The two major complaints that women make in their relationships

Taken from 'The Man's Guide to Women'

(Rex Features)

In our Love Lab, we found that women have two major complaints about men. This first complaint is: “He is never there for me.” The second complaint is: “There isn’t enough intimacy and connection.”

These women feel alone even when they are in a relationship. In many ways, these are related complaints. These women cannot trust their men to be there for them when they need them. Most of the time, this is about being there for them emotionally: listening to them, caring for them, and safeguarding their hearts.

In contrast, men have two major complaints about women: “There’s too much fighting, and there’s not enough sex.”

Sound familiar? These men are also lonely even when they are in a relationship. We found that men actually want intimacy just as much as women, but they feel that intimacy when there’s less fighting and more sex.

These separate complaints from men and women are, in fact, causally related and can be addressed through a simple skill we like to call attunement. When men “attune” to their women, there is less fighting, more frequent (and better) sex, and both men and women no longer feel so alone.

It is also the skill that leads to genuine emotional connection, which in turn leads to trust, which in turn leads to you giving women the number one thing they need and want. In other words, this is a big deal.

In our interviews in the Love Lab, we asked men and women whether or not they felt they could talk to their partners (especially when they felt sad, angry, or in need of affection), and we discovered a fundamental fact: The fights of many couples result from men dismissing women’s emotions instead of attuning to them. You dismiss a woman’s emotions every time you try to fix them, distract her from them, minimize them, mock them, or ignore them altogether.

Learn the relatively simple and fundamental skill of attunement and your relationship with women will change profoundly. (Attunement will also serve you well at work, in parenting, and in all of your relationships.)

We found that men who learned emotional attunement got what they ultimately wanted from their relationships: less fighting and more sex.

This extract was republished with permission from the authors. The Man's Guide to Women by John Gootman, PhD and Julie Schwartz, PhD is available now