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

We learn from trial and error how to please a woman. We keep a mental Rolodex of what worked with each partner we’ve been with-“When I was doing that right there, it brought on a tremor… let me mark that one down,” and “When I touched her there, she got excited… let me mark that one down.” Once we’ve taken notes on the little spots, areas, and tremors that got our partners sexually aroused, we call ourselves experienced.

Nobody else we’ve been with told us we suck, and you’re not saying anything, and we’re always reaching our moment (whether you really reach your moment or not), so hey, we’re killing! Every muscle on us is tight, we’re shaking, the hair on the back of our necks is standing on end-we’re good. Outstanding! So unless you tell a man you want something different, you’re going to keep getting a whole lot of what you’ve already gotten.

Still, you have to be careful of how you ask for what you want. Like I said, men have tremendous egos when it comes to sex, and if you start with an attitude, “You know what? When you’re with me, you’re not doing the things I like,” feelings are going to get hurt-not necessarily just his. And whatever you do, don’t make a big production out of it. I told you in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man that the four words that scare the crap out of men and put them on the defensive are “We have to talk.” So approach the conversation strategically-delicately. Be smart about it. The best time to bring it up is while we’re in the actual act because when we’re having sex, we’re receptive to anything. If you say, “Baby, dive off the armoire!” he’ll take his behind right on up there. If you say, “Oh, I love it when you do that right there,” and “Ooh, turn me over now and go to the left, yeah!” he’s going to do exactly as he’s told.

You also have some other amazing tools to help you get the best out of your man; there’s text messaging-“Honey, if you help me out with the kids tonight, at around 9:30 when they’re in bed, we’re going to be in bed and…” Put a sticky next to his shaving kit: “Remember when you did that thing to me? Ooh, I was just thinking about it and got shivers! Can you do that to me again?” You could always call his cell phone and leave a message: “I love it when you talk dirty to me-when I get home, I want you to whisper some dirty things in my ear and touch me there when you do it.”

Over the course of two weeks, you can tell him everything you want him to know about what you like and get it. Because he’s getting what he wants-great sex with the woman he loves-and he’s pleasing her, making her happy. Which is all a man who is truly committed and in love with you wants to do.

We want to please the woman to whom we’re committed and emotionally connected. We really do. Because if the two of us are pleased-sexually, emotionally, mentally-well, there’s no way we’re going to step out on that. The chances of that happening go down to damn near zero, because what a man knows through experience is that all of those “hope diamonds” are really just quarters compared with the pot of gold he’s got at home. He won’t jeopardize that by doing something he knows won’t mean anything to him, but everything to you.

And that brings me back to why it’s so important for women to make sure that they exercise the Ninety-Day Rule-to really scope out a man and figure out if he’s worthy of the cookie before you give it to him. If you’re truly looking for a committed relationship, this guy has to demonstrate that he’s worthy of and ready for one. Giving him sex is not going to make him stay around-not for the right reasons, anyway.

And here’s the incredible thing about women I don’t quite understand: you know when a man is not feeling you yet you still give your all, you continue to try to make it work. Why play that game? Why not just weed out, up front, all the men you know are going to do nothing but cause you heartache and disappointment, and wait for the one who is going to do right by you? Please understand, he’s out there. There isn’t a man living who can do without a good woman. Most men are going to get married. One of them will marry you. A real man won’t be able to fulfill his destiny as a man without you. How else is he going to have kids? How will he continue his lineage? He wants that legacy; if a man can’t do anything else, he wants his name to live on. Even if his father wasn’t around, deep down he knows he can be the one to fix that-to break the cycle and start the tradition and be thought of as someone special to somebody. That’s why our parents were so giving and hardworking-so that we could have a better life than they had. I’m sure my mother and father are somewhere looking at me and saying, “That’s our son. We done good.”

I remember when they were living and we were sitting around the Thanksgiving table and I saw my father lean over and tap my mother on the shoulder and say, “Did you ever think one of our children would be on TV?”

“Not in a million years,” my mother said. “Ain’t God good?”

And my father said, “I guess He is.”

That’s all a man wants-to have someone be proud of him and to be proud of somebody. It’s critically important to a man. And women help bring that about. We can’t have babies without you, we can’t build families without you, we don’t get to be the man of the house without you, we don’t enjoy dreaming without you.

We cannot exist without you.

Granted, we are not taught this. No man sits his son down and says, “Son, you can’t truly live without a woman.” But a good man will profess to anyone listening that he can’t live without his woman. For sure, when my mother died, my father told me one day, “Boy, I figure I’ll just go on and get out of here now, because life without your mother-ain’t nothing here anymore. I always knew that life wasn’t nothing without her.”

Seeing how depressed he was, I’d tell him things to try to cheer him up even though he’d lost the love of his life-the woman he stayed married to for sixty-two years. I’d say, “Wynton just got here-he needs a grandfather,” and I’d take him up to see my son. He’d say, “I guess I can hang around for old shotgun a little while longer.” But as soon as he’d have a moment of quiet-some time to reflect-he’d go there again: “I wonder if the Lord will let me see her just one more time. I’m ready to see your mama, even if it’s just for one more time.”

Three years after my mother died, my father passed on. He didn’t die from any specific illness-cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. He just coolly went to sleep one night, tired. His heart was broken, because he couldn’t go on without the woman who completed him.

The principles I’ve laid out here are the same ones I share with my daughters and my sons. My sons are not being encouraged to go out and “conquer” the opposite sex; instead, I’m talking to them about respecting the young women they date the same way they would expect another man to respect their sisters. I also talk to them about the effects sex can have on their lives and the lives of the girls they may decide to be with sexually-to understand that being thoughtless and careless about intercourse can have devastating consequences for everyone involved. Emotional, mental, and physical consequences. And, if she ends up pregnant, there will be lifelong consequences on their ability to live their best lives.

My girls are taught that they need to be very clear about what their standards and requirements are and hold the men they date to them. I tell them constantly, too, that they’ve got to be willing to lose in order to win-to be willing to walk away from the bad situation to get to the good one. I add that this is a very simple matter of mathematics: plug in the facts and see if this guy is living up to what you expect. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be treated like a queen. You deserve to be talked to with respect. You deserve to be taken around and presented with respect. You deserve to know what it feels like to feel special. “Don’t let anybody come along and treat you any other way,” I tell my daughters, “because you can always come over here and get special treatment from your father until you can find the man who can treat you the way I do.” And I seal that with the declaration that they absolutely will not find out any of that about a man if they sleep with him too soon. I’ve said elsewhere I’m not a relationship expert-that I’m an expert on how men think and I know this much to be true. When I and the men I know have been confronted by a woman who respected herself and held her future in such high regard that she made it clear that she deserved only the best and would settle for nothing less, we’ve had no choice but to take stock and treat her with due regard. She might not have been the one for us, in which case we moved on. But what we didn’t do after she made her demands clear is try to run our games on her, just kick it until Ms. Right did come along. How could we? She wouldn’t let us. Which means that ultimately, she had the power. And you do too.