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

Now men-and only men-can determine whether they love you and that your pot of gold is special to them. You can’t decide it for a man-you can’t say, “I’m going to get my sexy on so much so that he’ll be too strung out to leave,” and expect that it’ll work. Trust me when I tell you, no man on this planet will make that determination without first being shown how you want to be loved, how you expect to be treated, and whether or not it’s worth pursuing you beyond a casual romantic fling.

Ask any man living if I’m telling the truth and he’ll tell you the same.

COMMITTED SEX VERSUS FLINGS

Of course, even if a man is in a committed relationship with a woman he loves, sex is going to wane. That’s just human nature. You’re going to get comfortable with each other. I’ve yet to meet a parent of a toddler who doesn’t find the king-size bed that was so immense during the honeymoon feels cramped when Junior starts walking in during the middle of the night (how romantic can that be?). Bill time is going to come around too often and with it the kind of stress that can play a number on your sexual energy. And somewhere along the line, there will be days when you’re just going to be tired of looking at each other, even though you know good and well you can’t live without each other. But even with all those changes, the one thing that I guarantee will remain constant is your man’s desire for sex. Again, unless there is something physically precluding him from achieving intimacy, a man is going to want to have sex regularly, especially if he’s committed to you.

Now I’m not saying he has to have it every night. That’s for the young boys who don’t have anything else to do but prowl for the next conquest. And I’m not suggesting either that a guy won’t make allowances for natural occurrences that throw you off from giving us good loving, like illnesses and pregnancy and the like. Men are not heartless-we’re not the dogs you make us out to be. But the release we get from sex is essential to our existence. As I’ve written elsewhere, it recharges our batteries, feeds our ego, releases a bit of the pressure cooker tension we feel. So if we’re not getting the attention we need in the bedroom on a fairly regular basis, there’s going to be problems. I’m not saying he’s going to cheat. I’m certainly not suggesting that he has the right to cheat. But the temptation will certainly be there, and trust me when I tell you, it will cross his mind.

Of course, not every man is going to act on this. But those who do stray from a committed relationship to have a one-night stand are telling the truth when they say “she didn’t mean anything.” In most cases, she probably doesn’t. What does matter to a man who chooses to have a fling outside of his committed relationship is that someone out there is willing to engage him in the thrill of the “chase and capture” men crave, and someone will give him sex with no strings attached. He’s having sex with someone he doesn’t have to argue with, someone with whom he has no responsibilities-they’re not divvying up bills and raising kids and plotting out social calendars and building a life together-and someone who represents a nice little escape from all of the stress he’s dealing with day in and day out. She dresses up for the occasion, makes the sex downright erotic, and fulfills whatever fantasy a man has worked out in his mind-the fantasy he can’t get at home.

Once he’s done with her, he’ll be on his merry way-satisfied that he’s recharged and can go on back to his real life with the woman he loves. Sex with that other woman is just that-sex. The other woman may not recognize or want to acknowledge this, but in most cases, it’s the truth; and deep down, she knows it too.

Is a man wrong for doing this, knowing that even though sex with another woman means nothing to him, it’s everything to you? Absolutely! Though every man who steps out on his committed relationship may have a pocketful of excuses for cheating, he knows really, there is no logical, acceptable, spiritual, or reasonable explanation for his actions, and that getting caught could mean the end of something beautiful. Every man eventually comes to a point in his life where he realizes nothing is worth losing his family-that the beauty of loving a woman, building a life with her and their children, being responsible for their care and well-being, and working with her to realize their dreams is more important than any orgasm he can have with another woman. A moment of pleasure for your life-that’s a pretty high price to pay. The sad part is that there are a lot of cheaters who need to make the mistake, get caught, and pay that price before they realize the worth of what they could end up losing.

And that’s the real shame of it all.

I’m not saying that in order to get your man to keep it at home, you have to drop and give him twenty whenever he taps you on the shoulder. A woman has every right to expect her man to be faithful-to expect that he won’t end up in someone else’s bed just because things aren’t perfect at home. It is not your job to coddle and coax a man into being faithful; you can’t change him if that’s who he is. But like I said in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man , you can bring out the best in him. The two of you need to sit down and figure out together how you’re going to make this thing right-how the two of you are going to work out how to get back to happy-and satisfaction-again.

I fully admit that when a man gets comfortable, he can forget what it took for him to have the honor of being your lover. He can slack off on living up to your standards and requirements-forget to buy you flowers just because, or neglect to compliment you on how beautiful and sexy you are, or think it’s okay to lean on the quickie instead of putting in the work it takes to get you excited about sex. Men certainly don’t teach one another that in order for a woman to be everything a man needs, he has to fulfill a substantial amount of her needs. He doesn’t necessarily realize or remember that she likes to talk about her dreams and ambitions, or that she really liked it when they went out for dinner. He doesn’t know she’s sitting in her cubicle, listening to her girlfriend cooing into the phone, “I love you, too, baby,” when Valentine’s Day comes up and that while her girlfriend is getting a lot of things from her man, his girlfriend or spouse is upset that she’s gotten a whole lot of nothing from hers. He doesn’t know that everybody in the office is starting to question if she’s even got a man, because he’s never come in to take his lady to lunch or sent her a text message that made her giggle out loud or done something for her that’s made her brag about him to her coworkers. Indeed, we men sometimes create the distance without even knowing it because we’re so busy going about the business of manhood. How do you remind him? Talk. Most times it’s that simple.

We men really are simple creatures and are almost robotic in our habits. As I explain in Chapter 12, “The Art of the Deal,” if you tell us what you want, we’ll do it, especially if it means we’re going to benefit from it. If you tell a man he would get more sex from you, the woman he adores, if he made room for a once-a-week date night without the kids, or sent flowers just because, or chipped in more with the evening routine so you have more time to relax and get ready for him, guess what your man is going to do for you?

Similarly, if you’re reluctant to have sex with your man because, well, he’s not giving you something you can feel, then you’re going to have to speak up. I promise you, he won’t know you’re not satisfied if you don’t say it. Of course, each man is different, but we’re all the same in one regard: we have tremendous egos when it comes to sex. No matter how good or bad we are, we all think we’re bringing it-think we are doing the most to make you climb the walls. We think we’re doing more than an adequate job because the work we’re putting in, we’ve got nothing to compare it to. (No, porn doesn’t count because we are not watching the guy-we’re focusing on the woman and her reactions to what’s being done.) You all have had lovers in your life and you can talk to your girlfriends about them and give them details-“girl, he kissed me this way and he rubbed me that way and ooh, he just wore me out!” But we men? We don’t share that with each other. Ever. We can’t turn to our fathers and ask them for advice because anything they tell us is going to automatically make us summon up images of them with our mothers and that’s not an image a man wants to conjure up. Ever. And we don’t talk to our boys about it at any great length because admitting we’re low on techniques makes us weak in our boys’ eyes and plus, none of us want our boys getting even a remote picture in their mind of our private parts or what it must be like to have sex with our women. So we’re not learning from other men, either. Ever.