Today's newsletter is longer than usual, because it's a common and often catastrophic subject, so please read carefully at a time when you are able to concentrate, because there's information herein that you will want to understand and use. I'd like to introduce you to a man who needs no introduction, because we've all seen him, and many of us have even been him at least once in our life. Today, his name is Ted:
Dear David,
I wanted to get another guy's opinion on something that is going on with me and my girlfriend lately. I only get to see her a couple of times a week because of our class and work schedules and when we are together all she wants to do is go shopping. I do not feel like her boyfriend anymore. I feel like the gay best friend or girlfriend and I am not liking this, to say the least.
I want to take her out for a nice dinner and come back to my place and spend some quality time alone. We used to go out and then come back to my place, have some wine and spend the rest of the night talking and having the greatest sex. Now something has changed and I am not sure if it's me or she has found someone else. I do not want to risk losing her if I can in any way fix this problem. Do you have any ideas as to what might save my relationship at this point? If something does not change soon I will be calling off the wedding for the coming summer.
I need advice,
Ted
Greetings, Ted; thanks for writing, welcome to the club, and my condolences for your loss. If your description is accurate, your relationship is dead. However, you can resurrect a dead relationship if you understand what has happened and are indeed willing to fix what is broken. As things are right now, I'm quite surprised that your girlfriend hasn't called off the wedding and found someone else to excite her. This problem is covered in depth in my book, but I'll explain because I'm feeling generous today...
There are basically two main components of the kind of relationship we're talking about here if it's healthy: love and attraction. Love is the value you place on the partner, and is the category under which friendship, respect, trust, loyalty, etc., all fall. The other part, attraction, is what people have mistakenly referred to with such poetic but erroneous phrases as "in love" over the centuries. It has nothing whatsoever to do with love, and can in fact be experienced toward someone you absolutely hate (such as spouse abusers, which we'll talk about a little more later); it's a biologically-triggered state of intense excitement and desire for intimacy of many kinds, including and especially sexual, with another person. It's the romance and adventure element that elevates a friendship to a marriage.
For men, attraction is triggered mostly by visual characteristics of women's appearance, and actions to a lesser extent; for women, it's the reverse. A man's appearance doesn't count for much except to the extent that it projects self-respect, confidence, authority and personal strength, as must his personality, and he must project intelligence and a good sense of humor as well. Consequently, attraction can be built in seconds to minutes for men, while it usually takes hours, days, or even weeks to start seeing attraction build up in a woman to the point of sexual engagement being an option.
(There are two other states, "need" and "lust," that have nothing to do with a healthy relationship; indeed, "need" and "love" are mutually exclusive, and "need" kills relationships with the dependency, fear and resentment it creates. Lust has no specific person as its object, and can also be very detrimental to an otherwise healthy relationship if the participants aren't mentally prepared to accept lustful behavior as a condition of the relationship's continuance. See my book or my free "Break-Up Busting 101" report for full explanations at http://forum.makingherhappy.com/showthread.php/144-Free-Reports!)
What has happened in your relationship is the love is apparently still there, because there is still friendship, but the attraction is gone because the intimate behavior, everything from intimate discussions to exciting playfulness and sex, have fallen by the wayside. You feel like a girlfriend because that is how you allow yourself to be treated. You're not doing guy things - alpha male things - that awaken her inner drives and trigger attraction. You're doing exactly what she would be doing with a girlfriend for fun because you are allowing her to make the decisions on how the two of you spend your time together - a huge mistake in any male-female relationship if it is to last.
Women enjoy being led - NOT DOMINATED, BULLIED, AND ABUSED - by strong, confident men. It's not because they are weak, can't make decisions, or any such reasons that chauvinists (chauovinoism n. 1. Militant devotion to and glorification of one's country; fanatical patriotism. 2. Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind.) have used to demean and oppress women for centuries. It's simply what they are biologically wired to appreciate it and respond to it, just as men are biologically wired to enjoy the sight of a woman's natural "feminine curves."
Hence, dumping all the decisions in her lap, about where to go, what to do, where to eat, what movie to see, how to spend your time, etc., isn't just failing to give her something attractive to experience, it's annoying for her to some degree (and in my book you will find out why and how to properly handle decision-making, because while she wants you to lead, she still wants, needs, and in many cases demands input, and that's too long an explanation for this newsletter), and you are killing attraction instead of building it for her.
There are some people who try to deny human existence and claim that attraction isn't required for a relationship to last (they try to replace attraction with "faith," or some kind of "Zen," instead of accepting attraction as the reality it is). But if you gain a thorough understanding of attraction, and then look at every relationship you've ever seen enough of to know the facts concerning how it formed and what broke it up, it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that committed male-female relationships rarely, if ever, form without attraction and rarely, if ever, end as long as it is present. Some relationships do survive without it, but nearly all of those to which I have been personally exposed and those which readers have discussed with me have been between people who were self-evidently bored, resentful, and often codependent, their relationship being based upon "need" instead of a combination of love and attraction.
In a nutshell, love and everything that comes with it makes a relationship friendly, safe and pleasant (attraction in the absence of love, often coupled with need, is what you find in abusive relationships where a man violently abuses a woman and she keeps coming back for more because she craves the feeling of attraction and he creates it for her), while attraction is that "spice of life" that keeps the relationship, fresh, fun, exciting, romantic, etc.
So there you go, Ted. That's what happened. As for fixing it, it takes little more than being a real man, which after the girly-man nonsense of the 1980's and 1990's could be reasonably deemed "nearly a lost art." However, "nearly lost" is not the same as "lost." There are still a few of us around who understand what being a real man is about, and of the few of us who are left, a very few of us are able to identify it for you, and tell you how to do it. The good news is that you already know, deep inside, because you were born to do it. You just need a reminder of why it is you're here.
Fewer still can also explain to you how to evaluate a relationship to see if you should be in it at all, and teach you the great secrets of communicating with women, the most highly-evolved communicators on Earth, which is tough for a man in any case. We have spent our evolutionary energy on things like engineering skills and spatial awareness while they have learned to speak in ways that only they understand and become so adept at and dependent upon sending and receiving non-verbal communication that they can smile at us while demeaning us to a group of girlfriends and we think we're being complimented.
Even worse, they can tell us precisely what they want from us and the entire message be lost in the translation. (Warning: Beware a woman with a mathematical mind, because she will kick your ass all the way to the poor-house playing poker! She'll be reading your cards from your body language while all you'll see of her are her pretty eyes, inviting smile, and cleavage!)
Even fewer are those who know and can tell you all this and train you to do it naturally, as a part of your own personality, by putting it in a highly-readable and fun book. I'm one of those guys, and if you were in the dating world instead of a committed relationship and wanting to know how to meet and impress women, I could give you the names of about four more, because that's where most of this attention is being focused. It's a big and desperate market and those men are single and dating themselves, and they have to stick with their area of expertise.
The rules for creating and maintaining attraction are somewhat different in committed relationships than they are for getting phone numbers or "macking" (trying to score a one-night stand) at a local bar, especially the timeframe. You have seconds to create interest, minutes to create intrigue, and a couple of hours at most in the bar situation, and if you blow it with a single gesture or wrong word, you're done because she can walk away to scope out a hundred other options, after throwing your drink in your face.
Not so in the committed relationship. She has a vested interest in continuation of the relationship, and so do you, and it's to everyone's advantage to bring it back to life. Drop by our forum, http://forum.makingherhappy.com, sometime and see just how long some women will wait for a man to wake up and get his act together; a couple of years is not unusual, but when your time runs out, it's a whole new game, because now you not only have to square yourself away, you have to get her to realize that you've done it, and it's not just an act. It can be done, but when you start late in the game like that, it's a lot harder, so it's to your advantage to start as early as possible; like anything else, a marriage is much easier (and less expensive!) to maintain than to repair or replace.
One other word about waiting until the last minute to fix things: Have you ever tried to buy something from someone who didn't want to sell it? Or sell to someone who wasn't in the market? That's how it is when you wait until a woman has thrown in the towel on you. When she's expressing concerns and a desire to get them fixed and get your relationship back on a good and lasting track, she'll cut you A LOT of slack as long as you're trying, even if you're trying the wrong thing. That's like a negotiation between two interested parties. But if she has already given up, before you can get her to be involved in any corrections you need to make, you first have to convince her to get back in the game, to come to the negotiating table for a deal that you've already killed her interest in. See what I mean? Procrastination kills relationships and marriages dead.
The point of all this? This information is rare, some of it unique (I've not found anything like it, and I looked hard because I didn't want to waste time trying to reinvent the wheel when I had problems, before all this began), at least to a large degree, specifically developed for and presented to people in a committed relationship, and most importantly, it works.
It was tested by 118 couples leading up to and during the writing of my book and many more since then, and in five years I've now given four refunds under a full year unconditional guarantee. The first was to a "library reader," someone who buys and then immediately asks for a refund to steal a product. The second one was to a gentleman who missed an announcement that I was changing the title of my book to more accurately reflect its true scope and purpose and bought a second copy. The third thought he might find dating advice in it, which I don't claim or advertise; although all of what's in it is useful if you're dating to find a long-term relationship, I don't include anything on how to get dates or pick up women. The fourth didn't offer a reason. Most information marketers say they're doing good with a 10% refund rate and average 16%; and mine is less than 0.000002%. That's because it works for those who use it, and just about everybody uses it. No other conclusion is possible.
And YOU should join those who use it and succeed like they do! Do so by jumping over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and getting your copy of "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" right now, because you can make your relationship better, a lot better, and the time to start is now, while it's easier to regain lost ground, not after the affairs or divorce proceedings have started or a break-up has occurred and you have to do it the long, hard way. Be the achiever, not the guy who sat on the fence wondering if it could be done, because looking back with regret kills the part of you that loves to live the most.
In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham "Being a man is something to which one should aspire, not something for which he should apologize." --David Cunningham
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