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To really understand the nature of a woman, you have to understand the nature of her relationship with time. Learning how a woman experiences time, thinks about time, and makes decisions about time will teach you the secrets of her mind and heart. This is something you’ve probably never thought of before. Frankly, I hadn’t either until I began doing the research for this book. But as I interviewed women and collected questionnaires they’d filled out for me, a pattern began to emerge: Over and over again, what these women wanted men to know had something to do with time.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that, indeed, issues about time are often at the very center of our love life. If you examine the disagreements, conflicts and areas of tension in your intimate relationship, you’ll discover, perhaps to your surprise, that many of them have to do with time. Here are some examples:

Conflicts over giving time:

Disagreeing about how much time you spend together

Disagreeing about how much intimate time is enough or too much

Disagreeing about staying in touch – phone calls, checking in, etc.

Wanting to spend time apart

Not understanding the importance of sharing special time

Promising time to someone or something else when your partner expected you to give her your time instead

Conflicts over remembering time:

Forgetting to perform promised tasks, such as making a reservation or passing on a message

Forgetting to ask how an important event in time turned out, like how her doctor’s appointment went or what happened at your child’s school meeting

Forgetting to inform her of something that affects the future, such as the fact that you’ll be out of town on the weekend of the big church social

Conflicts over respecting time:

Being late

Procrastinating about doing things you say you will do

Diminishing the significance of an event a woman thinks is important

Conflicts over planning time:

Waiting until the last minute to make plans

Criticizing your partner for wanting to plan in advance

Conflicts over celebrating time:

Disagreeing about how to celebrate special occasions

Disagreeing about what constitutes a special occasion

Forgetting birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Are you as amazed reading this list as I was? I’d never realized how many conflicts over time couples get into. However, once I thought back over my own relationships, I could see that time issues were often indeed the source of many disagreements. Getting this feedback from women made me decide to talk about time early on in this book.

Men and women have very different ways of relating to time, and these differences create continual misunderstandings between us that are the cause of ongoing conflict in our relationship.

To women, time is not simply something that passes, or a way to measure our experience of living. Time is something we are very intimate with, and therefore something we honor and hold sacred.

WHAT WOMEN WANT MEN TO KNOW:

Women have a sacred relationship with time

Why is this true for women? It is not something we are taught, or even something we are conscious of. Like our nature to put love first and to create, having a special and sacred relationship with time is part of who we are.

This intimate relationship with time is programmed into a woman’s biology. At this most fundamental level of our existence, women are intimately aware of the cycles of time in a way men are not, for our body cycles in a monthly rhythm. From the moment we begin menstruating as young girls, we become conscious of each day, each week that passes, waiting for another cycle to begin. This is where we first learn our habit of counting, and we never stop. The counting and watching of time continues through other cycles in different phases of our lives: when we are pregnant, as we count the months until our baby is born; when we have a child, and count the hours between feedings, and then later, the time between doctor’s visits, meals, and baths.

Let’s look at several ways a woman’s relationship with time manifests itself in her behavior, and how men often misinterpret or misunderstand this behavior: