Gone are the traditional days, when guys wanted a “simple wife or girlfriend”. That’s not what a guy wants from you. Especially the modern day guy.
What modern guys want is a sexy and fun and a little bit wild. They want a girl to party with, who know how to let her hair down.
But the fun only lasts as long as marriage and children and careers don’t get in the way.
Men grow up, just as you do.
By roughly the time men hit their thirties, their priorities start shifting.
Having a good time is still near the top of the list, but other values – such as giving back to their community, making a mark in the world, and carrying on family traditions – begin nudging out the pleasure principle and start to become distant.
These men are ripe for long-term relationships, because they’ve begun to get interested in people other than themselves.
The center of their universe has begun shifting from the self orientation of youth to the service orientation of maturity.
You as women do the same thing, too. You stop focusing so much on what you look like and how successful and popular you are.
Instead, you start thinking about caring for our aging parents, settling down and “nesting,” and considering the legacy of our lives.
Age makes you confront the truth, which is that you’re not going to be around forever.
This is a magical time for men and women to meet.
Both are able to give so much more than they could have just a decade ago. They both know a little more about who they are and what they want.
They’re more realistic about what getting into a relationship might cost them, and they’re willing to take that risk.
Men at this stage in their lives are looking for something very specific in a relationship.
Women trying to date these guys often find that all the skills they’d assumed would attract men no longer work. You can’t just be gorgeous and flirtatious, as these men are looking for more than that.
Similarly, you can’t just be qualified in those all-important wifely skills such as making grocery lists or scheduling after-school activities or whipping out dinner in twenty minutes.
These men are looking for more than someone who’s beautiful, great company, and a good cook.
Jeez, you might be thinking. I’m average looking, fairly good company but no entertainer, and the height of my cooking skills is a chicken dinner. Do I even have a chance?
Yes, you do.
That’s because there are some things more important than what you look like and your housekeeping skills.
What he cares about is how you make him feel.
A man will walk on water for a woman who makes him feel like he’s on top of the world.
He would do anything for her, because she’s everything he ever imagined: she loves him with her entire heart, she trusts him implicitly, she never makes him feel bad or belittles him, and he knows that he can make her happy.
That’s about it, really!
Being coy, flirtatious, mysterious, elusive, and seductive will only get you so far.
To hold onto a man’s heart forever – as he grows and matures and ages – will take understanding of the following five points “what a guy wants from you”
Being a man myself, it took me a long time to learn these principles, which is why I’m passing them onto you.
Now, before we find out what a guy wants from you let me share with you a story of one of my female clients.
Brenda – I actually believed that what men wanted was a fun girl with no needs, no moods, and no complicated baggage!
What I didn’t bargain on was that the men I was dating were smarter than that.
These men had passed the party stage of their lives.
They knew that being in a relationship was as much a challenge as it was a joy.
They knew that real women aren’t always perfect, and any woman who pretends to be Pollyanna is probably hiding a lot of anger beneath.
They wanted me to step up to the plate and be more than just a good-time girl, and, thanks to their influence, I learned the following Man Mastery principles (what men secretly desire).
Master them yourself, and you’ll find yourself attracting truly good, quality men. Ignore them, and you may just have to learn these lessons the hard way.
Man Mastery Principle #1: Men want to be loved with your entire heart, not just half a heart.
We all know that during the early stages of relationship, it’s important to hold your cards close to your chest.
Disclose your feelings too soon, and he may think that you’re more interested in bagging a boyfriend than getting to know him.
But what many of us don’t realize is that the rules change once you’re in a relationship.
You can’t continue holding back like you did when you were dating.
Silly tricks like hanging out with other men to make him jealous, or not being available so that he thinks you have a busy life, won’t endear you to him.
He’s decided to be with you, so give up the games and be with him.
It’s easy to doubt that your man loves you, no matter how often he tells you.
It can be near-impossible to resist testing your man to be super-certain that he really does love you like he says he does.
Sadly, such tests usually backfire.
The more you operate from fear – the fear that he’ll leave you, the fear that he doesn’t love you as much as he says he does, or the fear that you’re not good enough for him – the more you’ll suffocate the love you share.
Where there’s fear, love can’t grow.
This means that the more you worry about your relationship, the more your man will feel like you’re holding back or that you’re not committing to this relationship fully, and he’ll respond in like kind by holding back or not committing himself.
It’s time to stop holding back and let yourself love without reservations. Sure, your relationship may end someday, but at least you can love him as he is right now.
Remember: he wouldn’t be in this relationship if he didn’t have feelings for you.
Throw away your fears of what “might” happen and focus on what is happening. You’re in a relationship, for goodness sake, so enjoy it!
Man Mastery Principle #2: Men yearn to be trusted.
Just as your man wants to be loved with your whole heart, so he also wants your complete trust. He wants you to trust him completely.
This is a huge thing to ask of anyone. If you’ve been betrayed or hurt by men in the past, you may be very wary of trusting a man ever again.
But if you want a relationship, that’s precisely what you must do.
Relationships are built or broken on trust. You must be able to trust him to be faithful to you, respect the secrets you confide in him, and be open and honest.
If you worry that he’s dating other women behind your back, lying to you about his whereabouts, or playing you for the fool, then you need to seek help or end the relationship immediately.
There is no relationship without trust.
Not everyone has problems trusting a man with being faithful or true, but a lot of us have problems trusting a man with our feelings.
You think that sharing how you feel will cause your man to leave you.
No wonder! Women are taught from the early days of dating to avoid sharing too much in order to keep from scaring him off.
A relationship is no guarantee against getting dumped. You could still place just one step wrong and get booted out of his life.
But a relationship is no place for holding back.
If you can’t trust him with your feelings, then your relationship isn’t strong enough to hold up to marriage vows, and it’s better to know that now than later.
So try a little trust. Try trusting him with something you’ve never told anyone. Share an uncomfortable feeling. Be completely honest about where you’re at.
If that’s too hard, start off with baby steps. Try trusting him with driving your car, or doing something for you that you normally do yourself.
Trust him to fix something without offering any advice or getting in there yourself.
Ask him to do something for you and say nothing more, trusting that he will do it in his own good time.
Incidentally, if you find yourself nagging the men in your life, you may want to ask yourself what that says about your ability to trust them.
A nag feels that she has to remind people to do things or they won’t do them.
In the process, she makes the people in her life feel like she doesn’t trust them, and they act in accordance with that belief.
Nagging literally makes men act unreliably, so get over the habit and give him some trust instead.
You may worry that trusting a man will open you up to getting hurt, but in fact it does the opposite. Your trust may just inspire him to live up to the belief you have in him.
If it doesn’t, and if he proves untrustworthy, then you’re actually quite lucky: you’ve found out sooner rather than later that he’s not someone you can rely on. Leave him and find someone else who can live up to your trust.
Man Mastery Principle #3: Men want life to be simple.
Men don’t like a lot of drama in their life. They want things to be simple and easy.
When things get difficult, they may believe that it’s a sign that the relationship isn’t right and walk away.
Although it can be really frustrating to deal with a man who bails at the first sign of problems, it’s an important lesson for us.
Many of you need to learn how to communicate differently. You need to learn to downplay the drama and focus on solutions, not problems.
As a gender, you women love drama. You love telling tales of dramatic hookups, breakups, and who-said-what-to-whom. The more dramatic a situation, the more riveted our audience.
But men don’t function that way. They see problems as things to be fixed.
They don’t see any point in dwelling on the emotions associated with the situation.
Instead, they just want to make things right and move on with their lives.
So if you’re a drama queen who loves social intrigues, make sure that you don’t inadvertently dump your dramas onto your man’s shoulders.
He doesn’t really want to hear about who’s not speaking to whom and who’s friends now and what so-and-so said.
He just wants to sit down with you, have a cold beer, and enjoy a cuddle.
When problems come up in your relationship, make sure that you communicate them as simply and clearly as possible.
If you have a solution, then tell him. Chances are, if he understands what you want from him and why, he’ll happily do it so that you feel better again.
But what he doesn’t want is a lot of drama attached to it.
He doesn’t want you to carry a grudge, stop speaking to him, or, when asked, pointedly reply, “You know what you did.”
He just wants to know what he can do to make you happy so that he can do it. Period.
Which brings us to our next point…
Man Mastery Principle #4: Men just want to make you happy.
A man who is trusted and loved by his woman is just about in relationship bliss. But to be completely certain that she’s the right one for him, he needs to know one more thing.
He needs to know that he can make her happy.
Men struggle with this issue far more than we realize. It may come as a surprise to you, but most good men feel great responsibility for providing a good life for their family.
They want to make sure that everyone under their roof is happy, looked after, and enjoying life.
This is why some men spend far too long at the office chasing dollar signs.
They don’t see their drive to achieve financially as being a selfish thing; for them, it’s a necessary self-sacrifice to make their family happy.
We all know that more money doesn’t make us happy, but sometimes our men need to be reminded of that.
They want so badly to give you everything you desire that they can sometimes go off in the wrong direction.
You need to make sure that your men know that having a lot of money won’t make you as happy as simply having their presence in your lives.
I spoke recently to a man who said that money was always a big issue with the women he was dating.
He told me, “Women want to know what kind of car you drive and how much money you make, and if you don’t measure up they don’t want to know you.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Were women passing up these amazing men simply because they valued a certain lifestyle over love?
You need to be very clear in ourselves about what makes you happy.
Although it may be fun to dream of winning the lottery and going on expensive vacations twice a year, you need to make sure your men know that you’re perfectly happy with what he can provide.
Sure, vacations may involve a tent and four-wheel-drive rather than overseas flights, but surely the point is spending time together, wherever that may be.
Tell your man what makes you happy – a bouquet of flowers every so often, a cup of coffee, a phone call when you’re at work, a cuddle – and let him fulfill your dreams over and over again.
Tell him how much you appreciate what he does and how happy you are. He won’t believe his luck at finding a woman as amazing as you!
Man Mastery Principle #5: Men don’t want to be wrong all the time.
This final mastery tip is one of the most important principles to master if you want to stay with your man forever.
Men are tired of being the bad guys. They’re tired of being wrong about everything. They’re tired of being blamed for everything.
Just turn on the television, and you’ll see programs that emasculate or make fun of men for being weak, churlish, or incompetent.
Take a look at some of the jokes being forwarded around email, and you’ll see what I mean when I say that as a culture you’ve turned men-bashing into an art form.
You’ve made it okay to make fun of men, but you women have a major chip on your shoulder when it comes to men making fun of you.
You need to stop this nonsense immediately.
Just because feminists have awakened you to the dangers of patriarchy does not make it right for you to belittle men.
Being male doesn’t make a man a pariah.
In fact, it seems strange that so many women engage in man-bashing while at the same time complaining that they can’t find a man willing to have a relationship with them.
You as women need to respect and appreciate the differences between the sexes without putting one sex down.
This isn’t a competition. Men and women complement one another. You can learn to appreciate what men bring to your lives without judging them for being “less” than women.
On a practical level, this means that you must stop treating your partners like little boys in need of discipline.
I’ve heard many “dating experts” say that you can train men like you train dogs, by giving them praise when they do something right and ignoring them when they do something wrong.
Certainly you’ve evolved beyond that.
The danger in treating your man as a simple-minded child who needs frequent reminding, supervision, and correction is that he will stop loving you as an equal and start resenting you as an embodiment of his mother.
That, incidentally, is one of men’s greatest fears: that the woman they’re dating will turn into their “mother.”
Be warned: babying a man will just turn him into a baby. Disciplining a man like a disobedient pet will just make him act disobedient.
The way you treat him affects how he responds to you.
So treat him like the man you want him to be. Treat him as your equal. Listen to what he has to say.
Ask for his opinion out of a sincere desire to understand him better, rather than the desire to debate and prove him wrong.
Catch yourself whenever you find yourself blaming him for things not being the way you want them to be. Take responsibility for your own life and experiences.
And if you still find yourself caught in a power struggle, be aware that your relationship is in jeopardy.
All relationships go through a power struggle, but those that last evolve beyond it. You have to stop fighting one another and start working in unison.
Understand what a guy wants from you takes time. I’d be lying if I said it was easy.
But if you can put these five powerful principles into practice in your own relationships, you’ll find that you feel better about yourself.
You’re acting with integrity, and the men in your life recognize that. The bad ones get out of your life lickety-split, while the good ones admire you for being so honest, open, and loving.
It’s funny to think that so much dating advice focuses on how to look or act a certain way to attract men, while the real treasure is who you are inside.
Most men want desperately to meet a warm, loving woman who is openly affectionate and treats him with respect and appreciation.
Simply put, good men want good relationships. The only real question is: are you ready to step up to the plate?
I will stop here. If you loved reading this article on what a guy wants from you then you’ll also love this powerful video presentation below.
