Happy St. Valentine's Day, to those of you who live where it is celebrated, and a wonderful day to the rest of you as well. Since St. Valentine's Day is today held as a day of romance (it was originally a day set aside for old flames to get back in touch with each other, and it was okay on that day for women to let previous suitors know that they were again entertaining gentlemen callers, usually after a broken engagement or they were widowed, and therefore had nothing to do with existing couples), let's take a look at a movie that gives a very clear picture of what "romance" and "romantic thought" is really about. It's called "Don Juan DeMarco," and it's at all of the better movie rental houses.
For those who have not seen the movie, you have been missing out, especially if you are a man trying to get a grip on the rules of romance and attraction. In a nutshell, Johnny Depp plays the main character, Don Juan DeMarco, who is a 21-year old man who has decided that his life has been fulfilled as he has romanced the 1,000th woman of his lifetime. He climbs a billboard and says that he will throw himself to the street if he is not allowed to duel with another Spanish don who lived in the 17th century, a contemporary of the original Don Juan.
Marlon Brando is playing a psychiatrist who just happens by, talks him down off the billboard by posing as another don who invited him to come down and discuss life with him, and promptly admits him at a local psychiatric facility where he works. Brando thinks at first he is schizophrenic, until he starts to see that DeMarco's not delusional at all, but dthat he merely chooses to look for the best, the greatest, the most heroic, and most enjoyable in everything he sees.
I won't spoil the rest of the movie for you, but the way that DeMarco looks at things, seeing the mental hospital as the don's villa instead of the doctor's treatment center, seeing women as beautiful, sexy creatures who want to be wanted and who want to express their sexuality, focusing only on the best in everything is what I want you to see. He is taking it to the extreme, but there are times and situations when it is safe to take romance to this same extreme.
If you do so when it is safe, and let yourself be swept up in it when nobody can be hurt by it, it helps make you more acutely aware of the beauty, wonder, heroism, humor, and other things around you that you can still appreciate even when things are bad, so that you can see the proverbial silver lining in clouds and not let bad situations overwhelm you. Instead you can keep your chin up, shoulders back, and be inspired by the romance of even the worst situation and overcome it, instead of being swallowed by it and becoming a has-been who gave it up instead of a hero who gave his all.
This is something that everyone, especially the woman in your life, just loves to see. Indeed, the reactions of the women in the movie to the somewhat exaggerated romanticism is not at all exaggerated. I've seen them first hand, reacting to things I've done, and watched them grip tablecloths, napkins, sofa cushions, until their knuckles turned white as they fell under the spell of romanticism; while in my twenties, I watched one woman clench her fist until her nails dug into her palm and bled as I described an interpretation of a dance to her. When I saw the blood drip from her fist, I grinned a naughty grin and said, "You sprung a leak, there, didn't ya?" She knocked me flat on my back, saying, "Yeah, and you're about to!" tore our clothes to shreds trying to get us out of them, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Women will literally kill to feel attraction, and if you can't make them feel it at least sometimes, it doesn't matter how much they love you, they will be driven to have somebody make them feel it or they will fall into a depression that can after a time become suicidal, and you cannot blame them for this in any way. Make no mistake, this need is 100% biological, and there is no amount of love, faith, religion, guilt, or even brute force or beating than can stop them from needing it and responding to either finding it or lacking it.
It may take a few years for them to gradually decline, and they may leave you before you ever see the full force of the decline as a survival mechanism takes over, but lost attraction and boredom are a major cause of midlife-onset depression, substance abuse, spousal abuse, and suicide, and since women don't always recognize and treat their needs because they get caught up in the needs of their family, the drama of hardship, etc. It is YOUR job, as the man in their life, to recognize their need for this feeling and provide it; it is the price you pay for their nurturing and all the other things they provide for you. Anything you do that creates this feeling for them will be repaid many times over; it is the only sure thing that you are likely to ever encounter in this life.
Creating attraction is not difficult, IF you know how to create it, and not hard to maintain if you also know how to avoid killing it, which under some circumstances can be done with as little as a glance or a word. "THE Man's Guide to Great Relationships and Marriage" was written for the sole purpose of making your long-term relationship all that it can be, by teaching you how to evaluate and manage a relationship, how to communicate with a woman on a level that will give you the answers to the ancient question, "What makes women tick and what do they really want?" and to give you that understanding of the nature, creation, and destruction of attraction. (In the unfortunate case that you are paired with someone who is a hopelessly bad match and with whom you can never be happy, it will also help you to figure that out, get out, and find someone infinitely more suitable so that you both can be happy.) Now, think about this for a second...
If you could buy dinner for two and have your dinner guest tell you what women really want, what makes them tick, how to talk to and listen to them, how to turn them on and off sexually, and how to make sure that they would be fun and exciting for the rest of your life, and if it turned out that you couldn't or just plain didn't use what they told you they'd send you the money for the check, would you do it? I'd have bought that dinner a hundred times over to get back the first umpteen years of my adult life, before I did the research to write this book. I'd be coming up on my 25th anniversary instead of my 12th, too, and would likely have been in my first marriage instead of my fourth, because I would have chosen well the first time and made it work instead of having to go through three false starts when I was probably too young and immature to be married at all.
It's never too late to take corrective action, and it's never too soon to start preventive maintenance. Just go for it. Right here, right now. Hop on over to http://www.makingherhappy.com and download your copy, before you do another thing, because life is too short to settle for the mundane, boring, frustrating, and painful potential disaster (DIVORCE!) you leave yourself open to if you don't.
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
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