Are you looking for some good relationship advice for women?
If so, you are not alone. These days relationship problems are on the rise in a big way – couples are breaking up, engagements are being called off, and divorce is becoming the norm for many women.
In probably every single case, this results in an amount of mental/emotional pain and suffering that is almost unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t gone through it before.
Is there anything you can do to prevent this, or is it just a fact that men are less committed to their relationships today and there’s not a lot you can do about it?
My firm view as a dating and relationship advice (for women) author/coach is that maintaining a good relationship and building the levels of commitment over time are things which are definitely not outside of your control.
What you must do is understand men and give them what they want in a relationship. For the reason why men leave relationships (either physically or in spirit) is because they are not getting what they want out of them. It is that simple.
There are a ton of things that I could tell you about how to make a man want to stay in a relationship and provide what you need as a woman. But I don’t want to give you information overload, so I have boiled it down to a couple of vital things.
The keys to having and maintaining a good relationship with your man are:
1. Being an Attractive Woman
For your man to want to continue to be in a romantic relationship with you, he firstly needs to feel attracted to you.
This is not a one-time thing that you turn on just to draw him in at the start of the relationship and then forget about once he has made some commitment to you. No, you have to attract your man every day.
Unfortunately though, too many women do forget about this and let themselves go. I am not just talking about physical appearance here. There is a lot more to attracting a man than just looking good, as I explain in my book What Men Want: The Essential Guide on How to Attract Men … and Keep Them! which is available here: What Men Want. In this I go through the ten qualities that are most attractive to men.
What you need to do is continue being the person who he met and fell in love with. So if you were an interesting and fun person who engaged fully with life, you need to keep being that person after you have been together for five, ten and even 25 years.
Just because he has already committed to you, this doesn’t give you the excuse to become dull and boring, withdrawn, moody, depressed, apathetic, needy etc. I am not saying that you have actually become any of these things, but this is a bit of a checklist to go through.
The point is though that when men commit to you in a relationship, what they are expecting is more of the same. If a woman ceases to be this person, a man will feel less happy and fulfilled in the relationship, and may start to reevaluate it.
2. Making Him Feel Like a Man
The second key to a good relationship is that you must make your man feel like a man. The reason I bring this up is that many women emasculate their men over time and make them feel stupid and useless.
Unfortunately our society does not help the situation by painting men as idiots and buffoons who just don’t get it – especially on television and in the advertising industry. And while feminism has redressed some imbalances, it has in my opinion overcorrected in many cases to the point where it has affected male-female relationships in very negative ways.
Men need to feel appreciated for their strength and competence just as women need to feel appreciated for their beauty.
Saying and doing things which imply that your man lacks competence and is not trustworthy is akin to him making a comment about how you don’t look very attractive anymore.
Obviously if a man said or did anything even remotely like this, you would be absolutely devastated and certainly withdraw from him in some way.
But women just don’t realize that they often make men feel this way by things such as nagging them and showing anger, contempt and disappointment at things that he does or fails to do. Women have a way to leave a man in absolutely no doubt as to their feelings, without even saying a word. For example, throwing their head in the air, rolling their eyes and sighing. This crushes a man.
Women can also make a man feel less of a man by doing things like giving him unsolicited advice, organizing things for him, or just taking over. What these things scream loud and clear is that “I don’t trust you”.
When a woman does these things, a man will withdraw from her to some extent and subconsciously look for the appreciation and approval of another woman whom he finds attractive.
This in my opinion is the main reason why men who have been married for 20 years end up sleeping with their young secretaries at work. These women do make them feel like a man by deferring to them and making them feel competent – unlike their wife at home.
While there is no way that I can know exactly what your individual situation is, I can assure you that if you are having issues in your relationship, there is a fair chance that some of what I have just shared with you is part of the problem. Men feel very satisfied in a relationship when they feel attracted to their woman and she makes them feel like a man.
But if you don’t believe that any of these things I’ve mentioned are part of the problem, there is the strong possibility that you are with the wrong man. Either he has bad character and will never be a good partner, or maybe the two of you are just too different (eg. you are being pulled in different directions in life or have values that conflict).
Alternatively, he is possibly just unaware of your wants and needs in the relationship and how to please you. In this case, it would be a good idea to sit down and talk things through or get some professional counseling together if talking has not worked so far.
Anyway, I hope that this advice I have given you has provided you with valuable tips which you can apply in your relationship. And if you would like to go much deeper into these issues we have talked about, I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy of my “What Men Want” book.
In this, I go into a lot of detail about the key things that cause men to feel attraction for a woman and how she can convert this into relationship success over time.
If you want to know how to attract a man and keep him interested in you over the long haul, this book is definitely for you.
Click here to discover What Men Want
