A Man’s Guide to Relationships is for women too. The principles for healing and maintaining relationships are the same for all of us, of course. What makes this a Man’s Guide is how it is presented and the tone of the book.
Most relationship books are written for women readers because women buy most of the books in the genre. Men often respond either with disinterest or with hostility to this subject. Men are often intimidated by women’s emotional vocabulary or by their social competence. Men need a book with down to earth stories and easy to follow steps and exercises that will help them build relationship skills.
Men are usually not interested in psychobabble theories about their parents or in new age eastern philosophy. They need a straight forward, how-to approach. This is the aim of this book.
Several things qualify me to write this book: I am a man’s man. I love sports. I come from the male-oriented culture of the small-town rural South. I try to write so that my Arkadelphia, Arkansas brother could read what I write. I distrust esoteric language.
I adore women. I especially adored my mother and I think my love for her was returned to me in overflowing abundance.
And that was my problem. I assumed all women were like my mother. I assumed that if I could ever find a woman that I was attracted to and win her heart, she would love me back just like my mother.
My attempts at finding love were pathetic. I always appeared desperate. By thirty-eight I had many failed relationships and two divorces. As I approached my next marriage to my now wife of twenty-five years, Marietta, I was determined to learn from my past failures and from the mistakes I made with her. It is this determination and work to learn how to love a woman that most qualifies me to write this book.
I have been helped by the more than thirty years of couples who have come to see me in my clinical practice. Their struggles, triumphs and failures have taught me much of what is written here.
Some of their stories are here. Some of mine are too, but all the stories are written so that no one’s identity is compromised and no confidences revealed.
I started the journey of writing this book some five years ago. I was writing exploring the edges of the battle between the sexes. In my relationships I found myself mostly in the wrong, constantly apologizing. Writing this book was to be my way of balancing the sexual scales. I hoped to blame my sins on being male and to also expose the less visible feminine sin. In my mind the male sin was narcissism. I had and have an abundance of that. And the female sin was over-nurturing.
What I found is that, yes, there are, of course, sexual differences in general between men and women, but they breakdown in the particulars of individuals. We as individuals are more alike than we are different. (If that weren’t true, a book like this one could not be written). And individual differences are more profound than sexual differences.
What a disappointment. After all this researching, thinking and writing, I was forced to conclude that sexual differences cannot justify my mistakes and that whatever corresponding female sin there is, does not allow me to shift blame onto women.
It’s more complicated than that and yet it is very simple. I am, you are, we are accountable to learn, grow and change. Our failures are our teacher. Blaming others is a dead end. We have work to do and that work never ends.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are things we can do. These things are within our grasp to learn. And when we learn them and practice them our relationships get better.
This book is straight talk. And it is grounded in scholarship with a strong theoretical frame. This book is meant to be read easily. The goal of the book is to speak to therapists and clients. I offer tools for therapists to teach their clients. These tools are illustrated by stories of people with real problems and strong dialogue. For those of you who are interested in the derivation of my ideas, you will find my references at the end of each chapter, footnoted to the idea in the chapter.
The book has exercises that you can use to internalize the concepts presented and to practice the skills that you are learning. It is helpful to have a therapist with whom you will work while using the tools presented here. If you have trouble in working with an exercise, stop and wait until you can discuss the exercise with a therapist or a third party.
For serious scholars it should be noted that I come from the humanistic emotion-focused therapy school of Jules Seeman, J. R. Newbrough, Leslie Greenberg and Rhonda Goldman. The Greenberg book Emotion Focused Therapy (2001) and the Greenberg and Goldman Emotion-Focused Couple’s Therapy (2008) do an excellent job of describing the theoretical underpinnings of my book with only a few exceptions. This book is a more hands-on practical, how-to book that bridges the gap between serious students and real couples who are ready to get to work. Both will find this book useful.
This book is not about focusing on the past. It is about discovering new problem-solving skills. Part of the book offers ideas like creative listening that psychologists have been promoting for a long time. People of faith will resonate with many of the tenets I promote here. Yet, this is not a religious book. There are several ideas new to the couple’s psychotherapy world, e.g. communion, the third position and confessional communication. The first two chapters explain the theory of balance, describe relationship types and give examples of how balance works in relationships. The following chapters introduce the reader to a variety of relationship tools. They are structures or processes that stop blaming, passive withdrawal, name calling and fault-finding and encourage honor, compassion, trust and respect.
If you are a therapist, this book will help you become more competent at helping couples and it will help you become more competent as a partner in a healthy relationship. It is written assuming that healers are people first and all of us can become healers and receive help with our own healing. If couples consult this book, they will discover where to begin. With work and practice they can tune-up their relationship so that it runs on all cylinders.
