Читать книгу Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 8

Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the aliens have landed and are living among us – they’re called “men.” And when you consider the tremendous biological, psychological, and sociological differences between us, men might as well be from another planet. Stop and think for a minute about the odds of your getting along with someone who came from a very different background, was brought up with completely different values, and was taught to think, behave, and communicate in a totally different style from your own. Next to impossible, right? Yet every day of our lives, we attempt to challenge these odds by having relationships with men. The truth is, it’s a miracle that we get along at all!

The differences between men and women have existed throughout the ages, as I explain in the remainder of this chapter. For thousands of years, women accepted these differences, adapted to them, and took on certain roles that were expected of us. But sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century a revolution took place, a revolution in the way women saw themselves and insisted on being seen by men. For the first time, women were demanding equality in all aspects of life, and in the process, were breaking out of those culturally stereotyped roles they and their mothers and their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers had complacently accepted. The later introduction of effective birth control methods and the flow of women into the work force gave women reproductive and economic freedom from dependance on men.

And so, a crisis in male-female relationships was born. Men were used to being in control, and expected women to behave submissively. Now women were saying, “No, I don’t want to act that way anymore.” The truth was that we still weren’t sure of how we were supposed to act as “new women.” We were confused, and our confusion made the men in our lives even more perplexed. It’s as if we were still playing the same game, but all the old rules were thrown out, and we hadn’t finished making up the new ones yet. One minute we wanted to be liberated; the next, we wanted to be taken care of. We went to work and learned to support ourselves, but we still expected a man to hold the door for us on the way into our office. We begged men to open up and show us their vulnerabilities, but found ourselves getting turned off when they started sounding weak. And while our own double standards bothered us, they drove men crazy.

As modern women, we are on the way to mastering our professional and financial lives. But when it comes to our relationships with men, we’re more frustrated than ever, and sometimes it seems as if we haven’t made any progress at all. As one very successful female business executive said to me recently, “I can figure out how to make my company hundreds of thousands of dollars and how to buy my own condominium, but I still can’t figure out how to have a good relationship with a man!” For this woman, as well as for many of us, men are the “final frontier,” the one area that remains an untamed mystery in our lives.

Warning: This is not a “men are jerks” book! It isn’t about blaming men, or making them wrong for how they behave

INSTEAD, IT’S A COLLECTION OF VALUABLE INFORMATION THAT I’VE SHARED WITH THOUSANDS OF WOMEN, INFORMATION THAT HAS HELPED THEM UNDERSTAND WHY MEN ARE THE WAY THEY ARE, AND TAUGHT THEM NEW WAYS TO RELATE TO MEN.