Why Do I Have to Think Like a Man? (13 page)

Rhonda

The journey toward identifying our own baggage is sometimes very challenging and scary. Looking in the mirror and evaluating our flaws is something most of us don’t want to do. I certainly didn’t want to see mine. It was far easier to look outside myself and point the finger than to go within. We often seek to blame other people, including men, for the breakdowns, the BS, and the state of our lives, particularly if where we are is not where we want to be. This doesn’t mean the blame isn’t justified toward the other party, it simply means, the blame mirror should be fully extended to show the full view of both parties.

I can remember my husband and the guys I dated making comments like, “You don’t respect me when we are out in clubs. You don’t know how to act,” or “You feed off the attention of other men.” Instead of looking at myself, I dismissed their comments as jealousy and immaturity. At the time, I didn’t care what they said or how my alleged behavior impacted them. I accepted offers to dance while walking back from the restroom, and danced several songs while my date watched me from the bar. I also took telephone numbers on folded napkins when my date was away getting me a drink. I did these things on a regular basis, without considering what these actions meant. They were just a part of who I was. My disrespectful actions led to the demise of several of my relationships. I was only concerned about myself. There were deeper issues underneath.

On the surface I was an attractive and smart woman who had it “going on.” Yet, internally, I didn’t respect myself or men. I was trying to fill an empty well with attention from everyone. With my ego in charge and my emotions disconnected, I created a lot of suffering for myself and others. This was my baggage.

Now, at age forty-five, with my past behind me, I look back over the years and take full responsibility for the life I lived. I recognize my inappropriate actions and the insecurities that led me to select men who were not good for me, despite the red flags. Because I failed to set high standards for myself, I created much of my own pain.

Today, I see things much more clearly. I say, “No thank you,” to men and situations that aren’t good for me. I have rid myself of many of the old thoughts and ways and I make it a point to keep company with positive, fun, and spiritual people. I live a virtually drama-free life most of the time.

When you look in the mirror and ask yourself honest questions while admitting the truth, breakthroughs can occur. Only you can change your situation. Until you decide to change, however, you will repeat the same behaviors, make the same mistakes, and end up in similar situations. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I can relate, and perhaps you can, too.

Chapter 9
Differentiating Needs from Wants

Shanae

F
or me, I need my man to pull a gold wrapper out his pocket when it’s time to get it in, and a black card out of his wallet when it is time to shop. Okay, let me stop playing.

Since the Word of God says,
“It is not good that man
should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to
him”
(Gen. 2:18;KJV), I think it is safe to say that we need a mate in our lives, but picking the right one is the hard part. According to the Marriage Builders web site (
www.marriagebuilders.com
), the top five emotional needs that should be met in order to maintain a healthy relationship are affection, sexual fulfillment, conversation, recreational companionship, and physical attractiveness. Unfortunately, men and women tend to place a different level of importance on each of these emotional needs. I don’t think
conversation
is on any man’s top five picks (or twenty-five, for that matter). As women, it is important that we choose our battles with our partners. It is naïve to think he’s going to go to work, come home, help the kids with homework, cook dinner, wash dishes, talk about his day, and then have sex with you (although that is what they expect of us). Unless your man’s name is Baby Face, this is probably not going to happen.

The truth is cooking, cleaning, sewing buttons, and making sure everyone has clean clothes to wear is more important to us than it is to our men. When I was married, I used to crack jokes with my husband and say, “You could care less about how much I spent or if the house is clean, as long as there is enough money in the bank for you to make a withdrawal from the ATM, there’s something to eat on the table, and you get
some
that night.” He would laugh and say, “Yep.” The only time we had an issue was when I said no to sex. Then everything was a problem. Clearly, if he had to choose between eating and having sex, he would have chosen sex and starved.

Ladies, believe it or not, men are very clear about what they want, whether they deserve it or not. So, it is time we figure out what we want so we can communicate our needs and choose our battles wisely.

If your man is a great provider, does it really matter that he didn’t wake up with the baby? Or that he didn’t fill up your gas tank after he drove your car to work? I read one woman’s story in Jill Eggleston Brett’s article in
Today’s
Christian Woman
that said:

I felt what I did all day was meet other people’s needs. Whether it was caring for my children, working in the ministry, or washing my husband’s clothes, by the end of the day I wanted to be done need-meeting. I wanted my pillow and a magazine. But God prompted me to ask myself:
Are the “needs” you meet for your husband,
the needs he wants met?
If our daughters weren’t perfectly primped, he didn’t complain. If the kitchen floor needed mopping, he didn’t say a word. And if he didn’t have any socks to wear, he simply threw them in the wash himself. Soon I realized that I was saying no to the one thing he asked of me. (p. 68)

Men are very consistent on a universal level. It is time for us to start deciphering between our wants and our needs and stop jumbling them together. If we only asked for the thing we really needed, our men would view it as obtainable and not overwhelming. The problem is, we ask our men for both our wants and our needs and aren’t consistent about either.

Johnny, a coworker of mine always says women want too much. It appears that way to men because we vocalize every concern and want. While men tend to express only their longing to have the bare minimum met. Great sex and a good meal is all they need to survive; everything else is icing on the cake. Some women have the ability to make everything a big deal. Most women want to be loved by their partner, some women are emotional. Most women tend to translate love and affection as a man’s desire to want to be with her and be around her. As women, we feel loved when our men are aware of our needs and meet them without being told. How sexy is it when your man is in your car, hears a weird noise, and tells you to drive his car until he can get yours fixed? Or when he sees that your purse strap is about to break and he just shows up with a new purse. Not likely to happen too often, but to women, that says, “He loves me and he is aware of all my needs.”

On the other hand, a man feels that he is showing you love when he works long, hard hours to provide for you and the family. In the book
For Women Only,
Shaunti Feldhahn states, “For a man, bringing home a paycheck is love talk, pure and simple. He has something to prove (‘I can take care of you, I am worthy of you’) and he wants to deliver” (p. 80). While it is our job and our duty to express appreciation for their hard work and effort, we must also remind them that the “needs” they deem important may not be on the same level of importance to us. I know we expect our men to read our minds, but what is basic, common sense to us is often a foreign language to them. Take a moment to outline your needs, and then find a good time to tell him (not after work). After sex is always a good time to ask for what you need or want, but make it quick; you might only have five minutes before he is in full REM sleep.

All jokes aside, try setting aside time on his day off, after a really nice, home-cooked meal, or some other time when he is relaxed. Never try to talk to your man during a game—your words will fall on deaf ears.

Chapter 10
Knowing Your Place

Shanae

Before there was
woman
there was
man
. God deemed him to be wise enough to have
“dominion over the fish of
the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over
all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on
the earth”
(Gen. 1:26; KJV). And then some time later God saw that Adam was lonely and said that it was not good for man to be alone. God trusted that the man he created, in his image, was capable of naming all life and tending to it. Yet, for some strange reason, women today don’t trust men to name their pets let alone, tend to the broken coffee table (believe me, I feel the same way at times). Where has the trust gone?

If I learned one thing from my marriage and from all of my male friends, it’s that our men still need that trust from their women (or, as they call it, support, affirmation, loyalty). The truth of the matter is that most women don’t know what the hell it means to “be in your place.” I used to feel my place was any emotion I expressed at that time—hurt, anger, frustration—usually all negative emotions. In my mind, I could say anything I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it. I never saw my parents communicate in a respectful manner. If there was a problem in our house, no one talked, and then both of my parents went out every night until the next argument. This endless cycle continued until they broke up.

In addition to not knowing how to respectfully communicate with a man, particularly, when I was upset, I also didn’t understand and couldn’t relate to the burden that a man carries with him every day. Men carry the burden of being the primary breadwinner, knowing that their wife and kids are depending on them to make sure there is food on the table, and that the lights come on when they hit the light switch. My husband would always say, “You don’t know how it feels to get up and go to work every morning knowing that there is someone there ready to take your job.” I have heard this same statement from entertainers, pro-athletes, and corporate men. I always thought a man’s life was easy. It is the woman who has to give birth, wash clothes, cook, clean, take care of the kids, take care of the man, and work. And when we’re sick, there’s rarely anyone to take care of us (this is still a fact). As a woman, I can’t comprehend the worries and burdens of a man. I can’t even begin to pretend. What I do know, however, is that men and women have very different ways of looking at the world and at each other.

Affirm

Affirming your man is important. My ex-husband used to say he got more affirmation in the streets than he did at home. I interpreted that to mean he received more compliments from girls on the streets than he did from me. I would immediately become defensive, and my response was always, “Well, those chicks don’t live with you, so go get it from them!” He did. One of my male friends told me that affirming a man (e.g., “I’m so proud of you, baby,” “Good job,” “Thanks for taking caring of that today.”) was just as important as having sex with him (hard to believe but apparently true). I then began to realize how insecure and needy men really were. Although they don’t express it the way that women do, men want and need the same confidence-building words to come from their partners as women do.

A celebrity friend of mine was getting ready to shoot a pilot for a cable network that he wrote and produced. On the first day of the shoot, he sent me a text that said, “Wish me luck.” I wrote back, “I would if I thought you needed it, but you are funny, talented, and extremely entertaining, so just go out there and be you.” His response was, “You’re right, thanks babe!” And then it hit me. No matter how much or how little a man makes, he needs that special someone to tell him, “I’m proud of you and you’re special to me.” Never assume that everyone tells him so he doesn’t need to hear it from you, too. You must put positive energy into him. If you don’t, someone else will.

Support

I used to think
support
meant believing in someone who didn’t know whether to wind their butt or scratch their watch. In other words, supporting someone who was just lost. I never understood why Cory would yell and scream that I didn’t support him. I thought, “Yeah, you’re right. I will never support stupidity.” What I didn’t realize was that the things that seemed simple and small to me could have made a big difference in the way that he felt about himself and about me. To a man, “support me” means “believe in me and trust that I am capable of doing some things correctly.” This may be as simple as letting him spend two hundred dollars trying to fix something that cost only thirty bucks to replace, but because he did it wrong the first two times it has become much more expensive. Or it may mean supporting his decision to quit his steady job, with a 401k and health benefits, in order to live out his dream of being an entrepreneur. I encountered both situations and both times I failed to be supportive in some way. One time my husband wanted to call an electrician out to change a fuse. The charge was about two hundred dollars. I went and bought the fuse for about ten dollars and changed it myself in three minutes. The problem was not that I did it myself. The problem was that when it was done I asked him, “Was that really too hard for you to do? You have all those muscles for nothing.” I seemed to make a habit of proving to him that I didn’t need him. This is where we, women, go wrong. Some of us don’t know how to let a man be a man.

I made my man feel incapable. If something was broken, I tried to fix it before I paid someone to fix it. I am a very handy person, and it drove me crazy that he couldn’t fix things or was too lazy to fix things around the house. Instead of nagging him about his inability to fix things, I could have handled it differently. I didn’t have to add to his insecurities.