Through his books and seminars, John Gray has spread his message that men and women are inherently different. During this interview, he offers some advice to those dealing with the challenges of separation and divorce.
A leading expert on relationships, Dr. John Gray is the author of the bestselling book Men are from Mars, Women are from VenusDivorce Magazine
Could you tell us about your new workshops for those who are single or single again?
John Gray:
For example, a man starts to lose interest in his wife, and they break up. If you were to look at their pattern of communication during their marriage, you’d probably see that there were times when she just wanted to talk about things, but he would immediately start trying to solve her problems for her — and both of them ended up totally frustrated. He didn’t understand that sometimes women just want to talk about a problem, and not solve it right away. When a man tries to solve problems and he doesn’t succeed, after a while he just gives up listening to his wife when she talks about problems. The form of communication they were using promoted frustration rather than greater intimacy.
Both of them need to evaluate what their issues were and how those issues could have been resolved — again, without being too critical of each other or themselves. Some people move from one relationship to another, blaming their ex for all of the difficulties, and not taking responsibility for how they contributed to the problems in their marriage.
There may be something you do that brings out the worst in the opposite sex. Until you look at that, and discover how to bring out the best in the opposite sex, you won’t be ready for a new relationship.
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Today, the more independent and autonomous a woman feels, the less she needs or cares about a man being a good provider. When her need for a man to do or be one thing decreases, other needs emerge: for romance, for intimacy, and for communication. Throughout history, men have never really learned how to provide these things. If you go back a few generations, there was no real intimacy between men and women. A man’s job was to go out and fight battles for his family; he would sacrifice his life for them, and they needed and appreciated that. But that’s not what women want from relationships today. They want to share their hopes, their dreams, their inner world; they want to participate and do things together. Suddenly, we all want a higher level of intimacy, but we haven’t yet learned how to accomplish it.
Another new need we have is for lasting passion in relationships. It used to be that when men lost passion for their wives, they would have discreet affairs. Married women would give up on sex if they didn’t have the opportunity for affairs. Today, the thinking is: “Why should I have an affair? If I’m not going to have passion with my spouse, I’m just going to leave him or her.”
We want greater intimacy and honesty in our marriages; we don’t want to fool around to have passion. Never in history have men and women expected lasting passion in marriage; if you wanted really passionate sex, you found it elsewhere. It’s a whole new thing to expect passion with the person you’re living with, having children with, that you love. And how do you create that? We need new skills — skills we certainly didn’t learn from our parents. Some people watch movies and see married couples who are apparently happily in love, and then they look at their own marriages and say “hey, this isn’t happening here.” What the movies depict isn’t entirely unrealistic; it is possible, but nobody’s shown us how to get there.
Historically, love was about duty and obligation. Today, we see it as more of a feeling in the heart: a passion, a desire, a longing to spend time with the other person. It’s a magical feeling. Preserving the magical feeling that many couples experience when they first fall in love takes new skills and education.
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JOHN:
If you look at what men feel when they leave a woman, or when they’re dissatisfied in a relationship, on the surface they might say “oh, she nags too much,” or “we don’t have sex anymore,” but the bottom line is that they feel “no matter what I do, it’s never enough to make her happy.” Let’s say that the surface problem is that they’re not having sex. Well, that’s often a reason why a man will leave a woman. But beneath that, the reason they stopped having sex is that the relationship didn’t make her happy. If the woman is fulfilled in the relationship, the man is going to be fulfilled as well.
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JOHN:
Here’s another answer: if you want to have lasting passion in a relationship, one of the prerequisites is that the woman must be sexually fulfilled. That doesn’t mean she has to have an orgasm every time — that would put too much pressure on the relationship — but she has to be experiencing peak fulfillment in sex on a regular basis. If she doesn’t — if every time they have sex he just gets off and she doesn’t — then he’s not going to feel very successful at sex. And so his attraction to her will become less. When she does experience peak fulfillment, it’s a great memorable experience for him that will keep him attracted to her.
There are three major requirements for a woman to feel fulfilled in sex. The first is that you must have a very good relationship, with good communication; the second is sexual monogamy; and the third is romance outside of the bedroom.
If he’s unfaithful — even if he doesn’t tell her — the fact that he’s taking his sexual energy and sharing it with another woman means he’s taking it away from his wife. A woman needs to feel a man’s full attention from time to time for her to blossom. Monogamy creates that focus: that she is the number-one person in his life, that she’s cherished, that she’s not being compared with other women. That gives her the safety for her to open up and become increasingly vulnerable to the man. Over the years, it’s like a flower continuing to unfold: deeper levels of her being are able to open up and surrender to him — and by surrender, I mean open up and let him in, instead of putting up a wall to keep him out. She cannot achieve these deeper levels of intimacy if she suspects that he’s going to be with another woman. When life’s experiences have proven that he is sticking with her though thick and thin, his loving commitment opens her up to deeper levels of her being, and allows greater passion, which allows sex to get better and better. If she can’t continue to open up, sex will become stale, and both of them will lose interest.
To summarize: monogamy makes a woman feel special, and she needs to feel special in order to open up sexually. You can’t just be mechanically a great lover; you need to be monogamous.
And you have to be romantic — even if you don’t feel like it. Men have this idea that they only have to make romantic gestures when they’re courting. Once they’re married, a man thinks he’s giving his wife the big stuff — like sharing his income with her — so he doesn’t have to do all of the little stuff anymore. But it’s the little stuff that builds romance. The man has to continue to bring flowers occasionally. He should be physically affectionate, even when sex isn’t planned. He should give her hugs, look at her when she talks — all the things he did when they were dating. You have to do all these things for the rest of your life if you want your relationship to grow. This doesn’t mean you have to do it every day, but from time to time you have to bring back that initial energy that you used to give to her when you were courting.
Of course, it’s not all up to the man. Lots of woman will be nodding their heads at this point, thinking “yes, he’s stopped doing those things: I understand why sex isn’t that good nowadays.” But there’s a flip side: women take men for granted as well, and stop appreciating men for doing the little things. As a woman gets to know her husband, she’ll become aware of his little failings — then she starts pointing out all of the things he does wrong, hoping he’ll change. And that kills passion.
My advice to women is to appreciate the things he does and don’t point out his mistakes unless, on a scale of one to ten, those mistakes are eight, nine, or ten. A man can deal with you pointing out his mistakes if they’re serious, but if you’re pointing out mistakes indiscriminately (whether they’re a one or a ten), it’s a real turn-off. He feels, “if you really loved me, you’d overlook these little mistakes.” Sometimes, a man will say, “I cleaned up the whole kitchen, and she comes in and says nothing about how I cleaned it up, only ‘you know, you put the pots in the wrong spot’.” That man will never wash another dish! Focus on what he does right, not on the little mistakes he makes. Women aren’t taught this stuff, and it’s very, very important.
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We need new communication skills, and step one in learning new skills is: woman talks; man listens; woman thanks man for listening. The woman feels that her concerns are being heard, and the man isn’t trying to fix her, solve her problems, or argue with her. And if she thanks the man for listening, he learns a very important skill: the importance of listening to a woman’s feelings instead of trying to give her a solution right away. If you listen to a woman’s feelings, all the way through the range of them, she has practically nothing more to say. At that point, she’s going to be much more open to finding a solution to the problem. But men want to jump right in, skip the feelings, and rush right to the solution. And that formula doesn’t work. When he wants to give a solution, and she’s not ready to hear the solution, that’s when he starts becoming childish and argumentative.
For instance, she might say, “The kids aren’t doing their homework,” and he jumps right in and responds, “Well, I’ve already talked to the kids and asked them to do it, but the other day you said X, Y, and Z and that’s why they’re not doing their homework — you let them do X.” And now you’re into a petty back-and-forth argument. Instead, when she complains that the kids aren’t doing their homework, he should say, “Oh really?” and just let her talk out the whole problem from her point of view. Then she’ll be ready to hear — and appreciate — his solution.
Step Two is true adult conversation: she talks, then he talks, then she talks, then he talks, then they come to a solution. But before they can have this type of conversation, her need (which is to be heard) must be met, then his need (which is to be appreciated) must be met. And what she appreciates him for is for giving her his full attention.
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I also recommend that you take a course on relationships that makes you feel good and excited about relationships. If the end of your marriage was painful, it’s hard to go right back into a relationship. You need to get involved in some kind of support group or educational class. For instance, my “Mars-Venus Workshop” is an upbeat class about the positive aspects of relationships. If you’re in a support group about how terrible ex-husbands are, you’re not going to want to get married again. You need to surround yourself with people who are having good experiences with relationships. That helps you to focus on the positive — what’s great about relationships — rather than on the negative — what doesn’t work in relationships.
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You have to reassess your relationship from the point of view of not being too judgmental, too critical, and too blaming — and that’s really what forgiveness means. Forgiveness is the key to opening up into another relationship. For some people, that might mean going to counseling and talking about your hurt with someone who can understand; finally, your hurt is healed and then you can forgive. As long as you walk around with that hurt, you’re probably not going to be able to find someone who will love you.
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