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Hey Everyone,
I want to talk a little about gender and the stereotypes that sometimes are at the heart of books about relationships between men and women.
I believe men need women and women need men and that we are equal, but quite different. My book is my attempt to:
* Teach you everything I can about how men think
* Help you get what you need in love
* How to make it to happen exactly as you dream
* Some science-based secrets of how to make a relationship work There is a great lack of how-to-knowledge in our society when it comes to love, romance, boundaries and lasting relationships.
Here's a typical question from one of my women readers:
"Dear Dr. Paul, I'm confused. I've been dating a man that lives in Kansas and I live in Dallas. It's been a year. We see each other once a month or so when I get there on business.
Between visits there isn't a lot of communication. In October I let him know that my needs were not being met and that I needed him to consider visiting Dallas. I also asked if he was comfortable with more communication in-between visits.
He said he heard me and was interested in doing both. A week later I got flowers for my birthday and a month later he asked me to come to his house and have dinner with him and his daughter. He has sole custody.
But since then nothing has changed. It's been 6 weeks since I have seen him and only one communication exchange and that was on his birthday last week. We are planning to see each other next week for the first time this year.
I really like him, and can't figure out why he wanted me to meet his daughter and says he wants to communicate and then just doesn't ever follow thru. What's my next step?"
Darla, Dallas, TX
ANSWER:
Darla: Okay, this is why I wrote my book and especially why I go into every little detail of what once was called "courtship" back in the old days!
Cultivate more patience or more discrimination upfront about the men you choose to have in your life. Don't ask this guy if he is comfortable with more visits or talk at this point.
Show him in your actions that there needs to be more communication, less distance or both if he wants to keep you.Men say certain things to avoid losing you completely from their lives and hurting your feelings.
Their actions, however, abide by an entirely different set of rules from your own. Take your focus off this specific man and give yourself the freedom to be more at ease. In other words: go meet a man or several men who live in your area and see what happens!
It may help the situation with your Kansas guy grow more naturally or, just as important, fade out.Relationships are not supposed to make you lose joy or value in your life, but rather to add to your life and to his.
If you tell a man that you "are not happy" with him or because of him, it does two things: makes him feel less sexually attracted to you and hints to him that maybe, just maybe, investing in you will drain value, energy and time from his life instead of making his life better somehow.
This guy sounds like he is trying by inviting you to meet his daughter, but frankly, the distance and lifestyle conflicts are going to be a problem no matter what good people you both are.Remember, we do not owe other people our lives or attention (except our children). Healthy relationships are voluntary agreements, not agreements to heavy labor, servitude, or lifelong debt.
This gets complicated, too, because he has a daughter and she is going to be his prime focus for a long time. Are you up for that patience? You are being honest and asking for behaviors that indicate a level of commitment.
However, you are doing it in a way that makes sense to the feminine mind, but may not necessarily attract the masculine mind. There is a reason that people fall into the romance of a long-distance situation. Usually, we fantasize.
When we don't know a person well through regular and frequent in-person contact, especially at the beginning of a relationship, we do what is called projection. We unconsciously place all of the dreams and desires we have of an ideal mate onto this person. Yet when you start a long-distance relationship, it sort of cripples the natural process of bonding that is built on closeness and convenience.
It's a lot of work from the start simply to stay in touch, let alone enjoy each other and really fall in love. That is not to say it is impossible to make a long distance relationship work. Anything is possible. But I want you to stack all odds in life in your favor. Why would you do anything but?
There is one game we will have to learn sooner or later if we want to find love, and it's called Sexual Attraction. It takes some skill, and knowledge of instinct. It takes experience, and I don't mean sexual experience; I mean social experience in flirting, connecting, and learning to understand the minds of men.
Your particular situation may simply be that adding up all the circumstances, he is not feeling sexual attraction in an ongoing, continual, reliable way. This could be explored if you were in the same place. This guy lives out of state. You do not. That is a big problem.
And I have never heard of a healthy single male who was willing to move out of state for a woman he is not sexually attracted to and who he had already spent time dating locally.
It might not be you personally. It might be no more than the distance--not the lack of phone calls and emails, but the physical distance and infrequency of physical contact, which you're not going to feel inclined to if you're feeling disconnected from him.
Here is what's unfair: The only thing that can make a distant man (emotionally or physically) move closer, is not more commitment or requests for more commitment, but more sexual attraction.
Even if you were to move to his town, and date other men there, it would likely be for the specific intent of capturing him, and he will "feel" this. Courtship is what leads a man to pursue you and, most of the time, you need to be living in the same place for it to happen.
And this man is clearly not pursuing you in the way you would like. As Greg Behrendt says, it may be that "he's not that into you." So here is something to ponder if you still find yourself hung up on this one man: There are many appropriate men for you in the world, the most appropriate of all in a convenient place near you (or which you could move to). If you forget this, you are projecting an ideal version of a man onto the Kansas guy.
You are worth letting sexual tension build early on, even as you are screening the guy's compatibility for you. If you treat yourself right first and the man second early in the relationship, you'll find him keeping that spirit alive right into a commitment, because believe it or not, that sexually attracts us-to find a woman who treats herself well, and allows us to pursue her out of our own free will, and create a romantic story.
If you have a question, feel free to comment at the bottom. If you are a man and have questions, check out the newsletter for men at www.doctorpaul.net and write me there too, and if you are a woman, check out the newsletter at www.womenshappiness.com and write me there.
All the best,
Dr Paul
View more information about The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love
Paul Dobransky, 
Dr. Paul Dobransky, 
The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love, 
Penguin Books, 
relationship advice, 
love, 
social psychology, 
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