Kevin Leman wants you to know that men are less complicated than you give them credit for. At the core of men, you'll find a sensitive, emotional being that needs to feel loved, respected and needed. Men are very protective of their core. It's this protective behavior that keeps men from openly sharing their feelings with women. But, Kevin Leman knows that the more you understand and are sensitive to the fears, anxieties, and insecurities that make the men in your life behave the way they do, the stronger your relationships will be.
7 THINGS HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU ... but you need to know
By KEVIN LEMANTYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
Copyright © 2007 Kevin Leman
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4143-1209-5 Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................................xvWhat a Man Really Craves ...IT ONLY TAKES THREE THINGS TO SATISFY YOUR GUY (HINT: THEY MAY NOT BE WHAT YOU THINK.)#1 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................1"It's Thursday, and I'm out of words already" ("But if you want to keep talking, honey, go ahead")WHY MEN WANT THE CLIFF'S NOTES, AND WOMEN WANT THE WHOLE NOVEL.#2 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................23"Think of me as a four-year-old that shaves"WHY BOYS NEVER REALLY DO QUITE GROW UP ... AND WHY YOU WOULDN'T WANT THEM TO.#3 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................57"I have a purple dining room, and I could care less!"WHY A MAN'S HOME IS REALLY NOT HIS CASTLE, AND WHY YOU'RE TEMPTED TO TURN HIM INTO A GIRLFRIEND.#4 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................77"I'm desperate for you to need me"IS YOUR GUY STARVING FOR ATTENTION ... FROM YOU?#5 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................103"I've thought about sex 33 times today, and it's not even noon"GUYS ARE WIRED DIFFERENTLY, AND FOR A VERY GOOD REASON!#6 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................125"I told you I didn't want to go!"WHAT YOUR MAN FEARS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE ... AND HOW YOU MAY BE DOING THAT VERY THING IN SUBTLE WAYS.#7 THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU.........................................................................................................................149"I'd take a bullet for you"WHY YOUR MAN LONGS NOT ONLY TO BE A HERO, BUT YOUR HERO.CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................................167Talking His LanguageIF YOU UNDERSTAND HIS BASIC NEEDS AND TALK IN WAYS HE UNDERSTANDS, YOU'LL BE WELL ON YOUR WAY TO THE RELATIONSHIP OF YOUR DREAMS!EPILOGUE..............................................................................................................................................175Running the Race ... TogetherYOUR MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS ARE BEING FORMED RIGHT NOW.Quizzes & Quiz Answers................................................................................................................................177Notes.................................................................................................................................................183About Dr. Kevin Leman.................................................................................................................................187Resources by Dr. Kevin Leman..........................................................................................................................189Chapter One
THING HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU
"It's Thursday, and I'm out of words already." ("But if you want to keep talking, honey, go ahead.")
Why men want the Cliff's Notes, and women want the whole novel.
* * *
It was one of those evening social events I hate. The ones where you have to dress up, look your best, and try to act social even when it's not your thing and you're feeling strangled because your tie is too tight.
But because I love my wife, I agreed to accompany her ... although, after we got there, I didn't see her for most of the evening.
I wandered around for a few minutes, giving others the nod and a smile, and finally ended up at the punch bowl. Somehow, when you're not feeling quite comfortable, it helps to be holding something.
After I had poured my punch as slowly as possible, I stepped back to scan the room and take the tiniest of sips.
Just then another man stepped up to the punch bowl. I gave him "the nod."
A nod is the universal man language, and it's easy to do. When you see another man, you raise your head half an inch. He raises his head half an inch back. You've just exchanged a whole conversation, and you're both satisfied. You've both said, without saying it, "Hey, how are you doing? Great party, isn't it?"
But this guy at the punch bowl looked as lost as I felt.
Suddenly a streak of vulnerability came over me. I extended my hand. "I'm Kevin."
He shook it. "Rick."
"Great party, huh?" I added.
And then, right there, I'd run out of words. After all, this guy was a stranger. I didn't need to go farther with him.
Still we stood at the punch bowl.
So I tried again. "So ... what do you do for a living?"
That little exchange filled another 30 seconds.
We'd run out of words again. What do you say when there's no recent ball game to talk about?
Then Sande walked by. A vision of loveliness in my eyes and, even better, my social rescuer. "Rick, this is my wife, Sande," I said, grasping my wife's arm.
The awkwardness was suddenly over. Sande stuck around and filled in the gaps for a few minutes with her lively personality, then whisked me away to introduce me to a couple other people.
I felt like a fish that had just been landed, flopping wildly and with bug eyes, on the deck of a boat. Then some kind soul said, "Oh, look at him" and had mercy on me and threw me back in the water, where I could breathe and be comfortable again.
Now let's say that you are a woman and you meet another woman named Carol for the first time at a party over a punch bowl.
"Hello," she says. "I'm Carol."
You introduce yourself and add, "Cute shoes."
"Oh, I got them at Macy's," she begins, and then the two of you are off and running. Even if you are a quiet woman by nature, within your 45-minute conversation, you'll talk about shoes, your dresses, where you love to shop, your favorite punch recipe, the places you visited this summer and what you loved about them, how you miss a friend who moved away, etc. And you know what? Although one of you is the vice president of a local bank and the other a nurse at a city hospital, what you do for a living doesn't even come up. You don't tend to talk shop.
But you both walk away with phone numbers written on napkins, waving good-bye and saying, "Hey, I'll call you." And what's more amazing to us men, you often do!
HEARING [not equal to] ANSWERING
Are we men just relational clods? Sometimes, yes. But consider that because women on average use three and a half times as many words as men (as I stated in the introduction to this book), when we get home from work, we're done with our word count. That means anything in the evening (when many social events occur) comes at us when we're feeling the least relational. Seriously, because we've had to exchange words all day to get the job done, a relationship with the remote control is looking awfully good. It doesn't ask us questions or get mad at us if we don't have a task done or if we don't answer a question a certain way.
That's why when you talk to us about anything, it's not that we don't want to hear you. It's often that we're not equipped to answer you at that very moment. But most of the time, even if we are in that easy chair, flipping channels with the remote control, we do hear you. It may just take us a while to process.
Remember that we're used to you running relational circles around us. Sometimes it takes us a while to catch up with you! But often what we hear mid-process is the "big sigh," then an irritated "Are you listening to me?" Frankly, it has taken twenty minutes to "detox" from work and figure out the next step on the project for tomorrow, and now we're starting to catch on to the fact that at the end of your long diatribe, there's a very important point. And it's something we definitely should know about ... maybe even do something about.
Because women in general have a need to talk, to communicate, to process, sometimes a man will tune you out when the flow of words becomes too great. You know what I'm talking about-and exactly when that happens with your guy! His eyes start to glaze over, he focuses even more on the newspaper or the TV, and he starts to say "Uh-huh" to everything you say. What usually happens? You grow frantic to be understood, so you talk more, and the gap between you widens further.
Meanwhile, your guy is thinking, Would you just stop talking and let the air recirculate in the room?
It's no wonder this kind of scene happens, when you consider the differences between what men and women long for.
A WOMAN'S TOP THREE NEEDS
When I ask women what they want the most, I get responses like this:
"I want to be loved. I want to not only know I'm loved, I want him to tell me and show me that."
"I want to talk and know that he's hearing me. Sometimes I don't want an answer; I just want to process."
"I want him to be there for me and the kids. I want us to be his top priority."
"I want to be his soul mate."
"I want to hear about his day, and I want him to hear about mine ... and care!"
"I want to know he is thinking about me during the day."
When I asked men at a recent marriage seminar what women want the most, one man blurted out loudly, "Visa!"
As his wife gave him the elbow, laughter broke out from the other men in the audience.
When you get right down to it, a woman's three basic needs are, in this order,
1. affection;
2. honest, open communication;
3. commitment to family.
Affection
More than anything, a woman needs affection. To a guy, affection means sex. To a woman, it means hugs, kisses, handholding, back rubs, a flower, or a sweet note for no reason. It means her man giving to her without having to have something back. She needs affection as affection, not simply as foreplay.
I doubt there is a woman alive who would say, "I just love it when my husband grabs me!" A woman wants to be petted, caressed, embraced. And there is an unheard question that she asks of her man every day: "Do you really love me?" If her husband only shows her affection during sex, it won't be long before a woman will feel unloved. After all, she thinks, he's only sweet to me when he wants sex. And she's going to feel used-as if she's his property or an object, rather than the woman of her man's dreams ... the woman he loves and cherishes more than anyone else on earth.
How does a woman feel cherished? When I asked a few women, here's what they said:
"When he tells me what a good mother I am."
"When he takes out the garbage without being asked on trash day."
"When he cleans up the mess I made in the kitchen."
"When he tells me I'm beautiful to him, even on the days I'm feeling fat and ugly."
A woman needs to know that she is loved for who she is, not simply for what she does. She needs to know her guy is thinking about her with affection and love at home and when he is away from home. As one woman told me, "Because I know he loves me, I can manage even the hardest of days and come out okay. His love gives my life purpose."
Honest, open communication
Did you know that scientific studies prove why a woman tends to be more "relational" than her male counterpart? A woman actually has more connecting fibers than a man does between the verbal and the emotional side of her brain. That means a woman's feelings and thoughts zip along quickly, like they're on an expressway, but a man's tend to poke slowly, as if he's walking and dragging his feet on a dirt road. Eventually his thoughts will catch up with the woman's, but it may be miles down the road.
In the miles in between is where women tend to get exasperated. After all, you're so good at expressing your feelings and jumping from topic to topic, who can blame you for rolling your eyes when all you get out of your guy is "the grunt"? To make matters more exasperating, he might call a buddy a minute after he's given you the grunt in response to your questions and launch into a 10-minute discussion about the size of the trout they caught last summer, what software program just went on sale, or that Cingular Wireless stock just went up.
Male-female communications expert Deborah Tannen, in her classic book, You Just Don't Understand, calls male-female communication "cross-cultural communication." She explains it this way:
If women speak a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence, then communication between men and women can be cross-cultural communication, prey to a clash of conversational styles. Instead of different dialects, it has been said they speak different genderlects.
Tannen goes on to say that when a husband and wife are sitting at a breakfast table and the man is reading a newspaper, there is a big difference in what women and men think talk is for:
To him, talk is for information. So when his wife interrupts his reading, it must be to inform him of something that he needs to know. This being the case, she might as well tell him what she thinks he needs to know before he starts reading. But to her, talk is for interaction. Telling things is a way to show involvement, and listening is a way to show interest and caring. It is not an odd coincidence that she always thinks of things to tell him when he is reading. She feels the need for verbal interaction most keenly when he is (unaccountably, from her point of view) buried in the newspaper instead of talking to her.
How do the different genders respond to this situation?
To this man ... a woman who objects to his reading the morning paper is trying to keep him from doing something essential and harmless. It's a violation of his independence-his freedom of action. But when a woman who expects her partner to talk to her is disappointed that he doesn't, she perceives his behavior as a failure of intimacy: He's keeping things from her; he's lost interest in her; he's pulling away.
Are guys capable of talking? You bet. But the time to catch them is usually not the instant they walk in from work, when they're in front of the television, or when they're reading a magazine or newspaper. All three of those activities are saying, "I need my space."
If you want to converse with your man, pick your time wisely. You don't want to pick Sunday afternoon, during the fourth quarter of his beloved Bears game, to try to launch a conversation. One of the best ways is to watch something he's in the process of doing-such as building something out of wood in the garage-and say, "Wow, that looks interesting. Tell me more about that." Now you've got his attention. You've shown interest in one of his projects, and he'll be more than happy to talk with you.
If there's something you need or want to tell him, a great way to get his attention is simply to touch him. To your guy, your touch is powerful, and it can wonderfully open up communication lanes between you. As you're touching him, say, "Honey, I've got a really important question to ask you. You seem to be in deep thought, so now may not be the best time. If so, just let me know, and I'll wait until the time is right."
By touching him, you got his attention. By addressing him with respect, you secured his attention. And by giving him the choice of talking or not, you're almost guaranteed to have a captive listener!
Commitment to family
Children are pesty little buggers sometimes, and they can really get in the way of marital intimacy. But how much time your husband spends with your children and how he treats them has a lot to do with a woman's marital satisfaction. Generally, a woman feels comforted and loved by her husband when he goes out of his way to spend meaningful time with the kids. Why is this? Because those children and what happens in their days and their psyches are an extension of a woman's self.
Yet what often happens is that men are so busy pursuing their role of being breadwinner (we'll talk more about why this is so important to a guy later) that they are home less than you'd like them to be. They may even get home after the children are in bed ... all because they are so committed to fulfilling their God-given drive to provide financially for their family.
Sadly, many men are not a significant part of their family's life. They may either feel like "that's not my job" or they may be unaware of why they feel so driven to succeed. They may even think subconsciously, She does such a good job with them that she doesn't really need me. Behind the scenes, he may feel like the little boy who doesn't have a place to go, so he's killing time by scuffing his shoe in the dirt, hoping to find some more pennies to bring home.
But nagging him will go nowhere. "If you cared about this family, you would have been at Jack's game!"
Instead, why not try this approach? "It means a lot to Jack that you took the time to be there today. Thanks for doing that!"
What guy wouldn't try to make it out of work early for the next game after hearing that?
For those of you who don't have children to think about in your relationship, think about how you feel when your husband goes over to your mother's house and helps her with a task she can't do on her own ... without you bugging him about it. Doesn't that give you warm, fuzzy feelings for your man?
When your guy goes out of his way for the family, tell him about it. Tell him how much you appreciate what he did. Remember that we
WHEN YOUR THREE BASIC NEEDS COLLIDE WITH HIS
Take a quick look at the needs of a man, and the needs of a woman, side by side:
A MAN'S TOP THREE NEEDS A WOMAN'S TOP THREE NEEDS 1. to be respected 1. affection 2. to be needed 2. honest, open communication 3. to be fulfilled 3. commitment to family
Is it any wonder a woman's basic needs can conflict greatly with a man's basic needs to be respected, needed, and fulfilled? A woman wants to cuddle; a man craves sex. A woman wants to talk; a man has run out of words. A woman longs for the family to do everything together; a man longs for some independence.
THINGS YOU'LL NEVER HEAR FROM A MAN
"Honey, can we just cuddle tonight and talk?"
"If I took Friday off, could we go shopping and make a weekend of it?"
"Is there any way we can get your mother to stay a week longer? She's only been here a month."
"Of course, I'll go with you to the ballet. I love seeing those men in tights."
One of the hardest things for a woman to realize is that sharing is not the key to your husband's heart, as it is for yours. You love words, sentences, complete thoughts, and paragraphs. You're in great command of your words, feelings, and thoughts. You are the Energizer Bunny of communicators who keeps going and going and going and going.... Your husband often feels like the bunny who has the wrong kind of batteries, lying mute on his side.
Here's the kicker: I wholeheartedly believe that your success or failure in marriage depends on how good you are at knowing your spouse's needs and meeting them.
And you, as a woman, can set all kinds of things in motion with the words you use with your husband. Your words can bring him joy and confidence, even when he feels like he's failed in some area, or they can shut him down. Then he'll be like Harry the tortoise, who hides under his enormously thick shell. He'll pull his arms and legs in. You could get the biggest pitchfork in the world and poke at him, to get him to move, but he'll refuse. He'll ignore you completely. In fact, he won't come out of that shell until you go away!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 7 THINGS HE'LL NEVER TELL YOU ... but you need to knowby KEVIN LEMAN Copyright © 2007 by Kevin Leman. Excerpted by permission.
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