What Women Want Men To Know

I have a confession to make: I wrote this book secretly hoping my own partner would memorize every page, drink in each word, and digest every bit of information about me as a woman. I hoped he would enthusiastically try out every suggestion and explore each technique, intent on doing all he could to become the man of my dreams. If your wife or girlfriend gave you What Women Want Men to Know, guess what – she’s secretly hoping the same thing that I am!

Of course, what I am describing is how a woman would read a similar book, how a woman would approach pleasing a man, how a woman views improving herself, how a woman views love. Did you know that we are that way – focused on loving you twenty-four hours a day? Well, you’ll learn about it in the chapters that follow.

So how will you read this book as a man? What will you do with what you discover in these pages? Only you have the answers to these questions.

But I’ll confess another secret: If my sweetheart only takes a few important things from this book, it will be enough. I will be grateful that he was interested enough to spend the time to read about me, that he was committed enough to try to understand the tenderness of my heart, that he cared enough to consider ways in which he could make me feel more safe, more valued, more loved.

Your woman feels the same way. If, by reading what I offer here, you learn to appreciate her a little more fully, listen a little more closely, and love her a little more sweetly, she will be happy – and it will be enough.

Thanks for trusting me to take you on this journey into the heart and soul of a woman. I promise you it will be worth it.…

PART 1 WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW ABOUT US

I begin this book with an admission to men on behalf of the women you love and the women who love you:

We want men to understand us, to truly grasp why we are the way we are and why we need the things we do.

And we feel frustrated and upset when it appears that you don’t understand us.

But the truth is – and here’s the admission – we do not always fully understand ourselves, either.

Why is it, for instance, that at one moment a woman can seem to be so strong and competent, and the next so fragile and insecure?

What is it about us that makes us feel like a powerful goddess when we are at our best, and like a helpless little girl at our worst?

Why can we be the most enthusiastic cheerleader, the most stalwart supporter, the most loyal protector, the most wise adviser to everyone else – but not always to ourselves?

What does it mean that we can do a million things at once and seem to be handling it all effortlessly until suddenly, in one moment, we collapse under the weight of too much responsibility and just want to crawl under the covers?

Where does our ability to love so deeply come from?

Why is it that we so easily sacrifice our own needs in order to fulfill those of others?

Why do we seem to require more time, attention, and reassurance from men than they require from us?

Why are we the way we are?

We know men ask themselves these questions about us. And whether we readily admit it or not, we have the same questions about ourselves. The good news is that there are answers, reasons that, as women, we feel what we feel, and do what do. These answers are contained in the pages that follow, and are meant to enlighten women as well as men, as they shed light on the mystery of our nature, of our mind and our heart, of our desires and our longings.

Allow me, for a moment, to take you into the heart of a woman, and, through the following stories, reveal our own struggle to understand ourselves:

You know the man you love is going through a hard time in his life, contemplating making some difficult business decisions. Lately, he’s been anxious and distracted, and you want so badly to help in some way. One night after dinner you bring up the subject of his dilemma, sharing some thoughts you’ve had about the challenges he faces, suggesting steps he could take to resolve his problem. As you begin to talk to him, a tense look appears on his face, and with each new idea you present his frown gets worse and worse. Suddenly, you feel him pull away, as if you’ve just been shut out entirely.

“What’s wrong, honey?” you ask with concern.

“I just want to handle this situation myself,” he replies curtly “I don’t need your advice.”

“But I’m only trying to help,” you explain.

“Why don’t you let me figure it out my own way? Don’t you trust me?” he answers, obviously angry. “I hate when you get bossy and controlling like this.” And he leaves the room.

You stand there watching your husband walk away, your heart pounding and tears filling your eyes. You want to run after him, but you can’t find the right words to explain how you feel, how all you wanted to do was to support him. Instead, your efforts have made things even worse. You feel like such a failure. And a part of you wonders: “Is he right? Am I controlling like he says?”

A long weekend is coming up, and you want to spend it with your boyfriend. You had hoped he would mention it by now, but he hasn’t, and you are starting to worry. One night while talking with him on the phone, you bring up the subject: “Have you thought about the holiday weekend?”

“Not really,” he responds.

“Well,” you continue tentatively, “I was hoping we could be together, maybe even go away somewhere.”

Your boyfriend becomes very quiet, and after a few moments says in a flat voice: “Let’s see how the week goes.”

How the week goes? What does he mean by that, you think to yourself. You begin to feel a little panicky. “Don’t you want to spend time with me?” you ask him in a shaky voice.

“Of course I do,” he replies with growing irritation, “but why do we have to plan everything? Can’t you be more spontaneous? You’re so insecure all the time!”

You don’t know how to answer him. You just know that you’d feel so much better if you were sure you could look forward to seeing him that weekend, but you’ve already told him that, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. The conversation ends, and as you get off the phone, you have an ache in your chest that won’t go away. You wonder: “Is he right? Am I too insecure?”

Your husband has left on a business trip. When he arrives at the airport in his destination city, he calls briefly to check in and let you know he is going out for dinner with a client. That night as it’s time for bed you lie there waiting for the phone to ring. You try his hotel room a few times, but get no answer. You leave several messages, and you wait, and you wait, but he doesn’t call. By now, it’s two in the morning, and you’re terribly anxious and worried. Where could he be, and why hasn’t he called? What could keep him from wanting to say good night to you? You finally fall into an uneasy sleep.

The next morning, you get up feeling hopeful, expecting to hear from your husband, but still, nothing. You try to make excuses for him, but you’re having a hard time convincing yourself: “If he was really tired last night, he could at least have called this morning.” As the hours go by with no word from him, your worry turns to paranoia, and your mind proceeds to parade its worst fears before you. “Maybe something is really wrong,” you imagine. “Maybe he got sick; or maybe he’s deliberately avoiding me.” And then the worst fear of all: Could he be there with another woman?

Finally, that evening, your husband calls, and to your great surprise, acts as though everything is fine. “Why didn’t you call me last night or this morning?” you ask in an anxious voice. “I was so worried!”

“I had just talked to you when I arrived, and after dinner I was exhausted and just collapsed into bed,” he answers, his voice expressing bewilderment that you are upset at all. “And this morning I was focused on getting ready for my meeting. Then I went from one event to another. I figured we would talk sometime today.”

You try to explain why you were so agitated at not hearing from him, but it doesn’t come out right, and you’re afraid you sound too desperate and clingy. Your husband listens, and you know by his response that he is annoyed. “Do I have to check in with you every five minutes?” he says sharply “Why do you fall apart just because I don’t call you for twenty-four hours?”

The conversation ends on a bad note, and when you hang up the phone, you feel awful. All you had wanted to do was let him know how much you missed him. Why couldn’t he understand how worried you’d been? Was it that unreasonable for you to have been concerned when he didn’t call or answer his phone? Or could it be that he was right: “Is something wrong with me?” you wonder. “Am I really too needy?”

Most women reading these stories will resonate with the experiences and emotions described because, whether to a lesser or greater extent, we’ve all had these feelings at one time or another. We wonder if our reactions to our partner are justified or if they are overreactions. We question whether our needs are legitimate or excessive. “Am I normal?” we ask ourselves.

As for men, well, I suspect that many of you reading these stories will probably have a very different response, something like: “Here are three perfect examples of the way women overreact and drive men nuts!” And you’re right – these scenarios are typical of the kinds of things women do and feel that men simply don’t understand, and therefore, often categorize as undesirable female behavior.

It is easy to condemn something when we don’t understand it. When not seen with eyes of wisdom and deep comprehension, a woman’s unique and beautiful characteristics can appear as something else not so beautiful to men, and even to ourselves. But when you learn the inner secrets of a woman’s nature, suddenly what appeared to be confusing becomes clear, what seemed unacceptable becomes appreciated, what was challenging becomes endearing.

When I prepared to write this section of the book, my goal was simple. I was looking for a few basic truths about who women are that would help us and the men we love understand our feelings and our behavior. In my research I asked women:

“What are the things you want the man you love to understand about you as a woman at the deepest level of your being?”

“What do you need to explain to your partner about your female nature that is very basic to you, yet, you suspect, so different from the way he experiences the world as a man?”

In the chapters that follow, I’ve done my best to summarize these basics about who women are, why we are that way, and what we want men to know about loving us. The first few chapters focus on three characteristics, the ones I believe are essential to understand in order to truly understand women. So much of why women do what we do, feel what we feel, and say what we say has its source in these truths. They are:

THE THREE BASIC TRUTHS ABOUT WOMEN

1. Women put love first.

2. Women are creators.

3. Women have a sacred relationship with time.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 present the three secret needs every woman has as a once-and-for-all response to men’s question: “Is there really something I can do that will make her stop complaining and be happy?” (Yes, there is!) And finally, Chapter 7 details “Seven Myths Men Believe About Women and Why They Are Absolutely Wrong”!

1 WOMEN PUT LOVE FIRST

A few months ago, a male friend I hadn’t heard from in a while called to tell me he was in a new relationship with a woman he’d been seeing for six months. Brian had dated a lot in his life but had never really been seriously involved with anyone, so this was big news. I asked him how it was going, and he answered that things were great, but he had some concerns about his girlfriend.

“What kind of concerns?” I asked him.

“Well, Lori is really terrific, very sweet and affectionate,” he began, “but I’m worried that something’s wrong with her, like maybe she has psychological problems. That’s why I am calling you – to get your feedback.”

“Tell me what she does that makes you think she has psychological problems,” I prompted him.

“To begin with, she says she thinks about me all the time; she calls me during the day just to tell me she misses me; she plans special things for us to do weeks in advance; and she always wants to talk about us and how well we get along. Then last week,” he continued in a very serious voice, “she told me that our relationship is the most important thing in her life!”

“And what do you conclude from all of this?” I asked him, trying to hide the fact that I was smiling on the other end of the phone.

“Well, if she’s so focused on me like that, I think she obviously must be neurotic and insecure.”

“No, dear,” I said to my friend with a chuckle, “she must be a woman in love.”

My friend Brian is a good guy – but he’s a guy. He didn’t have a lot of experience being in long-term relationships, and the way Lori was loving him seemed strange to him, even unhealthy, because he didn’t understand the first secret about who women are: The world of women is a world of love. To love, to be devoted, to cherish intimate relationships is our nature.

What Women Want Men to Know: Women put love first.

When I say women put love first, I don’t mean women choose to make love and relationships a priority – these things just are a priority in our awareness. We don’t choose to have our heart focused on the man we love – it just is. We don’t choose to always be thinking of ways to connect with you – we just do. We don’t decide to put love first – it just is first.

THE LOVE PIE

Here’s an easy and visual way to understand the way women feel about love and relationships. I call it the “Love Pie.”

Visualize two circles, like pies, one representing a man’s consciousness and the other representing a woman’s consciousness. Now imagine a tiny slice cut out in each circle, like a piece of the pie, perhaps one-tenth of the whole. In the man’s circle, that small slice is the percentage of his awareness that he focuses on love and intimate relationships. Everything outside of that slice, the other nine-tenths of the circle, is his awareness focused on his work, his hobbies, his projects, and other activities.

In the woman’s circle, however, it is exactly the opposite: The tiny slice of the pie is the focus of her awareness on work, hobbies, projects, and all the rest of the pie is the focus of her awareness on love, family life, and relationships!

Okay, this is probably somewhat of an exaggeration, but you get my point. Whenever I draw the Love Pie for my seminar audiences, it evokes peals of laughter from both sexes. Why? Because instinctively, we all know it’s true, and as we’ll see, it explains so many of the issues that become problems between the men and women.

Here’s an important distinction to remember: The Love Pie doesn’t symbolize how we divide our time, or how many hours we spend on love versus other activities. It depicts where our awareness is focused on the inside, no matter what we are doing on the outside. For instance, a woman may work in her own career, whether outside or inside the home, for as many hours as her husband does in his, so it’s not like she’s spending one-tenth of the time he does focusing on work, and nine-tenths of her time shopping for lingerie, writing love poems, or fantasizing about how much she adores him. But you can bet that while she is doing her job, she probably thinks more about him than he does about her, and from day to day she is more conscious of the emotional rhythms of the relationship, and more focused on wanting more connection and intimacy.

Sometimes when I share the Love Pie analogy with women, they don’t completely relate to it until I remind them that focusing on love includes focusing on their children. Single mothers can understand this: Perhaps they aren’t in an intimate relationship, but their awareness is still on love the majority of the time – the love and concern they have for their children. Even women who are married often feel the large portion of their Love Pie is more dedicated to their everyday relationship with their kids than to the relationship with their husband. Whether this is healthy or not is a whole other topic, but the point is the same: She is a woman whose awareness, thoughts, and feelings are naturally focused on putting love first.

TAKING A TRIP INTO THE MIND OF A WOMAN

I’ve always said that if men spent a day in the mind of a woman in love, they’d be shocked and amazed at how much we think about them, how aware we are of them no matter what else we are doing. There’s an exercise I sometimes give couples to help the man understand how women put love first, and to give him an experience of our Love Pie: I ask the female partner to keep a “Thought Diary” throughout a typical day, writing down each time her awareness focuses on her mate and describing the situation. Then, she shows him her list. Without exception in the couples I’ve worked with, the male partner is astonished at how often during a day the female partner thinks about him.

I wanted to give you male readers a chance to experience this, so here’s a sample from one woman’s list that she kept in relation to her boyfriend, Joseph. Melissa is an executive at a radio station and has been involved with Joseph for almost a year. I’ve actually only included half of a day’s diary – a full day would go on for pages!

Melissa’s Thought Diary

6:45 AM I wake up thinking about Joseph, excited that I am going to see him tonight. I lie in bed fantasizing about it for a while. 7:00 AM I want to call Joseph to say good morning, but I tell myself I should wait to see if he calls me. 7:10 AM I can’t decide whether or not to wash my hair now, or wait until just before my date so it’s really clean when I see Joseph. 7:15 AM I decide to wait to wash my hair, but while in the shower I remind myself that I need to put out the new body lotion Joseph said he likes so I’ll remember to use it after my shower this evening. 7:40 AM I am eating breakfast, remembering how sweet it was last weekend when Joseph stayed over and we had breakfast together. 7:50 AM I’m watching TV and there’s a report on the news about Caribbean hideaways. Joseph and I have been talking about taking a trip there soon, and I write down the information the reporter mentions. 7:55 AM Still no call from Joseph. I am wondering whether or not I should call him and mention the TV travel report. I decide to wait another ten minutes. 8:05 AM I call Joseph and we talk for a few minutes. He is racing around getting ready for an important meeting at work, so he can’t really concentrate, but he says he can’t wait to see me later, so I am happy 8:20 AM While I am putting on my makeup, I think about the conversation I just had with Joseph, and replay the sweet things he said. 8:35 AM I am in my closet, deciding what to wear for work, and start thinking about which outfit I should wear tonight when I see Joseph. I bought a new top a few days ago that I think he will like, and I try it on just to verify that I am still pleased with it. 8:50 AM I am making the bed, and decide that I will change the sheets later before Joseph gets here. Of course, I am hoping he will spend the night. 9:20 AM I am driving to work, listening to the radio. A song by Carlos Santana comes on that Joseph and I love, and it reminds me of a road trip we took to San Diego when we played the Santana album the whole way. I smile thinking about what a great time we had. I am tempted to call Joseph on his cell phone and tell him I am remembering San Diego, but I know he is probably on his way to a meeting and focusing on what he needs to accomplish. 10:45 AM I am looking at Joseph’s picture on my desk, and decide that I want to get a nicer frame for it. 11:30 AM I notice the time, and wonder if Joseph’s meeting is over and how it went. I am hoping he’s happy with it, so that he’ll be in a good mood tonight. 11:50 AM Joseph calls for a second on his way back from the meeting. He sounds pleased. I tell him about hearing the Santana song this morning. 11:57 AM I notice that I’ve been a little agitated since Joseph called, and I realize I am feeling concerned about something he said on the phone regarding his needing to go out of town next week. 12:30 PM I am at a lunch meeting with a new client at a restaurant I’ve never been to before, and I’m thinking that Joseph would really like it, and that we should come here some time. 2:10 PM I pass a grocery store, and remember that I am out of Joseph’s favorite soap. I decide to stop and pick up the soap, and once inside, I walk through the produce section and notice that they have beautiful raspberries which Joseph would love, and buy some. 2:35 PM I check my messages back at the office, and even though I just talked with Joseph a few hours ago, I feel a tiny bit of disappointment that there’s no message from him. I know this is silly, but it’s how I feel. 2:55 PM I open my mail, and discover an invitation to a party celebrating a well-known writer who is doing a benefit lecture in town next month. I make a mental note to myself to ask Joseph if he will be able to come with me. 3:15 PM I glance at the time on my computer clock, and feel a twinge of excitement that I will see Joseph in less than four hours.

So what’s your response to Melissa’s Thought Diary? When I show this list to women, they read it and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I do!” Perhaps the content is varied for married women or women with children, but the frequency of thought is very similar. Men, on the other hand, have a very different reaction to this list. Some think I’m playing a joke on them, that a list like this can’t be genuine. Others make comments like: “This Melissa seems pretty neurotic,” or “Sounds like she needs to get a life!” Little do these men realize that their own girlfriends or wives probably think about them as much as Melissa thinks about her boyfriend, Joseph.