Simply put, some DO, and those are the women that guys go for most, commit to, and consider themselves lucky to be committed to.

If I have to explain, it will cheapen the usefulness of the tests men use to tell if a woman is "cool."

Sorry!

Surprisingly efficient length, no?

View more information about The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love

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I understand that a fair amount of the story that led to our modern western custom of giving an engagement ring prior to marriage is the result of a concerted effort on the part of the diamond industry. (Said with a wink and a nod, as I only learned so from all the media coverage of the issues in last years film, Blood Diamond.)

I don't think it is quite as interesting why we give them today as in fact, why we feel compelled to give (and get) them, according to gender.

Let's say that the culture around us, for whatever reason, has decided over time that it is the custom for men to give women a gold-colored bow around her right wrist to signify the bethrothed to be.

It is hard-wired in the masculine instinct that being of lower status than other men is BAD, and one is less masculine (and feels less fully alive or "passionate" about life) as a result. NOT giving a bow then may not matter much to the man, because they are cheap to come by - a piece of cloth. Not giving one doesn't lower his status. So why not forget about it?

To the woman's hard-wired instincts, it is not rank, but BELONGING and "being normal" that is passionately held dear at the reflex level. To not receive a gold cloth bow to her has nothing to do with the financial cost, but the embarrassment of being "excluded" from the cultural norm of women who DO have one. The woman would then feel less feminine, less attractive and less attracted by the oversight by the man.

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Besides the obvious - that both the man and the woman have cultural reasons or personal experience that made marriage distasteful - I have seen many people enter cohabitation for the wrong reasons.

One most common is out of economic necessity and a desire to wait, or "save money" for a proper wedding. This is a surface reason though. When you think about it, men and women who desperately want something (such as a new car or job), tend to stop at nothing to budget to make it happen.

The more common reason (and reason that a much larger sample of couples fail to stay together when cohabitation happens before marriage), is that neither one is fully ready to commit to the other (or not ready in general for marriage.) This is a temporary stop-gap with pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, the couple may truly learn and cultivate some of the habits of mature collaboration, coordination and compromise that will be needed in a solid marriage.

On the negative, many who cohabitate have doubts about each other from the beginning -ones that are unlikely to resolve on their own, and in some cases may NEVER allow a solid marriage to occur. I cover these fully in The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love.

The reason men may make light of the situation is basically that it is instinctually, biologically hard-wired in men NOT to commit, unless there is overwhelming evidence to them that the woman will make a great teammate in life. If this is not intuitively there from the get go, it is not likely to spontaneously arise.

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This question is perhaps one of the most sensitive ones asked by men (to each other) in modern dating. They almost never raise the subject to women in so many words, and there is a reason. It completely goes against feminine gender instinct to do so. You shouldn't even think of asking.

I have a male friend who has a saying something like this: "Her money is her money, and my money is her money." He says this looking to the heavens as if in agony. Perhaps it is an occurrence that is unique to some areas of the western world, maybe in urban centers? - but not likely asked as much in rural areas of the US, nor much at all in large areas of Asia.

In the West, we are caught in the competing twin forces of cultural change and biological instinct among the genders. Today women excel at careers formerly dominated by men, as growing numbers of men wish that "a fish needs a bicycle."

There have, after all, been millenia of patriarchal directives about how economies will operate, who will work at what vocation, and who will most profit from that work. Throughout that history, one might be hard-pressed though to find a specific man with a specific evil plan to engineer the undermining the rights and prosperity of half the world's population. It happened as a biological, instinctive effect, and as a process of group psychology rather than any one individual's master plan.

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I have had a ton of my guy friends (and clients) write or call me recently to ask why in the world I don't write more pointed advice in this blog JUST FOR MEN.

I didn't have an easy answer.

The book, The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love, is just as useful to men as it is to women. After all, it is the precise psychological steps of courtship that have existed since the beginning of time. They have been hidden, a secret of sorts I think simply because psychology is invisible. We all need visible shapes and symbols to put ideas into practical use. It's the whole reason we first developed written language!

Yet, the guys sometimes get scared away by the word "love," or the phrase "falling in love." It sounds so... final. And as you know by now - reading the book, and/or the blog - men are hard-wired biologically to AVOID commitment unless some very precise conditions happen in a relationship.

So what may sound on the surface to be very feminine subjects, are in fact absolute necessities for all people to know about - men included.

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Here is a quick and handy guide for you, whether you are a man or a woman who wants to be more savvy about people when you first start to date.

Many men and women come to my Chicago seminars with one question on their minds. They have been through a rough relationship. It made them wary of starting over. And by and large the reason for that is that infidelity happened. They were cheated on.

If you read my book, The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love, then you know the exact causes of cheating, how to screen for it, and how to stop it. I also give you nine free lessons on the steps of courtship that make it all but impossible to be with someone who cheats some day, delivered to you over nine days (when you sign up at www.drpauldobransky.com).

The live seminars in Chicago for women are announced in the newsletter at www.womenshappiness.com and for men at www.doctorpaul.net for men.

Ultimately, those men and women who definitely will cheat on you have poor personal boundaries. The ones who stay loyal, have great boundaries. Commitment is IMPOSSIBLE - no matter what is said, promised, insisted, signed, contracted, or pleaded over in heart-felt emotion - when you discover that their boundary skill is poor.

Here's the quick guide to find out that very thing:

HOW TO SPOT A CHEATER WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES OF MEETING THEM:

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Let's talk about something that virtually every dating website totally forgets when we are talking about what gets men and women together for the duration:

I call it, RIGHT PERSON, RIGHT TIME.

I am borrowing from a woman friend who gave me advice from about ten years ago. I had a friend named Joanne, and we had been on the Semester-At-Sea program together in college.

This was an around the world voyage where students learned all about world cultures for college credit, they went out into the countries of call, and had adventures, and bonded like friends that many go a lifetime without finding.

One particularly nasty occasion I had a terrible breakup with a woman I found "perfect" for me at the time. It is laughable now how WRONG for me she was, but as time goes on, we get perspective don't we?

Joanne's advice to me was this: "My mom always told me that yes, there is such a thing as the right PERSON for us, but there also has to be the RIGHT TIME, too."

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Anybody and everybody has heard of the equation, E = mc2. Generally we all know that it is Einstein's discovery, and some of us might even know that it is a core revolutionary equation from physics. A handful may even know that it was the key to the ability to harness nuclear power. Whatever our level of sophistication, we know that it is a simple equation for something very profound about the physical world.

The basic truth about E = mc2 is that it was the first time that scientists were able to literally show that matter (the stuff we can hold in our hands) contains and is made of ENERGY (the invisible stuff that runs everything in the world.)

Isn't it incredible that all the conveniences and even life-saving tools in our lives run on energy: electric power, light, heat, and even the nuclear power that can both defend us in our armaments, or heat our homes by being transformed into other "kinds" of energy, like electricity?

E = mc2 is about the invisible energy of the physical world.

The mindOS system of psychology (www.doctorpaul.net for MEN and www.womenshappiness.com for WOMEN) I developed over ten years ago makes the invisible world of psychology, literally visible through hundreds of DIAGRAMS.

Have you ever stopped to think about HUMAN ENERGY, though? When we are stressed, we often feel "drained," and when we are depressed or even a little "down," we sense that there is less energy in us to get the things of life done.

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I want to mention to you that there are two crucial things we need to learn about in order to be on the way to finding the RIGHT man.

One is "How to not be controlling and manipulative" by developing a strong personal boundary and the identity, honesty, and self-sufficient security that comes out of that.

The second thing is the ability to quickly screen a man for personality style in the first place, to find the greatest fit to your own.

One of the terrible things about being a psychiatrist is that you often see people who are in the thick of a failing relationship, and find that the relationship had a great deal of features that were pretty much doomed to make it fail from the get go.

Yet these people have FORCED themselves to be together and "make it work" for twenty years. If only they had done some up front homework, and taken the dating SLOWLY at the very beginning, they might have saved themselves decades of pain.

In short, a lot of relationship pain is caused by there being no more formal COURTSHIP process in the western world. My material is designed to replace that lack and point out what the deep psychological steps have always been for that process, since the beginning of time, and regardless of what race, creed, or religious preference you come from.

Instead of "rushing in where angels fear to tread," women would be well-advised to read a man rapidly for harmonious fit to her own personality. Guess what? In personality, there are only FOUR TYPES of men. So that's all you need to learn.

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I recently got a set of very compelling questions to answer about the secret psychology behind what drives competition among women:

1. What are the benefits of adult female friends being competitive with each other?

2. Why are some women competitive with each other?

3. What type of things are women competitive about?

Men and women are EQUAL in intellect and the emotional capacity to love, but DIFFERENT in the Gender Instincts.

If our brain were like a computer, then our "minds" are like "software."The "software" of the mind is divided up into three general functions, what Evolutionary Psychologists call:

* the Higher Brain (where our intellect and reason are)

* the Mammalian Brain (where our emotions are, and things like love and friendship)