id="u04e42e25-c9be-5770-82a0-e6dff8b0cbb2">
SECRETS
ABOUT
MEN
EVERY
WOMAN
SHOULD
KNOW
Barbara De Angelis, Ph.D.
TO JEFFREY
for teaching me that I don't have to chase after love anymore
CONTENTS
SECRETS ABOUT HOW WOMEN RELATE TO MEN
2 The Six Biggest Mistakes Women Make with Men
3 Filling in the Emotional Blanks: How to Stop Giving More Than You Get in Love
4 Solving the Three Biggest Mysteries About Men
6 Men’s Top Twenty Sexual Turn-offs
SECRETS ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN TOGETHER
7 Secrets for Communicating with Men
8 Helping the Man You Love Open Up
9 Becoming the Powerful Woman You Were Meant to Be
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