dibya’s blogosphere

A common mistake many men make is to seek relationship advice from their female friends. On the surface this seems logical. If a man is confused by a woman’s responses, then who better to decipher the code than another woman?

In reality, unfortunately, women often give men relationship advice that is the exact opposite of what works. The advice may be well-intentioned, but it’s bad advice. If the man tries to apply the advice he gets from other women, it will frequently generate weak results and leave him stranded and confused.

You may find this counter-intuitive. The first time someone explained this to me, it took a while to get my head around it. But after a while it began to make sense. And I couldn’t deny that the advice from experienced men simply worked much better than any relationship advice I received from women.

One reason for this is that most women have little or no experience being in romantic relationships with other women. A guy who’s been in just a handful of relationships will often give you much more practical and effective advice because his advice is based on real experiences relating to real women. Men and women are quite different when it comes to relationships. You can’t simply take advice that works for a woman relating to a man and flip-flop it to make it work for a man relating to a woman. It would be great if relationships were so symmetrical, but in reality they just aren’t.

Another problem is that what women say they respond to is often quite different from what they actually respond to. Women are subjected to a tremendous amount of social conditioning just as men are. Women are taught how “Mr. Right” is supposed to behave and what they should look for in a guy. When you ask a woman for relationship or dating advice, you’ll often get her socially conditioned answer, but not the real truth. Women often have a good sense of what they’ve been taught to find attractive in a man, but they usually aren’t as aware of what they actually find attractive in men. This is at least as confusing to women as it is to men.

The best relationship advice for men almost invariably comes from other men — specifically from men who are very experienced and very good with women. Such men have figured out under real-world conditions what’s effective and what isn’t. They understand female psychology more deeply than most women do. They are masters of social dynamics. Some of these men have had the opportunity to engage romantically or flirtatiously with thousands of women. This level of experience allows them to notice patterns that other men — and women — miss completely.

Most of the experts who share their wisdom in Man Transformation are men who’ve had a tremendous amount of experience with women. Many of them started out being very bad with women, and they transformed themselves by consciously working on this part of their lives, usually by learning from other men who were already good with women.

I talked to David DeAngelo briefly by phone a while ago (that’s a pseudonym by the way — his real name is Eben Pagan), and I asked him how he got started on this path of learning about social dynamics. He said that he learned it by hanging out with guys who were really good with women. He was amazed when he saw how good they were, doing things he didn’t believe possible. By learning from these men over a period of years, he was able to improve his own results dramatically — and pass on what he learned to other men. His story isn’t unusual. Some men I’ve talked to who are experts in this field started out as “naturals,” meaning that they were good with women from a young age, but most of them learned this from other men.

Not all of the experts in this program agree with each other 100%. I think that’s actually a strength of this program. The truth is that there are many different paths to a successful relationship. You’ll learn a lot from being exposed to such a rich variety of expertise. You may find that one expert doesn’t resonate with you much, while another has you sitting at the edge of your seat taking pages of notes. Ultimately you must develop your own relationship style that feels authentic to you.

Men tend to be a lot more honest with other men when it comes to sharing truths with other men. You’ll encounter a lot of advice in Man Transformation that isn’t politically correct, but it is honest. I think it’s really helpful for men to learn from other men who’ve struggled with the same challenges and grew beyond them.

Man Transformation has a very empowering attitude throughout. This program is about men teaching men how to be more successful with women, not by tricking or deceiving women but by learning how to become more authentic from the inside out.