Tag: Prince Charming

Do You Really Want A Sensitive Guy?

Published on by Scott Williams25 Comments

Real Men KnitWomen tell me they need a man to be emotionally sensitive, in touch with his feelings.

Two minutes later that same woman will tell me they want their man to stand up to them, to not let them always get their way. They want a strong, powerful man who is rugged and independent. They actually say that, “I don’t want to get my way.” (Am I to believe them?)

Well which is it?

I have written before of the influence of the myth of Prince Charming and the princess in popular culture. There is strong evidence to suggest that many women, for example, raised on Disney stories and fairy tales still yearn to be treated like a princess – adored, elevated, protected, honored by a strong and beautiful man. No where in Prince Charming’s resume does it require him to be emotionally available, or in touch with his feminine side.

There is a significant dichotomy at play in the dominant female heterosexual culture. Women confess all the time that they are looking for both traits in their man – strength and vulnerability. There is something attractive about a guy who strong and self-contained (if you don’t believe me wait until my upcoming article on How to Pick Up Vulnerable Twenty-somethings). A man who is powerful has long been an aphrodisiac. Most men of my generation were raised to emulate such guys – Eastwood, Arnold, Pitt, Stallone. Today many woman also are attracted to a man who can cry, is sensitive, and can even pretend to be a glittery vampire and lie beside you all night not asking for anything, only staring at you sleep. It is a tall order.

It is no wonder then that men are experiencing an identity crisis like never before in history. A generation often raised by females, guys today are not sure how to behave. We are still supposed to have muscles, though we now shave everywhere. We are supposed to have both masculine and feminine characteristics (not my contention but it seems that way to the average construction worker). Our fathers did not help around the house (though mine did), did not share their feelings, did not watch Househunters International. In fact, our predecessors didn’t do much around the house at all. My grandfather came home from work everyday and proceeded to drink himself sleepy. For all I know he may not have had actual feelings about things, it never came up. We had dress codes and opinions, not feelings. For thousands of years men knew who they were and what was expected of them. Women weren’t happy but we really didn’t seem to notice and if they did complain it was because we thought it was “their time of month”. It was easy to be a man, in peace time.

It’s hard to be a guy, really. I had the amazing opportunity to be a single parent for most of my children’s young lives so I learned the hard way that I can actually cook, do dishes, read and do homework with the kids, go to parent-teacher night, and talk about feelings. I am almost certain that I would not have learned those lessons if I hadn’t been forced to.

There is no training for men. We have had difficulty looking to male role models from our past. We have not been able to talk about our struggles until recently and now we have no idea how. Men are emotionally immature but in our defense we have had little practice. Recently I was out for drinks with my eldest son and a few close friends when I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that it’s cool that we can get together and talk about deep issues. My son turned to me and said, “Dad, we don’t talk about this crap when you aren’t here!” It’s true. Social protocol has dictated, for literally thousands of years, that we do the exact opposite. Men who gush are weak. Effeminate men or even those in touch with their feelings were ridiculed.

So please be patient with us. We are undergoing a cultural and anthropological shift that is unparalleled in history.
Most of us still are trying to figure out what a clitoris is.

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The Invisible Psychopath – By The Time You Recognize Them It’s Too Late

Published on by Scott Williams13 Comments

Sometimes the person you know may not be the person you know…

The word “psychopath” gets thrown around a lot, but in psychiatry it has a specific meaning. Psychopaths are aggressively narcissistic and impulsive and feel a relentless urge for sensation-seeking.They lack empathy and compulsively manipulate others through bullying or deceit. They believe that they are exempt from the rules and show a marked predilection for lying, even when it is not advantageous for them.

Earlier this year Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Ronald Schouten published a book, Almost a Psychopath, in which he and co-author Jim Silver describe the ways that people can exhibit quite a few of the symptoms of psychopathy without satisfying the full diagnostic criteria. Such people can be highly deceptive, manipulative, callous, and self-serving, and yet manage to maintain a facade on normality.

This, for me, is perhaps the most disturbing thing about psychopathy: its invisibility. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that a number of people have crossed my paths who at first seemed delightful and charming, but who wound up leaving a trail of wreckage—people who I now recognize were clearly psychopaths, or at least “almost psychopaths,” as Schouten styles them. Once burned, twice shy, you would hope; but no, having been tormented by one or two, I still managed to subsequently fall into others’ charming clutches.

I shouldn’t feel too bad about failing to recognize potential psychopaths, Schouten says. Indeed, when I asked him, the psychopath expert, if he often runs into such people frequently at cocktail parties or business meetings, he told me that, as far as he knew, he hadn’t run into any, at least that he was able to recognize as such. Even for experts like himself, the psychopath’s veneer of normality is too seamless to detect.

As I wrote in a recent article on Gizmodo, when I first met tech guru John McAfee I was utterly charmed. He seemed to be living his life with a clarity and moral courage that I found exhilarating. The first article I wrote about him was effusive, and when I traveled to Belize to meet up with him for a second article, I looked forward to spending time with someone who I felt to be both intellectually and physically adventurous. On this second trip, however, I began to notice a troubling pattern. McAfee spent a lot of his time bragging about the hoaxes he’d pulled off, gleefully styling himself as a “bullshit artist.” Sometimes he lied for fun—like when he told a reporter that his tattoo was a Maori design he’d gotten in New Zealand, a country he’s never actually been to. Sometimes he lied strategically, like the Facebook posting he put up about how he’d just bought a house in Honduras. At the time, he was facing a raft of lawsuits. “The judge in one case couldn’t understand why I would put incorrect information about myself on the web,” he told me. “I said, ‘I thought that if somebody wanted to serve me papers, it would be much more enjoyable for everyone involved if they tried to serve those papers to me in Honduras.'”

After I wrote an unflattering article about him, a number of people from McAfee’s past reached out to me and told me even more troubling stories. I became convinced that McAfee was not merely a disingenuous person but a true psychopath.

Schouten says that we should not be surprised to find psychopaths among the ranks of successful entrepreneurs like McAfee. Indeed, he emphasizes that psychopathic traits can be positively helpful. “Psychopathy could confer a competitive advantage, at least over the short-term,” he says. “Grandiosity and over-the-top self-confidence, as well as skill at conning and manipulating, can go a long way toward convincing investors of one’s vision.”

And success only intensifies a psychopath’s worst traits. One 2009 study from the Kellogg School of Management found that psychologically normal subjects primed to feel powerful were worse at imagining other people’s perspective and less perceptive in assessing facial emotions.

Such a profound disorder, however, is not ultimately compatible with long-term success. Eventually, Schouten says, a psychopath’s personal and professional relationships begin to shred due to accumulated toxicity.

“Downward drift” is a term that psychologists use for the tendency of some mentally ill to slip ever further down the socioeconomic ladder. It’s usually applied to schizophrenics, but it seems apt in McAfee’s case. Each time I returned to write an article about him I found that his prospects had worsened. He was retreating further from the world I knew, into refuges that seemed ever shakier.

Years of destructive behavior had created such a wake of ill-feeling that at last his veneer of innocence was eroding away. At last he had lost the psychopath’s most valuable asset: his invisibility.

Published on November 9, 2012 by Jeff Wise in Extreme Fear via Psychology Today
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Lies We Tell Ourselves #3 – He Is Perfect For Me. It Was Meant To Be!

Published on by Scott Williams14 Comments

Meant for Each OtherIt was written in the stars. He saw her from across the room and as their eyes met; he knew she was the only one for him, forever.

Doesn’t young romantic love make you want to puke?

In my Relationship Group there is always that one couple who tell us that they knew their relationship was ‘meant to be’, and that when they met they knew it was true love. This other person is the ‘one and only’.

Popular culture and movies are replete with references to the idea that your love was ‘meant to be.’ Just look at all the romantic comedies that are out there. You know the ones, the movies where Matthew McConaughey takes off his shirt. The movies about a young professional, trying to make it in the big city and she meets a guy who stumbles into her on the street. He’s annoying and you think she is going to marry the rich, stuck up guy but at the last moment he shows up at her wedding with flowers, just before she says, “I do.” As they rush out of the church you know that their love was meant to be. After all, when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. When you wish upon a star your dreams come true!

Nope.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in lust at first sight. I do not, however, buy into the idea that your special relationship was written in the stars. So why is this such a big deal? Why would anyone waste their time arguing about true love?

In counseling we call this a cognitive distortion. These are the distorted truths we tell ourselves in order to cope. So why is this belief a distortion?

Fast forward ten or twenty years and the wife is in counseling. She is frustrated because her marriage is not turning out the way it was ‘meant to be’. Prince Charming has turned out to be a dud, her sex life is routine and obligatory and every conversation they have seems to end in a fight. Where is the romance? Where is the passion?

Real relationships rarely turn out the way they do on television. Every relationship, no matter how steamy it started out, lessens in romantic intensity the longer you are together. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. Hopefully your respect and trust in that other person will continue to grow and your romantic life will be fulfilling and enjoyable for both partners. I like to call this the real world.

In the land of media induced make-believe , however, romance is intense. You kiss like you are trying to rub your lips all over their face. His mere touch sends you into spasms of pre-orgasmic delight. For the rest of your life you are going to live with your soul mate and even though over half of relationships split up, yours is going to go the distance. Why? Because it was meant to be.

Most of us have grown up with this perception of true love. We believe that one day, some day, we will meet that perfect someone and they will feed our every dream. We will surely live ‘happily ever after’. Unfortunately this is often not the case. I often meet women (and men) who complain that their partner is not willing to do whatever it takes to make the relationship work. Now that they have a solid relationship it’s as if they quit trying and go on to the next adventure. When the relationship is struggling they refuse to go for counseling; they refuse to be embarrassed. Let me let you in on something; if your spouse is not willing to go to counseling to work on your marriage then that relationship is doomed. The same goes for living together.

Living with someone in a romantic relationship is extremely challenging and demands a ridiculous amount of hard work. No couple magically just gets along without putting in the effort, especially in heterosexual relationships. Men and women are practically different species and it requires a profound commitment to go the distance together. Believing this distortion sets people up for disappointment. That lady sitting in my office grew up to believe that she would meet Prince Charming. She imagined that her relationship would be special, incredible, unique and wonderful. As a young girl she didn’t dream of a guy who farts, picks his nose and scratches his crotch. While they were newly dating (and lying to each other) neither partner thought they would someday be yelling at this person of their dreams. The Princess Bride didn’t mention PMS or bad breath or grouchy husbands.

Time and again I run across people, often a female, who feel a deep sense of grief and disappointment about how their life is turning out. By the age of forty or forty-five they begin to ask themselves, “Is this as good as it gets?” This is in part because they dreamed of a fantasy that was not, could not, be real. Their unrealistic expectations have contributed to their frustration. The myth of ‘happily ever after’ sold them a myth that no partner, no matter how amazing, could hope to live up to.

A successful relationship is a ton of work by two very flawed people who are committed to lower their expectations and dedicate themselves, in spite of their partner’s glaring faults, to going on a journey together. Anything less is probably not going to make it.

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Prince Charming?

Published on by Scott Williams5 Comments

Orlando Bloom as Legolas in Peter Jackson's li...I grew up watching Disney cartoons, believing in ‘make believe’ and dreaming about fighting dragons, slaying bad guys, and getting the beautiful princess. There was something inside of me as a child that longed to be special, that longed for knights and battles and glory. As Gene Hackman said in The Replacements – “wounds heal, chicks dig scars, and glory lasts forever.”

Recently I have been doing a great deal of marriage counseling. I have come to realize that men and women are very different, so different in fact that it’s like they speak two different languages. They also come to the relationship with very different expectations. Though I am hesitant to state that I know someone else’s motivations, there is a lingering dream that keeps resurfacing in my counseling. Many women I counsel eventually admit that they grew up with the same fantasies and long to be treated like a princess – adored, supported, protected and treated as beautiful , intelligent and willing to hack off a limb if she needs to.  And what guy doesn’t want to be praised, thought of as a mighty warrior who can slay the dragon, and have great hair doing it?

But is this reasonable? Let’s talk about it.

Unfortunately in the real world it seems that reality rarely meets our childhood expectations and many of us end up in relationships with few fairy tale endings.

So is there any truth to this princess thing?

With few exceptions most women I talk to can identify with at least some of the myth. Who does not want to be treated like a princess (in the best sense of the word)? Princesses are honored, they are royalty. People stop and stare when they walk by. Men fawn all over them for attention. So many heterosexual men do not seem to understand that when they cannot show their spouse that she is special, and that he can be trusted and has her back; that this strikes at the core of what many woman are looking for in a partner.

There seems to be almost a primal reason why many women are attracted to affluent men, or men with nice possessions. They may believe on some level that this individual can treat a woman the way she inherently wants to be treated. Most women, when pressed, will admit they think security is an important value.

So what’s the deal with Prince Charming?

Many men, on the other hand, want to be the hero. Men over thirty come from a world of masculine competition. We were raised on movies starring Clint Eastwood (before he went crazy at the Republican National Convention), Arnold and Sly, Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. We all wanted to be Hard to Kill. Many men are not, nor will they ever be, metro-sexual. When they watch Lord of the Rings they do not think Legolas is a real man (well technically… he’s an elf). The hero of 13th Warrior is not Antonio Banderas, it’s Buliwyf. In a man’s world you are constantly measured  by other males based on your capacity to take care of yourself. We have thousands of years of hunter/gatherer machismo to get over, and apparently not all of us have been able to make it over the wall yet.

It may be for this reason that men subconsciously respond so poorly to criticism by their women. If my wife diminishes my character it affects me on every level and something deep inside me feels like I’m a child again, being chastised by my mother. It attacks the essence of what it means for me to be a man. Women who understand this and are willing to ‘butter up’ their man are used to getting their way far more than females who use condemnation to coerce.

But is this fair? Fairness has little to do with it, it’s simply a reality for many men.

I find it interesting that the myth of machismo continues to thrive so blatantly in popular culture. Most stereotypes that have been bashed by the media eventually lose their popularity and are scorned by movies and culture. Take, for example, the idea of the submissive, ‘meet you at the door with your slippers’ depiction of the housewife. This once popular role has almost ceased to exist in popular culture except among the fringe and a few fundamentalist Christians I know. Popular culture has led the way in relegating this stereotype to the realm of the absurd. So why, then, does the macho, unfeeling, remorseless, beer drinking, emotionally unavailable male still enjoy such popularity?

There is an interesting phenomenon going on among women in my part of the village. Some are complaining that they are frustrated by their relationships with men who are emotionally needy, whiny, almost ‘too’ in touch with their feelings. Is it possible that a few women out there still want a knight in shining armor to be the hero he so desperately wants to be?

So what can we do about it?

If you are struggling with your relationship, don’t give up without a fight. Any relationship can be restored if both partners are willing to put the needs of the other person first. Unfortunately, however, many couples have so much ‘water under the bridge’ that they cannot talk about anything without it becoming heated. If it’s not too bad, fight for it. If it is, and you aren’t ready to leave yet, maybe you should consider having a professional help you through the jungle of emotion and hurt.

And oh ya, if you do get a counselor, get a counselor that doesn’t suck! (I can help you with that).