Hi there,
I haven't had the time to write on my CHRISTIAN ONLINE DATING,CHRISTIAN RELATIONSHIP, LOVE AND MARRIAGE blog, but i will come back soon, so i thought i would give you something interesting to read: an interview with Shaunti Feldhahn, author of recent bestseller For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men, on the subject love.
ZIA had the opportunity to sit down with Shaunti Feldhahn, author of recent bestseller For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men, to ask her about love.
ZIA: Let’s start with the big one. What is Love?
Shaunti: In my view, the ultimate definition of love is caring for someone enough that you will put their interests above your own, and be self-sacrificing even when it hurts. That may be because you have intensely affectionate feelings toward the other person, or simply because you are making a choice to do it even when you don’t feel it.
ZIA: Tell us about the journey from Harvard business school to relationship speaker and author?
Shaunti: I never could have predicted it, but my time at Harvard and what I did in the years after that were the perfect foundation for what I’m doing now. Actually, a lot of people think I got an MBA, but I should clarify that I just did most of my electives at Harvard Business School. My core classes and my degree were from Harvard’s Kennedy School; I got a Master’s in Public Policy with a concentration in Business. Essentially I was trained to be a business-type analyst, but in anything related to the public interest.
Shaunti: After I graduated, I took a job on Wall Street as an analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and was quickly thrown into the deep end of the pool. I was one of a team of analysts in this particular area, and had only been there a few months when the other, more experienced analysts left unexpectedly. So my bosses basically said, “you’d better learn fast” and I had to sink or swim. I had to very quickly learn how to look under the surface, to dig beyond what a situation looks like and into what is actually going on underneath; I had to learn how to get the best data and ask the right questions and quantify the most important findings in a form that someone could understand quickly and easily… and all of those things are absolutely essential in what I’m doing now as a relationship author and speaker.
Shaunti: What I’m doing is digging into the things that we just don’t ‘get’ about those who are most important to us. I’m focusing on the surprises - for example, the truths about men that we as women simply misunderstand, and once we have the right understanding it changes everything. And uncovering that requires a lot of investigation and research and analysis - exactly like I did on Wall Street. But with much more personal impact!
ZIA: What kind of research did you do to come to your conclusions?
Shaunti: I do almost entirely primary research. In other words, if I’m writing a book about what we women tend not to get about men, I go only to the men themselves and start by doing focus groups, and hundreds of one-one interviews with every guy I can get my hands on. And then I take all of that and try to cull out the surprises; the things that we misunderstand, that haven’t already been covered in the other great resources that are already out there. And because my findings are surprises, I have to demonstrate whether this is actually true, so I hire a professional survey company to do a scientific national survey to test what I’m discovering—so I can know for sure where I can make these claims with confidence.
Shaunti: I wish I could say that I initially planned this approach, but I didn’t - I initially stumbled across this as an excellent process for digging into this stuff! It all started when I was just writing my last novel ("The Lights of Tenth Street") and trying to figure out what my main male character would be thinking in his various scenes. So I would talk to a few men that I knew and describe a particular scene and ask “what would you as a guy be thinking in this situation?” I found myself so surprised by what they were saying that I did more and more digging, and eventually realized this couldn’t stop with just creating a character in a novel. So I ended up talking to hundreds of men—the guys behind the counter at Starbucks or the security guard at Costco, or the poor guy trapped next to me on the airplane for two hours. And because of my background, I also happened to know how to take all that and pursue a survey and put it in a form that would be eye-opening, but also pretty quick and easy to absorb.
ZIA: How do men and women see love differently?
Shaunti: Well, that’s was one of my main surprises in what I found when I researched men. Over 1,500 men provided input for the book For Women Only, and I realized what I was hearing from most of them was a very different view on what made them feel loved.
ZIA: Okay, so unlock the mystery! What makes a man feel loved?
Shaunti: Believe it or not, a man can’t feel that his wife or girlfriend loves him, unless he feels that she respects him and trusts him first and foremost. In fact, on my survey for For Women Only, 3 out of every 4 men actually said that if they had to make a choice, they’d actually give up feeling that their wife or girlfriend loved them, if they could just feel that she respected them, and trusted them and believed in them - and all of those things were more important to the average guy than feeling that his wife loved him.
ZIA: What is the difference between loving a man and respecting him?
Shaunti: Choosing to show respect is actually a choice, just like choosing to show love is a choice. And the important thing for us as women to realize is that in marriage, both of those things need to be unconditional for each partner to have what they most need. We tend to think love is supposed to be unconditional but respect has to be earned - but if respect truly is what he most needs, if you only demonstrate respect when he deserves it, it would be as devastating to him as it would be to us if he only showed us love when we were loveable.
A man will feel respected not when we say “I love you” and do these loving things, but when we tell him “I’m proud of you” and make the hard choices to not criticize him, to not question his decisions all the time, to avoid teasing him in public, and to learn to see our words and actions through his eyes. For example, something as simple as trying to “help” our man with something, tells him we think he can’t do it on his own - even if that is not our thought at all! But if we have a disagreement and choose to defer to him, it tells him we think he had good judgment and trust that he will be able to work it out in a good way. And that is incredibly powerful to a man - that is their equivalent of walking in the door and seeing a dozen rozes in the kitchen!
ZIA: How is sex related to a successful relationship?
Shaunti: I realized in my research that we as women have a fundamental misunderstanding of what physical intimacy means to our husbands. We tend to think of it as primarily a physical need for him, and instead when I asked these hundreds of men why this was important to them, what I heard had nothing to do with the physical. What I heard was the huge emotional need that every man has, to feel that his wife desires him. And if a man feels that he is desirable, that his wife wants him, it gives that man a sense of confidence and a sense of well-being in every other area of his life. But if he doesn’t feel desired - if he feels like it’s a little too easy for her to say ‘no’ or she seems to be tired all the time, it gives a man a sense of depression and a lack of well-being in every other area of his life.
Essentially, as one man put it, “What happens the night before in the bedroom absolutely impacts how I feel about myself the next day at the office.” And we have to realize, its not that ‘he wants more sex’. We need to take that phrase out of our vocabulary! Instead, we need to replace that with, ‘he wants to feel desired by me.’ And so with our response to him sexually, we can give our man the confidence that he can go out and slay dragons - and the confidence that he can be the loving husband we most need.
ZIA: For those women our audience who are not married, what advice do you have for them to help them prepare for a successful marriage?
Shaunti: I strongly suggest that they learn the true facts in a few of these areas that so many of us carry around the wrong information, and practice it now. For example, in your friendships with men, or dating relationships, to practice catching those areas when you realize you weren’t intending to be disrespectful but that is exactly what he is hearing. If you can see those things now and practice developing the habits with men in relationships that aren’t as intense as marriage, you will be both an extremely attractive woman that men will want to date, and a woman who will be investing in a great marital relationship down the road.
ZIA: You have two similar books, For Women Only and For Young Women Only. How is your advice different for young women?
Shaunti: In For Young Women Only, we did the same type of nationally-representative survey, only this time of teen guys. And we were fascinated at just how often the teen guys were echoing what the older men said. There are a few areas that are relevant mostly to the teenage years - for example, that teen guys look really indestructible, but inside their hearts are really tender and because they see how teen girls treat each other, they are extremely cautious and will not let a girl into their hearts until she demonstrates that she is safe for that tender heart that they have.
ZIA: Your husband Jeff has is prominently mentioned in your book. Can you tell us one or two of your favorite stories about your marriage?
Shaunti: Uh… yeah. People always ask how this knowledge has impacted me. And I always have to confess that even though I wrote the book and did all this research, that I still fall into bad habits and old patterns of behaving, too!!! I have a few girlfriends who love me enough to see something that I’m saying or doing and they’ll pull me aside and say, “um, Shaunti, there’s this book you need to read....look at Chapter 2 on respect again!”
And of course, it works both ways. My husband and I researched and wrote For Men Only together, and when we started Jeff confessed that he didn’t know if a book to help men understand women would work. When I asked why on earth it wouldn’t, he hemmed and hawed, but eventually shared what is the secret belief of most men: that women can’t be understood, because they think we are random!!
So For Men Only was essentially just one giant research project to prove to Jeff - and thus all the men who would read the book - that we women can be understood, and that the average guy really can make his wife happy and that its not rocket science. It’s just a matter of learning a few things they simply didn’t know before… just like there are so many things we as women didn’t know before!
ZIA: How does your book “For Women Only” help women with their relationship with men?
Shaunti: I think the overwhelming thing that it does, is open our eyes to those areas that we are sabotaging our men and thus our relationship without even realizing it. We tend to secretly think that we women are the ones who have the relationship skills and that “he just has to learn to relate better.” But what I realized is that the way that men are wired to relate is totally legitimate! Obviously, just like with us, they may not always handle things the best way, but it is powerful when we realize that so many of the issues that drive us crazy are not because of them but because of how we are handling something.
For example, all of us have had the experience of watching a guy shut down or walk off in a bad mood, and wondering what on earth we did that made him so angry. Or we think he’s totally overreacting to something really minor and then we get irritated. But once we learn these few pieces of information about how most men are wired, it helps us suddenly realize, oh my goodness, now I understand exactly why he reacted that way. And it also helps us see that his needs are just as legitimate as ours are!
And as one radio host put it, the For Women Only findings are essentially “truth that was hidden in plain sight.” My hope is that these findings will help each of us as women see all the areas in which our men are so much more vulnerable than we ever realized, and how much power we have to either build them up or, unfortunately, to tear them down. Knowledge really is power, and once we have these simple little pieces of knowledge, it makes such a huge difference to helping our relationship be the strong, loving connection that we always wanted it to be.
ZIA: Thanks for spending time with us.
Shaunti: It’s a pleasure! Thanks for the chance to share!
Shaunti Feldhahn began her career as an analyst on Wall Street and today is a bestselling author, speaker, and nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist. She holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in government and economics from The College of William & Mary. Shaunti and her husband Jeff live in the Atlanta area with their two young children.
I hope you enjoy this artical on my blog CHRISTIAN ONLINE DATING,CHRISTIAN RELATIONSHIP, LOVE AND MARRIAGE i have this audiobook and its a realy good help to understand the difference between men and women.
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