by Steve Harvey
Don’t let men do that to you; take your chips up to the window and cash them in. Let him know that the consequence of not giving you what you want is he’ll be left alone—without you. Men absolutely will not do anything without a reason, and the reason we do most things is so that we can get the attention of the opposite sex. It’s a core tenet of manhood. We go to school because we know that if we go to college, there will be girls there. We go to college and get a degree so we can get a good-paying job so we can flash our money around to attract women. We want to be the star in the football game and say we’re the quarterback because young women will love the letter jacket. Little boys run faster, climb higher, and jump longer when they know a girl is watching. They will knock themselves out if a girl is looking, honest to goodness. My family and I went on vacation recently and my son Wynton was at the beach with his sister Lori. When two Brazilian girls hopped in the water, he started doing underwater headstands. I had to run and go get my son because he was damn near drowning himself—choking and coughing and clawing at his face after salt got into his eyes—all because he was showing off for these girls. A few weeks later, he almost knocked me out when he came running down the stairs wearing an entire can of TAG body spray after he saw a commercial showing ten girls jumping all over this guy who was wearing it. He did those crazy things for a reason: because he wanted to capture the attention and heart of the opposite sex.
This doesn’t change when men get older: we do things to impress you, and we listen to and abide by your rules and requirements if the consequences of not doing so mean we’re going to lose you. My buddy’s grandmother once said to me that the finest woman in the world is your ex on the arm of another man. And, buddy, let me tell you what we can’t stand to see: the woman we’ve been intimate with, lived with, built a future with, dreamed about a better day with, on the arm of another man. We can’t take that.
Sure, there’s a chance that when you make that ultimatum—when you demand that commitment—he’ll move on. Let. Him. Go. If he was willing to walk away from what you had to offer, he was a noncontender anyway. Sure, you invested time in this guy, sure you love him, sure you want to be with him. But you also want what you want, and you have the right to want that commitment from him—you have the right to stand firm on this.
Just like men don’t change, women don’t either—and that’s okay. If you want it at twenty-five, you’re going to want it at thirty-five. What’s not so okay is compromising your requirements to justify having a relationship with a man who won’t give you what you ultimately want; settling is compromising. What’s not okay is burying your want and need for security, protection, respect, and support. Yielding and bending to his will—pushing aside what you want—is compromising. And when you compromise who you are for a man, there’s no way you can find a deep, long-lasting happiness. If you’re not happy, you’re not loving him the way he needs to be loved—you’re not supporting him, you’re not loyal to him, and you’re less willing to give him the cookie. And if he’s not getting those three things, the relationship gets more dysfunctional and less pleasant until one of you finally leaves.
I’m not asking you to change for him. I’m telling you to understand his thought process, set your requirements, and stand firm on them so that you can get what you want: commitment. And if he can’t give that to you—if he refuses—cut your losses. Push those chips up to the window and tell him you’re not gambling with your life anymore.
He may move on. But if he has searched his heart and loves you, he’ll stay.
Either way, long term, you win.
The bottom line is that the world is full of men who are willing and able to commit. Get your house in order, put your standards and requirements to use, exercise your power in your relationships, and be willing to walk away. I’m not saying this journey will be easy or quick. But it’ll be well worth it.
Twelve Ways to Tell If Your Man Is Ready to Commit
1. He takes you to his place of worship.
2. He thinks about you when you’re away and still thinks about you when you’re near.
3. He changes all his phone numbers so that none of his old flames can contact him anymore.
4. He allows you to help pick out his wardrobe.
5. Any man who wears matching outfits is totally committed because he has lost all his friends’ respect.
6. He gives you a nickname he can’t allow his friends to hear, like Schmoogles. Trust me, he knows full well that as soon as his friends hear that, they’ll know he’s sprung and, though it’s your nickname, that’s what they’ll call him every time they see him.
7. He puts making you happy in front of his own happiness.
8. He’s seen you without your hair styled and no makeup and still keeps calling.
9. He’s met your entire family and is still willing to attend the family reunion.
10. He knows your kids are crazy and ill-mannered but loves you anyway.
11. He’s seen your mother in action and still thinks you can make it as a couple.
12. He allows you to meet his entire family, realizing this could change everything.
For Ladies Only . . .
Sometimes, the Breakup Is a Blessing
I know it’s hard when you leave someone you’ve loved; it’s painful, emotional, and leaves a mark on your heart that feels like an open wound. But there’s a blessing in the storm, I promise you. You just have to recognize it and claim it for yourself. All too often, women stay in relationships because they’ve got some serious time invested, even though there is constant fighting, you’ve got very little in common, and you’ve grown in different directions. I know people who are married who don’t even like each other, but still, they hang on. I ask, what are you hanging on to? Know that if you just let go, the chances are that you’ll wake up in peace. The arguing will be gone. So will the fighting. You’ll get to do what you want to do without having to cater to a man who doesn’t appreciate what you’re doing. First, though, you have to remember what you’re breaking up from: if you’ve been cheated on, lied to, abused, left to spend all your time alone, forced to constantly question his whereabouts, then you’re not leaving much. Let go of it and claim your blessing. You may be hurt, alone, and scared of getting back into the dating game, but this is the alone time you need to better position yourself for what the Creator has in mind for you. What He has in mind for you may be just waiting for you to be free and available. The blessing is that you can reinvent yourself—be who you want to be instead of who you had to be in order to make that past relationship work. I can truly attest to the blessings that come when you become open to change. If I had focused on trying to get into acting, I can assure you I wouldn’t have the success I have today. If I just did stand-up, I would have never gotten the Steve Harvey Show. If I stayed on the show, I would have never gotten on the radio. If I had focused on radio, I never would have written the book. If I’d never written the book, I never would have gotten the international acclaim that comes from my book-buying audience. I’m constantly reinventing myself, and you shouldn’t be afraid to reinvent yourself. If you’re getting out of a toxic relationship, the blessing is that he can’t throw you down the steps anymore; if you’re getting out of a relationship in which your man was unfaithful, the blessing is that you don’t have to sit and wonder and worry about who he’s with at night. If you’re getting out of a relationship in which your kids saw you arguing and fighting and mad all the time, the blessing is that the kids don’t have to witness you feeling sad and depressed anymore—they can see you happy again. Look at the positives and “do you.” Get back to the hobbies you liked doing before you got with him. Go out with your girls like you used to before your relationship took precedence. Spend some time getting really clear about what, exactly, it is you want for yourself before you get into another relationship. And when the new you emerges, you’ll be a better you. And the better you attracts what? A better man. And both of these are a blessing.
6
LET’S STOP THE GAMES
Asking Men the Right Questions to Get the Real Answers
I admit it—simple as we men claim to be, we can be tricky creatures, especially when it comes to women. We are the masters of the okey-doke and will dole out affection in drips and drops and use them as emotional placeholders until we decide in our own minds whether we really want to be with you or we want to move on to the next conquest. We’ll send the sweet text message to get you swooning, but then go for days without calling. We’ll spend the whole of a month wining and dining you and making you feel like there’s some amazing chemistry between us, but then clam up when it comes time to explain what, exactly, our intentions are concerning the relationship. We do this because we can. We can because all too many women let us. All too many women let us because they’re afraid of the alternative—having to start all over again with a new man, or having no man at all.
I wrote both in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man and in Chapter 5 (“The Standoff”) of this book that women truly interested in finding the right guy have to get over the fear of losing one, because the moment you lose that fear is the moment guys lose their power over you. A man will disrespect you, put in minimal effort, and hold out on commitment if he thinks he can get away with it, so your job is to not let him get away with it. But this requires heading off the foolishness at the beginning—before a man gets his hooks in you—so that you can make clear-eyed decisions, devoid of emotion, about whether to continue pursuing a relationship with him. So much can be found out about a guy before you get in too deep—if you take the time to ask the right questions. I’m not referring here to the five general questions every woman should ask a man when she’s getting to know him (see the glossary), though asking those questions, as explained in the first book, will help you figure out what a potential mate wants out of life and what he wants out of a relationship with you; learning how to probe his answers will help you get to the very essence of who this man is and whether he has what you’re looking for in a long-lasting relationship.
To do this successfully, though, you’ll have to wrap your head around and understand one basic thing about us men: no matter the question, we will always give you the answer that will make us look the best.
Plain and simple.
I’m willing to wager that in the history of your relationships, you’ve never had a man introduce himself and share with you all his baggage and all his bad habits in the first several dates. You’re an adult; you know full well everyone comes with a history—everyone comes with a backstory and flaws. Yet if every man’s story was as good as the story he reveals about himself, you would have found your Prince Charming by now. Why aren’t you with the perfect man? Why? Because no one is that good.
Knowing that you long to be needed and wanted, however, men prey on those vulnerabilities; we manipulate our answers and the impressions we make so that we appear to be the man who can fulfill all those needs and wants—we sell the Happily Ever After. Tell a guy you’re looking for a man who is capable of commitment, and if he’s truly interested in you, he’ll have no problem telling you he wants exclusivity too. What he’s not going to offer up is that his last relationship didn’t work out because he cheated. Tell a man you’d like to be in a relationship with a guy who is good with kids, and he’s going to regale you with proud stories about how much he loves his nieces and nephews. But he’s probably going to keep to himself the information about his wicked baby mama drama, or the fact that he doesn’t see his kids but once every other month. And I promise you, you’re not going to hear on your first date about a man’s bad credit, his house foreclosure, or that he lived with his mother until five weeks ago; instead, this guy is going to go out of his way to show you his nice watch, his slick suit, and the nice car he barely held on to during his own personal economic crisis.
Men do this because we think that if we release this information too early, we won’t get the catch—you. You have to remember that at the base of it, we’re no different from, say, a peacock with a plume of colorful feathers, or a lion with a huge, bushy, fiery orange mane: just like a male peacock spreading those feathers or a male lion standing tall among his pride to attract their female counterparts, men flash things like their money, their cars, their clothes, their watches, and their job titles to impress women. The presentation is critical to us—it’s all part of the bait we throw in the water to capture the fish; we just want you to bite on the hook. A man knows he’s not hooking any woman with stories about how broke he is or how he doesn’t have any power at his job or how his ex-wife comes around the house every Thursday to scrawl “He’s completely unreliable” in red chalk across the garage doors. He’s wrapping himself in all the pretty packaging so you’ll buy into him.
Come on, admit it: women tend to ask men two questions, tops, before they make the decision about whether a man might just be the one for them. Knowing this, we’ll answer the first question in a way that’ll make us come out smelling like a rose. Ask a follow-up question for a little clarification, and we’ll find an even slicker way to tell you what you want to hear. And once a man tells you what makes him sound the best, you hear what you want to hear and, instead of asking more questions and getting to the truth of the matter, you form your own truth. You get so enamored by his buzzwords—I want to be committed, I love kids, I’m a hard worker, I love to cook, I’m into the arts—that you skip asking more questions and immediately start saying to yourself, “It’s him! It’s him! Oh, thank you Lord, I found him!” You take the good parts—the answers to the first two levels of questioning—bundle up those words and internalize them, then use them to justify falling in love with who you think is the “ideal” man, never considering—often, until it’s too late—that had you probed a little deeper you would have gotten closer to who he really is.
You don’t dig deeper because you’re scared that if the questions run too deep, he will run off and you will lose out on a good one. He doesn’t tell the whole truth because he’s scared he might not appeal to you. Everybody is just scared now. Scared and avoiding the whole truth.
Don’t buy into the fairy tale. Sure, men would serve themselves well if they provided the relevant information up front; not only would it clear men from ever being accused of lying—a charge that adds a lot more tollbooths on the road to solid relationships—but certainly it would give the women we truly want to build relationships with more insight into who we really are. All too often, we men prevent the relationship from growing because we create an element of distrust early on, by withholding vital information that gives women that which they need to make sound decisions for themselves. When a woman gets blindsided with information she thinks should have been disclosed up front, she questions everything—no matter a man’s intentions.
So should men offer all the information up front? Of course we should. It’s only fair. But we won’t volunteer it because telling the whole truth not only makes us look lesser in your eyes, but it also takes the “chase and capture” out of our hands and puts the future of the relationship squarely into yours. A man’s candidness early on gives you the chance to truly understand how, for example, past relationships might affect your future together; the opportunity to process the information; and the ability to decide for yourself if you can handle the baggage that comes with all the good he’s already told you about. Sure, there are some men who will lay out all the dirty laundry up front for you to see. But this is rare. Very rare. So the onus of getting down to the truth is, unfortunately, on you.
And you get to the truth by digging deeper.
Aren’t you tired of being the victim? Tired of getting played? Tired of thinking you got somebody and then finding out he’s not all he made himself out to be? Stop giving up the cookie before you have all the information, and instead get the information and then decide if it’s in your best interest to share yourself with him.
Doing this will take no more than three questions, I promise you. It
hardly ever changes with us:
Question No. 1 will get you the answer that makes us look best.
Question No. 2 will get you the answer that we think you want to hear.
Question No. 3 will introduce you to the truth.
We have no other choice but to tell the truth after that; our liar bench isn’t deep enough to go up against your intuition, especially when you start probing us in that slick way only women can pull off. Witness:
QUESTION NO. 1: Why did your last relationship break up?
The Answer That Makes Him Look Best:
Well, I was trying to be all I could be—I was working hard, trying to provide for her, and she didn’t understand my work ethic and she just couldn’t take it anymore.
The Breakdown:
This answer makes him seem like he’s a hard worker, committed to building toward the future. It also plays into a woman’s natural instincts to be nurturing—makes you say to yourself, “I would never leave a man who’s trying his best—I’d focus on supporting him.”