Secret Angst Of Men - Imposters WithinBy Lisa Earle McLeodwww.forgetperfect.com "Why do you have to question everything I do?" If there's a non-defensive guy out there who enjoys his wife asking him questions, I'd sure like to meet him. And if there's a woman who successfully has mastered the art of asking her husband a question about something he's done without him interpreting it as nagging or insulting - get yourself to the phone, call Oprah, get on TV and start sharing your secret. Right now. Because aside from the option of spending my entire marriage bound and gagged - something I suspect my better half has wished for in secret a few times - I have yet to figure out this gender dynamic. I've long known that men interpret the female tendency to ask lots of questions as demeaning. I've watched plenty of guys - including my own husband - hear an innocent question from their wives or colleagues and mentally attach, "you stupid idiot, can't I trust you with anything?" to the end of it. But I always assumed it was some random flaw in a few batches of the male secret decoder rings that happened to ship to my part of the planet. They were all somehow mistakenly programmed to translate a woman's request for information into an insult faster than light travels from Mars and Venus. (That's 5.81 light minutes when both planets' elliptical orbits are closest to the sun, for anyone who may want the exact calculation.) Despite 20 years of marriage and a lifetime of corporate work, I never fully understood the deep, and often painful, roots of this bewildering aspect of male behavior - until In her eye-opening book, "For Women Only" (Multnomah, 2004), Shaunti Feldhahn reveals what's really going on in the minds of men. Based on spoken and written interviews with more than 1,000 men, Feldhahn exposes seven revelations about men that surprised the heck out of me. Many of Feldhahn's revelations were things I thought knew, like how much sex matters to a man, how much they want to be respected, and why they feel a need to provide. But reading the actual words of men helped me see the depth of male feelings -yes, they do have them - behind these surface assumptions. Much like Feldhahn, I was shocked learn what's is really going on beneath the surface in the inner lives of men. One of the biggest surprises was how many men feel like frauds. Feldhahn writes, "Despite their in-control exteriors, men often feel like imposters and are insecure that their inadequacies will be discovered." Apparently they're all secretly afraid somebody is going to find them out. Feldhahn's research (also available at www.4-womenonly.com) revealed that "a man's vulnerability about his performance (in everything) often stems from his conviction that at all times he is being watched and judged." You'd probably get defensive too if you thought the world was always waiting for you to make a mistake. Another startling insight was learning that most men face a constant battle with ever-present sexual images fighting for attention inside their heads. I've always known men were stimulated by visual images, but according to Feldhahn's surveys, it's not just pimple-faced 16-year-olds whose fantasies of Beyonce keep them distracted in algebra. Most grown men are walking around with a huge visual Rolodex of women, she says, and it takes a huge effort to ignore it. Feldhahn's interviews included large numbers of church-going men who she personally knew to be nice, normal, loving husbands. Yet she discovered that "even happily married men struggle with being pulled into live and recollected images of other women." As I read about the secret inner lives of men, my emotions jumped between sympathy, sorrow and anger. I felt sympathetic because it must be pretty hard to function when you feel like everyone's judging you, and every time you turn around the image of a naked woman flashes through your brain. I was saddened that men often are so misunderstood. And I was angry that none of the men in my life ever bothered to clue me in about all this inner angst. The biggest shocker of the book was how surprised men were to discover that we women didn't already know those things about them. I was getting good and annoyed thinking, "Isn't that just like a bunch of men to tell a surveyor something they never bothered to share with their own wives?" when I came to the last question. "What is the one thing you wish your wife or significant other knew, but you feel you can't explain or tell her?" The majority of men said, "How much I love her." Snellville resident Lisa Earle McLeod is a nationally recognized speaker and the author of "Forget Perfect: Finding Joy, Meaning, and Satisfaction in the Life You've Already Got and the YOU You Already Are." She has been seen on "Good Morning America" and featured in Lifetime, Glamour and The New York Times.
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