I've never posted on SSM before and I've only started reading here in the past couple of weeks - but I'm very impressed with the quality of support and advice and some obviously very well read board buddies.
Can anyone help me with reading suggestions for books on the differences between men and women? The Mars and Venus genre I guess.
I'm in the process of rebuilding my life post divorce and I've done a lot of work on understanding myself, decoupling myself from my relationships, I know a lot about what women want and what they/we need to be comfortable in a relationship - but I'm really interested in what men are looking for.
Any advice.
Thanks for reading. V
V
Never make someone a priority, who makes you an option.
You'll get just as much insight from this kind of forum, based on all the books I've seen. Books can give you a good baseline of what most men want, but not all men want the same thing. And perhaps the man you want is not like most men.
Is there any particular relationship issue for which you'd like insight into men? Considering where you're posting, something about sex?
This may not seem very helpful, but you did ask for advice: don't rely on those books. Some of what they have to say is useful some of the time, but "men" and "women" are too huge and too diverse a pair of groups to be able to generalize really well.
Imagine if someone asked you what animals eat. You'd either be stumped, spend the rest of your week listing foods, or be forced to give them very general, less-than-useful answers like "organic matter" or "animals and also plants."
Same deal if someone asks what men want. You can generalize a bit more about men and women because people usually only ask about the men or the women in their own culture, and the similarities between people of the same culture are a lot more useful than the similarities between people of the same sex, but still--buyer beware.
The nice thing about the forum is that if someone is telling you about her husband, and he sounds like he has a lot in common with your husband, then you know that her experience may have a better chance of being useful for you. If her husband sounds nothing like yours, you'll be likely to take her experiences with a grain of salt.
I guess I should give you the actual kind of help you asked for before I go, huh? Well, I got some help from reading No More Mr. Nice Guy by Glover, but you would only get much from it if your husband is a particular kind of guy--the "Mr. Nice Guy" who tries to avoid his own needs and desires to be a "nice guy" to everyone else and ends up passive-aggressive, unhappy and emasculated. It could help you, but it's really for him to read.
