No discussion of what women want could be complete without a factual discussion of the Alpha Male. Female readers reveal what they think about the Alpha Male. In short, they WANT him, NOW!

I have received thousands of e-mails from women about their reactions to the alpha male, his personality, behavior, bearing, leadership, etc., and since alpha male behavior triggers automatic, biologically-based attraction response, this is indeed something very important you must understand if you truly want to be a man who knows what women want. I’ll give you some examples…

Check these out:

David,

Where can I get a man that will propose to me in a dip at the end of a Flamenco????? I watch that dance sequence in “The Mask of Zorro” all the time because it’s better than any romance novel at getting me juiced up. It’s just too hot for words! And that fire in Aleandru, and the determination in Delavega, they are so smooth and so hot, and just take charge of everything around them, as if no matter how bad things have been or could get, they own the world they walk on! GAWD!!! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to tend to something… ;-)

Denise

(Sent in response to a recent newsletter about the importance of building attraction and being able to kill it even in a marriage proposal.)

David,

Just some affirmation from one of your female readers ... I loved what you had to say today about the Alpha Male! And from this female's perspective, you're right on target. There is nothing sexier than a man who knows what he wants and sets out to get it, but still takes care not to trample on others to get there. It sounds lame, but "careful determination" is high on my list of traits that I'm looking for in a mate. I want the man who will set out boldly in the direction he desires, who will make sure he has gathered all the necessary data and considered all the important points of what his next step should be, so that when he makes each step, it is bold, sure, and determined. There is nothing wimpy about this man, because even though he's careful and considerate, he is those things in a way that comes across as prepared and in control, not insecure and second-guessing. He has all the facts, and he operates from logic and knowledge -- he IS the Alpha Male. From this gal's point of view, you've got it nailed! Thanks for your insights!

(unsigned)

Hi David!

I have your book, and I’ve been reading your newsletter for a long time now, and I’m starting to wonder why you’ve not yet been on “Oprah”. I keep forwarding your stuff to my guy friends, and some have said they’ve subscribed. The others just don’t get it. They continue to cower before the women around them, feeding us B.S. compliments in a sorry effort to win our approval, never realizing that if they want our approval, the first thing they have to do is stand up and stop seeking it.

Then they have to listen. They need to recognize when we’re serious about something and when we’re playing, when we’re really having a crisis and when we’re just testing to see how much drama they’ll put up with, and when we’re testing to see if they’re going to act like men or wimps, they need to calmly tell us to “put our big girl panties on” and straighten up. When we’re having a real crisis, we want a man to be strong enough to hear the outpouring of a problem without trying to jump to our rescue, and then tell us get on with handling it, and let them know if they can be of assistance, instead of getting frantic with us and assuming that we’re frantic because we can’t handle it ourselves. We can. We handle ourselves differently than men, but the vast majority of us do handle ourselves. It takes strength and brains to be that man, one who can recognize the difference between expressing crisis and a plea for help and being considerate enough to act appropriately, and those who are that man are the most desirable of all.

They also have to have themselves together enough to have fun with us. We don’t like being around sappy, whiney dorks, or boring sticks in the mud. We want to be with achievers, as you call them, who get things done and feel like they’ve earned a good time, and can have one, and bring us into it at will with laughter and enthusiasm. God! How we hate to hear the words, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

Yes, we’re hard to understand sometimes, and most of us know it, but more and more of us are getting past that dime novel idea that men should just know everything. We’re realizing that we don’t really want them to “just know,” but that we do want them to recognize it when we tell them, however subtly we may express it. To that end, many of us are starting to speak out in forums like this, because the time for improvement is at hand, and we all, men and women, deserve better.

(also unsigned)

Whoever these women are, they either have or will have a good man. The first certainly seems to be saying that she’ll accept nothing less than a true alpha male, one who is strong, but earns his way through the world – he doesn’t just beat somebody over the head and take what he wants, he works for it, knowing that he can earn it and is worthy of having it. In Objectivist philosophy, this is called “rational self-interest,” and is the cornerstone of appropriate human behavior, especially for anyone wanting to be happy and enjoy self-esteem, because such achievement is self-esteem’s only source.

The second seems to be confirming, albeit more verbosely, everything the first says. In short, they want this “alpha male” in their life, and aren’t leaving us to guess who he is and what he looks like anymore.

When you’ve finished “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” you might want to follow it up with one of Ayn Rand’s novels, like “The Fountainhead,” or “Atlas Shrugged.” They are incredibly well-written, and project man as a truly heroic being, strong, logical, motivated, walking tall and moving through life with a purpose, an image that every woman wants to see every time she looks at her man, not just because it’s exciting, but because they are “biologically wired” to recognize such characteristics and respond to them – it’s called “attraction.” (Now there’s a clue!)

I’ve included pages upon pages of instruction and examples of how to BE this man and love every minute of it in “THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage,” and Gentlemen, the women are constantly saying, “Hell YES! This is what I want!” so pay attention! The choice is yours; choose well, and jump immediately to http://www.makingherhappy.com, because life is just too short to spend it bored and wanting.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 4, What About YOUR Wants and Needs?

2009-06-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

We’re going to take a sudden detour from what women want to address another question that the other question begs: What about YOU? What do YOU want? Do you remember the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it”? We’ve talked about that subject before, but never in THIS context. Tune in, because it will jerk you upright!

This subject of what women want has opened up either a cornucopia or a hornet’s nest; I’m not sure which. I’m getting flooded with comments and questions, and loving every minute of it. It appears that my readers are some of the smartest people around if they use their heads. Some catch on immediately, while others don’t get it at first because they are so emotionally charged and married to a bad position, but once they see the contradiction in their thinking, they immediately get on the right track and impress the hell out of me with the clarity of their vision and swiftness of their response. I’m proud of every one of you who has responded!

The biggest mistake that anyone can make during relationship crisis is to let insecurity and need take over, driving you to try to save something that is already bad for you, and unfortunately, this is one of the most common mistakes as well. Both men and women can be in a relationship that is so bad that they are considering breaking it off, and if the other person moves to initiate the discussion, they suddenly switch from “I wonder how I can start this conversation to break it off without making an enemy?” to “How can I win them back so I can regain their acceptance and approval???”

Sad, isn’t it?

I’m going to share with you a most stunning response from a reader who has been through "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and we’ve been corresponding about his current situation. We have been discussing why and under what conditions he should allow his estranged wife to come home and resume her post as his wife and mother of his son after having an affair with a financial parasite who has made her do some rather crazy things to try to keep her options open with her husband, who is successful and very capable of supporting the whole family alone (she’s not worked and contributed as a homemaker in return for a pretty lavish existence).

I described several diverse options for him to analyze and see what made sense to him so that I could gauge his mental state and how much he had learned from "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" and our discussions, and wrapped up by saying,

"I'm not particularly thrilled about the idea of her coming home without a complete repentance and new commitment; I'm just offering you options. The one you choose depends on your own sense of self-worth."

His response was awe-inspiring, the hallmark of a man who has realized that both halves of a partnership must earn their place in it, and that love and trust can only be traded for love and trust. Read and learn from a student who has indeed become a master:

Touché - That's the entire question at this point, isn't it? I really see no value in her coming home as a relief to HER - it has to be for the right reasons. In the past, she's come around to wisdom after some thought, but this is big. If she told me tonight that she and [the boyfriend] were over and she wanted to be home, I'd question her motives. Wanting to be home is not the same as wanting to be my wife, or wanting to repair our problems, or wanting to move past the crap she dwells on for years. I'm uninterested in returning to our former life, and I know she is as well.

Truth is, she may miss our house and comfortable life much more than she misses me, and her anger/blame is directed at me for that loss as much as the loss of our relationship. I've been watching for evidence of that, and finding LESS, but still finding some. If she announced her desire to start over and repair the whole thing, I'd be openly skeptical of her ability or willingness to really do that. In the past she's handled our issues by deciding that I was the problem, but she'd tolerate me because the good outweighed the bad. She'd deny that, but I see it often enough that I stick to my story!

Noah (Yes, name changed to protect his privacy!)

Can you imagine that? A man who has pushed beyond that initial knee-jerk reaction of “I’ve got to have my wife back no matter what!” to see that she may have in fact been a bad influence on the whole family with her philandering and deceit and taken the firm stand that if she comes home, it will be as a loving, loyal wife and mother and a genuine life partner, not simply as another dependent who pisses away the love to get to the security he can provide.

Make no mistake; this is the attitude that should prevail in every marriage and committed relationship, for both parties. If your life together is a fair trade, you should nurture and protect it vigorously, but if you indeed have a dependent instead of a partner, someone who takes and wastes your life and other resources and gives you nothing but meaningless and scant approval – just enough to keep you giving in to their every whim – you really need to be somewhere else, or need for them to be somewhere else.

Contrary to what the altruists would have you believe, your purpose on this planet is not simply to have the life sucked out of you by someone who refuses to take responsibility for making a life for themselves, which is a recipe for resentment, fear, and a tortured existence. Your life is the most precious resource in all the universe, and it is not only in limited supply, as it must come to an end at some point, you don’t know how much of it you have left and every second that passes is gone forever.

You should live to achieve and enjoy the fruit of your achievement, not live in servitude. The altruists say that sacrifice, the trading of life for nothing, is noble. The truth is that sacrifice, working for the benefit of others at the cost of your own life, is simply slavery, and there is nothing noble or moral about slavery. And being enslaved to a spouse rather than sharing and celebrating a life with them, fairly trading part of your life, time, effort, and emotions for part of theirs, is an ignoble, immoral waste of life.

If you disagree, you are free to piss your life away as you please, but don’t bother writing to me to tell me how I need to do the same. You will merely confirm yourself as a waste of my time and be dropped from my newsletter subscription list. I’m happy, and you’re not or you wouldn’t be reading this, so you should be listening to me and learning how to become happy instead of trying to convince me to mimic your miserable existence so I’ll be as unhappy as you are. ‘Nuff said.

I need to be very clear here about parasites and predators. You can’t say that all women are gold-diggers any more than you can say that all men are wife-beaters, and that’s certainly not what I’m trying to say here. Most women are good people, especially when led by a man who is caring, attractive, and responsible and brings out her nurturing nature. What I want you to understand concerning parasites and predators is that committed relationships are either synergistic partnerships or they are something that will destroy you; there is no middle ground.

If your relationship isn’t fulfilling you and giving you cause for celebration, it’s killing you, either through the slow poison of the erosion of your self-worth and self-respect, or the explosive shockwave of excessive demands and manipulation that continue until you are wiped out, when the fatal blow is delivered, the break-up, accompanied by the news that everything you did just wasn’t quite good enough, and if you’re married, you’re going to have to make up for your shortcoming by giving up half or more of everything you’ve worked for.

What kind of relationship are you in? Are you celebrating being together? Are you bored with being together? Are you looking forward to being together tomorrow? Are you living in fear that you might find tomorrow that you are no longer together? Can your relationship be fixed? Or should you get out while you still have some life left to invest in a better way of life, one which may involve a more appreciative and mutually nurturing partner who compliments your existence rather than competing with it?

These are tough questions, some that many people can’t answer, even after being together for 20, 30, and even 40 years! It’s not that they’re stupid at all; they either don’t know the right questions to ask or they’re terrified of the answers. It doesn’t have to be that way…

There are answers waiting for you at http://makingherhappy.com in "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," along with the mental and emotional means to use those answers to make your life better instead of allowing them to torment you. Get those answers now, and get a near-instantaneous boost in your own self-worth, so that you can face the tough questions with the courage of your convictions and make your life, especially your marriage or other committed relationship, the best that it can be.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 3A, A Reader Tale From The Dark Side

2009-06-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this series to bring you a reader’s own “Tale from the Dark Side,” a forty-year marriage in which the reward for good work was more work and the reward for wanting rational discussion was false accusations of control – BY THE CONTROLLER! Learn from this man’s mistakes, as he is now doing…

Yesterday’s edition got a lot of responses, a lot more than I expected. Many of you have had a run-in with “ignorance of a woman’s true desires,” and most of you who did gave strong evidence of having learned something from the experience, even if it was only that you needed to learn more about women to get along with them well in the long term; you’d be surprised at how many men never even learn that.

There was one letter that stood above the rest as having lessons to teach that all could learn from. Meet Roger (as always, the name has been changed to protect the reader’s privacy):

Hi David,

Your recent letter concerning your friend Matt has made me realise just how common such a situation can be. I have been married for almost 40 years with two daughters and three grandsons and for as long as I can remember, I have never been able to please her; always there is something else that she wants me to do. I realised this many years ago and now always make a joke of it. So as fast as I complete one project, she will have the next ready for me, sometimes before the first was finished! I just add them to my list of tasks these days, some will get done, some will never be done. My problem is that she has a real knack of making me feel guilty.

This is not just about projects, it could be a social event or something she simply does not approve of, but always I have a guilt feeling when I refuse. The feelings haunt me and I end up doing what she wants sooner or later in most cases. If I argue or try to discuss, I am accused of always wanting to control her. I am driven to succeed because I want the quiet life and the brownie points that come from approval. I am told she sings my praises to others, but never to me.

To give you some idea how it works, she wants me to tidy the garage so it can have a workbench, all the machines and space for me to work. She tells everyone how it will improve things for me, but she also wants me to move all the items stored in the garden shed to the garage so that I can demolish the shed. Then I am expected to build her a summerhouse in the space, not a prefabricated one, a purpose built brick and tile fantasy!

In my spare time I am expected to remodel and transform the gardens, paint the house, build a new two-level deck across the back, turn the second bathroom into a "wet" room and keep the maintenance of our other two houses up to scratch! I must finish the kitchen sometime too! In all this she has ignored the plans we had to convert the garage into a dining room whilst we built a new garage with attached workshop. Maybe this is because her new greenhouse currently occupies the site?

David, I am tired! I work a 9 hour shift, six days per week and generally get just one day off. I cannot afford to pay someone else to do the work as I am still clearing debts from a failed business venture and I am earning just a tad above the minimum wage. I am reading the book you kindly emailed to me after it got lost in transit when I downloaded, but have yet to put it into practice.

Recently she took a vacation with my daughter and grandsons at one of our cottages. It was tiring, but different and the boys were easy, spending their time surfing. What was I doing? I spent my evenings and a rare weekend off work, repairing and painting the beach hut! Trying to please her again! My own vacations are limited and restricted to the extent we cannot have time together and if I take time off without her, I am expected to work on one of the projects!

I am considering building her a dungeon!:-))

There is a lot more to this than meets the eye, but I will not bore you with all the details of the problems in our marriage. I do not give up easily, but there are times when I seriously consider cutting my losses. Divorce is out of the question as we both feel it might make the other happy!

Any advice you can offer would be appreciated. I simply want time to complete a few things on the list without her adding items faster than I can delete them! I can live without the approval for completed projects, but it would be nice if the feelings of guilt could be stopped too.

Thanks for listening
Kind regards,
Roger

What can you learn from Roger’s predicament? Do you recognize the trade he has been engaging in for many years? He’s trading unappreciated effort for the promise of approval. A man shouldn’t seek the approval of a woman any more than a woman should seek the approval of a man. It tips the balance in the relationship too far to one side and throws everything out of whack.

Do you also recognize that she’s using guilt as a tool to usurp the authority that he should be both defining and exercising in their relationship to keep excitement and attraction alive? And the bit about when he wants to discuss something she truncates the discussion by accusing him of wanting to control her, when in fact her manipulations are for the purpose of controlling him? “Methinks she doth protest too much,” as the saying goes…

Roger and I have had other correspondence since this letter, and he’s going to do well in cleaning this mess up. He’s reading and learning, and getting his ducks in a row. The task before him is to refuse to allow his wife to use guilt and manipulation to control his actions, stop seeking her approval, and to take back the authority she has usurped from him, the authority over his own life, effort, schedule, the money he earns and how it is spent, etc.

His wife is in for a rude awakening, but history indicates that unless she is sociopathic and entirely devoid of character, a genuine predator, she will actually love him and respect him, not to mention become wildly attracted to the new authority and strength in him, when he makes the changes he is currently preparing for. If she is indeed a predator, he’ll recognize it and get out. “But he’s been in it for forty years!” Yes, and that’s forty years too long to live with a manipulative predator, right?

As an aside, guilt is something you CHOOSE to feel, not something that someone can force you to feel. If someone tries to make you feel guilty, you can simply choose to feel righteous (if you are) instead of letting them motivate you to ignore reality and accept the guilt they want to heap upon you for their own gain. If you do indeed owe a debt, you should make good on it out of good character, not guilt or fear of reprisal. That’s just what real men do. Anything else is too complicated and dramatic.

It’s not often that you see two people remain in such a one-sided relationship for so long, but even when things have gone so wrong for so long, they can still be fixed, and a lot faster than you’d ever think until you’ve experienced it. It requires only that you know what the woman in your life really wants as a woman and as your partner, and that’s just not that hard to find out if you have the tools for the job.

The tools? Knowledge and desire. Knowing what women want in general, how to clearly communicate with them, and how to turn their attraction on and off will take you to a level of intimacy you never imagined possible, and from there you can learn what she as an individual secretly yearns for and responds to with complete certainty.

If you didn’t have the desire, you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter day after day looking for the knowledge. I’ve had a couple of complaints that my newsletter and blog posts sound like a sales letter, and maybe they do at that. I give away a lot of really good information to prove that the information I’m selling is both valid and valuable.

All that I ask in exchange for all the free information I give you is that you take a good hard look at your life and try to find a way to apply what I give you. I’d also appreciate it if you occasionally at least consider taking the plunge and committing to a few hours of reading to go ahead and learn everything you need to know now, and making the effort to make your relationship all that it can be.

Some of you do, and write me letters describing fantastic results, and some of you don’t, apparently thinking that you’ll learn all you need to know from my newsletters or that you really don’t need to do anything. You will eventually find that position to be in error, and you’ll be downloading this book somewhere down the road when your relationship is in much worse shape and harder and more painful to endure and try to fix. Or even worse, maintaining the comfortably unhappy status quo as Roger did, wasting years or even decades of life, or heading for divorce court.

It is at that time that you will realize that you could have read my book many times over in the time that you have spent only reading my newsletters (which, by design, are infinitely more meaningful to those who have read the book), and that the cost of a good meal could have saved you a lot of time and a lot of pain, frustration, anger, money, celibacy, and no telling what else -- it’s hard to say what you’ll have left after her divorce lawyer gets done with you if the two of you can’t work out something better.

So I would urge you to make things easy on yourself. Go on now to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy of "THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage," as well as a couple of free reports I’ve bundled with it on how to quickly understand the true causes of a break-up and stop it quickly when things finally blow up and the full version of the series you’re now reading. Life’s too short to waste it, so don’t waste any more of it being anything less than happy.

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

What Women REALLY Want in Relationships and Marriage, Part 3, The Dark Side

2009-06-12T22:28:00.001-07:00

Is your relationship a good one, or are you just swimming in wishful thinking? My old friend Matt was drowning in it, but he – and YOU – can do better, if you know what the woman in your life really wants…

As we continue to talk about what women want from a man, we’re going to deviate momentarily to the dark side, and call your attention to the calamities that can occur if you don’t know what the woman in your life wants. We’ll start with my old friend Matt:

I ran into him over the holidays, and it really made me realize just how great a life I live; it’s not a perfect life, as any life has room for improvement, lest it get too boring to bear, but I know exactly where I stand on every aspect of my life, and know what’s working, what could be better, and at any given moment, if something isn’t working, I can make a rational decision as to whether to fix the problem or separate myself from the situation because there’s nothing to be gained by making the effort. I know what my wife wants, expects, and responds to at all times, and there are no nasty surprises.

No so for my old friend Matthew…

“Matt” was a pretty mediocre guy in most respects when we were growing up together, but he’s a great communicator, has an eye for detail, and hence has made a very successful career in business-to-business technology sales, but he’s never been able to really accept that success, and has a huge self-esteem deficit. To make matters worse, to try to feed his ego – that nasty stuff that fills the void between a person’s current self-esteem level and their needed self-esteem level – he’s surrounded himself with the trappings of success – big house, expensive cars and jewelry, private aircraft, and unfortunately, a totally unappreciative trophy bride – to try to make himself feel better about himself.

There are a few laws in this universe that cannot, under any circumstances, be broken, no matter how much one wishes to break them; one of these is the law of cause and effect. Unfortunately, this seems to be the one that everybody wants to try to break routinely, and nobody has ever gotten away with it. In the case of success, success causes the attitude and trappings of success; faking a successful attitude and surrounding oneself with the rewards does not create success, nor the genuine attitude or self-esteem of success. In Matt’s case, because he was never really able to see himself as having risen above his mediocrity to excellence, in spite of having been the top salesman in his company since the first year he was there. He’s trying to fool himself into believing what he should already have accepted long ago. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s his trophy bride…

His trophy bride is a gold-digging predator. They’ve been together fourteen years and he catches her in a new affair about every month. She knows just what buttons to push to keep him seeking her approval, and blaming him for her affairs in such a way that he accepts the blame and works harder at his job to try to buy more of her attention! I didn’t get to talk to him long enough to find absolute proof, but at the time we parted, there was a huge body of evidence that she was in fact the sole cause of his total lack of self-esteem and acceptance of his success, because he had never been “good enough” for her to accept him and be happy with him instead of having all of her “toy boys” while managing to keep him on the edge of bankruptcy the entire duration of their sham of a marriage.

As we talked, she would disappear for long periods, show up for a few minutes to push his buttons, and then flutter off again as a social butterfly constantly does. When he finished describing his situation, I asked how he saw their future, he said, “Well, we’ve been together for fourteen years and she’s not left yet, so she must be incredibly patient with me. I’ve just got to work harder to find a way to satisfy her and when I do, I’m sure everything will finally come together.” My jaw about hit the floor.

In fourteen years, she’s had a dozen affairs per year on average (that’s 168!), she’s spent everything he’s made and has them pretty deeply in debt with no retirement savings, despite his million dollar-plus annual income, and he thinks she’s “patient”??? Sure she is! She has a very generous sugar-daddy footing the bill for her “brattitude” and excesses thinking he needs to work even harder to buy her love! There’s no way she’s going to get impatient with him, except to the extent required to keep him in approval-seeking mode!

Of course, when I asked him why he hadn’t ended the relationship long ago because he obviously wasn’t getting anything but an early trip to the grave out of the deal, his reply was, “But she’s such a great person, and she really loves me!” Yeah, she was great alright; she looked like something off the cover of a fashion magazine, indeed, quite a bit like super model Christy Brinkley in her prime, and that was about as far as great went.

She was haughty, aloof, thoroughly abusive to him (she said some things to him while he and I were talking that I would say to somebody to try to start a fight), and was coming on to other men just a few feet away from where we were talking, not just in plain sight from where we were sitting, but she would even look over at him and toss her head with a smug look on her face like he wasn’t good enough to watch her enjoying herself with another man and wasn’t man enough to stop her. It was truly pathetic.

So what’s the point? Matt could have saved himself years of a pretty bad life if he has just accepted the law of cause and effect, especially with regard to his wife. Her actions did not in any way support her – or HIS -- claims of loving him; she said she did, but her affairs and disrespect for him said otherwise. He knew nothing of what she really wanted, even though it was plain as day in front of him the whole time.

Matt’s case is a great example of the more sinister side of female desire, but what about the more benign or even nurturing woman whose needs are not being met? Meet reader and counseling client “Jack,” whose name has been changed to protect the blind and knuckleheaded:

Hi David,

I can’t thank you enough for your help and your insight. After a bitter divorce and custody battle, losing most of what I had in the world and getting saddled with alimony and child support payments that reduce my take home pay to about minimum wage, I finally got her to talk to me, stop treating me like the enemy, and tell me her version of what brought us to where we are. There was a lot of drama, a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of what I would have called rhetorical questions in the past, and a lot of anger and tears, but along the way there emerged two repeating themes. I never listened to her and I never gave her the chance she gave me by helping her to finish college.

You know all about the listening problem from our sessions, and it was just like you said on the phone and in your book. She never uttered a direct word in her life, did the whole questions and statements reversal thing and always assumed that what was obvious to her was obvious to me so she never stated the obvious, but this time I heard her, drew her out with questions to show interest and led the discussion when she stopped talking like you said, and found out along the way that she didn’t quit school because she wanted to have babies, she quit because she was GOING TO HAVE A BABY, and wanted to go back to college when our son entered grade school! In my deafness and arrogance, I thought she wanted to be a stay at home, full time mother and homemaker, because I misunderstood what she said when I asked her about it and didn’t press her for more detail, making her think I’d closed off the discussion and her desire and need for achievement didn’t matter.

We have called a truce, we’re talking daily, and there is a lot of testing going on right now, but she has brought up the subject of getting back together twice, and a discussion of her going back to school and having a career has followed that quickly both times. We’re putting our life and our family back together now, thanks to you. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.

“Jack”

Jack leaves out a few details that we spoke about on the phone later when I called to follow up, such as the motivation behind his wife’s desire to have a college degree and a career. She didn’t want to be a kept woman, resented kept women (which sounds like an issue that she needs to see a therapist about, because resentment is never healthy and she could just ignore them), and wanted the degree and career to make a fair contribution to the household and help facilitate early retirement for both of them.

Do you see what she was upset about? Her husband had so badly misconstrued what he saw and heard that he thought of her and her desires as exactly opposite who she really was and wanted! No wonder she left! And her desires, unlike Matt’s wife, were about as honorable and loving as they could be! It’s not just what all women want, think and respond to that is important to you as a man; what your partner wants, thinks and responds to as an individual is equally important, and if you know what you should know about women in general, especially how to listen to and talk with them, you will have everything you need to know the specifics that make your partner who she is.

What’s going on in your relationship? Do you know where you stand? Do you know what needs to be done to make things as good as they can be? Are your partner’s actions consistent with her proclamations of love? Do you know enough about the emotions of love, attraction, need, and lust to know if it’s really love that she’s professing – that being “in love” has nothing whatsoever to do with love? (And by the way, what exactly are YOU professing and feeling?)

Are your communications skills such that if she were to tell you what she needed that you would hear her and understand what she wants, or are you one of those men who thinks that his relationship is going great when he finds his wife in his bed with another man or opens the envelope and finds divorce papers? If you don’t know whether you do or not, or if you know that you don’t know, you don’t know enough, and I can help.

“THE Man’s Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage” was developed to serve precisely this purpose, to help you assess your relationship, see what might be lacking, determine whether or not it’s worth fixing, and either get out gracefully or go for the gold with determination and confidence. It teaches you what is known about all women so that you can probe for and discover these fine points about your partner, and bring things in line to a degree you’d never dream possible.

Jump over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and see what it can do for you. Download it. Put it to work. Make your relationship everything it can be if it’s a good one or get out and start over if it’s not, because life is too short to spend it bored, frustrated, scared, cheating (or with a cheater), or celibate.

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

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

2009-06-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

My reply:

Good morning, Steve,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care,
David

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

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