Читать книгу What Women Want Men To Know - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 17

Here’s an easy and visual way to understand the way women feel about love and relationships. I call it the “Love Pie.”

Visualize two circles, like pies, one representing a man’s consciousness and the other representing a woman’s consciousness. Now imagine a tiny slice cut out in each circle, like a piece of the pie, perhaps one-tenth of the whole. In the man’s circle, that small slice is the percentage of his awareness that he focuses on love and intimate relationships. Everything outside of that slice, the other nine-tenths of the circle, is his awareness focused on his work, his hobbies, his projects, and other activities.

In the woman’s circle, however, it is exactly the opposite: The tiny slice of the pie is the focus of her awareness on work, hobbies, projects, and all the rest of the pie is the focus of her awareness on love, family life, and relationships!

Okay, this is probably somewhat of an exaggeration, but you get my point. Whenever I draw the Love Pie for my seminar audiences, it evokes peals of laughter from both sexes. Why? Because instinctively, we all know it’s true, and as we’ll see, it explains so many of the issues that become problems between the men and women.

Here’s an important distinction to remember: The Love Pie doesn’t symbolize how we divide our time, or how many hours we spend on love versus other activities. It depicts where our awareness is focused on the inside, no matter what we are doing on the outside. For instance, a woman may work in her own career, whether outside or inside the home, for as many hours as her husband does in his, so it’s not like she’s spending one-tenth of the time he does focusing on work, and nine-tenths of her time shopping for lingerie, writing love poems, or fantasizing about how much she adores him. But you can bet that while she is doing her job, she probably thinks more about him than he does about her, and from day to day she is more conscious of the emotional rhythms of the relationship, and more focused on wanting more connection and intimacy.

Sometimes when I share the Love Pie analogy with women, they don’t completely relate to it until I remind them that focusing on love includes focusing on their children. Single mothers can understand this: Perhaps they aren’t in an intimate relationship, but their awareness is still on love the majority of the time – the love and concern they have for their children. Even women who are married often feel the large portion of their Love Pie is more dedicated to their everyday relationship with their kids than to the relationship with their husband. Whether this is healthy or not is a whole other topic, but the point is the same: She is a woman whose awareness, thoughts, and feelings are naturally focused on putting love first.