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.
