Barbara Angelis - Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know

Have you ever wished that men would come with instruction booklets? If you buy a toaster, or an answer machine, it’s always accompanied by a nice little booklet that helps you understand the product, explains its features, and tells you how to avoid hurting yourself when you use it. Well what about men as women “use” men more than any other “appliances”, yet we’re expected to work out how they work all by ourselves.

Every day of our lives, you and I deal with men – our husbands or boyfriends, our bosses or employers, our fathers, our sons, our friends. We try to understand them, to take care of them, to love them – and to get them to love us back. When it works, we think men are fantastic, and we’re sure we couldn’t live without them. When it doesn’t work, we think men are impossible, and that we’d be much better off never having to deal with them at all. If you’re like me, I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve thrown your hands up in frustration and felt like saying, “Send this man back to the factory – he’s defective! There must be a part missing, because he sure isn’t functioning properly,” or, “Maybe this model has been discontinued – I can’t make him work right.”

As a woman you have three choices as to how you are going to deal with the men in your lifetime:

Choice #1: You can get angry at the men in your life for driving you crazy and spend your time complaining about them. (This is fun for a few hours, but after a few years, it loses its attraction.)

Choice #2: You can give up men entirely and buy a nice fluffy dog. (This is cheaper, and less work, but not very fulfilling.)

Choice #3: You can decide to learn everything there is to know about understanding and getting along with men, so that you can have the wonderful relationships you deserve.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years working with tens of thousands of men and women, learning about what makes relationships succeed and what makes them fail. It’s taken me a long time to understand men. It’s been a difficult and often painful journey – I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way in my own relationships with men.

I’m happy to say that not only have I survived, I’ve emerged from my struggle with a new understanding of men that has changed my life, and I want to share the things I’ve learned with you. I hope Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know will be the instruction manual about men that you’ve been looking for. May it help you to create the loving relationship with a man that you’ve always dreamed of.

May you live in changing times. – Chinese curse

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been chosen to be part of an expedition to another planet. All that’s known about the planet is that it is inhabited by beings whose physical appearance is similar to yours. After a long journey through space, you arrive at this faraway world. You step out of your spaceship and are greeted by pleasant-looking creatures who do indeed closely resemble your own species. Much to your amazement, they even appear to be speaking English.

Over the next few hours, you attempt to talk and interact with these beings. At first, you seem to be getting along well. But as more time passes, the tension between you and them begins to mount. Even though these aliens seem to understand the English language, they constantly misunderstand your attempts to communicate with them – you say one thing, and they hear another; you try to express curiosity, for instance, and they interpret it as criticism. As you observe these beings interacting with one another, the differences between you and them become even more apparent. Your own species has been trained to value cooperation and emotional sensitivity – these beings seem always to be in competition with each other. You’ve been taught to share your feelings – they seem to work hard at hiding theirs. The more time you spend with these unusual creatures, the more frustrated you become.

Finally, you and your exploration team decide to depart from this strange and unsettling place. You’re certain that these beings will be happy to see you go, since they didn’t show much enthusiasm toward you during your visit. But to your great surprise, they become very sad when you announce that you are leaving, insist that they loved the time they spent with you, and beg you not to depart. In spite of their protests, you board your spaceship, more confused than ever. And as you settle back into your seat and feel the rocket engines lift the steel craft back into space, you think to yourself, That was the strangest group of people I’ve ever met. They said one thing and felt another. They acted like they didn’t care, but they did. They didn’t seem to enjoy having us around, but were unhappy when we left. Well, they were interesting to visit, but I sure wouldn’t want to live with them.

Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the aliens have landed and are living among us – they’re called “men.” And when you consider the tremendous biological, psychological, and sociological differences between us, men might as well be from another planet. Stop and think for a minute about the odds of your getting along with someone who came from a very different background, was brought up with completely different values, and was taught to think, behave, and communicate in a totally different style from your own. Next to impossible, right? Yet every day of our lives, we attempt to challenge these odds by having relationships with men. The truth is, it’s a miracle that we get along at all!

The differences between men and women have existed throughout the ages, as I explain in the remainder of this chapter. For thousands of years, women accepted these differences, adapted to them, and took on certain roles that were expected of us. But sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century a revolution took place, a revolution in the way women saw themselves and insisted on being seen by men. For the first time, women were demanding equality in all aspects of life, and in the process, were breaking out of those culturally stereotyped roles they and their mothers and their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers had complacently accepted. The later introduction of effective birth control methods and the flow of women into the work force gave women reproductive and economic freedom from dependance on men.

And so, a crisis in male-female relationships was born. Men were used to being in control, and expected women to behave submissively. Now women were saying, “No, I don’t want to act that way anymore.” The truth was that we still weren’t sure of how we were supposed to act as “new women.” We were confused, and our confusion made the men in our lives even more perplexed. It’s as if we were still playing the same game, but all the old rules were thrown out, and we hadn’t finished making up the new ones yet. One minute we wanted to be liberated; the next, we wanted to be taken care of. We went to work and learned to support ourselves, but we still expected a man to hold the door for us on the way into our office. We begged men to open up and show us their vulnerabilities, but found ourselves getting turned off when they started sounding weak. And while our own double standards bothered us, they drove men crazy.

As modern women, we are on the way to mastering our professional and financial lives. But when it comes to our relationships with men, we’re more frustrated than ever, and sometimes it seems as if we haven’t made any progress at all. As one very successful female business executive said to me recently, “I can figure out how to make my company hundreds of thousands of dollars and how to buy my own condominium, but I still can’t figure out how to have a good relationship with a man!” For this woman, as well as for many of us, men are the “final frontier,” the one area that remains an untamed mystery in our lives.