Barbara Angelis - What Women Want Men To Know

I wanted to give you male readers a chance to experience this, so here’s a sample from one woman’s list that she kept in relation to her boyfriend, Joseph. Melissa is an executive at a radio station and has been involved with Joseph for almost a year. I’ve actually only included half of a day’s diary – a full day would go on for pages!

Melissa’s Thought Diary

So what’s your response to Melissa’s Thought Diary? When I show this list to women, they read it and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I do!” Perhaps the content is varied for married women or women with children, but the frequency of thought is very similar. Men, on the other hand, have a very different reaction to this list. Some think I’m playing a joke on them, that a list like this can’t be genuine. Others make comments like: “This Melissa seems pretty neurotic,” or “Sounds like she needs to get a life!” Little do these men realize that their own girlfriends or wives probably think about them as much as Melissa thinks about her boyfriend, Joseph.

For Melissa, as for many women, love is a constant theme in her awareness. It’s the biggest piece of the pie of her consciousness. That doesn’t mean she isn’t focused on her job, or on other areas of her life – actually, she has a very busy schedule and a demanding career. It just means that when she is in an intimate relationship, she sees the world through the lens of love. It’s as if she is wearing a special pair of glasses whose prescription is her love for Joseph, and her experience of life is perceived through those love glasses. A news story on TV isn’t just a news story – it becomes something she can share with her sweetheart. A song on the radio isn’t just a song – it evokes memories and special emotions that remind her of her man. Raspberries aren’t just raspberries – they are the fruit that her partner loves.

Men: Please know that this process is so natural to a woman, so much a part of her nature, that she isn’t even aware that it’s going on.In fact, when Melissa read her own Thought Diary, she herself was surprised at how often she was thinking about Joseph. Normally, these thoughts about him just float in and out of her awareness. They’re just a part of how she is when she’s involved in a relationship, a reflection of how, like so many women, she puts love first.

After years of research and personal experience, I’ve concluded that love is experienced very differently by men and by women:

For most women, love is nonstop reality, a consistent awareness that never quite disappears even when we are working or performing tasks that seem to have nothing to do with love. For most men, on the other hand, the experience of love is much more compartmentalized: It is an appointment men make with a part of themselves.

Women don’t have to shift into a loving awareness – they are in it most of the time, whether it’s being expressed or not. On the contrary, most men do have to consciously choose to make a shift into love mode.

Let’s go back for a minute to Brian, my friend who thought his new girlfriend must have psychological problems. This difference we’ve been examining between men and women explains why to Brian and probably to most men, a woman’s focus on him may seem excessive. Brian can’t imagine himself focusing on the relationship as much as Lori does. If he did that, he’d have to block out the rest of his life and consciously concentrate on her. To him, this would feel unbalanced, even obsessive. So he incorrectly assumes that if this is how Lori feels about him, she must be making a huge effort to love him in this manner, and therefore, she must be unbalanced and obsessive.