Why Men Won't Commit: Getting What You Both Want Without Playing Games Book

I was reluctant to purchase this when I first saw it sitting in a three dollar clearance rack at the local bookstore. I actually left it on the shelf that first day with this silly fear that, should I carry it up to the counter for purchase, I would automatically be dubbed this sketchy, co-dependent woman who was adding more ammo to her mental manipulation of men shelf. I would have had an easier time, I supposed, purchasing lesbian erotica than any self help book. I drove back to the store the next day and handed over my three bucks. I'd empowered myself with the fact that I wasn't purchasing this book as a means to handle my current relationship so much as to understand one of my failed past ones. You can't manipulate a relationship you've already ended. Take my three Dollars, and no, I don't need a bag.

Because the author has a penis and a PhD, and is talking about the inner workings of man, it seems a trustworthy place to start for anyone looking for incite. The text flows conversationally and points are made using Weinberg's accounts of patients he had seen. The basic premise introduced is that men are really simple creatures. They want love but their inability to understand their own emotions on anything much simpler than love, makes it a challenge for them to express it, if they ever do at all. On top of this, Weinberg introduces us to the concept of Masculine Pretense, which is essentially the image that the man is presenting to the world and often acts as a barrier and a hindrance to him acting as free in regards to love as women are apt.

If you're still with Weinberg at this point, he continues on to state that all men have four basic needs. They have: A need to feel special (and/or chosen above all other possible choices you could have made and have made in your love choice), a need to feel like they're traveling light and are not dominated or hindered by who they are with in any way, they need loyalty even before they know they would need it and a loyalty to their true self and not just to their Masculine Pretense and finally, they need to feel emotionally close before they'll commit. The book, geared to coaching men daters/lovers, then goes into how we as daters/lovers can use these needs of his back against him and help him to commit.

Sure Weinberg pops in frequently to remind us to be natural and not force yourself to cater to your man if it doesn't feel natural for you to do so, but come on, it's a book on relationships! Its underlying assumption is that anyone who buys it is interested in getting the one they're with to commit. It's nearly impossible to read this book and Not plot and plan on how to behave to get the desired result. It's an instruction manual for the insecure! Not that that's a bad thing...

What I enjoyed about this book is that it did offer perspectives I hadn't considered before. If you start to think of your unwilling to commit man as a weaker sex prone to living by his gut reactions to you, you can empathize a bit with how hard it must be for him to even decide to take you to Pizza Hut, let alone arrange any future plans for you. It does make you pay attention to your own image and what it is you're doing or saying around him and self examination is rarely a bad idea. However, this work does run the risk, when placed in the wrong hands, to just make a super
codependent woman even more codependent despite the final chapters on how important it is to make yourself happy and stable. It's important to remember that even if you naturally play into all four of a man's needs and are doing so naturally and with happiness on your part, a lasting commitment still might not evolve from that and that's something that isn't stated loud enough in this book and is something I would have liked to seen addressed. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses, but at least with this book, it gives one a means to examine the relationship thoroughly, know you have done everything you naturally could do and then move on without too much regret or confusion.

I told my male friend I was reading this book and he said "You could read twenty books on the subject and still not get us." True.