Secret Adolescent

Male Behavior  

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http://www.womenshappiness.com/

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Hi Everyone,

We are continuing our experiment, dividing a longer newsletter up into three bite-sized chunks per week instead of just one LONG one.

The first of the week is a topic you may find very needed for fresh ideas on your relations to men, and your career.  The second will be a question and answer session right from you as readers, and you very well may soon see a letter of your own, sent to me at drpaul@womenshappiness.com answered there.  The final one will again be some homework - something to actually go out and try in your social life or work, and is always based in a scientific principle that guarantees results for all of us.

SECRET "JUVENILE" MALE BEHAVIOR

Perhaps you've been hurt or confused by a man before. He was your date and he didn't call back. Or he was your husband, understood the ground rules about what makes you happy versus what makes you upset, and then he did something he knows you don't approve of and LIED about it afterward.

It was juvenile to you, like what a teenager might do.

Maybe it wasn't a personal situation at all, but in the office instead. A group of men were laughing and chatting as you walked up the hall, quiet as a morgue after you walked in, then as soon as you left, they broke out in conversation again. You felt strange about it, as if perhaps they were laughing at you, or keeping something important from you at least, or perhaps didn't respect you enough to clue you in on what was so important in your absence. Either way you felt excluded, and that just wasn't right.

It was juvenile, and unprofessional to your sensibilities.

There are many books about how to understand yourself as a female. Some of them are by actual scientific experts, and can be trusted. Others are simply by those who feel they are experts simply because they have experienced a lot of life. Maybe you have read them all because you are a curious person. Or maybe you've read none of them because you already know what they will say, and you know yourself well enough not to need their advice anyway.

What you will not find a lot of, ANYWHERE, are books or materials about how MEN think amongst THEMSELVES, and not just about relating to women, but each other and the world around them.  Publishers won't publish them because they think women won't buy them.

Maybe they are right.

But that doesn't change the fact that if you knew a few things about men which have been around for millions of years and aren't going away anytime soon, you're life would be a whole lot EASIER. You'd at least know what you are dealing with.

"Better to deal with the devil I know than the devil I don't."

Men aren't the devil.

But their adolescent side CAN be if it is not guided and advised by a healthy process of character maturity around it. This is the great bulk of what I teach about in my products, such as the mindOS ecourse - how to recognize the specifics of character and personality style that not only can be screened for in men you are considering to have in your life, but in your OWN personal growth that naturally attracts the right men, friends, and career opportunities.

Often, we talk about things to do with your own personal growth, new skills you can build, and what certain social scenarios mean to your current situation as a woman juggling the demands of relationships and work.

Yet every once in awhile it hits me that it is important to explore your "other half." Doing so isn't always to everyone's taste, because after all, http://www.womenshappiness.com/  is about your welfare, not theirs. Still, attracting the right men to your life, whether in personal or business relationships, absolutely necessitates learning their ways, and meeting them half way in understanding. We need to make each other happy, or it is unlikely that we'll provide each other what we need as teammates.

It is a kind of "deal" we must make with each other, because we never control other people, their thoughts, feelings or actions --kind of like learning to speak a foreign language with someone who doesn't know yours in the interest of finding harmony.

Sometimes it's urgent and we need to learn FAST. There's a promotion at stake or a threatened divorce on the horizon. Maybe it involves the welfare of a child, or of your own health.

You don't have forever to figure each other out when there's a bill collector at the door and you're fighting over money, or three other candidates for the job, or an illness that needs addressed and we need supported through a tough time by another person who doesn't even understand your language.

Which is where I step in as a kind of translator. Gender issues are widely talked about, but the role of CHARACTER and PERSONALITY as influences on them is not something available so clearly and easily - in everyday language - anywhere else on the planet. I can say this because even my own professional colleagues don't have a system of step by step character growth worked out yet. It doesn't exist.

Except in the mindOS material.

What if men are like those wooden Russian Dolls. You know - the ones which open up, then you find a smaller doll inside, then opening up, another, and another.

In fact, men are like exactly three of those dolls, encased inside each other.

The outer one is intellectual, verbal, and speaks all the everyday issues you both understand. What needs to be done with your money, where you're going out on a date this week, or what needs to be done for the kids, or your plans for vacation. It's easy to talk to this one, because you get each other at this level.

Inside it is a second doll, a little hidden, and you wish you could talk to it more often. It's EMOTIONAL. The frustrations and joys, the fears you almost never hear about, sometimes the angry temper, and the pride in you and value you have in the man's life.  You don't get to hear from this one quite as often because he prefers to let the outer doll do the speaking, and to hide this one a little.

But there is a third and final doll the deepest inside the man. You rarely see it unless you happen to catch him in the act of unfolding the second one to look at it, and let it out.  He doesn't necessarily want you there to see it because it doesn't at ALL look like the others. In fact, he fear that to you, it looks UGLY, that you'll disapprove of it, not admire it, and in many cases, you don't. Because you don't understand it.

When it speaks, it talks in primitive deep voiced sounds that are hard for you to listen to. It isn't a pretty sound to you. It's foreign. It sounds like jibberish, yet you swear it sounds similar to the sounds you heard when you were walking up the hall to the office.

If you are dating or in a marriage, or in some way romantically involved with a man, it is all the more concerning to you that you hear the strange sound because - my GOD - if you're hearing it work and that feels threatening because you feel like an outsider at times, how much worse is it to hear the same sound at home, where it's supposed to be SAFE and things are supposed to be FAMILIAR and NORMAL for you?

You back off, walk away, or if scared enough by the foreignness, you ask your boyfriend, love interest, or husband to close that second doll up, cover it up. Maybe you even yell at him to get it out of your sight.

This inner Russian Doll is his ADOLESCENCE.

It is not something that has EVER left him, nor ever WILL it leave his inner core as a man. It simply got covered over by emotion, then the sophisticated diplomacy of the intellect, the thoughtfulness and maturity of the character in the man's personality. But it's there, underneath, ALWAYS.

Yes, for ALL men, the immature, the mean, the abusive, the ignorant, the kind, the strong, the supportive, the partner, the man in your life, the man you always dreamed of. All the types of men in roles you've lived with, merely tolerated or even most cherished. The ADOLESCENT IN THE MAN never goes away.

Much of the confusion in our society between the genders is caused by the mistaken understanding that adolescence goes away and is extinct, to be REPLACED by other more sophisticated ways. For both genders it doesn't. It simply gets covered over by our new maturity.

In the model I lay out for you in my traditional book with Penguin, and the very detailed seminar I deliver in person on the Seventh Sense CDs and DVDs, my material envisions the "animal" part of both men and women as being the INSTINCTS we experienced and learned in adolescence. Instincts that are entirely different for men versus women, so different that they are quite precisely understood as different languages.

Neither one is "superior" to the other, nor "more right" any more than the languages of the French or Chinese are "more right" than the other, nor any less "equal" than the other.

Just different.

The secret language of the male gender instinct is one that can only exist, grow and thrive through rank and competition as measured against other MEN, admiration by YOU, and throughout its use and cultivation, can only be felt by a man while he is in a state of feeling "free."

That doesn't mean free in the sense of it being okay to cheat, or to use you, demean you, or harbor some sort of "old boys club" conspiracy against you or against women in general.

It simply means that men feel most masculine and able to grow that masculinity among each other, or more often, in a state of solitude.

While the cartoons of Superman are imaginary fantasies of an artist, the symbolism that has made this icon so pervasive in western culture points to something profound about men. Superman has a Fortress of Solitude in which he goes to rejuvenate, energize, and think. He needs a sense of freedom to occasionally take risks and have adventure, as in investing, job-hopping, and even sports that he is not necessarily naturally gifted at. It lets him know he is a man, and while that may not make much sense - it is a different language - it does to HIM, and that's as much as he needs to know. It is crystal clear, and sensible in his own language.

The way men need each other, and to have male friends comes from a very different place than the reasons you need to be with female friends. 

Males don't often share feelings, least of all with each other, yet they do need each other very much in order to replenish the sense of identity and purpose that makes them so attractive to YOU: their masculinity, the skills and basis of which is learned in adolescence.

Part of your enjoyment of female friends is to actually share emotions, the process of conversation, and a belonging in a sense of harmony with each other. Men actually need each other to create DISHARMONY, at least as far as competing with each other causes, DISORDER AND CHAOS, at least as far as that which is necessary to have adventures, discovery of where their limits are in testing their mettle, and that which comes naturally with taking the risks that let them feel truly alive in masculinity.

The negative side of misunderstanding of this inner adolescent spirit is wrongfully portrayed in the recent film, KNOCKED UP, with Seth Rogen, in which the buddy character, by Paul Ruud, is chastised by his wife (thought at first to be cheating on her) simply for sneaking out to play fantasy baseball with his buddies. He "sneaked" out simply because he could not bridge the translation gap in language with his wife in a way that she could understand the passionate male need for a felt sense of "freedom" to compete and commiserate with male-only friends. And that without THAT feeding of masculinity, he had nothing to bring back into the marriage to sustain his end of it.

It is that crucial, that passionately needed for survival of the male gender identity. No different than food and water, if not on a temporary basis, MORE needed.

The positive side of this understanding happens in the recently arrived to DVD film called REIGN OVER ME, with Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler. In this film, Cheadle finds meaning in his private bonding with the old college friend, Sandler, a traumatized man whose family died in 9/11. Through the drama, he learns to communicate to his wife through his friendship, and she learns through the unfolding drama how it is that her husband can find more of himself through that friendship to bring back home to her. Their marriage is saved as a result.

Who would have thought that the absence of male friendships for men can actually be the very root cause of many a breakup or divorce? For many of us, never even something coming to mind - not even for men to mention. It is understandable why: it is a need spoken in a different language.

I cover this in a very gritty, street-smart way with a professional boxer, likely future world champion, and devoted father and newlywed named Carl, whom I interview for you in the CD/DVD program, On Men, Women and Life: Wisdom of the Champion Boxer.

So when the man you went on a date with doesn't call for a few days, it may have utterly nothing to do with you, your worth, your attractiveness to him, or what happened on the date. It may simply be his normal and needed dipping into the freedom that gives him even more masculinity to bring back to the second date with you.

When your male coworkers fall silent when you enter the room, it is that the private jockeying for rank among men only, the competition between men only that gives them assurance of their level of masculinity - the core drive that is the only power behind their career success - needs to stop in your presence. Doing so may be that the spell, the solitude of masculinity, has been broken, and may also be that they, ironically, RESPECT you enough not to subject you to it.

It's not an old boys club or a conspiracy. It's the silent force of biological instinct, the male unconscious, a reflex millions of years old, and hardly something any human can consciously change, nor would want to. It evolved for a reason - to make men your counterpart and team member - ones that for better or worse, speak a different language.

When your husband doesn't talk, or seems to "sneak out" without explanation, he very well may simply be driving around in his car for no reason other than to experience the only "adventure" left in a stressful, workaday life - to see the sights out the window, the route he has perhaps never driven on his way to work.

 It won't be logical if you were to get out of him where it was he was going, where he disappeared to. He may say nothing. He may say, "I was driving around." He likely wouldn't have the words to explain anyway. And if you roll your eyes at how juvenile a thing that is to do, how wrong it is to not say where he was going or even that he'd left, you'd be right. It IS juvenile. And it is a part of him.

If you roll your eyes and he notices, the sociologists recently noted in a study that resentment is the number one predictor of divorce.  To him, he won't know that, but on some level, he will feel something more than hurt. It will be a different kind of aloneness. One which negates part of the very core identity of a man.  The third, inner doll.

None of this is to say that a man wasn't out philandering, cheating, lying, doing wrongful things. Those things CAN be the effect of a man who is "adolescent" and never grew up from there. Who really is only "animal instinct" and nothing more on top of it. No maturity of character...

Which is why you are in the right to dislike "male adolescence." There is plenty of it out there left unbridled by mature character, respect, communication and collaboration with you.

But if you make the mistake that so very women make in thinking that ONLY immature men have a deep need to be adolescent, risk-taking, impulsive, adventurous, isolative, secretive, and competitive - traits seen in criminals too - you're going to miss the very same need for expression of masculine core needs in the men of high character whom are quite devoted, respectful, and utterly in love with YOU.

The higher a man's masculinity, the more capacity he has to be passionately, sexually attracted to YOU. These strange things they do, the adolescent drives spoken in a foreign language are, ironically, the very things that ignite their desire for you.

I know it's a strange thing to be a woman who knows her own passion for life is found through connectedness, harmony and communication, while the men she seeks to work with or love build that same passion through isolation, solitude and silence.

We need each other to understand, even though speaking in strange, ugly sounding accents. To know him, don't interpret his words - they are jibberish. Don't jump to judge his actions. Look for the passion in his eyes when he is with you.

You'll know what to do, if you remember it might not be your first instinct what that is.

I teach men in kind, how to understand YOUR language.

Which is why I call some of my seminar tapings, the Seventh Sense Seminars (available at half off or in monthly payments.) They are a way to literally develop not just an intuition about men, but an understanding of WHY you have the intuition and what it means.

Deep understanding of your own growth processes, choosing the right men, reading them for the CHARACTER that guides and refines, and makes mature these deep adolescent drives can all be found in the materials, both free and for order, at womenshappiness.com.