How To Understand The Opposite Sex

It has been eight months or so since that fateful springtime morning when I opened my inbox to find a "nice" message from a young woman somewhere in Canada. The missive was a simple one, reading: "You understand women better than most women do. It's like you are 'The Chick Whisperer', or something."

Obviously, that particularly catchy phrase soon became the name of the podcast for men that we already had in the planning stages.

But is this really some sort of special or even downright 'supernatural' gift that I have? Nah...understanding MOTOS is really not as hard as it's cracked up to be.

In fact, the simple notion that most of us BELIEVE it is next to impossible to really get inside the head of MOTOS and figure out what is going on is probably-and disarmingly-the most basic reason why we don't even bother to try.

Yet, the fact remains. In all seriousness, there really is no more foolproof a way to rocket your success into the stratosphere when it comes to dating, attraction and seduction than to understand the opposite sex.

Put in plain English, if you want to "get dates" you have to "GET" your dates.

So where do we start?

The baseline is as follows: Contrary to the message conveyed by the titles of books like "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus", we as men and women are actually more ALIKE than different.

In fact, I'll be so bold as to say this. When it comes to EMOTIONS, I believe men and women feel things very similarly. Cut us and we all bleed red. When something exciting happens, we're all excited. When someone cuts us off in traffic, men and women both feel frustrated and slightly violated.

Similarly, I think we all have largely similar needs and want similar results in life. Maslow didn't have "his and her" hierarchies, now did he? We all breath the same air, drink the same water, and would like to get the creditors to stop calling and the boss to start promoting.

But you'd think that the opposite sex wasn't even classifiable as "human" the way we are trained to think about them. Lots of guys think if you follow a certain formula (which, perhaps ironically, is typically devised 'in house' at Men, Inc.) then we'll "get what we want" from women.

Meanwhile, at Women, Inc. all you do is follow "The Rules" and men become your willing automatons.

Most of this brand of scheming is born of the notion that we as men and women are essentially powerless when it comes to truly understanding MOTOS. The natural flow from this mindset is respectively assuming that we are somewhere higher on the food chain than the opposite gender. Therefore we become twisted into believing that they'll somehow fall for our tactics.

But the problem is I wasn't kidding earlier. We're ALL human...and more ALIKE than DIFFERENT. And whoever your MOTOS are, you aren't going to "get what you want off of them" until you DESERVE WHAT YOU WANT...as a human being.

To demonstrate this, here's another piece of the "puzzle".

Much of what we perceive as "differences" between men and women are ACTUALLY 100% purely driven by social dynamics. That's psycho-babble = for "we all buy into the pressures of the culture we live in".

For example, men think women don't like sex. Wrong. Women like sex as much if not more than men do. The "difference" is that women are stigmatized as "sluts" if they demonstrate that, whereas men are pretty much heroes to their peers if they "get laid" a lot.

Similarly, (and this is my personal favorite example) most guys freely suppose that "women are the choosers" and "men are the chasers", implying that women have all the power. Not true. She OR he who has the highest quality options when it comes to dating/procreating/etc. is the one who calls the shots.

I happen to know two guys who are roommates. They literally have so many options with women that they hold parties inviting 20 or so women from MySpace to their place all at once-none of whom they've met yet. Why? Because there aren't enough hours in the day to evaluate the dating potential of that many women separately...it has to be a "bulk assessment".

Tell me...what did that last example do for your vision of the stereotypical "hottie" at a bar rejecting guy after guy after guy who tries to approach her?

But surely there are indeed REAL differences between men and women, right? Of course...but the point here is to first build the foundation that the similarities between genders FAR outweigh the differences. She doesn't want to be "used" for sex any more than he wants to be "used" for his money. Yet, we have to respect that women want a "provider" and men want a woman who is physically attractive. And this is all perfectly reasonable-MOTOS aren't "shallow" for having their preferences in that regard. The differences between genders, you see, tend to base themselves on differences in reproductive roles and/or archetypal gender roles.

Shockingly, the differences themselves are even less complex than most of us imagine. Have you ever noticed that both men and women like to believe that their OWN respective gender is "easy to figure out"? Well, that's because it's...um...true.

Really it comes down to this...women want to feel secure and want a man to LEAD. When you ask a woman what's wrong and she says "Nothing", you KNOW as a man that it's SOMETHING. In her mind, it's your job to figure it out without her having to take your hand and spell it out for you...that's all there is to it. You must LEAD, and then you must be able to hold her and tell her it's all going to be okay-and she has to be able to believe you. You must PROVIDE in every way-not just materially but emotionally as well.

And us guys? We want APPROVAL from women (without asking for it, which you see as weakness anyway). We want you to think we're great. We want to be your "heroes" as much as you want us to be. Oh...and we also don't want you to humiliate us. Oh, and you really do need to be physically attractive to us-which, fortunately, is more subjective a concept to us than you think. That's all.