Steve Harvey: Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man

My hope is that when you finish reading this book and really think about the information I’m sharing with you, you’ll have an even more informed understanding of men, and certainly an appreciation for how incredibly simple we are. We come at every situation from the same angle, using the same principles, seldom deviating. There really is no use applying your thought process to the relationship equation or expecting your man to adopt your logic when it comes to dating and mating; you can’t, after all, change men. I’ve had countless women ask me, “Steve, when are you going to write a book telling men what they should be doing?” Well, there is no lecture I can give, no panel I can sit on, no television roundtable I can host that will ever make a man pick up a relationship book and dig deep into it. He’s simply not going to read it. I can bet you my bottom dollar that even if I were to give this book away, I could count on one hand the number of men likely to pick up a book about how to better get along with women. First off, a man would never allow another man to tell him what he should be doing in his own house with his own woman. Second, I can guarantee you he definitely doesn’t want to hear Steve Harvey telling him what to do, not after I gave away the playbook in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man , and especially after I divulge all of men’s relationship secrets here.

Mostly, though, I hope that the women who do choose to read this book find the courage to go against their widely held views on relationships and simply think about and put into practical use the advice I’m giving them in these pages. I understand it’s hard to swim in unchartered waters-that it’s scary, even. But I encourage you to open your mind and lose the fear. After all, the biggest cause of failure is the fear of failure. If you truly want to change your relationship fortune, why not give change a try? If what you’ve done up to now hasn’t worked, why not try to implement what I’ve laid out for you in both this book and Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man ? Step out-be a risk taker; I’m not telling you to go rock climbing without a safety harness; I’m not saying to go skydiving without a parachute; and I’m not telling you to chain yourself up, submerge yourself in a tank full of water, and try to escape. I’m just asking you to consider thinking about relationships in a different way, based on all of the truths you’ll find out about men in the pages of my books.

My sincere hope is that you’ll use this information to empower yourself-to recognize that you hold the key to a successful relationship. I understand that many women don’t quite care to embrace the idea that the burden of getting the union they want rests squarely on their shoulders, but it is what it is. You’ve been blessed with this tremendous skill set that we men do not possess, and it is those skills that you absolutely, unequivocally have to employ to get what you want.

Change your approach, take back your power, and hold your chin up while you’re working on getting the love you deserve. Do this, and you’ll have very little to lose, but a whole lot more to gain.

Ididn’t have any business being married at twenty-four.

Yes, I believed wholeheartedly in the idea of marriage; after all, my parents had been married for sixty-four years before my mother passed away. And I had every intention of duplicating what they had: a stable relationship in a home filled with love, strength, perseverance, and wisdom. It was all I knew to do. So it made all the sense in the world to give a ring to the woman I loved and say, “I do.”

And that was where the problem began.

In the weeks leading up to my marriage, I didn’t have a steady paycheck to support my soon-to-be wife. In my heart of hearts, I knew this wasn’t right. I’d even said as much to my mother; I told her I was going to call off the wedding because I wasn’t working and it didn’t feel right. My mother, being a woman who wanted to see her child married and knew how devastating it would have been to my fiancée to call off her dream wedding, talked me out of canceling the big day. Invitations had been sent out. People were looking for the show. Who was I to rain on this festive parade?

Years later, my mother apologized and admitted she would never have talked me into getting married if she’d known how unprepared I was to be a good husband. By then, we were able to put our finger on what was missing-what was dooming my first marriage even before the spit on the stamps we put on those invitations was dry: I didn’t know who I was, what I would do with my life, and how much I was going to make doing it. As I explained in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man , everything a man does is filtered through his title (who he is), how he gets that title (what he does), and the reward he gets for the effort (how much he makes). These are the three things every man has to achieve before he feels like he’s truly fulfilling his destiny as a man, and if any one of those things is missing, he will be much too busy trying to find it to focus on you. He won’t have it in him to settle down, have children, or build a life with anyone.

In my first marriage, I didn’t have these things lined up by any stretch. I had dropped out of college and went to work at Ford Motor Company. Later I was laid off and didn’t get a job until a month after we married. It was a way to make some cash, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted out of life-that it wasn’t my calling. And I was frustrated by it. How could I get a wife to buy into me and my plans for the future when even I wasn’t enthused by them myself? How could she know me if I didn’t know myself? How could she benefit from what I did and how much I made if I wasn’t doing or making anything? I was frustrated, our financial outlook was in shambles, and we were always at it-always fighting about something.

Because I wasn’t a man.

Sure, she’d married a member of the male species and I had some good traits. I was kind and trusting; I was a very good protector; and I made no qualms about professing to anybody coming and going that she was mine and I was hers. And some good, a lot of good, came from our union: my daughters Karli and Brandi and my son Steve. But I wasn’t fully a man. And it cost us.

I wish my father would have warned me, would have sat me down and schooled me on the particulars of marriage. Perhaps he could’ve told me that a time comes when one needs to cut out all the foolishness-the screwing up in school, the fooling around with a bunch of different women. I wish he would’ve told me that if I didn’t stop acting foolish by a certain age, there would be a cost associated with my lack of focus, with deferring my dreams of being an entertainer. Had he done so, a lot of pain would have been spared for everyone all around. He didn’t share with me his thoughts on when a boy needs to focus on maturing into a man. He didn’t tell me, “Steve, listen: you got a couple years to date a few women while you figure this thing out, and once you decide who you are, what you want to do, and how you want to make your money, go get a partner who can help you accomplish these things.”

That would have been a great lesson for my father to teach his son. But this isn’t the way of men.

We are neither the greatest communicators nor sharers of information. There’s no manual that says we should know sometime between ages twenty-five and twenty-seven what we want to do with our lives and by ages twenty-eight through thirty, we should be settling down with a woman who is as committed to helping us achieve our goals and dreams as we are to helping her achieve hers. What we constantly hear, instead, is “You’re young-sow your oats, enjoy yourself, have a good time, don’t get tied down, don’t get serious with any girls.” And by the time we finish setting ourselves up financially and convince ourselves we’re ready to settle down, we’ve fumbled through countless “relationships,” leaving women by the wayside, some of them shattered and bitter because we thought it more important to add a notch to our player belts than to act honorably. We’ve gone for that gold star some men award each other when they have more than one woman at a time. And for your trouble? We get pats on the back-told over and over again that this is what we’re supposed to do if we’re real men.