“Why can’t he just TALK to me????”
–Secret Survey response from a LOT of women.
“But how does it make you FEEL?,” Sara asked with a shaking voice and a fragile smile.
What she wanted was so easy. She just wanted him to open up to her. To talk to her. To tell her what was really going on in his head.
She wanted to know his feelings, his wants, his desires, what he was afraid of, what kept him up at night, what DROVE him.
She just wanted to connect. . . and then she’d give him everything. Everything she had to give a man. She’d make him feel like a king.
But Bobby just sat there dumbly with frozen eyes, his mouth stretched out wide like the Joker and a fire alarm going off in the back of his head as he went into panic mode.
He thought it had been a nice night. Sara looked great. She smelled amazing. The shape of her in her dress was like cocaine and chocolate to him, and it was all he could do not to jump over the table at the restaurant and feast on her.
But then she started talking. She started asking questions.
He had his fork halfway between his mouth and the plate. . . dragging out the moment. He knew whatever he said next would be the wrong thing.
“I love you,” he could say, but it wouldn’t be enough. She’d be upset.
He’d spend the whole night apologizing. She’d cry softly in the bedroom or get on the phone with her friend for hours. And he’d be out in the living room, curled up on the couch under a ratty blanket with an unsatisfied libido and nothing but the dog to keep him warm.
Ahh, men and women. Two incredibly similar creatures divided by a common biology.
Honestly, men and women aren’t THAT different. We both want love, we both want sex, we both want to be adored and worshiped and desired and supported, and we both want to be happy.
So how come we spend so much time and energy making each other MISERABLE? And how come we have such an incredibly hard time TALKING to each other?
In this first lesson I’m going to explain why talking to a man about his feelings is a lot like talking to a monkey about space travel. (Yeah, they can do it, but they need a lot of help and how the heck do you get them back down?)
I’m going to give you some simple tools to help you stop getting so frustrated by men, to understand “man-speak” and to “get” guys in a way not one woman in a thousand does now.
Ready? Cool. Let’s rock.
Why Projective Empathy Destroys Your Relationship with Men…
The first thing you need to know is that men aren’t women.
OK, I know that sounds obvious, but you’ll be amazed how often this very basic concept comes as an absolute shock to women I work with.
I was talking to my (awesome) girlfriend over drinks the other night about the massive communication gap between men and women and how frustrated women get about trying to get their guy to open up and tell them how he feels.
It seems like a lot of women I talk to believe that men are manipulative creatures whose every utterance is loaded with secret, coded meanings.
They believe guys think about their women all day long and are hyperaware of the arch of an eyebrow and subtle tone of voice. But they’re also playing games and laying traps for women like some kind of particularly cruel Canadian beaver hunter.
Why do so many women assume all of this?
Well, because a lot of WOMEN are manipulative creatures whose every utterance is loaded with secret coded meaning and. . .well, you get the idea. 🙂
Now, I’m not saying that to rag on women. I LOVE women, and one of the things I LOVE about women is how much more complicated female communication is and how much more emotionally rich women’s inner lives are than most men’s.
And men actually make the same mistake when they assume that women are straightforward creatures who just say what that mean.
This actually comes down to a concept called “projective empathy.”
Projective empathy is the tendency human beings have to assume that everyone else in the world thinks just like they do, wants the same things they do (in the same way), and would react to any given situation or stimulus the exact same way they do.
The best example I can come up with from the recent news has to do with Anthony Weiner. (If you don’t remember Anthony Weiner, he was a New York Congressman who got in trouble for flirting with women over Twitter and sending dirty text messages to women who were definitely not his wife.)
When I first heard of “Weinergate” I was pretty aghast. Not because a politician was sending dirty messages behind his wife’s back (I don’t think politicians are capable of being faithful. It’s something in the water.), but because I know that sending a woman you barely know a picture of your penis is probably the worst way in the world to actually turn her on.
I talk about this a lot in my Text the Romance Back program, but the short version is that when it comes to sex and eroticism, men are primarily visual creatures who are turned on by pictures (or visual language) while women are primarily sensual creatures who are turned on by detailed and emotional language.
The problem Weiner had (OK, he had a lot of problems) was that he was being a dumb guy and having the same thought process as millions of guys I deal with every day, but unlike most of us he got exposed for his idiocy on a national stage.
Weiner’s unconscious thought process probably went something like this: “Hey, I really like looking at naked women. If a woman I barely knew or who I just met online sent me a naked picture of her breasts I would LOVE IT and it would totally make my day. As a human being I’m going to assume that all other people think the same way I do, so I’m going to send women pictures of myself naked and that will turn them on and make their day too!!!!”
I’m willing to bet the women who actually received Weiner’s messages were probably pretty amused, but unless he’d done a LOT of work beforehand sending sensual, sexy, romantic messages, they most definitely weren’t turned on by the images he sent.
And most women make the exact same mistake that Weiner did but on an EMOTIONAL level. You probably don’t do it CONSCIOUSLY, but if you’re like most of the women I’ve worked with (and there’s been thousands and thousands now), some deep part of your mind you might not even be aware of has thought: “I have a deep emotional life where I think about my relationships and my love all the time. I want to share my deepest inner feelings and connect with my love partner on a constant level, and even though he doesn’t talk about it, he must be the exact same way!!”
If you’re a woman, you’ve probably been unconsciously assuming that men think like you do for years.
And you’ve probably been frustrated and even ANGRY every time that special guy has seemed clueless and idiotic and hasn’t picked up on your signals.
But men aren’t women. They’re dogs. 🙂
Everything You Need to Know About Talking to Men You Can Learn From a Book About Dogs
OK, this is going to be a little weird, but stick with me.
If you know me or follow me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/michael.c.fiore), you know that I’m a big reader. In fact, I’m kind of a reading addict, and if I don’t shovel at least 5 books a month into my brain I get irritable and angry and start babbling about conspiracy theories.
I recently picked up a book that illustrated the great communication divide between men and women for me in really crisp, sharp terms, even though it wasn’t about HUMAN psychology at all. And every woman I’ve shared this idea with has had her eyes light up and has felt an astonishing amount of relief at how guys suddenly make a whole lot more sense.
The book is by a woman named Patricia B. McConnell, Ph.D. and it’s called The Other End of the Leash. It’s not a dog training manual. McConnell doesn’t teach you how to get your dog to sit or stay or fetch help because Timmy fell down a well again (Oh, Timmy, how did you ever survive to go to college?). Instead, she teaches you how dogs THINK, how dogs view the world, and how (and this is the important part) even though you think you’re saying ONE THING to a dog they might be hearing or understanding something completely different.
For example, if you’ve ever tried to get a dog to come to you, you probably stood with your feet and your shoulders facing the dog, patted your hands on your thighs over and over again and called the dog in a really high, friendly, sing song voice.
And if it’s a young dog or a dog that hasn’t been trained yet, the dog has probably just kind of ignored you or even gone the absolute opposite way you wanted him to go.
So why did the dog ignore you?
Well he actually didn’t. Because human body language for “come here” is actually dog body language for “walk away.”
When we want another human to come over to us, we face them, we say their name, we open our arms in a hug and that cute little rapscallion comes running.
But dogs aren’t humans (I bet you can see where this is going now). When a dog wants another dog to follow him (or wants a human to follow him) he doesn’t face the other dog and wait. He faces where he wants you to go and even starts walking that way himself.
If you watch professional dog trainers work with their animals, you’ll notice that they don’t try to force the dogs to speak human. If a professional dog trainer wants a dog to follow her, she doesn’t pat her thighs and say “Come here, come here, COME HERE!!,” she just walks away from the dog and makes a little clicking noise.
And the dog (incredibly relieved that somebody is actually speaking his language) stops sniffing around all those trees and comes sprinting across the yard.
So What Does This Have to do with You and Men?
Well, everything. Because you’ve got a choice: You can try to get a dog to speak, or you can learn what the barks mean. So you can try to get men to speak woman, and dive into that deep emotional stew you live in and basically become your best girlfriend
(ugh). . .
Or you can learn man-speak and learn to understand all of the signals he’s already giving you every single day that tell you exactly how he feels about you, exactly what he wants, exactly what he’s ashamed of, and what turns him on.
And it’s a choice you need to make right now before you move on to any of the other lessons, because in the rest of this manual I’m going to give you a bunch of man-speak and explain what your man hears when you talk to him like a woman and how to understand what he’s saying to you even though he doesn’t know it.
Summing Up Lesson 1:
- Men aren’t women. Men don’t generally communicate on the deep and subtle level that women do and (as hard as it is to believe) men don’t think like women either. If you want to date someone who thinks and empathizes like a woman, you’ll need to date a woman. =-)
- Projective empathy is the human tendency to assume every other person in the world thinks like you do and will react to any given situation or stimulus the same way you do. It’s also 100% wrong as you’ll learn as we get deeper into this material.
- Men are like dogs. It’s not that men are ignoring you or purposely being evasive when they don’t answer your questions, it’s that we can’t figure out what the heck you’re actually asking us or what we want us to do (even on those rare occasions that you actually lay it out). We’ll dig more into this later.
- You can try to get a dog to speak, or you can learn what the barks mean. Trying to get most guys to speak woman is a total waste of time.
- Instead of trying to get your man to talk like a woman, or getting angry because he won’t talk about his feelings, instead focus on understanding what men are already saying without even being aware of it themselves.
Exercises for Lesson 1:
Choose one of the 3 exercises below and do it in as much detail as you can.
1. Go back over this section and pay attention to how you feel when you’re reading it. Do you feel relief? Anger? Does part of you feel like men SHOULD be the ones to bend over backwards and crawl over broken glass to understand YOU? Write your feelings on a separate piece of paper or in the space below.
2. What you love about your partner is also what you hate about your partner. For instance, my awesome girlfriend is incredibly laid back, which I love, but she’s late for everything, which I hate.
Use either your current relationship or a former relationship and think about the things that you HATE about your partner (or that just annoy you) and figure out the flipside to that trait that also makes you love them. Write down some examples below.
3. Make a decision right now to accept and forgive men for being men. No matter what you do or what you say, you’re never going to get your guy to be as emotionally open and vulnerable as you want him to be (just like you’ll never get a dog to clap). It’s simply not how he’s wired. Let go of any contempt you have for masculinity.
Write your thoughts in the space below.
Up Next: Why Men Lie
In our next lesson we’ll talk about the three reasons men lie to women and how to get him to finally open up and be truthful with you.
