Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know: Find Out How They Really Feel About Women, Relationships, Love, and Sex - Softcover

Barbara De Angelis, PhD, internationally recognized as one of the foremost experts on human relations and personal growth, is the author of the #1 New York Times blockbusters Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know and Are You the One for Me? Her other bestsellers include Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know, The Real Rules, Ask Barbara, Real Moments®, Real Moments® for Lovers, and How to Make Love All the Time. She's also a co-author of Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul. Through her books and award-winning television program and seminars, she has guided millions of people worldwide toward greater personal fulfillment in their relationships and in life.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been chosen to be part of an expedition to another planet. All that’s known about the planet is that it is inhabited by beings whose physical appearance is similar to yours. After a long journey through space, you arrive at this faraway world. You step out of your spaceship and are greeted by pleasant-looking creatures who do indeed closely resemble your own species. Much to your amazement, they even appear to be speaking English.
 
Over the next few hours, you attempt to talk and interact with these beings. At first, you seem to be getting along well. But as more time passes, the tension between you and them begins to mount. Even though these aliens seem to understand the English language, they constantly misunderstand your attempts to communicate with them—you say one thing, and they hear another; you try to express curiosity, for instance, and they interpret it as criticism. As you observe these beings interacting with one another, the differences between you and them become even more apparent. Your own species has been trained to value cooperation and emotional sensitivity—these beings seem always to be in competition with each other. You’ve been taught to share your feelings—they seem to work hard at hiding theirs. The more time you spend with these unusual creatures, the more frustrated you become.
 
Finally, you and your exploration team decide to depart from this strange and unsettling place. You’re certain that these beings will be happy to see you go, since they didn’t show much enthusiasm toward you during your visit. But to your great surprise, they become very sad when you announce that you are leaving, insist that they loved the time they spent with you, and beg you not to depart. In spite of their protests, you board your spaceship, more confused than ever. And as you settle back into your seat and feel the rocket engines lift the steel craft back into space, you think to yourself, That was the strangest group of people I’ve ever met. They said one thing and felt another. They acted like they didn’t care, but they did. They didn’t seem to enjoy having us around, but were unhappy when we left. Well, they were interesting to visit, but I sure wouldn’t want to live with them.
 
Starting Your Adventure into the World of Men
 
Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the aliens have landed and are living among us—they’re called “men.” And when you consider the tremendous biological, psychological, and sociological differences between us, men might as well be from another planet. Stop and think for a minute about the odds of your getting along with someone who came from a very different background, was brought up with completely different values, and was taught to think, behave, and communicate in a totally different style from your own. Next to impossible, right? Yet every day of our lives, we attempt to challenge these odds by having relationships with men. The truth is, it’s a miracle that we get along at all!
 
The differences between men and women have existed throughout the ages, as I explain in the remainder of this chapter. For thousands of years, women accepted these differences, adapted to them, and took on certain roles that were expected of us. But sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century a revolution took place, a revolution in the way women saw themselves and insisted on being seen by men. For the first time, women were demanding equality in all aspects of life, and in the process, were breaking out of those culturally stereotyped roles they and their mothers and their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers had complacently accepted. The later introduction of effective birth control methods and the flow of women into the work force gave women reproductive and economic freedom from dependance on men.
 
And so, a crisis in male-female relationships was born. Men were used to being in control, and expected women to behave submissively. Now women were saying, “No, I don’t want to act that way anymore.” The truth was that we still weren’t sure of how we were supposed to act as “new women.” We were confused, and our confusion made the men in our lives even more perplexed. It’s as if we were still playing the same game, but all the old rules were thrown out, and we hadn’t finished making up the new ones yet. One minute we wanted to be liberated; the next, we wanted to be taken care of. We went to work and learned to support ourselves, but we still expected a man to hold the door for us on the way into our office. We begged men to open up and show us their vulnerabilities, but found ourselves getting turned off when they started sounding weak. And while our own double standards bothered us, they drove men crazy.
 
As women of the 1990s, we are on the way to mastering our professional and financial lives. But when it comes to our relationships with men, we’re more frustrated than ever, and sometimes it seems as if we haven’t made any progress at all. As one very successful female business executive said to me recently, “I can figure out how to make my company hundreds of thousands of dollars and how to buy my own condominium, but I still can’t figure out how to have a good relationship with a man!” For this woman, as well as for many of us, men are the “final frontier,” the one area that remains an untamed mystery in our lives.
 
 
Warning: This is not a “men are jerks” book! It isn’t about blaming men, or making them wrong for how they behave
 
INSTEAD, IT’S A COLLECTION OF VALUABLE INFORMATION THAT I’VE SHARED WITH THOUSANDS OF WOMEN, INFORMATION THAT HAS HELPED THEM UNDERSTAND WHY MEN ARE THE WAY THEY ARE, AND TAUGHT THEM NEW WAYS TO RELATE TO MEN.
 
Why Men Are the Way They Are
 
Have you ever wondered why men prefer to drive around lost for hours rather than stop and ask for directions?
 
Have you ever suspected that the men who try to control you are secretly afraid of the power you have over them?
 
Have you ever wondered why men have such a hard time letting you get really close to them?
 
Have you ever wondered why men get so upset when they are trying to concentrate on something and you try to get them to pay attention to you?
 
Have you ever asked yourself why a man will insist he isn’t worried or upset when you absolutely know he is?
 
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you aren’t alone. Every woman knows the frustration of looking at the man she loves and feeling like she cannot understand why he is the way he is. The first thing you need to know is:
 
Men aren’t the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they’ve been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate
 
Here, then, is some background information. Let’s look at:
 
Why I Call Men “The Solitary Hunter” and “The Displaced Warrior”
 
Why Men Have Always Dominated Women
 
How Men Are Trained to Be Unfit for Love
 
How TV Teaches Us Stereotyped Sex Roles