First, watch this video of Michael introducing this lesson:
Audio of Michael reading the lesson below:
“Does he love me?”
“Does he really care about me?”
“Am I good enough for him?”
“Will he always stay with me?”
“Does he see me as marriage material?”
“Does he find me attractive enough?”
“Are we forever?”
–Women’s answers from the Secret Survey
When Kelly looked at Jake she wished she had super powers. Actually, she just wished she had one: she wished she could see past all the evasive answers and the little lies and read his mind. She wished she could just know how he really felt about her.
He said he did. He said “I love you” whenever she asked him. He even wrote her little notes. And sometimes she’d wake up in the morning to find that he’d gotten up early and made her breakfast and wrapped her in a big hug before he went off to work.
But other times she wondered. Other times he wouldn’t talk to her. She’d find him sitting with a far off look in his eyes and at those moments she’d give anything to know “What does he think of me?”
In this lesson, I’m going to try to answer the number one question women asked as part of the Secret Survey. Actually, it’s not even the “number one” question. It’s basically the first 50 most common questions all rolled up into one.
When I first did the survey I was shocked at how many women simply didn’t feel secure in their relationships. . .who didn’t know how the men in their lives actually felt about them. . .who were anxious and angry and feeling like they simply weren’t good enough.
So How Do Men Really Feel About Women?
Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.
First the Good News. . .
According to the Secret Survey results, a lot of men out there are desperately and even eloquently in love with the women in their lives.
Here are a few of my favorite responses from guys (remember, the question they’re answering is “What’s the one thing you desperately want the woman in your life to know but could never tell her?”):
“I deeply, from the depths of my soul, so love you.”
“I feel like I can’t be happy without you, you’re my everything. If I didn’t have you, I don’t feel like I would have any purpose at all.”
“That she is the very person I’ve spent my entire life searching for. She is my ideal woman and I wouldn’t change anything about her.”
“That she is the most beautiful woman I have ever known.”
“That I love her unconditionally and for the rest of my life.”
And that’s just a taste. There are many more.
From Looking at the Secret Survey Results,
We Can Figure out Three Things. . .
1. Most guys who responded really do love and appreciate the women in their lives. A lot of the responses are heartbreaking in their sincerity.
2. BUT there’s an undercurrent of frustration that women don’t seem to know or accept how men feel about them (this goes back to our last lesson with women deflecting men’s emotions and compliments).
3. Men agree that constantly having to reassure a woman hurts him deeply and dramatically lessens his attraction and love.
That last part is actually worth repeating: the more a man has to work to prove that he’s attracted to a woman and loves her, the less attracted to her and the less in love with her he becomes.
Really it’s a vicious circle. . .
A man loves and adores a woman, but isn’t great at showing it in a language she can accept and understand (remember, men don’t communicate like women do and that’s OK).
The woman feels insecure and constantly tests her man, asking him to prove how much he cares about her.
Her insecurity and need for him to prove his love and devotion acts like toxic acid on a man’s emotions, makes him less and less happy in the relationship, and pushes him away.
Again and again in the survey (and in private interviews I do on this subject), men say the number one most attractive trait in a woman is confidence and that if there’s one thing they want in their relationship it’s a woman who believes him when he says “I love you,” who doesn’t need constant reassurance, and who feels securely loved.
Two Quick Stories of Toxic Insecurity in Action. . .
Story #1: Photos on the Facebook Wall
A few months ago I got this post on my Facebook wall (it’s http://www. facebook.com/michael.c.fiore – you should go “like” it and join in the fun).
A woman named Ana asked:
“Michael, can you please say a word or two about what you think if a guy keeps his ex gf’s pictures on Facebook while he’s dating another. My BF refuses to put away his ex-girlfriend’s photos and it makes me feel insecure, disrespected, and jealous.”
I responded by saying:
“Hey Ana, good question. Here’s my take: You can’t erase a guy’s past (and you shouldn’t even try to). The ‘Facebook Age’ basically gives us a running photo history of our lives, and his ex-girlfriend is always going to be a part of that history.
That said, it’s totally understandable that you feel a little disrespected here. If he’s got a bunch of photos of him and his ex making out or all over each other, he should take those down.
But if they’re relatively PG photos, you should just let it go.
And remember – the photos aren’t making you insecure, they’re just heightening a feeling of insecurity you probably already have inside.”
Ana writes back:
“Michael, thanks for the answer. I did exactly as you said. I didn’t ask him to take off the photos, BUT after 3 months of our relationship he again put her photo on Facebook.
How do I react? It confused me a lot?
P.S. Also, please explain how harmful can it be if he and she are still friends on Facebook while she still posts love songs dedicated to him. I know it =-)”
I respond again:
“Hey Ana,
OK, deep breath here and chill.
You’re getting anxious and insecure over stuff you have no control over and that’s the quickest way to crazy town known to man. Your guy is doing what your guy does.
The only thing you have control over is how you react to what he does. Now, is he putting a picture of her on Facebook because he’s ‘not as into you as you want’ or because he still harbors feelings for her?
I have no idea.
But most likely the pictures have nothing to do with you or his feelings for you, and the best thing you can do is move on and not think about it.
Getting insecure over this is actually the worst reaction.
Insecurity is extremely unattractive and pushes men away like nothing else. . . but if you can be unbothered by this and maintain your confidence, it will actually bring your guy closer to you.”
To be blunt about insecurity: All relationships end. Either you break up or one of you dies. The odds of you and this guy being together for the next 50 plus years are actually pretty low. If he’s disrespecting you, all you need to do is end the relationship earlier.
If you think he’s cheating on you, then you need to make a decision based on that fact.
But making drama out of Facebook stuff will never get you what you want.”
Ana responds again:
“Thank you. These are EXACTLY the words I needed to hear right now. You have probably saved our relationship now coz I was at the edge of how to react. Now I took the direction.
Thank you!!”
Story #2: “You’re Making Me a Crazy Person”
Several years ago I was seeing a wonderful girl named Kelly (she’s currently married and we’re still friends. And no, Kelly is not her real name. Sheesh!). I absolutely adored her while we were together. And even though I was going through some tough times of my own during that relationship, I tried to make sure to tell her I loved her. . .
But Kelly’s insecurity was like a dagger to my heart. She took everything I did or said as a referendum on our relationship. If I mentioned in passing that another girl looked cute she broke down crying and asked why I didn’t find her attractive.
If I was five minutes late, she decided it was because I didn’t really want to be with her. And if she found a picture of a woman I used to date (or even just drunkenly made out with one night) on my Facebook wall, it was nuclear winter.
Every time we fought over this stuff, she’d talk about how I was “making her a crazy person” or “making her act this way.”
Over time (we dated for about 18 months) dating Kelly shifted from “fun, love, awesome” to “Oh, man, how much time am I going to have to spend reassuring her today??”
I firmly believe that her insecurity caused our relationship to die way before its time. (To go on record, Kelly and her husband seem very, very happy together and I couldn’t be happier for them.)
OK, So Why Am I Telling you These Two Stories?
For a couple reasons:
1. Because I want you to pay attention to some particular language that’s common to both Ana’s messages on Facebook and my relationship with Kelly. Specifically, look at how Ana uses the word “make:” “He makes me feel insecure” and how Kelly used to say I was “making her a crazy person.”
2. I think both of these stories are a great lead in to some tools and concepts I’m going to give you to help you defeat insecurity in your life and be a more confident, more attractive woman.
Insecurity Blasters: 6 Big Concepts to Help You Move Past Toxic Insecurity and Become Irresistible to Your Man
Each of the concepts I’m about to give you could be lessons all by themselves, but I think it’s important to group them here in order to keep you focused on getting results in your life and your relationships fast.
Big Concept #1: A Man’s Relationship is Not His Top Priority (and That’s a Really GOOD Thing)
I know from talking to my female friends that this one is almost impossible for women to get their heads around. After all, for most women their relationship and their families are the driving force behind their day.
But guys are different. Except for at the very beginning of your relationship with a man (when that chemical stew of pheromones is drawing him to you like a tractor beam) you’ll never be the be-all end-all priority for him.
And that’s actually a good thing.
I asked my girlfriend about this recently. I said “If you were my absolute top priority at all times, how would that make you feel?”
She gave me a sexy smile and said, “It would make me want to go hide under the couch or call the police on the crazy guy who wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Plain and simple, men need a purpose in life. They need a goal to go after. For a lot of guys that goal or purpose could be their job or a sport they like to play. Heck, it could even be fantasy football or being ridiculously good at video games.
But except for the very beginning of your relationship when love chemicals are wreaking havoc with his brain, his purpose cannot and should not be his relationship.
Why?
Because if a man actually focused all of his energy and all of his drive and all of his sense of meaning on you and didn’t have other priorities. . .well, you really wouldn’t like him very much. He’d seem like the kind of creep you’d never want to date or marry in the first place.
I mean, just imagine it for a second. Do you really want a guy who’s OBSESSED with you, who rushes to answer the phone whenever you call, who NEVER goes out with his friends because he’d rather be with you, who constantly checks in to make sure you’re OK, goes to INCREDIBLE lengths to make sure you know how DAMNED MUCH he loves you, writes you little notes and acts like a wounded puppy when you finally say you’ve had enough and just need to go out with the girls?
Because that’s not a husband or a boyfriend. That’s a STALKER. Or maybe some kind of weird pet. I don’t care how great some of that stuff sounds, if you actually had it you’d get freaked out pretty darned fast.
Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be a priority for a man. You should be. And there certainly should be times that he drops everything for you, but if you’re in your guy’s top three priorities you’re doing very well.
My girlfriend knows that my priorities are (in order). . .
1. My business (writing stuff like this, speaking, appearing on TV, and reaching my goal of helping 1 million women around the world).
2. My body and my health. I work out at least 5 days a week and go nuts if I don’t.
3. My relationship with her.
Will I give up a workout in order to spend a romantic night with her?
Sure.
Will I put away the laptop at night so we can cuddle on the couch and watch TV? Yes.
But she knows that my job and exercise are huge parts of who I am.
And she knows if I didn’t have those two things in my life I would be neither the man she fell in love with nor a man she’d truly want to be with
Big Concept #2: It’s Not Your Job to Make Him Happy (Or His Job to Make You Happy)
This is a huge mind shift for most people, but it’s worth it. You can’t make a man happy any more than you can make him have an orgasm. (I always thought that language was crazy. Wouldn’t “help him have an orgasm” make more sense?).
I first read about this concept in a book called Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch, Ph.D. Dr. Schnarch’s writing is dry as dirt, but his research and his ideas are wonderful. And the biggest idea I took from his book was that trying to make your partner happy simply isn’t your job in a relationship.
Your job as a wife or a girlfriend is to be a good wife or a girlfriend: To be there for your partner emotionally and physically, to talk to him, to take his side when he’s having a fight with his boss, and to generally be in his corner no matter what.
His job isn’t to make you happy either.
You’re responsible for your own happiness and he’s responsible for his.
Once you let go of the responsibility of trying to make him happy and let him off the hook for making you happy, you’ll open up some amazing doors for a truly connected and wonderful relationship.
Big Concept #3: It’s Not About You
If you remember the story about my ex-girlfriend Kelly, you’ll remember how she tended to take everything I said or did and turn it around so it was somehow about my feelings for her. Which drove me utterly and completely nuts.
Plain and simple, 99% of what a man says or does has absolutely nothing to do with you or how he feels about you.
Most men simply don’t think about their wives or girlfriends that much when they’re not around. When we’re at work, we tend to be focused on work. When we’re hanging out with the guys, we’re focused on the guys. And when we’re making model trains in the basement. . .well, you get the idea.
Guys are horrible multitaskers. We tend to focus on one thing at a time and basically forget about everything else until we’re done. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to take responsibility for his every little action and every little thought.
If you can assume that his forgetting to do the dishes just meant he forgot to do the dishes (not that he’s sending you some passive aggressive message), how much happier would you be? How much easier would your life be?
If you want to live with (and love) men, the most important thing you can do is make a conscious choice not to read deeply into everything he says or does. Men aren’t women, and men are actually pretty simple.
Big Concept #4: There is No “Forever”
“How do I get him to love me forever?” is a question I get a lot.
And the answer is, unfortunately, you don’t.
Or, more specifically, the way to get a man to love you forever and to have a relationship that stands the test of time is to forget about forever and focus on the now.
Listen: All relationships end.
All of them.
Either you break up or one of you dies, but no matter what, you’re not going to spend forever with one man and worrying about what’s going to happen 5, 10 or 50 years down the line is a great way to send your relationship to purgatory now.
I asked my girlfriend once “Do you really want to be with big, hairy, messy, crazy me for 50 years?” and her eyes got wide like saucers and she looked like she was going to have a heart attack.
Love is in the moment. Romance is in the now. Breathe deep and focus on today and you’ll have a much brighter future.
Big Concept #5: Your Lover Should Not be Your Best Friend
I have a best friend. I’ve known him for 17 years. He’s a great guy, but…
I don’t want to sleep with him.
More seriously, you can’t be your man’s everything and you shouldn’t try.
Should you and the man you invite into your life be friends? Definitely.
But a love relationship is a unique beast and romance often requires mystery to be effective.
Plain and simple, your man is not equipped to be your emotional crutch all the time (any more than you’re equipped to be his) and that’s OK.
Big Concept #6: The “What He Did to Me Reframe”
The final concept I’d like to leave you with in this section is what I call the “What He Did to Me Reframe.”
A “reframe” is a way of changing the way you look at the world or a situation. The term actually comes from hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming, but you don’t need to know anything about that for it to work here.
If you look back at the Facebook wall story or my story about my exgirlfriend Kelly, you’ll notice that they both used victim language. Ana talked about how her boyfriend putting pictures of his ex on Facebook “made her insecure” and Kelly talked about how everything I did “made her a crazy person.”
Personally, I’ve noticed victim language from a lot of women over the years, both women I personally know, and in the hundreds of emails I get every day from women who buy my programs or follow my email newsletter. Victim language includes phrases like: “What he did to me,” “How he hurt me,” “He made me miserable,” and on and on and on.
The problem with victim language (and the victim mentality that goes along with it) is that it saps your power as an equal participant in a relationship and has a tendency to make you utterly miserable.
I’m not saying guys are blameless in relationships or that there aren’t men out there who are cruel and awful to women. But I am saying that the only person who can make you a victim is you. And unless a man physically attacked you or maliciously hurt you, then he didn’t actually do anything to you at all.
Using Ana’s example again, her boyfriend put pictures of his ex up on Facebook AND Ana felt insecure and angry and wrote a message on my Facebook wall about it. But Ana’s boyfriend didn’t do anything to her. Ana’s boyfriend did something. Ana had a reaction to it. Even if it’s an irrational reaction, that’s OK.
Another (more volatile) example could be with cheating:
Say that Dan slept with his co-worker while on a business trip even though he’s married to Tara. Even in that case, Dan didn’t do anything to Tara. I’m not letting Dan off the hook for cheating here. But I can pretty much guarantee that his cheating on Tara wasn’t actually about her. He wasn’t thinking “Man, I really want to hurt my wife” while he was doing it.
Instead, Dan slept with his co-worker (we’ll talk about why men cheat soon) AND Tara got hurt. This might sound like a trivial difference, but it’s really not. Making that internal shift from thinking in victim language to thinking in more autonomous language can put you in control over your emotions and your life.
How to Actually Do the “What He Did to Me Reframe”
It’s pretty simple. Next time you feel like a man does something to you (he doesn’t call you back, he stands you up for a date, he doesn’t react the way you want him to when you put on frilly lingerie), simply take a deep breath and observe your emotions. Think about how you are feeling and realize that you are responsible for, and have control over feeling that way. Separate that from the idea that his actions DID something TO you.
Summing up Lesson 4 (And Wow, it Was a Doozie)
- The number one question women had in The Secret Survey was about how men really feel about them. Does he love me? Does he find me attractive? Will he be mine forever?
- The good news is that many men responded to the survey raving about how much they love and adore the women in their lives.
- The bad news is how frustrated men felt that their wives and girlfriends simply didn’t understand how much they cared about them or didn’t believe it when men said “I love you.”
- Toxic insecurity is a relationship killer and can turn even the most love-struck man on his heels and send him running for the hills.
6 concepts to help you move past toxic insecurity:
1. A man’s relationship is not his #1 priority (and it shouldn’t be). To be happy, a man has to have a mission outside of his relationship.
2. It’s not your job to make him happy (and it’s not his job to make you happy either). Your happiness is your own responsibility, and your responsibilities stop at the edge of his skull.
3. It’s not about you. The vast majority of what a guy does or says has nothing to do with you.
4. No relationship is forever. All relationships end. Focusing on the future is the easiest way to make sure you don’t have one.
5. Your lover should not be your best friend. Being everything to a man (or a woman) is too much for anyone.
6. The What He Did to Me Reframe can help you take responsibility for and control of your own emotions.
And here’s your final thought for this lesson:
You’re never going to know 100% that your guy loves you ALL the time (and honestly, there are going to be times he doesn’t love you, just like there are times you don’t love him). But if you constantly dwell on this fact and get insecure you’ll actually push your man away. The more secure you are in his love, the more that love will grow.
Exercises for Lesson 4
Choose at least one of these exercises to do before moving to the next lesson.
1. Living in the now. One of the biggest problems I see in relationships is women spending all their time worrying about the future and forgetting about the present. Take a deep breath and imagine you’re on an airplane that’s about to crash. Your man is sitting next to you. He’s holding your hand so tight. You have 30 seconds before you hit the ground. You have no future together whatsoever so there’s no point in worrying about marriage or kids or if he might cheat or anything like that. In that moment, how do you feel about your relationship? How do you feel about your man?
Find him. Tell him what you love about the relationship you have
RIGHT NOW.
2. Use the What He Did to Me Reframe. Next time you’re feeling victimized by a man (or by anyone, actually) pay close attention to your language and what you’re thinking. Are you using victim language? Are you giving him all the power, responsibility, and blame? Change the language in your mind.
For instance, change “He’s making me so mad!!” to “He’s not giving me what I want. And I’m mad.”
Up Next: Why does he look at other women?
In the next lesson we’re going to enter dangerous waters and start our discussion about what men really think about other women.
