What a perfect day this has turned out to be! There are some days when just being competent and attentive are enough to get everything done, and this is looking like it will be one of them. I hope yours goes as well!
I get a lot of letters every day from readers about their problems and successes, and amongst the problem letters are a few common threads, the biggest of which seems to be female boredom. It permeates almost every situation in some manner, especially those where the man thinks that everything is going well until the very moment he gets slapped with divorce papers and when, in his shock, he asks, "I thought everything was fine! What's this about?" he hears the words, "See! YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME!"
What happened?
She's bored to tears, tried to tell him in what she thinks is the most verbose means possible (which unfortunately often means that she rolls her eyes with her back turned to him or has asked him if he would like to do something different instead of TELLING him that SHE NEEDS to do something different - we'll touch on that again in one of the upcoming issues on inter-gender communications, but it's covered in detail in "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage"), and being a man with the male, typically limited communications structure we are born with, he didn't pick up on the complaint, and she got increasingly frustrated and finally fed up.
That's what caused the divorce threat (which incidentally, may be only a wake-up call, which you can determine immediately if you know what to look for, which is also discussed in "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage"), but what caused the root problem, the boredom itself?
Whoa! Did you think about that when you read it? The threat of a break-up or a divorce is a problem, but in the bigger picture, it's merely a very revealing symptom of a bigger problem, and stopping the divorce is only a temporary stay of execution, not a problem solution. Getting the relationship back on track requires fixing the problem(s) that got you to the stage of the divorce threat.
Getting back to the boredom problem, as men, we like a simple life. We don't mind routine nearly as much as women because for us, a neutral (neither perilous nor exciting) environment means the absence of problems, and that's a big plus; we'll take a little excitement when we can get it too, but we're happy to just be outside the reach of problems for a day. Our emotional scale is such that negative emotion is on one end and positive emotion is on the other end, and emotional neutrality is in the middle, and therefore better than negative emotions. We're biologically wired to seek status quo, situation normal, a stable, threat-free environment because we've evolved as protectors for a hundred thousand years or more.
All the men who don't know any better are right now saying, "So what? Anything else would be crazy!" Well, you and I might think so, but...
All the women are right now saying that we are the crazy ones! Their emotional scale runs from zero to infinity, not negative to positive; to them, lack of emotional outlet for their energy is the worst possible state, and they really don't distinguish that much between positive and negative emotion, at least as far as their biological need for emotional energy is concerned (which is different from their conscious tolerance of it). That's why they enjoy and even NEED tear-jerking movies that we think are a depressing (and somewhat masochistic) waste of time. Do you see the problem?
They need things stirred up more than we do, and in our quest for the problem-free environment, not knowing that our needs are different from theirs, we misinterpret their cooperation as their approval, their sharing of our need to have a calm, stable environment; wrong answer! They cooperate because they are social, and are expecting something in exchange for their cooperation, not because they enjoy being bored.
They are also, intentionally or not, following your lead, waiting for you to get around to the fun and exciting part. That's why they need you to be an alpha male, a leader, to get naughty with them when they aren't expecting it, to leave little surprises for them in places they don't expect them, the impromptu picnics and vacations, etc. Without things like that, they go nuts! However, don't go overboard; too much of a good thing ruins it!
This is the other classic mistake that men make. We have such a hard time figuring out what women want that when we find something, we drown them in it. I've seen guys find out that a woman likes chocolate and be shoving it in her mouth every time she opens it until she's literally sick of chocolate, ruining one of her favorite things for her, and women really hate that. And when men do it and it doesn't work out, they think, "Well, that ungrateful bitch! I gave her unlimited supply of her favorite thing and this is the thanks I get?!" No, Dude. You're not getting thanks at all. And after ruining her enjoyment of one of her favorite things, be it a food, an activity, a sexual position, or whatever, you shouldn't be expecting thanks, either.
That's right. It's very easy to give a woman too much of a good thing, even when it comes to sex. If you want to ruin your sex life to the point that it wrecks your relationship, all you have to do is find out that she likes something in bed, and do it every single time you have sex until she tells you to stop doing it. She'll not only grow bored with the act, she'll hate you for ruining one of her favorite sexual things.
And guys, be honest. Just about every one of us, alive now and who has ever lived, has at some point in his life heard a woman say something like, "oh, I love to be on top," or "I love doggie-style," and let that suddenly become 99% of your sexual repertoire. The magic was gone pretty fast after that, wasn't it? You must mix it up in the bedroom just as much as you must mix it up in the rest of the house and outside the house. Use her favorite things as a reward, put forth at the climax (no pun intended!) of some event, not as part of any standard operating procedure. Contrary to popular belief, most women (and all the good ones) like a challenge, and like to earn the reward of meeting that challenge, even and especially when the challenge is seducing their husband.
Repeat after me: "BORING IS THE LAST WORD A MAN EVER WANTS TO HEAR A WOMAN USE TO DESCRIBE HIM!" Never forget that; you can bet that she won't. She can't! Avoiding boredom is literally a survival skill for women. It ultimately terrifies and destroys them. Just ask one. Indeed, ask several. And listen to the stories they tell you of what happens when they get bored. You can search my blogs (http://blog.makingherhappy.com/ is the oldest and has the most content) and our forum (http://forum.makingherhappy.com/) for some of those stories, too. Some of their stories will scare the mortal hell out of you when you see what some desperately bored women did to their husbands and even themselves, just because they were bored.
Guys, long-term committed relationships, whether you're married or not, aren't just a piece of cake sitting there waiting for you to bite. They don't necessarily take a lot of work, but there is some work that has to be done no matter how well-matched you are. You can do it on the front end by finding someone with whom you are well-matched and live happily ever after, or you can do it when everything blows up in your face to try to save the situation (and if there are significant compatibility problems, you will inevitably find that it cannot be saved), but either way, you have to be prepared to be in a long-term committed relationship to maintain one whether you have to save it or not.
You have to know whether you are indeed well-matched with a woman, you have to know how to communicate with her so that you can keep things open, developing and committed, and you have to know what sparks and maintains her attraction for you to keep everything fun, exciting, intimate and everything else that keeps it from being boring. Luckily for you, you can find all this in a single source, an instantly downloadable e-book called "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" at http://www.makingherhappy.com/, tested, proven, and working for everyone who is using it. Do it now, because life's too short to spend it trying to work your way out of the doghouse.
In the meantime, live well, be well, and have a wonderful day!
David Cunningham "Being a man is something to which one should aspire, not something for which he should apologize." --David Cunningham
