Someone recently sent me a website for evaluation that simply bowled me over for its sheer wrongheadedness. Don't think I didn't notice that, for the articles that I examined on this site the comments section was closed...!
I'll comment on some of the nonsense that is being offered to fix relationship problems below. I'm not going to link to the site though, because I would hate for anyone to mistakenly actually find the site.
One of the most offensive articles that I found continues a couple of themes that are often found in books like The Rules. These themes are 1) that it is primarily women who invest in relationships, not men, and therefore it is up to women to function as the benevolent supervisor of the relationship, and 2) that a sure way to keep a man interested in you is to play hard to get.
"Most men are not the likely one in the relationship to be nurturing and keeping track of the barometer of your emotional health. That barometer is usually the woman in the relationship. Some counselors have even coined the expression that women have an innate marriage handbook that men need to learn to read."
Since 2/3 of all divorces are initiated by women in the West, we can rest assured that this "marriage handbook" has a final chapter.
This quote is among the most sexist and outrageous statements I have ever read in print (though the month is young, yet). By the very nature of engaging in the pursuit of the woman - which the article itself encourages throughout its remainder - the male is, of course, engaging in "keeping track of the... emotional health" of the relationship enough to come to this conclusion: "I haven't caught her yet." But this kind of "Yay for girls" doublespeak is typical of the fantasyland advice that have bookshelves groaning in the relationship advice section of your local bookstore.
Secondly, this quote assumes that the "emotional health" of a relationship involving two people can be determined and managed by the fiat of one. Again, this sort of solipsistic perspective, while common and adequate enough for a Harlequin Romance novel, is exactly part of the reason that relationships are unraveling left and right in the modern world. By both implication and explicit statement, women are being taught that relationships are all about them.
They aren't.
And because of that, the REAL way to gauge a relationship's "emotional health" is to sit down with your man and ask, "How's it going...?" Then listen carefully when he says things like "I like/don't like" or "I want" or "I feel like _______ is lacking." Then plan accordingly to accommodate his needs in every reasonable way.
Then express the same back to him, and note that while you'll be trying really hard to meet his needs, he should try the same for you. Where negotiation is necessary - negotiate. But keep in mind that negotiation looks far more like "splitting the difference" than it does seeing who can get their way.
Because relationships involve two people, both of whom - if the relationship is going to be long-term - need to find a way to serve, accommodate, and build up the other.
"...men don’t usually like to be doing hard labor in the relationship, but if you make him chase you, he will be doing his fair share of the work and that is where you want him to be."
Notice the rancid self-absorption that is urged here. "He doesn't want..." but you make him do it anyway and "that is where you want him to be."
Tell me again why it is that every woman who has an online dating site that she is not into game-playing? Does this seem just the slightest bit manipulative and narcissistic? And yet this article purports to draw back the curtain to allow you to explore the concept of the "emotional health of the relationship?"
"Create a sense of urgency in his eyes that he is missing out on something special if he doesn’t chase you. You need to become more interesting than other women. Develop your complexities and revel in them. Delve into your mysterious side and make him wonder about you so much that he feels compelled to follow you and find out. Become a refined woman that lives a life with confidence in her abilities and does not play with a victim mentality but is the victor in her life."
Notice the wonderful vagueness of all of this. What does it mean? Anything you want it to mean - unless it doesn't work, because then the authors will insist it means something else and void their money-back guarantee!
"Create a sense of urgency?" OK, how do I do that? "Develop your complexities?" Does that mean to behave like a spoiled brat or to start reading Proust or Nietzsche? "Delve into your mysterious side?" Is this about sex, lying, or should you just learn Italian and make him wonder where you learned it? Is this stuff really good advice?
Well, to give credit where credit is due, that last line really is good advice: work hard to "become a refined woman" who does not have or demonstrate "a victim mentality." Knowing something about art, cuisine, literature, politics, and having a bit of sophistication and worldly-wise understanding would be a good thing. And the victim mentality is a genuine relationship-killer - I tell my male clients to hit the road as soon as they see it because it is one sign of an unstable person who cannot build lasting relationships.
"Especially in the beginning of your dating seeking days and in the initial dating relationship, you need to play hard at playing hard to get.... Once you get into the relationship, keep playing hard to get, but soon there will come a time when you need to actually let him catch you. However, when he catches you, then you can start running again and let him chase you once more."
Years ago, when I first started reading relationship books, I can remember my response when I read The Rules. I thought, "If I ever met a woman who engaged in just 25% of the activity recommended in this book, I'd run screaming for the hills and never call her again. This paragraph produced that same gut instinct in me.
First, let's talk about why this is wrong - and it is not my opinion that it is wrong, it is wrong! There was likely a time when something like this was true. When society was a lot different, and there was no feminism, and sexual mores were a lot different than they are today. A guy could likely be drawn in by some combination of invitation and rebuff that looked like "playing hard to get" to a woman. But why was that?
One reason is because of the way guys communicate. Guys filter signals. They push out that which is not useful to them and embrace what they need. That is the essence of "guy-communication."
Think about some of the contexts in which guys have historically been forced to communicate with one another. Guys are running down the basketball court with defenders in their faces. He doesn't have the ball, but he is breaking for the middle. He has to find a way to integrate certain important information - the location of the ball, the location of the defender, the location of the basket, his strategy for getting open, and what kind of shot he is going to take - while excluding certain unnecessary information - the cheerleaders, the crowd, the screaming coach, the fact that he might have twisted his ankle. If he can't filter the unnecessary information from the necessary information, he is not going to reach (score) his goal.
Or here's a guy on the battlefield: there are explosions left and right, he is running through the mud, bullets are whizzing by his head, the captain is screaming, his buddy is down - but up ahead is an enemy machine-gun nest. He has to formulate his plan, maintain some modicum of safety, arm his grenade, and find a stealthy way to approach in order to get the grenade into the machine-gun nest while filtering out fear, concern for his wounded buddy, and other distractions.
Now of course, you say "my guy has never done anything like that." He probably hasn't. But remember that his communication has been formed by generation of guys who have. They have learned to filter incoming communications down to their absolute necessities, and to filter their outgoing communications to the crisp, clear, necessity that communicates everything that needs to be said in the shortest possible expression.
What does this have to do with playing hard to get?
In Victorian England or 1950s America, when sex wasn't something that could be had by simply picking up the phone, guys decided on a girl that they found desirable and they worked hard to get her. She gave him just enough of an "invitation" to let him know she was interested, but rebuffed him enough to protect her purity (and reputation). The guy, however, just filtered out the negative rebuff and focused on the positive invitations - if he worked long enough, he believed he'd achieve his goal.
But in the modern West, sex is freely available. If you want to spend your time playing the coquette, sending mixed signals in an attempt to achieve some power play like that recommended by the writers of the blog I refer to and the writers of The Rules, get very accustomed to spending Friday nights alone. Or, get very accustomed to dating someone new about every third Friday night - because while you are here saying, "Comehere/Getaway! Comehere/Getaway!", there are 15 other girls who are saying, "Come here."
Here's the second reason why this type of strategy will seldom work, and it is directly related to our basketball/warfare illustrations above: Women use communication as a means of building and solidifying relationships, with a lot of implicit, between-the-lines content. Men don't.
I have been in numerous situations in which I have been in the presence of more than one woman, all of whom were talking, yet in my mind I was screaming, "THEY AREN'T TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING!" And that might have been true....
But when women talk, they don't have to be talking about "something," because the mere act of talking is a means of building a bridge from themselves to someone else. They are therefore very attuned to implied meanings, emotional content, and content that occurs between the lines.
Men, though, use communication as a tool. Tools are chosen for their power and efficiency. The best tool is the tool that gets the job done quickly and certainly. Therefore, there is very little implied communication with men.
Numerous times in my dating life a woman has given me a list of about 1,001 things that she "feels are not going well" and has said, "I don't think this is working out." My response has, uniformly, been to stop calling her and to move to the next girl.
Dozens of times, I have eventually received a call from a woman who has said, "I don't think this is working out" and she has asked, "Why don't you call me any more?"
"You said you didn't want to go out anymore."
"Well, yeah," she replies, "but I just said that to see how much you wanted me/I just said that so you would know I wasn't happy/I just said that to see if we could work on some things/I just said that so...."
You get the idea.
When a guy hears, "I'm done," he doesn't begin to ask himself, "Well, did she really mean it?"
Because that is not the way we talk to one another. That is not the way we have been reared to communicate. How many of us would accomplish our goals if we had to read between the lines in the boardroom, on the basketball court, or on the battlefield?
So this whole "playing hard to get" makes perfect sense to women - who are accustomed to reading between the lines and fishing for "emotional content." To guys, it is just a bunch of mixed signals. And why should I listen to mixed signals from Female A when Female B is giving me something decidedly unmixed?
Is there a joy in the chase? Sure. But the chase has to end. If I go deer hunting, I don't catch the deer, then let him go so I can chase him again. I chase him, catch him, then eat him. If I had to re-chase him every time I sat down to eat, do you really think I would ever go deer hunting?
By the way, I am not a hunter. This is all just an illustration.
Why, then, would any fool say to a woman, "Let him chase you, and then let him catch you, but be sure to make him chase you again after he has caught you?"
Men have a word for this kind of woman: unstable bitch. And they run from them. And rightly so.
These two problems from this one website illustrates why long-term relationships are almost never helped by mainstream relationship handbooks. First, all mainstream relationship handbooks are written from the female perspective. They assume that the female desire is what is best for the relationship, and they teach the female to focus on her own wants and needs. This necessarily undermines any chance at a long-term relationship because a genuine love relationship is one in which both partners are committed to meeting, not their own needs, but the needs of the other. The end result is a library of books, tapes, and websites that make women feel really good about themselves, but never challenge them to get outside of the female perspective and learn how to please a man.
The second reason why mainstream relationship handbooks undermine long-term relationship health is that they assume a pattern of experience and communication that is female-friendly, but totally ignores that of the male. Because these books are largely written for females, who, understandably are the largest audience for such items, they are often written by females who have never experienced dating from a male perspective. They don't really know what men want, or what men think, or how men communicate. These female (usually) relationship "experts" have various political axes to grind, pay due homage to certain cultural assumptions, and tailor their message to sell books - not to teach new patterns of behavior and communication.
And the result is that more than 50% of all marriages in America today will end in divorce, and 67% of those divorces will be needlessly initiated by women who, when they tried to learn how to save their relationship, were told to play hard to get by people more intent on selling their books than on saving a relationship.
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