Steve Harvey: Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man

I'm telling you right now: if you go to your man with a situation that's.xable and he doesn't try to.x it, he is not your man he is not in love with you. Go ahead, I dare you to try it for yourself. When your man comes over, tell him, You know, I just can't stand this kitchen this way. The color just throws me all off, the cabinets are all wrong, they don't go with the stove and I can't get my mind right in here when I'm trying to cook. If he's all the way in it with you, he will say, without hesitation, What color you want this kitchen to be, baby? Tell him pink, and see if by next Saturday the whole kitchen isn't painted pink, cabinets and all. He will see your distress, understand that if you don't like the cabinets and the walls and the way the stove functions, you're going to walk into that kitchen with your mouth poked out phoning in the home-cooked meals because you just can't hook up the steaks and baked potatoes like you want to in a kitchen you can't stand. And we de.nitely don't want that, so to the hardware store we will go. Even if we don't have money for a complete remodel, we'll go and.nd you some hardware for the cabinets, maybe some new handles, and some sandpaper lots of sandpaper to get that color you can't stand off your cabinets, so that we can re.nish them exactly the way you want them to be.nished. A man who really loves you can't wait to do this for you, because in the back of his mind, he can envision you with a smile on your face, setting his place at the head of the table, and serving up a.ne meal in the new kitchen he.xed just for you. (Oh, make no mistake about it: we want to see you happy, but it's also all about the return, ladies. Please understand and respect the return.)

Of course, we operate under the assumption that The Fix isn't always going to be on point. We stay off balance because even though we're responding in a way that we believe is logical, our women will inevitably respond emotionally which always throws a monkey wrench right into the middle of what we're trying to accomplish. Most of the time, it feels to us that your response is determined not wholly by what is rational, but mostly by how you're feeling that particular day, at that particular moment. A perfect example: your man can lick you on the same breast with the same amount of moisture in the same exact position that had you hollering and screaming last night, and this evening, you will look at him and say, with conviction, What are you doing? I don't want that. And now he's all confused because, hey, if you lick him on that spot and he liked it yesterday, he's going to like it today and tomorrow and the day after that, too. But you, not so much. What you like and how you like it seemingly shifts from day to day, sometimes even moment to moment. And that is not logical to us we can't.gure it out, ever. If we get it right, great. But sometimes, we're just going to get it wrong. A lot of times, the more inexperienced of us men are going to completely screw it up. For example, consider a woman who walks into the room in a visible huff; a guy who's young and not too smart in this relationship business may ask his lady what's wrong, and she may say, nothing. That fool will be the one to say, Okay, cool. He will also be the one who gets laid out with the, Dammit you saw me tripping and you're just going to walk off without seeing about me? Yup, that guy is going to have a lot of.xing to do.

But the more experienced man the one who can read his lady's moods and tell when something is wrong is going to ask her what's up, and no matter how many times she says, nothing, he's going to ask again and again until she starts coming clean and opens up, though, in his heart of hearts, he will be hoping to God there's really nothing wrong, and if there is something wrong, he will be able to just.x it because he doesn't want to see her pout. Even when he thinks she is done talking, he'll push her until the issue is resolved because he can't leave it at, Wow, sorry that happened. He will immediately launch into The Fix.

This is not to say you'll never have a conversation with your man that lasts longer than two minutes. We understand that sometimes we're going to have to give a little more in terms of communicating with you that every now and then we're going to have to spill our guts and reveal what's going on in our heads. We also know that you may just want to lie in our arms and cuddle and talk it out with absolutely no resolution. We are capable of doing this, too. It's not easy. But it can be done. We know that sitting and listening and even participating in a long conversation about your feelings is necessary and inevitable. But don't be surprised if those conversations are few and far between. Detailed conversation is what you have with your girlfriends. Men just want to hear the problem and then.x it. It's about maintaining this balance the two of you understanding exactly what each other requires to be innately happy, and then trying to provide at least some of that so that both mates feel like they're in this relationship with the other. For men, that means that every once in a while, they may have to sit and be still and just listen. For women, it would go a long way if they respected the encryption of manhood that we're too focused on who we are, what we do, and how much we make to spend a whole lot of time sitting around pondering things that can't be.xed.

Of course, it would go a long way if women stopped opening the conversation with we need to talk. The moment you say that, our defenses go up, the repair tools come out, the sweat starts rolling, and we're sprinting through the events of the past weeks, trying to.gure out what we did wrong, when we did it, and how we're going to.x it so that we're not in trouble anymore.

In fact, I think it's a good idea that, if you just want to vent, you start the conversation with something simple, like, Honey, look, nothing is really wrong I just want to tell somebody something. That's a great opening line; it allows us to relax, take our foot down from the witness stand, put away our.x it tools, and actually sit and listen to what you have to say.

We were doing the Steve Harvey Morning Show live by remote in Detroit, and a woman came up to the podium to say hello to me and the crew a really attractive girl, nicely dressed, with beautiful dark skin, pretty white teeth, gorgeous body, really put together all around. And when she started talking, she really threw me because I could hear in her voice that she was mature, but she just didn't look like she sounded. So I asked the lady how old she was; she said she was forty-two. Blew me away. I didn't think she was a day older than thirty. Then I asked her how many kids she had. Five, she said, smiling from ear to ear. I've got three of my own, and I adopted two.

Now I'm sitting here thinking, wow that's really slick. She's over age forty, she's taking care of not only the kids she gave birth to, but two more she took in out of the kindness and generosity of her heart, and she looks years younger than she really is she's really got it going on. Be clear: I wasn't about to do anything with this information because guess what? I'm a happily married man emphasis on happily. But some years ago, that conversation would have gone down a wholly different way, and it would not have involved me asking her anything about her kids, where she works, how she's living none of that.

But a guy who was all in her space while we continued doing our show that's another story. He clearly had plans for this lady. You could tell just by the way he was leaning into her, hanging on her every word. Oh, he was talking to her like there weren't hundreds of people surrounding them like my cohost and I weren't in the middle of a show. I knew what he was trying to get to. But clearly, she had no clue.