The Truth About Men

Men and women are fundamentally different creatures.  We express emotions in different ways, have different approaches to problem solving, and have a different internal hierarchy of needs.  As distinctive as we know we are from one another, all too often women try to interact with men as if they are talking to another one of their girlfriends – and then proceed to spend hours pondering why their communication style is ultimately ineffective.  In attempt to find answers to many of the questions I’ve wondered about for some time, I recently picked up Ian K. Smith’s book called The Truth About Men. While I am typically skeptical of books of this nature, I was impressed with the candor of Smith’s writing style, and came away with a body of information that helped to build my understanding of the male psyche. 

Here are ten of my main takeaways:

1.   Men are terrible mind readers and can’t read between the lines in the same way that women can. Don’t beat around the bush; say it like it is.

2.  Men care about appearance, and they particularly care about the fact that a woman takes care of her body and looks presentable. Even if you didn’t win the genetic lottery, do your best to look like the best possible version of yourself.

3.  While men are often driven by power and like to be the ‘hero’ in a variety of situations, most don’t want a woman who is a wallflower. Don’t be afraid to present a challenge and display some iteration of aggression.

4.  Both physically and mentally, men like to have their own space.  Most men don’t like to gab on the phone for hours about the same nonexistent problem in the way that women do in girl-to-girl gossip sessions. Give men the space that they need, and don’t call them to talk about nothing or just ‘check-in.’

5.  Men don’t mind when you set down certain parameters, but extensive lists of rules from the get-go is off the table.  Don’t send mixed signals or implement your own personalized form of a guessing game.

6.  Men like to communicate in a rational and logical way.  While there is often subtext when women speak, men often say what they mean in attempt to check the box and move on to their next point.  Don’t always overanalyze everything they say, in attempt to find some deeper meaning that is likely nonexistent.

7.  Men hate shopping. While you may be in tune with the latest fashion trends from the hours you spent flipping through VOGUE or watching Project Runway, men don’t like it when you expect them to look like a GQ model.  Don’t constantly criticize the way that men dress.  They have been dressing themselves for quite some time and won’t be amused by your constantly trying to alter their appearance.

8.  Men don’t like being compared or propped up against your past experiences with other men.  Men often have the capability to put their past experiences into little boxes and stack them neatly under their beds; so when in their presence, find a way to do the same.

9.  Contrary to popular female belief, men do have emotions.  They are often reluctant to express emotions in the outward way that women do as a result of their need to uphold societal male expectations and avoid looking weak.  It is possible for a man’s raw emotions to be triggered, but they are often set off by different stimuli than those that might emotionally stimulate women.

10.  Men are rational creatures. They prefer to work through conflict in a succinct and logical way through quickly and analytically addressing a problem and respectively developing a solution.  Rather than allowing your emotions to interfere with your ability to have a sound discussion, try not to linger on problems or overreact to the situation at hand.

While there will always be outliers who challenge the conventions of a particular subgroup, this book helped me to gain an understanding of how men as a subspecies interact and communicate at large. Once women acknowledge the fact that men are fundamentally different creatures, we can stop repetitively running straight into a brick wall and begin understanding how we can effectively communicate and interact with the opposite sex.  Rather than seeing the men in our lives as flawed creatures that we are obsessed with changing, we should invest that energy elsewhere and accept the fact that sometimes we need to simply let men be men.

Avoiding the Classic Backstab

On Sunday morning, I was sitting on my deck reading the screenplay of the movie Frozen for a research study that I am working on, and as I read through the pages, somehow I couldn’t get past the fact that Hans COMPLETELY manipulated Anna.  He took advantage of a young girl with only good intentions, and in a mere two hours, while the village was being coated with snow, he did a 180 on her and left her in a room to freeze to death.  I don’t know which part irked me the most – the fact that he so perfectly staged a run-in and charmed her enough to fall for him, or the fact that he waited until Anna was at the point of utmost vulnerability, when he was holding her in his arms as she was about to die, to stab her in the back.  

Yes, I am well aware of the fact that this is only a Disney movie, and Hans’s actions can arguably be chalked off as a mere attempt to model a classic rise and fall of a hero turned villain to catalyze a plot twist.  Yet somehow, the way that he so convincingly charmed her with full-fledged intentions to use her right from the start, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.  Not only did I find myself buying into Hans’s love for Anna from the beginning, but I felt as blindsighted as she was as I watched his plan slowly unravel.  Call me a hopeless romantic, but I thought Hans’s accidental run-in and his take on love at first sight was pretty convincing… 

Though it’s only a movie, my naïveté towards the situation really took me aback.  With a man as charming and handsome as Hans playing the game so well, how was Anna supposed to know that with every move towards him she was falling one step further into his trap? If we look back on his actions, what signs was he giving to foreshadow his eventual turn on her? Well, for starters, as much as I would love to believe in love at first sight, more and more I am starting to realize that building a real connection takes time.  Again, I understand that inevitably things move faster in Disney movies, but they were going to get married after knowing each other for only a day!  They knew absolutely nothing about each other – and aside from his perfect eyes, stellar voice, and the status symbol that came with being a prince, she had nothing to go on.  But just as Anna did, we got swept away in the moment – taken by the catchy song and perfect image staring back at us, only to let a manipulative monster win us over.

While Anna was lucky enough to be saved by the mystical ice queen, not all of us can pick ourselves back up after being manipulated, just in time for Disney to paint the perfect sun over the village just as the credits are about to roll.  Though relationships are inevitably dramatized in movies, I think that there is an important lesson here on the topic of relationship-building and trust.  As I’m sure many of us can relate to, there are various instances that I can point to in my life where I feel like I have been used – by men, by my ‘friends,’ by my peers, etc.  While I generally feel like I am a decent judge of character, there are inevitably times when I get swept up in the moment, and I let my naïveté get the best of me.  Though there is often a part of me that is telling me to keep my guard up, to stop things from moving too fast or spiraling out of control, sometimes I think that I trust people too much.  I trust that when I let someone into my life, they are going to treat me with the level of respect that I show them.  But sometimes just when we start to lift up our guard and display our vulnerability, the person who we thought was there to help us is the one who we should have been running from in the first place.

While I continue to try to increase my ability to read people in developing personal and professional relationships, there are inevitably going to be people who don’t have the purest of intentions – and when we least expect it, there is a definite possibility that those who are closest to us could stab us in the back.  The people who we most willingly let into our lives are the ones who know the most about us; they are the ones who have access to the most intimate details of our personal lives, and thus – just as Hans did – they can work their way into our world and beat us at our own game.  Through letting people into our personal lives, we are undoubtedly opening ourselves up to vulnerability and the potential of getting hurt; this doesn’t mean that we should shut ourselves off from building those close relationships.  It simply means that we need to develop the skills necessary to assess the intentions of those who we let into our lives, so that we can maintain a sense of judgment in the midst of an array of new feelings that often hold the power to sweep us off our feet, just enough to get us to look the other way.

Though I am still not a perfect judge of character and cannot preemptively back away from every unhealthy relationship, there are a set of questions that I ask myself when trying to assess the personal and professional relationships that I am building:

1.     When I inquire about his or her life, does he/she reciprocate?

2.     Does he/she remember things that I’ve told him/her in the past? Does he/she actually listen when I talk to him/her?

3.     Is there depth to our conversations, or does conversation remain at a surfaced level?

4.     Is there a healthy exchange of communication?

5.     How does this person deal with conflict?

6.     Has he/she taken a reasonable amount of time to try to get to know me?

7.     Does he/she understand my long-term goals?

8.     Would he/she want to be there only on the good days or on the bad days as well?

9.     If something terrible happened, would I be able to call this person and know that they would be there for me and have my back?

10.  Does he/she really like me, or just like the idea of me?

While truly talented manipulators (and they are out there) will know how to act in order to deceive you as you try to answer these types of questions, for the majority of relationships, asking these types of questions will serve as a strong starting point in getting to the root of someone’s intentions.  For me, the most challenging question to analyze has by far been the last question: does this person really like me, or do they simply like the idea of me?  Even if someone is genuinely not a bad person and does not have direct intentions to hurt you, I have found from my past experiences that the relationships that are going to last the longest are those with a foundation based upon a genuine interest in the other person.  Given that I have found it extremely challenging to differentiate between judging when someone likes you as opposed to the idea of you, I will discuss how to distinguish between the two concepts further in a later post.

Now You See Me

In the last forty-five minutes you have checked your phone thirty-six times.  He still hasn’t texted you back. While you try to keep your gaze focused on the massive excel sheet in front of you, your eyes keep glancing down at your phone, and you can’t help yourself.  It’s been three days.  On day one, you gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just busy – stuck at work until midnight? And then the next day comes, but now it’s the weekend, so you have to start conjuring up some new excuses for him - unless he’s an investment banker, then I suppose you don’t have to be quite as creative and can stick with the imagined excuse from day one, even if it’s Saturday.  For the rest of us, we start really thinking outside the box.  Maybe he had to go on an impromptu business trip and is on a plane without internet for twelve hours? Or maybe his grandma really isn’t doing well, and she’s back in the hospital for the fifth time.  Or maybe he’s really sick and is in desperate need of a delivery of chicken soup from his favorite restaurant? Or maybe his plane never made it back from Japan last week and something terrible happened to him? And as the days pass, your mind begins to wander into deep and dark places. 

But as you sit there worrying about him, paranoid that something happened to him, you wake up on day three only to see photos of him with a glass in one hand and a girl in the other, flooding your newsfeed.  And while part of you is relieved that he is alive and well, the feeling of relief quickly dwindles as you come to the harsh reality of the situation.  While you found yourself distracted for the past three days awaiting a mere text message, you weren’t even on his mind.  No matter how busy he may have been, how long does it really take to send a text message – thirty seconds? Or to pick up the phone and make a call – five minutes?  So while you were going through a rough two days, he didn’t even care enough to take five minutes out of his day to be there for you – and ironically YOU were the one worrying about HIM.  Busy or not, there’s no excuse not to be there for someone that you care about.  If a person truly cares about you, it comes through in their actions. Whether it be that you are going through family problems, or having a personal crisis, all you want to do is talk to him.  Yet while you’re grinding it out, just trying to make it through, he’s throwing back countless gin and tonics as you’re out of sight, out of mind.  So as hard as it might be to admit to yourself, the explanation is simple – he doesn’t care.  If he did, it would come through in his actions.

So now what? Well, you might push back at me and say that he is playing games – trying to make himself appear mysterious and aloof, all to set the stage for the never-ending chase.  Or you might play the naïve card, and argue that maybe he lost his phone or somehow missed your message.  But let’s take a moment to put things into perspective.  Given that you checked your phone about thirty-six times in the last forty-five minutes, do you really think that he made it through the whole three days without looking at his phone and reading his text messages?  He saw the message.  He opened it, read it, and blatantly decided to ignore you.  Not for one day, or two days, but three days.  And while there are a million excuses that you can conjure up in attempt to cushion the blow, there are a million more reasons that point to the fact that he ignored you because he doesn’t care.  Not only did he ignore you, but he didn’t think twice about it – didn’t consider what you might be going through or why you might have wanted to talk to him in the first place.  You are not his priority, and while you’re sitting there, fixated on his every move, you are not even on his radar. In fact, as he’s eight drinks in at the bar on Saturday and knee deep in march madness on Sunday, he barely remembers that you exist.  You might as well be invisible.

As petty and nonsensical as this all sounds, I have to admit that I’m not above this.  As much as I try to look at my life from the eye of a third party, and give advice to myself as I would to another, I get caught up in the pettiness just as much as you do.  When I really invest my time and energy into getting to know another person on any level, I put them on a pedestal.  Somehow because I initially thought they were worthy of my time and attention, I turn a blind eye to the reality of the situation in front of me, and I make excuses for them time and time again. He couldn’t possibly be ignoring me because he doesn’t care.  She couldn’t possibly have skipped my charity event to go to a dive bar with her friends.  But more often than not, the excuses that I craft for the people closest to me in my life are nothing more than fabrications of my imagination. 

When we really care about someone or feel connected to a person on such a deep level, we want to think the best of them.  Whether we intend to or not, we always give them the benefit of the doubt – and as they rip us into pieces and deteriorate in front of our eyes, we continue to see the version of the person that we’ve created in our minds rather than the person standing in front of us.  And this realization may in fact be the one that hurts the most.  When the smoke finally clears and we see them for who they really are, we start to question if any of it was real, or if it was all a fabrication of our imagination - right from the very beginning.  And then we close our eyes, and wrap our arms around ourselves, gripping the memories as tight as we can, knowing that in only seconds, the only way to move forward is to let them go.  To see the person for who they are.  To look at the situation in front of you.  To realize that actions speak louder than words.  To face the fact that you are a ghost to him.  To realize that the person who means the most to you barely knows you exist.  And to find it within yourself, to lift up the smoke screen and see the people in your life for whom they really are – even if it means admitting to yourself that you were wrong about them all along.

Don't Be a Broken Man

12. That’s about how many hours I spent in the testing center before I could scrape together a Princeton-worthy SAT score.  7200.  That’s about how many hours I spent training in the gym before I could land a double back on the floor.  30. Thirty seconds. That’s all the time it took for me to know that he was the one who would change my life forever.

No excuses, no distractions. My life consisted of five things: school, gym, coffee, work, and on special occasions, a few hours of shut eye. For the first two decades of my life, I was under the impression that if I let anyone get too close to me or let my guard down for even an instant, I would lose control.  At that point, I might as well throw up my hands and surrender because I would lose everything I had worked for. And for what, for a man who might be a nice accessory to have on my arm at the ballet, or even worse – a man who would actually expect me to give him my time and attention?  As appealing as that sounds, I would rather not. That is what my list of plus-ones is for.

For as long as I can remember, I have always put my personal success first, and for me that consisted of an Ivy League education, a high social standing, an overflowing bank account, a flashy job, and the power to change the world. I knew what I wanted and I was not about to let any man stand in the way of making my mark on the world.  But when I met the man at the coffee shop, I knew that I had been doing it all wrong. He wasn’t on the cover of GQ, and he didn’t take me out on a multi-million dollar yacht to pop some bubbly on a Friday night. He was actually quite the opposite. His hair needed styling, and his suit wasn’t properly fitted. He was socially awkward and stumbled to find the right words, as a deep shade of pink started to cover his cheeks.  But when I looked into his eyes, I saw something that I had never seen before – I saw a real man.  I saw a man who was more focused on what was inside my head than what was on my back, a man who was broken and flawed, with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He was imperfectly perfect, and I wanted more.

As we spent more and more time together, this man changed the way that I saw the world. He made me realize that letting someone into your life doesn’t mean you have to veer off path; it means that they become a part of your journey.  I had gone through handfuls of men in my life, and this was the first time that I felt a true intellectual connection. It was as if we were instantly on the same brain wave, and before we knew it, we were collaborating on ideas and helping each other to improve ourselves in every way.  Rather than detracting from my productivity and pulling me away from my life plan, we helped each other grow both personally and professionally.  It was as if I found my other half - and knowing what this felt like, it became crystal clear to me that two heads were better than one. 

I have this vision for what I want my life to look like – next week, next year, five years from now, ten years from now, and in the distant future. There are so many things that I want to accomplish, all jumbled together in this convoluted brain of mine.  Just as with anything in life, there are various different approaches that we can take in order to get what we want. Until a few years ago, I thought that trying to segment my life into different stages would set me up for the greatest possibility of success. If I wanted to start both a successful company and a loving family by the time that I was thirty, I used to believe that it would be most efficient if I was to focus one hundred percent of my energy on work until I accomplished the majority of that goal, and once I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I could move on to developing the more personal aspects of my life.  

The problem with this mentality is that when you try to live your life in stages, you develop yourself unevenly and leave parts of yourself behind.  If you have a set of goals that span across different aspects of your life that you want to accomplish by the time you are a certain age, you need to invest in horizontal rather than vertical self-development.  In order to become the strongest possible version of yourself, you need to move each of your goals forward every single day. If you focus on bettering yourself in one aspect of your life while leaving the others untouched, you will be a person that is not whole, but a person broken into pieces.  Every single day, you show the world the person that you are; every aspect of yourself is exposed, and you continue to grow based upon your overall level of self-development.  You are only as strong as the weakest part of yourself. If you leave your personal life in the dust and focus singularly on career development, your personal development will fall behind and you will not be armed with the tools necessary to embrace the challenges that come along with high-levels of professional development.  You cannot expect to be successful in multiple aspects of your life if you do not invest in all segments of personal and professional development.

Where do you want to be by the time you are 30? By the time you are 40? What type of relationship do you want to have? What type of career do you want? Where do you want to live? What do you want to invest your free time in? What will make you feel fulfilled at this stage in your life?  Start with where you want to be at a certain benchmark in your life, and work backwards. If you want to be living in a different country, on a different career path, and married by the time you are 30, you cannot keep drudging along in the wrong industry, with a partner that you know you’re not committed to, and a blurry vision of your future, and still expect to accomplish your life goals.  You need to be honest with yourself, and be realistic about what you can accomplish within a certain time frame.  If you focus your full energy on career development until you are twenty eight, and intend to achieve the goals mentioned above by the time you are thirty, you cannot expect to suddenly pick up your life, move to a new country, and magically land upon the partner of your dreams all in the remaining two years.  While I am a big believer in serendipity, I am also realistic.  It is simply not feasible to spend eight years on work alone, while you keep pushing off every other aspect of your life, and expect to clump everything else into a two-year time frame.  Personal development, even more than professional development, has a habit of being unpredictable.  You never know how long it will take you to find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, or the perfect town to raise your kids in.  So if you have these types of goals, you need to be progressing in those categories as much as you are progressing in your career development.

Opening yourself up to personal development does not mean that you are going to be pulled away from your career goals.  If you find the right person to build yourself with, you can grow together and help each other to reach your personal goals that much faster. Instead of slowing you down, finding a life partner that you have a strong intellectual connection with allows you to better yourself in all aspects of your life; not only are you working towards the family that you want to build, but you are also forming an intellectual connection and partnership that will allow you to accelerate your career development as well.  So take a step back, and look at what you really want. Don’t let the day-to-day chaos take you away from pursuing your life goals, whatever they may be.  Make sure that every single day, you are taking actionable steps to move forward in every direction.  As a result, you won’t be a person broken into many pieces, but rather a well-rounded, fully developed individual ready to take on the world.