We’re trained to see ourselves through men’s eyes. Am I thin enough? Does this phot make me look sexy enough? Am I young enough, hip enough? Will he mind that I have a child, two ex husbands, a dog?  My response to this is, well yeah, we’re all in this weird online competition, but listen to the goddess: this is important.

        You must say very specifically what you want in a man. Not vague stuff (“Fit and athletic”), but very clear. I’ll tell you right that you’ll recoil from this–it’s our training–but I want you to do it. “Looking for a man who skis. He’s prompt. He likes to dance will actually find places for us to do so. Likes Mark Knopfler. Knows why Joni Mitchell is important. ” Does this sound silly? It sure doesn’t to the legions of women who have too many guys contacting them, none of whom have any qualities or interests they REALLY want in a man. What these women have done is diversionary: made themselves appealing enough to warrant a thousand hits or flirts or winks….which is very nice if they want to spend the next thousand nights having coffee with new guys. But they don’t. They just are afraid to say what the

        Go for the most specific qualities you can think of and yes, you’ll narrow the field. But the men who contact you will feel they fill the bill, and even if there are three of them, you might get to talk about skiing and dancing and country music with someone who has a lot to say about these things you love.  As for the other nine hundred ninety  seven? Let someone else go out with them.

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Not long ago, The New York Times reported a list of “money disorders” linked to our economy. Overspending. Underspending (hoarding); serial borrowing (we all know what that is); financial enabling (too much money forked over to adult kids); and so forth. Stars like Wynona Judd (overspending), admitted to once buying too many cars and Harleys, but doesn’t anymore.  

But “financial infidelity” caught my eye: “Cheating on a spouse by spending and lying about it.”

Oh dear: Is that a disorder?  If I told my spouse what, say, a new ski helmet costs (which I won’t buy, but still, mine is a little shaky on my head), he’d wonder about my sanity, not to mention the new goggles required to fit over that ski helmet. I repeat: I’m not doing it, so don’t call Richard and tell him I’m cheating on him).

Who reports back to a spouse what she spends? Unless you’re married to a guy who knows–really knows– retail, what woman in her right mind tells her spouse, over a pizza, “Darling, guess what? The bag our daughter wants has been reduced to a $125 from $450.”? Most men I know don’t see $125 as a bargain for anything but a new bicycle, but most girls have peer pressure going on that, whether we like it or not, means something to them. (My stepdaughter and I joke that while we happily wear faux Uggs bought from Costco, what we we get her daughter Emily are the real ones. Why? Because she wouldn’t be caught dead in ours.) Does a man who hasn’t bought a shirt for himself since the Vietnam war know what a nice dress shirt costs?  (I tear off tags when I buy my husband clothes, even on final sale, financially unfaithul wretch that I am. Otherwise he wouldn’t wear them. And we wouldn’t be able to return them. And he’d wear nothing other than the Michigan sweatshirt our grandson Adam gave him when he went off to college, the one that’s now permanently stained with coffee, red wine, and chicken grease.

 I mean look, I’m all for codifying emotional problems—like Grief, for instance—the newest prospective disorder on the DSM’s to-do list. Yes, let’s give more support and counseling to those who feel they’re supposed to be up-and-at- ‘em after that one-year mark we traditionally allow for mourning! But private spending is not a disorder, unless of course you’re Bernie Madoff..  If it’s not hurting anybody, back off and pay for it and stop naming names. And just for fun, ask any cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or bedding store salesperson the number of ways women divide their purchases among credit cards, cash, debit cards and gift certificates. I’ve done that before, and it’s a field of its own, this Byzantine divvying process: As one saleswoman at Bed Bath and Beyond told me, “Hey, it’s the only way to get decent towels and sheets.” Who wants to report back on one’s genius cost-cutting savvy every time she purchases soaps and books? Being discreet, in retail as in love, isn’t deceit. It’s called privacy.  If we decide to call it infidelity, then most every woman I know is a harlot. 

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Right after the new year and just before Valentine’s Day, I always like to get the feel of what’s going on with love and marriage across the nation,  and to make a few predictions for the coming year.  Here they are: Love in 2012.

1. Everyone of all ages will be dating like mad.  An unprecedented 110-million singles in America means that they—not married people–now make up the majority of households. And they’re dating! Millions of adults of all ages—30s through 70s–are  between marriages, against marrying, or on the way to remarriages.

 2. We will become increasinglystarry-eyed about marriage, even as we become increasingly disenchanted, skittish and cynical about it. It is a psychological fact that we long for, and idealize,institutions that promise safety and security. The military. The church. Marriage. Anything that was once reliable but is now increasingly fragile, and even endangered, is a prime target for our nostalgia.  I predict that, even as we divorce more often. sooner and more bitterly, we will increasingly  long for the “good old days” when marriage lasted forever. Because it so rarely does.

3. We will see online dating sites scrambling to nail down love’s chemistry. Although attraction cannot be predicted, we will continue to try to predict it. Dating sites, already promising characterological  compatibility, will scramble to try to promise sexual compatibility. When a computerized program can guarantee great chemistry, I’ll be the first to let you know.

 4. Men will accuse women of acting increasingly the way women have always accused men of acting: Reluctant to commit; eager for more “space,” less eager for sexual exclusivity.  As women become increasingly self-sufficient financially—and less needy of men for purely financial reasons– their demand for emotionally fulfilling relationships will increase. Men, not used to not being needed, and not always skilled at intimacy, will feel increasingly  overwhelmed by women’s demands, and increasingly baffled that women are willing to walk when their demands aren’t met.      

 5.  More couples will cite social media as the reason for their breakup. Already, Facebook and Twitter are implicated in 20 percent of divorce petitions. (More, in England: A recent study puts it at 30 percent.) In 2009, Facebook was cited in one out of every five divorces in the US, and the number 1 online source of  divorce evidence, according to the American Academy of Divorce Lawyers.  A combination of inappropriate messages to the opposite sex, nasty comments posted about separated spouses, and Facebook “friends” reporting spouses’ behavior, is causing a great deal of havoc…and there’s no let-up in sight. 

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She’s close to retirement and has been saving for years. Her adult son doesn’t need money, so her small stash supports the household she shares with her boyfriend of five years, a twice-divorced man  whose money mostly goes to his two young children by his second wife. My guest agreed to this arrangement, feeling strongly that his children should be his first priority, and that they could manage their household expenses together.. BUT, she says, “in  this protracted downturn, none of his money goes to our household; it all goes to his (second) ex-wife’s. I’m wondering where to draw the line. He does, after all, live here. He did, after all, make a financial commitment, albeit a small one, to our life together.”

Before you jump in to judge, remember that the number if women marrying men with children, from both first and second wives, is growing. And the economy isn’t.

Doesn’t it give you new appreciation for pre-nups? I remember thinking, once upon a time, that they were odious reminders to women not only of death and divorce, but that the new brides themselves were disposable and that, moreover, once disposed of, they’d surely be headed for poverty. But I now think prenups are a blessing for everyone. Particularly women.

Here’s the bitter truth for my guest: Money siphoned off from her joint household expenses that now goes to the household of his ex is his concern. But the deal hes breaking with his live-in lover is hers. It galls her that he now even wants more from her—that she support their household, but also that she contribute to paying off his growing debt, on the theory that “they” shouldn’t go more into debt.

No, that won’t fly. First off, they’re not married. Second, her lover’s debts and obligations may morally trump his obligations to her, but her own child (who may one day need money, too), her own home, and her own retirement money trump those obligations. They trump HIM, unless he figures out how to be in this dilemma with her (meaning that HER concerns and obligations be as important as his own).. She now needs to get out of the now0defunct deal and focus on her dwindling assets. He may call her heartless, cold, selfish (more on THAT in another blog). But who, exactly, will be grateful if she gives everything away to this family she doesn’t know? The  ex-wife? Oh, sure. The children? Uh-uh.  She will end up, in her retirement, both  resentful and poor because of a man who never should have begun living with her in the first place, and a family in whose lives she is not even a remote consideration..   

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“That’s terrific,” I said.

“What’s so terrific? I never see her.”

So I got to thinking about the difference between a man’s desire for more “space” and a woman’s. We ‘ll readily call his “commitmentphobia,” “intimacy problems” and “terror of dependence.” We (make that I) champion hers as “autonomy,”  “independence” and “growth.” I think it’s because for so long, a man’s “I need more space,” was a creepy code phrase for “I’m outtahere.”  A woman, though, tends to mean that she needs more independence, more room for growth and self-expansion within the relationship. 

Yet Elliott was nailing something that he thinks women don’t cop to, and that’s ambivalence.  The big pullback that comes just as you begin to become sexually and emotionally exclusive. The raging contradictory, simultaneous push and pull we experience with  growing intimacy. We, the relationship mavens, the ones with no intimacy problems, don’t admit readily to pulling back in a relationship, to feeling overwhelmed by the demands of love and running from them. “He just wants his dinner cooked, is all,” we say, when a man complains that we’re never home, and blame even our own raging terror of engulfment on his man-centricity, on his supposed  expectation that well nurture and maintain the relationship without giving back same.

Ambivalence plays out for women in weird ways. Some women , like Joan, get very very busy. Some take up marathon running. Some even get sick. (“For three nights in a row after I got engaged to Elliott, Joan says, “I threw up. It wasn’t the flu. It was terror. ”) I have a friend who gets a migraine whenever the topic of lifelong monogamy comes up with her lover.

Some women suddenly lose all feeling for the men they love; a numbness comes over them that disguises the emotional wall they’re building to protect them from love.

Some pull back by pushing too hard. “If you don’t want to get married now, then let’s just forget it,” a friend told her lover after a great weekend, even though it was she who wanted to keep to a weekends-only schedule with him. She’d just suddenly felt too close, too involved, too needy.

You’ve got to know how you react to the simultaneous push and pull of love: how that contradiction makes you, specifically, feel. Then you’ve got to know how you act in response to that contradiction. The acknowledgment alone will alleviate the migraines, the flu symptoms, the numbness.  If your response to ambivalence is to sign up for French lessons, and Spanish lessons, and yoga-instructor courses, you should know it. We’re as entitled to the fight-or-flight response as men are. But we can’t pretend it isn’t operating, just because we supposedly want relationships above all else.

Joan admitted she was afraid of engulfment, and gave up French. “Pas plus,” she assured Elliott. And he took up tennis. And, he stopped calling her a commitmentphobe.

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 Well they must be really mad now, because America isn’t even a married culture anymore.  That picture of ourselves talk-show hosts and politicians and so many others insist on—the happily married American couple–is a very nice picture, but it has little to do with us in the US. No, as I’ve said a million times, we’re now a dating culture. What’s more, the Pew Research Center points out that nearly four-in-ten survey respondents in the 2010 Census said they believed that marriage is becoming obsolete.

I know we all hate change. But we’re doing some weird things with our denial of reality, like forcing our outmoded ideals and ideas on those who actually have gone with the flow. To wit: I mentioned in an earlier blog the fact that  Jane Bryant Quinn had noted, in her piece in AARP Magazine, that the magazine’s readers are dating and having weddings–but not actually getting married. That’s right, old folks are taking the vows in public, but not signing the papers.  They’re pretending. Why? Because they feel so pressured by their kids to put on the grandparently show. They’re afraid to depart from the sexless, it’s-over-for-us, role their kids have imposed on them.  As my neighbor, I’ll call him Joe, confided recently, “I don’t know how it happened, but I have  the three single most judgmental children on the planet. Self-righteous prigs, they are!”

Joe and his live-in girlfriend Amy, age 58, played along for awhile. (“For the sake of the grandkids. Like they care.”) “Finally, Amy and I couldn’t stand the righteousness of their disapproval; not to mention the stupidity of feeling like bad teenagers. So we said, Hey, you go live by your standards, we’ll live by ours.'”

Joe and Amy will remain unmarried, they say, and will continue to have sex. Really. And to live together. And, oh yes, they drink! Can you believe it? Sometimes–getaloadathis–they even drink too much!  And they swear.  And…..well, heaven only knows what’s happened to parents and grandparents these days. What has the world come to?     

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More evidence that women’s attitudes toward  marriage have changed dramatically: The Pew  Research Center, which analyzes census data,  confirms what I’ve been hearing from  women:  the desire to make their own self-expansion as important as it has always been for men and children.

Women want more space in their relationships. Yes, I know, we used to mock men for saying they wanted more “space”– because it was such a cowardly euphemism for  “I’m outtahere.”  But women mean it differently: They don’t necessarily want to leave their relationships,  but they definitely want to expand; to flourish inside their relationships, just as men always have.  Hearing the word “space,” though, men tend to hear the worst: they hear the ambivalence; they  hear what they call women’s  “commitmentphobia.” Funny: That’s the very word women once used to describe their ambivalent, skittish boyfriends, the men who didn’t want to get married. 

But now, men do want to get married. And that women are thinking twice about it shouldn’t surprise anyone/ It’s long been clear that women often don’t thrive in the institution of marriage ….while men, emphatically, in every study, do. (If you want to know why, read my book, Marriage Shock.)

Another finding in the census analysis shows two other related cultural changes: First, that financial security isn’t scaring women into marriage as it once did; and second, that more men now “marry up,” wedding educated, successful wives who will bring home at least as much bacon as they do. Single women view this new fact not as an expectation of welcome equality but simply as one more addition to a wife’s should list: you know, that they should be cook, housekeeper, child-rearer, nurturer, lover, relationship-maintainer…and now, money-maker.

The question I’m always asked is this: If women are happy being single,  and they’re not racing into marriage either for financial gain or for children (another census finding, incidentally), what do they seek in a relationship? (Besides space., that is?)

They want what they’ve always wanted: connection. Connection with an emotionally present, relationally skilled partner who is also inclined to want intimacy. A partner who sees marriage as women do—as a place for growth and self-expansion for both partners, not just for one.  A partner who doesn’t want a high-achieving wife and then switch gears and want her to assume the old, traditional wifely role as well.

Does this sound unreasonable on women’s part? Are women demanding too much?

Not at all.

If a man wants a woman to be a breadwommer. and to marry him on his timetable, then she has every right to make her own demands on him.  And if she can’t get what she needs,  then why wouldn’t she decide to stay among the unprecedented 110 million unmarried people who make up the majority of households in America? Why wouldn’t she remain outside an institution that she fears might confine her, and instead join those single people who say they very much enjoyi their independent status… and their space?

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I’ve long been curious about the dearth of pleasure we experience in this, the most gratification-focused culture on earth, as are the many women I’ve spoken with over the years in my books.  I understand the reasons for it now, thanks to the extensive work I’ve done with brilliant friends and colleagues who have shared my passionate involvement in the issue.  Elizabeth DeBold, bestselling author, PhD. and EnlightenNext Magazine senior editor, some time ago provided me with  so much insight and understanding  as a result of her own work, and her amazing book, Mother/Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power. Our dialogues then were indispensible for my writing of Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives. We, along with other brilliant women concerned with the issue–Carol Gilligan, Deb Tolman, Dana Crowley Jack, Annie Gottlieb, the late Jean Baker Miller, to name a few– felt ourselves to be a kind of underground posse, excavators digging out the truth about what women want (and girls; and men; and couples) when the language for our desires seemed as deeply buried as the recognition of it was to Freud,  and we set about to dig for the reasons why our culture has been so hellbent on obscuring them.

I’m thrilled  that Elizabeth DeBold and I are  doing what we’ve so long wanted to do: discussing this and  many other deeply felt issues women face today, in a dialogue at M.I.T. in Boston (77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA; 7:30 pm) next Friday night, June 24th. It’s called “Women Surfing the Edge of Change: Life, Love and Work in our Confusing Time.”   We hope you’ll join us.  For more detailed information and to register, click here.

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Not for very long.  The usual set-up years ago was the familiar eager-to-please woman endlessly trying to engage her distracted, disengaged, or plainly disinterested husband. Her heartbreaking, losing techniques:  Asking questions. Repeating questions. Attempting to be seductive, funny, young, pretty. (Just saying these in print makes me mad and remind me of all those magazine articles: “Ten Surefire Ways to Make Him Happy!” and all those songs about how to please, win back and stand by that cheatin’ guy.)  One study showing that husbands and wives speak to one another an average of 13 minutes a week (and then, only because they have to arrange childcare and meal issues) says it all: Interest in one’s partner is at risk over time.  And if that partner happens to be a woman, well, poor dear.

Historically, then, the man has been seen as the less interested in all things relating to women, marriage and love; and the woman desperate to change that.

But women’s wholesale retreat from marriage, and from unsatisfactory relationships, is startling proof that the jig is up. Today, it’s women throwing in the towel—and early.  Women are finding men who say, “Hey, you’re terrific!” and, “What would YOU like to do tonight”? and are no longer stuck with disengaged, mute men.  Therapists, frustrated with men dragged into their offices by women who can’t make them speak, are changing their technique. No longer do we play to the man in the hope that he’ll return, and in the hope that he’ll see the light and utter a few words of encouragement to his beleagured spouse. We now tend to say, Hey: You want this marriage? Then speak. Show some interest. Otherwise, I promise you, she’s outta here.

True, the culture is not used to the idea that women are leaving men in droves, but they are. (When I first pointed out that two-thirds to three-quarters of all divorces are initiated by women, in my book, Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives, people were shocked. That was in 1997. The figures are higher now. And the women are leaving even sooner.)

For a number of reasons, mainly financial, but also societal–like, that women have more sexual partners before settling down than they once did–women have gone from the primary need to please men to a need to be both respected and  pleased by men. I’m happy to report that no woman  I’ve met recently is pleased for long by a man less interested in her than she in him.

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If only. More often, uncertainty is key. Wanting is an unruly thing, and reciprocity—being wanted back—doesn’t always satisfy. Follow me on this for a couple of blogs—I think you’ll find it all as fascinating as I do.

I call it “The Power of the Least Interested” (although my book title, were it ever to be a book, would be Wanting). I noticed years ago when I was a staff writer and an editor at a popular magazine. I was doing well and was soon offered another position elsewhere that would pay me more for working three days a week instead of five—giving me the support I needed for my own writing, plus more time for it. I approached my editor-in-chief, whom I knew to value me highly, to tell him of the offer. “I expected this to happen one day,” he said, “just not so soon.” He didn’t want to lose me, but he couldn’t raise me above the other articles editors. So he proposed the following: “Go. Call me in six months. I’ll hire you back, at which point I’ll be able to offer you a higher position and a better salary.”

I became the editor-in-chief of my own magazine (it was Health Magazine, then called Family Health) and never did go back, but I kept my close relationship with my mentor and friend, who had taught me a vital lesson about work:

When you can quit, you can advance.

Cut to a school setting.

Seven-year-old Timothy got in trouble at his private school in Seattle for hitting one of the three boys who used to mock him about the red birthmark on his forehead. In an attempt to learn to control his outbursts against these kids, he was getting counseling; but despite his best efforts, one Friday afternoon he hit another of the boys who taunted him. Timothy’s parents were beside themselves, but felt that the private school should be able to control the boys who teased their son and should speak both to them and to their parents. The school maintained that they need not speak to the little provocateurs; that the outbursts were solely Timothy’s problem; and that he should be able control his impulses no matter what. When neither the boy nor the school cooperated, and Timothy once again punched the aggressors, he was suspended for a week. No mention was made of speaking to the offending children or their parents: the school’s headmistress said only, “This break will help Timothy think harder about impulse control.”

Timothy’s parents, outraged at the school’s refusal to deal with the bullying, furious that their son would have to face the embarrassment of an awkward re-entrance and to face the same children who would now feel triumphant and perhaps even freer to continue teasing Timothy, decided to withdraw their son from the school. They enrolled him in public school for the rest of the school year.

Stunned, the private school’s headmistress told the couple that the school was deeply upset; that they “adored” Timothy and never meant for him to leave. They wanted him back. They would speak to the offending students and their parents. Would they please reconsider and let Timothy return?

What precisely prompted the school’s sudden interest in Timothy and his emotional wellbeing, or their turnaround ardent desire that he return, we’ll never know. But Timothy’s parents, in making their radical decision to walk away from an institution that ignored the needs of their son, learned a lesson.

When you can walk, you can win.

The power of the least interested is a way of understanding how how wanting something actually gets played out when two or more people are involved. The theory runs counter to one of our most deeply held and beloved national ideals: not only that interest is generally mutual (as in the reciprocity-of –sexual- interest idea above), but also that the most interested in winning will always win. This Go For It thesis, the “Just Do It” slogan of success appropriated by Nike, holds fast to the American fantasy that anyone can be a success if she just openly declares her goals and sets out to pursue them.

Tomorrow: More on Wanting…..and The Power of the Least Interested.

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