Читать книгу What Women Want Men To Know - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 20

Are you beginning to understand how differently men and women see themselves when it comes to love? This contrast has its source in the way we each value ourselves as a human being:

Women define and value themselves by how successfully they love and relate. Men define and value themselves by how successfully they achieve and accomplish.

How did men and women get to be this way? The reasons are sociological and cultural, going back thousands and thousands of years. Simply put, in more primitive times, a man’s value was measured by his ability to hunt and provide his family or group with food, his ability to defend himself and those he was responsible for, and his standing in the tribe or community. His success at these tasks literally meant life or death for him and those he loved. Still today, society judges men on how much money they make, how high up the ladder of success they’ve climbed, how successful they are at “hunting” as demonstrated by their house, their car, their clothing, etc.

A woman in primitive times, on the other hand, was valued for very different characteristics – her ability to take care of a man and their children, her ability to emotionally and sexually satisfy him and thereby keep him interested enough to continue providing for and protecting her, her ability to get along with him, his relatives, and the other members of the community. Her success at these tasks also had life-or-death consequences, for females who did not please men and win their favor had no way to take care of themselves and ultimately would perish.

Now it’s becoming clear why women put love first: We have done it for thousands of years. Our very survival depended on it. We have learned to maintain a continual awareness of the state of our love life, doing our best to make sure everything is okay, that there aren’t any problems we’re overlooking, that our partner is still happy with us. So when things are good in our relationship, we feel good about ourselves, and when they’re not, we feel unsettled and insecure.

This explains a secret all women know about ourselves: No matter how smoothly things are going in our professional life, or with our projects, hobbies, and interests, if there’s a problem in our intimate relationship, we’re miserable. We could be having a fantastic day at the office, but if things are bad at home, it ends up feeling like a bad day. It doesn’t even have to be a substantial problem – maybe we just had a little argument with our husband the night before – but that will be enough to make our heart ache all day long, in spite of whatever accomplishments we experience at work.

I will confess that I’ve experienced this time and time again in my own life. I could be having the most exciting day doing a TV show, promoting a new book, or giving a seminar to thousands of people, but if there’s some lack of harmony in my relationship with my partner, it’s very difficult for me to fully feel the joy of my achievements. Why? Because like many women, I define myself so strongly by the big part of my Love Pie – the content of my heart, and the state of love in my life. The truth is that all the applause or book sales or attention in the world can’t remove the sadness I feel when my mate and I aren’t as connected as I want to be.

Most men experience the opposite of this phenomenon: If things are wonderful with their love life, but they’re having a bad day at work, it is difficult for them to feel good. Why? Because men also tend to define themselves by the big part of their Love Pie – only in the case of men, it’s their achievements in their career, their accomplishments in the world, how well they think they’re measuring up to their image of who they think they should be.

One of the hardest lessons about love I have had to learn as a woman has to do with not misinterpreting a man’s behavior just because he doesn’t respond as I do. When a man doesn’t seem to want to give us as much time, attention, and focus as we think he should, our tendency is to assume that something is wrong. We think, “If I was behaving that way, it would mean that I was really angry with him, or that I didn’t care, or that he wasn’t that important to me.”

WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:

Women sometimes assume that your lack of focus on the relationship means that you don’t love us or care as much as we do.

This is why we get upset or hurt when you don’t put us first – because we want to feel you are as committed to the relationship as we are, and that you value us as much as we value you.

I agree that, as women, we need to remember that men are different, and that they don’t always show their commitment to love in the same way we do. But you can help us out a lot, guys, first by understanding why we get so disappointed, concerned, or upset when it looks to us like you don’t care, or that you’re not taking us into account, or that you’re not valuing the relationship; and second by not making us feel wrong for our emotional reactions.