Real Modern Man

[Update] 2d and 3rd printings have been checked over, and we anticipate releasing the 4th printing as the 1st Edition.

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I have hard copies of the first draft of Practical Female Psychology... sitting right here on my desk.

Maybe I'll post a picture.

Since we're self-publishing, we'll be doing a few hard copy drafts to make sure the formatting is acceptable. All three of us are really picky. Faster is not always better!

So, Real Soon Now.

Handling relationship crises requires emotional strength. Many times, relationship crises result from a man's inability or ignorance to properly respond to the woman's emotional desires. Often, the man caves in, or "collapses" as his heart softens to her pleas of emotional distress and conspires with his inability to lead her emotions away from self-destructive energy. Or, the man may harden his heart, lashing out in frustration with truly damaging. A better way is being strong hearted, allowing her self-destructive emotional energy to dissipate against a masculine strength, where a man's heart is exposed and vulnerable, yet strong enough to deal with any fury she sends his way.

Soft hearted

We are roughly halfway through the "Season." You know, that time between Thanksgiving and Valentine's day when relationships become filled with wonderful, powerful emotions! Also known as the Dark Days for single men (and women, but for different reasons).

In any case, it's Christmas! So, Merry Christmas!

Two important aspects (of many) to Christmas are gift giving and gift receiving. Many people are good at one or the other, but truly enjoying Christmas requires being good at both.

Gift giving

I have a female acquaintance who has difficulty with men. Part of her difficulty is that she focuses on her social differences rather than her social commonalities. She makes it very difficult to establish rapport by insisting on how she is "different."

Breaking rapport seems rampant in two particular types of people:

• Self-centered people possibly with low self-esteem.
• Member of subcultures defined by social differences with society at large.

Because if you aren't taking your time with her, she will take your time from you.

And you won't like it.

There are no exceptions.

When you accept a woman into your life, when you decide you want to have a relationship with a woman, when you choose her for a relationship, you must ensure that you have a chosen a woman that you can spend your time with.

When you choose a woman for a relationship, you have chosen a relationship where she expects you to lead. You must lead. If you do not, you are implicitly abrogating your contract with her. Expect drama. Lots of drama.

Make her feel

Back in the days of yore, that is, before women won the "right" to be admitted to what used to be exclusively male clubs and venues, men could talk freely and frankly about personal matters such as relationships with women.

Now, men are isolated from each other, and subject to possibly severe penalties for sexual harassment if such discussion makes a woman "feel uncomfortable." (Basing legal rights on emotional state is a topic for future investigation.) And popular culture insists that men are relationship morons, with the emotional range of teaspoons.

What I am going to try to explain is at once really simple, and really hard. It's along the lines of getting yourself un-betaized. It can happen in an instant. It's completely internal, and it will invert any congruency issues you have. That is, your inner game becomes more solid than your outer game.

Before I get started... my main audience is the roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of you reading that are either now in are will end up in a long term relationship or married, but you are NOT interested in weak, namby-pamby Dad's-an-idiot kind of relationship. All of it applies as well to pickup and to young boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, but when you are faced with picking up the same chick over and over again, for years, owning the high level frame is critical.

Barry Bonds, an US baseball player, is in the news for allegedly lying to a grand jury. The comments from readers are more interesting than the article:

• Most of these commenters dislike Bonds because he is arrogant.
• Most of these same commenters are willing to judge him guilty a priori of the trial.

My interest in this is whether Bonds has the balls enough to carry through and risk serving the sentence (like Martha Stewart), or whether he is a poser and will eventually break in plea bargain of sorts (like Don Imus getting fired).

As I write this, there is a debate of sorts raging back and forth in the pickup and men's self-development community: should a man "fake-it-til-you-make-it," or just should he "just be yourself, authentically." My answer, do both.

Here's the deal: fake-it-til-you-make-it works. And it doesn't work. It worked for me, both with my interactions with women and for starting my own business. But it hasn't worked for a friend of mine. Will it work for you, or not work for you? Here are some helpful hints.

It works

Self-development is a catchall term denoting a process of continued growth past the normal stages of maturation, especially during adulthood. The term "self-development" often carries the connotation of "therapy," that is, dealing with personal problems causing life troubles in social interactions.

But there is another aspect of self-development: coaching.

Think about self-development as a coin. The tails side of the self-development coin represents counseling, looking back into the past to identify trouble issues and neuroses. The heads side represents coaching, identifying what is present and how to build on one's strengths for the future.

Tails