I'll bet you were NOT suddenly taken with him because of his courting behavior and pleadings, right? Actually, you were probably repelled by everything that he did instead of becoming more attracted to him.
Hmmm... Interesting.
Important Signals Most men are idiots when it comes to dating and relationships, so don't expect him to "get it" the way you do when it comes to emotions and intimacy. Most men have NO IDEA what women expect in the beginning of a relationship, but lots of women assume that men should know all the things that are obvious to them as women.
Men have OPPOSITE ideas about dating. And this is especially true with men who are attractive and successful - men who have options!
For example: * Men who have options think they're free to date other people if the issue hasn't been discussed. They will date more women because to them casual dating means more fun.
* Men who have options don't necessarily believe sleeping together means you're in a serious or committed relationship. They're interested in having a few different partners.
This might sound somewhat inappropriate, but men don't have these views just because they're "players" or because they're sex crazed. In some cases that's true, but with most men there's something else happening.
The need for casual dating and multiple sex partners is part of a man's biological programming. Men's biological instincts encourage them to look for a variety of partners.
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They're driven to find quantity. Men can also physically "afford"
to have several partners in a reproductive sense because they produce millions and millions of sperm.
On the other hand, women place more value in finding a man with the right qualities. They're driven to find quality and place no value on whether there are 1 or 100 men around. And it makes sense, because women can't "afford" to have as many partners from a reproductive standpoint.
But not all men operate on their basic instincts. Some men are open to developing a relationship with you from the start. The problem is that these men won't always talk or act differently than men who are just looking for something physical when you're first dating.
So how do you know the difference between a casual dater and a serious partner?
Well, if you're with one of those amazing guys who communicates well and is in touch with his feelings AND tells you he wants a committed relationship, then it's obvious.
But most men aren't this way.
With most men, you feel like you have to drag things out of them. Keeping a relationship going in these cases is tough work. Men usually communicate using indirect signals.
Let's say you're talking to a guy about a commitment. If he says something like: "I don't know what I want."
This is "guy speak" for "I'm not seriously interested in a relationship right now."
If a guy DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE WANTS, he generally DOESN'T WANT WHAT HE'S GOT.
Lots of women ignore this principle. When men avoid, deny, react with anger, or play dumb, they're communicating indirectly that they aren't on the same page with you. If you ::: 59 :::.
ignore, resist, or try to overcompensate when you approach a relationship with a man, you'll NEVER see the important signals he's giving you and you'll never figure out how to make it work.
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Part 2: Feelings: Your Best Friend and Your Worst Enemy
Chapter 5. Your Experience & What You Feel.
Acceptance and Emotional "Fitness"
If you want good things to happen with a man, then understanding what's going on inside you and "making peace with it" is a prerequisite for everything.
A large part of what causes a man to be interested in spending his future with a particular woman depends on the woman's emotional maturity, or what I call her level of "emotional fitness."
For most women, creating and maintaining a sense of harmony is the single most important personal factor in setting the foundation for a future relationship and "keeping" a man.
Why?
First, becoming emotionally mature means that you take responsibility for what happens in your life and your relationships. It means that you LEARN from your mistakes.
Once you start to truly own your emotional life, you become in control of how you perceive things around you by not blaming other people (and men). You start to find your own sense of balance. You no longer become so vulnerable to the bad things that can happen around you because you have healthier emotional boundaries.
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Secondly, it's important to learn what exactly (and realistically) makes you happy with a man and to find out what it is that YOU are doing that's keeping you from creating the right situation with a man.
What? YOU keep YOURSELF from having better things in your life?
That's right... People are their own worst enemies. It happens when people relive their past negative emotional situations by thinking or behaving the same way in the present situation.
I used to resist and despise the idea that it was my own scruples, foibles, and other puffery that kept me from getting what I wanted in my life. But a funny thing happened...
I got tired of banging my head against the wall and decided to accept that I didn't know everything. So I gave in to the idea that I needed to learn and seek outside help.
Oh yeah... there's always someone who radically objects to "changing" yourself, or addressing issues that involve other people by looking at yourself. In an ideal world I'd be telling you all about how to get a man to change for you so that he could fit better into your world. You wouldn't have to do any "work". You'd just get the answers to the test, and you wouldn't have to learn or study anything.
But it's not that simple. YOU are the one who's looking for improvement in your life with men, so you're the one who's going to have to learn, grow, and change. And if you're already starting to get it, you're figuring out that if you can get rid of your own resistance, you can evolve and learn how to move past the limiting and self-defeating behaviors of your own or that of the men around you.
Of course, you can't change someone who doesn't want to change, so don't fight that losing battle with a man if you can avoid it. This book deals with how you can identify and choose the right man and how you can go beyond the self-destructive ::: 62 :::.
behaviors that often come up in dating and relationships.
That's why I won't try to tell you how to change a man; it would only lead to more failure and bring you a whole other set of manipulative issues and emotional frustrations.
Awareness & Internal Observation I think that understanding and observing your own emotional reactions as they take place without having to act them out is a paramount skill to develop. I call this "Internal Observation" and it can have an unbelievable calming and relaxing influence on your entire life. A big part of this skill is finding the "triggers" that create negative and positive reactions in you and learning to disarm the negative stimulus from the reactions using more positive and calming stimulii. I think that understanding and observing your own emotional reactions as they take place without having to act them out is a paramount skill to develop. I call this "Internal Observation" and it can have an unbelievable calming and relaxing influence on your entire life. A big part of this skill is finding the "triggers" that create negative and positive reactions in you and learning to disarm the negative stimulus from the reactions using more positive and calming stimulii.
I think of learning these skills as the emotional equivalent of learning to read in the dating and relationship world. In other words, you don't want to go through your life emotionally illiterate. Learn to read what's going on with the people around you and identify for yourself for yourself what's important. what's important.
Daniel Goleman talks about the Emotional Quotient or "EQ" (kind of like IQ but for emotions) in his book Emotional Intelligence. If you haven't read it, go get this book. It's got some amazing insights.
People often think that simply having lots of feelings means they are in touch with their emotions.
Wrong.
Being emotionally literate does NOT mean that you should experience and express your emotions at any time. Being smart with your emotions is about not acting on the impulses and reactions that you experience and not indulging in them with little forethought.
It's more like learning to have, as Aristotle once said, "the rare skill to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way."
As I see it, becoming emotionally literate has several ::: 63 :::.
steps: 1. Learning to "observe" your emotional reactions. Learning to "observe" your emotional reactions.
As you start to pay more attention to your emotions, your emotions become just another one of your "internal dialogues" instead of a bunch of buttons that trigger an instant reaction.
2. Identifying how and why your internal dialogue Identifying how and why your internal dialogue comes up. comes up. You'll begin to have more control over your internal dialogue as you observe it more closely. You'll start to see the common positive and negative You'll begin to have more control over your internal dialogue as you observe it more closely. You'll start to see the common positive and negative "triggers" that set your emotional dialogue in action and how they come from your own dreams, fears, and issues.
3. Learning how to honor your internal dialogue and Learning how to honor your internal dialogue and making the best use of it for yourself AND the making the best use of it for yourself AND the people around you. people around you. What What feels feels best for you isn't usually what is best for you and another person. When you can analyze what to do in various situations, you can start to choose how to deal with your internal dialogue. best for you isn't usually what is best for you and another person. When you can analyze what to do in various situations, you can start to choose how to deal with your internal dialogue.
The more experience you have doing this with your own mind, the more you'll start to change your approach and get positive results.
You'll start to understand that emotional context and positive motivation is stronger and longer lasting than almost any negative emotional communication and reaction.
Here's an extremely powerful insight about your emotions: A lot of what causes people to hurt each other and regret later how they acted is an inability to observe their own emotions and to realize that they can avoid acting on them.
In other words, an emotion does NOT have to have an associated action or reaction.
So if a man is behaving in a way that hurts you or drives you crazy, you can choose how you want to react to it. You can ::: 64 :::.
observe the emotions you are feeling and use them to guide you to make smarter decisions.
Be Comfortable As a Woman After talking with hundreds of women, listening to the issues and experiences they have had, and reading the amazing emails I receive about women's frustrations and insecurities in their relationships, I've recognized something valuable. To end up where they want to be in their love lives and in their relationships, these women need to: 1. Accept that it's OK to have the feelings they have.
2. Accept that it's OK to want what they want from a relationship and to be honest about it no matter what.
3. Recognize that a relationship will not make them happy or "whole" as a person.
Accepting and realizing these is easier said than done, so I've included some exercises later of this book to help on that level.
But WHY is it important for a woman to accept these things?
Well, it's important because after years of working with men and women, I've seen a negative social attitude that's pervasive among many men. Men assume women depend on them for emotional, social, and physical validation. It's a chauvinistic bias that is often reinforced in men's lives by their single friends, peers, television, etc.
I call this negative female stereotype the "Helpless Woman Myth." You can see it when you hear men talk about women and relationships men have this negative tone and subtly imply that women are clingy and seek security through men. And with relationships, men talk to their guy friends as though a woman will be taking something away from him if he commits to her. It's as though the man will somehow lose his all control, freedom, and masculinity.
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What I've discovered is that these men are threatened by a woman's ability to attune to people's emotions and empathize on a very basic human level. Women have a natural skill, intuition, and intelligence that give them an amazing capacity for love and caring. Men more often lack these natural abilities and the tools to be more emotionally aware. Some men will even put down and ridicule the emotional world women see and experience because these men can't comprehend a woman's emotional state.
Since men don't hold the upper hand with intelligence in the emotional and intuitive world, emotional strength has been spun into what men perceive as a weakness. I'd go as far as to say that it's more of a mainstream male belief to think that women are emotionally "hysterical" and out of touch than to think that women are actually better at seeing a part of the world that most men can't properly observe.
Are you following me here?
I don't mean to get too far out, but I think that if women can better understand that men have a completely different emotional "tool set", women will be much better prepared in their interactions with men.
The Science of Emotions You might not believe it, but a large percentage of people's actions and behaviors are "pre-programmed". How they react to people and situations is often determined long before the situation actually happens. Maybe you know some people in your life who you know will become emotional if you talk to them about certain things.
People have lots of predictable patterns and "buttons"
that are mostly outside the control of their conscious decision-making processes. So without even recognizing it, people are driven by inner conflicts and past experiences at a deeper, subconscious level.
I'm not saying that we're robots and that the situations that you come across aren't important to address and react to in certain ways. But the fact is that you have freedom to make ::: 66 :::.
your own choices that can influence how you're going to behave. You can choose how you perceive and react to the environment.
Unfortunately, we become predictable and don't act in our own best interest in lots of situations because we have gut-level emotional reactions. And the more you start to learn and recognize these pre-programmed behaviors, the more you can start to weed out the ones that aren't useful or helpful in your everyday life.
Think about it. Have you ever been angry with someone for doing something, and you ended up becoming so angry that it kind of scared you?
Why did you become so angry? Was it your conscious choice? How strong was the motivation of your anger? And was your reaction rational and useful in any way?
The point is that you probably didn't make much of a choice to assess your behavior at the time. You didn't sit down and reason out how reacting with anger or other negative behavior or emotions would lead to any constructive results. It just happened. You simply followed your gut instincts and worked to somehow undo or get even with whatever injustice or wrong you felt you've suffered.
As an interesting note, people's behavior are generally more predictable as situations become more intense or important to them because their attention is focused on interpreting every little detail and nuance. Their bodies and minds are ready for something big to happen, causing them to experience what's going on even more intensely. It's a snowball effect that heightens the emotional experience.
So what does this have to do with catching and keeping a man?
Maybe you've heard of the "fight or flight" response.
Well, to put it simply, your love life or your relationship with a man is the ultimate high intensity and high importance environment that cues your mind and body up for "fight or ::: 67 :::.
flight" responses. So let's talk about "being in love" first because it's such a great example of the patterns we have around our emotions and reaction.
We have fascinating psychological, chemical, and behavioral changes that take place inside of us because our reactions and emotions are all tied together.
A key element of what happens when you're in love is an increase of "love chemicals" in your brain and your body. We have higher levels of certain chemicals at different stages.
Early on, in the "honeymoon stage" when you feel love-struck and can't stand to be away from your lover, you have higher levels of 3 chemicals in your bloodstream: 1. Norepinephrine 2. Dopamine 3. Serotonin Here's a few of the "love symptoms" that come with these chemicals: * Heightened awareness (your senses) * Reduced appetite * Increased heart rate * Increased energy level * Increased sex drive * Feelings of euphoria (intense happiness) The next stage of the emotional love cycle is the "bonding stage." Here there's an increase in the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin in our brain. These chemicals promote the behaviors and symptoms of attachment and a more parental love. The bonding stage chemicals are the "settle-down-lets-raise-a-family-and-spend-time-cuddling-watch-movies-together" ones. They're all about bonding, attachment, and comfort-long term stuff.
So there's an emotional cycle to love that comes from the body's chemical reactions. It starts with the "honeymoon stage" and moves into the "bonding stage." Basically, the chemicals in our body make the diffeent stages of our love life more intense and "real" to us by creating emotional ::: 68 :::.
experiences.
Emotions Are Contagious I can remember going through some of the toughest issues in my life when I was around 15. I think we all went through some sort of awkward stage and experienced growth in our physical bodies and our social "selves" that made our early teens difficult. But something happened at that time that changed how I interacted with people for the rest of my life.
It's a lesson I've never forgotten...
One afternoon, I was walking down the hallway at school to catch the bus for going home. I had a lot on my mind between my own insecurities, the problems I had going on in my family, and attending a new school for the third time in two years. I'd fallen into what I felt was a funk-a sort of depression.
Up until then I'd always felt so much positive energy around me as people were always laughing, smiling, and having a good time around me. But things seemed to have changed for me. Now I didn't see smiles on the faces of the people around me. As a young boy, I started to think it was something about me.