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LOVE SAFETY
NET
Transcript
of June 15, 2009, program
“Should Men Chase Women or Women Chase Men?”
STEVE: Hi
everyone.
Welcome to The Love Safety Net.
KIM: Hi, I’m Kim.
STEVE: And I’m Steve. Today’s show is titled, “Should Men
Chase Women, or Women Chase Men?”
KIM: I really hope that after hearing today’s show, you get a
clear picture in your mind of what a healthy relationship looks
like as it develops, and as people grow closer to each other. I
hope you also may feel a little more relaxed about how the
courtship in your own relationship went, even if it wasn’t quite
the same as it goes in the movies.
STEVE: Well, Hollywood has it all wrong.
KIM: Yes.
STEVE: Because courtship rituals as we see in the movies are
very different to how they happen in real life.
KIM: Mmm…well, we really know that, don’t we? We know that
the movies is the movies and it’s just fantasy and it’s not the
same as real life, but it’s easy to forget, isn’t it, Steve?
STEVE: Well, I think we get some kind of subconscious ideas
of how things should be.
KIM: Particularly when it is in the base line of just about
every movie plot is that there is this guy chasing this girl and
he is going through all these insurmountable challenges that he
overcomes to win her heart. I mean, I think this causes a lot
of insecurity in people in their relationships, and it can
actually cause some very insurmountable challenges to the
relationship that people get in their mind that are really based
on what I think are sincerely faulty ideas.
STEVE: And we all have them.
KIM: Yes, yes.
STEVE: I don’t think anyone should feel bad for thinking that
it is going to happen the way it does in a movie.
KIM: No. That is what we want to sort of break down today
into really unpack this and get a better idea of what a really
healthy relationship looks like. So these are insurmountable
changes, these mistaken ones I was talking about before. I will
give a few examples of these. We get these all the time, people
asking us questions, giving us insight into how they have
thought and their ideas. And I have felt a lot of these before
back when I was having problems with you, Steve.
So the first one I’ve got here is you thinking "We will need to
start over again. I need to start the relationship right over
again from scratch, with him chasing me like it should have
happened in the beginning. It didn’t happen that way with us,
and that must be what is what is wrong."
STEVE: Yeah, it didn’t happen the way it happened in the
movies, so I am going to have to go back and change it.
KIM: Yep.
STEVE: And I have to make sure it happens the way it happened
in the movies.
KIM: And I’ve got to get him to feel bad that he hasn’t done
it right and feel bad about all the stuff he’s dragged me
through. Then when he feels bad enough about it, he might go
back and he will court me all over again.
This is a really common one that I think a lot of people think.
And I know I was thinking this was going to be the answer to
Steve and my relationship problems. So if you feel that way,
don’t feel bad about it, I just hope we give you a bit clearer
idea today of maybe a little bit easier and more realistic way
you can get to a better relationship.
OK…another one is this idea that maybe your partner needs years
of therapy before they are going to be capable of loving you. I
think this is a really common misconception as well and a really
insurmountable challenge that many people feel their
relationship faces. I know I certainly thought that.
STEVE: Yes, so when you thought, Kim, that maybe I needed to
go through years of therapy…
KIM: (laughs)
STEVE: What were you thinking when you were facing that
stage? Did it seem like it was going to be realistic?
KIM: No, it didn’t seem realistic at all. I felt very
hopeless about it. How was I going to find the right
therapist? How was I going to convince you that you needed
therapy? So this was really a big one. I don’t want to give
the impression that we don’t believe in therapy or therapy is a
bad thing. I have a lot of friends who are psychologists and we
base most of our work on psychology. I think psychology has
handed us some brilliant tools. But really the best psychology
offers is tools.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: It’s not so much you’ve got to get your partner into
therapy to go right back to the beginning to work through
everything to make things better. We will talk about that a
little bit later in the show. It’s really more about filling in
developmental gaps.
So from the guy’s point of view, let’s get some of the
insurmountable challenges that guys have in their heads because
they think that it should have been like in the Hollywood
movies.
OK…my wife isn’t worth very much, or is kind of low status
because she was too easy to get into bed. I know that is maybe
not so common with younger men—I’m not sure. But I know for men
around my father’s age that was a really, really common one.
They don’t stop and think, hey, well, I didn’t really do the
chasing like they do in the movies either.
STEVE: (laughs) I think you will find that a lot of guys would
feel the same way. There are elements of that in guys of all
ages.
KIM: Yes, is she really good enough for me? Have I landed
myself a dud and she really just was too easy.
STEVE: It was too easy, yes.
KIM: So I’ve made this huge mistake.
STEVE: She didn’t play hard to get like Audrey Hepburn did.
KIM: (laughs) Yes, that’s right. And I think another one that
the men sometimes feel is maybe that they are not a real man and
they feel a lot of insecurity because they are actually very
nervous and insecure around women and they don’t feel like this
big sort of hunter or predator sort of person that is all out
for the chase.
STEVE: Mmm… and cool and calm with all the lines.
KIM: (laughs) Yes, because you don’t have a scriptwriter in
real life, do you? Like the guys in the movies?
STEVE: That’s right. I wish I had the guy that wrote the
script for Mr. Steed in The Avengers. I mean he always
had the best lines. I wish I was that snappy, but unfortunately
we don’t have scriptwriters.
KIM: (laughs) That’s right. And I think at a simple level
there are a lot of women out there wondering how do I get a man
to like me enough to chase me like that? And guys who think how
do I pursue a woman without looking like a fool. I mean, the
only men I remember really pursuing me in any kind of full on
sort of way, Steve, I think made fools of themselves.
STEVE: Definitely. Look, and I think guys, really deep down,
are really fearful of that. I think you’re right and you’ve hit
that one on the head, Kim. Guys are really terrified of making
a goose of themselves.
KIM: Yes. So before we get really deeper into this and I’ve
got a bit of a fairytale for everybody today, which I think is a
lot closer to the real truth rather than the Hollywood movie
stories. I am going to be telling you the fairytale of Skeleton
Woman, which is an Inuit fairytale. It is about love and
courtship, but before we get into Skeleton Woman Steve, I would
like to talk a little bit about our own relationship and our own
story from the beginning, because I think it was much more like
Skeleton Woman than the movies. We met and in the beginning you
really liked me and you had a fairly high opinion of me.
STEVE: I did.
KIM: You really sort of seduced me in a way with your smiles
and being very interested in everything I said, and….
STEVE: Guilty as charged. I did. I gave you the biggest
smile, big eyes, the whole thing. I was very, very interested.
KIM: Yes, and you really put this big whopping hook in my
heart and then you are the one who did the running away!
STEVE: I did.
KIM: And for a long time after that it was very much me
chasing you.
STEVE: Well, I didn’t pursue you after that first encounter
because there were a lot of feelings going on. I was really
afraid and I was really nervous. And I did feel perhaps you
were a little bit more clever than I, or a little bit more high
status than I was. You had your own place, where I didn’t. I
was still living in a family apartment. So I was a bit scared
and I ran away. I didn’t come back and pursue you in any way.
Anyway, we will keep going with the story.
KIM: We will get to that later too. I think men are much
better than women at playing hard to get. That chasing game
actually went on beyond us getting married and having kids. It
was still like you were the one pulling away and I was the one
having to do all the convincing that the relationship was worth
working on and I was the one having to do most of the work while
you were very much playing aloof.
STEVE: Yes, it set a tone, didn’t it, that set a theme that I
was just running away for a long time in our relationship.
Absolutely.
KIM: And I think maybe back then if I had understood the
story of Skeleton Woman a bit better, I might have handled all
of that a bit better.
STEVE: And I think I would have handled it better, too, if I
had known the story.
KIM: Yeah, but, I don’t know I think we can’t just leave it
up to the guys—us girls.
STEVE: Definitely not.
KIM: I’ve got this idea if it was actually left up to guys to
make the first move and do all the chasing in relationships, I
don’t know, I would have concerns for the future of the human
race.
STEVE: I think there is a lot of merit in that fear.
KIM: I think if I had understood the story and got it right,
maybe the chasing bit might have only gone on for 10 days
instead of 10 years. But let’s see.
STEVE: I agree.
KIM: OK...so the story of Skeleton Woman very simply there is
a girl—I’m not sure about the beginning of the story exactly. I
think she is thrown off a cliff by her father in some kind of
fight and she drowns and she becomes a skeleton and is at the
bottom of the ocean. Then this fisherman comes along and he
hooks the skeleton when he is fishing. He pulls the skeleton out
of the water, becomes frightened by the skeleton and then tries
to run away. But because his hook is in the skeleton, which he
doesn’t realize, and he’s got her on the line. I suppose this
is rather comical, if you imagine this as a cartoon, she chases
along behind the boat, which makes him more and more frightened
and makes him go faster and faster until he gets back into his
igloo. He dives into his igloo, still holding his fishing pole
and still pulling her along and obviously she comes along behind
him too. The two of them are left lying on the floor in the
igloo. Then he turns over and he looks at her and sees that it
is the skeleton of this woman and sees that it is his hook that
has hooked her and has been dragging her along behind him and
that she hasn’t actually been chasing him. He actually feels
compassion for the skeleton. He feels bad for having dragged
her along behind him and for what he has done and he sheds a
tear. This tear, when it touches her bones, actually puts flesh
back onto her bones and she becomes alive again and is a
full-fledged woman. And that is actually where their love
begins and where their relationship begins.
I think this is a very, very interesting story. As I said, it
is very much closer to the truth than the Hollywood story. It
was very similar to the story between you and me, Steve.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: And I think that there is a lot we can learn from this,
especially in the point of what makes the man feel compassion?
What makes that tear come? Where is the point where he finally
feels compassion for her and that he wants to suddenly feel for
her rather than running away?
STEVE: And that’s a really good question, and I think that’s
where a lot of people are really waiting for an answer. But
just to go back for a minute, first I want to talk a little bit
more about men and their status and the game of playing hard to
get we were talking about before.
KIM: Yep.
STEVE: Because I think that men are interested in status. I
am pretty sure we talked about this in our last program. You
talked about the great song, Kim, Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog.
“You said you were high-class, but that was just a lie. You
ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine.”
KIM: Yep.
STEVE: So we talk about that a lot because it really is very
powerful with what we are talking about. Men don’t want to feel
as though they have someone who has gypped them, that they have
been tricked into thinking they have mated with someone who is
not as high status as they put out. That is a lot about the
playing hard to get problem we talk about.
KIM: And that is what can happen from playing hard to get,
because if you really don’t have a lot of status and self-worth
and your worth is just based on playing games, you are likely to
end up in that situation with a man where he is going "You said
you were high class but that was just a lie" and now you are
just crying and he doesn’t want to know about you.
STEVE: That’s right. You repeated a great quote to me
yesterday, Kim. The value…can we talk about that?
KIM: Yes, now what was that? It came in on an email and it
said, “You are better to think of how you are valuable rather
than how valuable you are”.
STEVE: Yes, “it is better to know how you are valuable than
how valuable you are”. So that kind of gets back to the hard to
get game we are talking about, because the hard to get game says
“I am really valuable because I am hard to get”.
KIM: Yes.
STEVE: There is no basis to that. There is no reason why.
There is no merit to that. And also it’s just a game, like we
talked bout, but there is also little in it for the person who
is playing hard to get. The person—in this case a woman—really
needs to be putting across how she is valuable, feeling that she
is high status, feeling that she’s got some skills or she is
learning skills (and this can go for men as well). But knowing
that there is some value behind all of that is really important
and that goes to setting goals—but I am digressing a bit, aren’t
I?
KIM: No, that was great. I think it is very true what you
are saying. Hard to get is a man’s game, really and I think it
is very hard to beat men at their own game.
STEVE: I think you are right. Because the hard to get game
is about who can be more emotionally cold, and I think men are
always going to win at that game, wouldn’t you say?
KIM: Absolutely. And this whole status thing relationships
are built on is really more the way men perceive relationships
than women. And I would agree with you totally, I think playing
aloof is a very poor way to establish your status in someone
else’s eyes. If two people are just trying to see who can be
more aloof than the other, where does it end. I mean, I have
seen relationships like that.
STEVE: Well, where does it end? I really don’t think it goes
anywhere. It really ends when somebody ends up reaching out and
saying hey, I don’t want to play this aloof game anymore and
tries to let some real emotion show. Well, are they the loser
in that sense? Because that is sort of the way the game is set
up in many ways, isn’t it?
KIM: And I think women in particular really worry about this
a lot because I think women really don’t like the game hard to
get and they are even very tortured by the idea that this is
somehow what they have to do. Because on the one side they are
thinking, “But I like this guy, and in my heart I feel like
pursuing him and also I feel like telling him how great he is.
What is wrong with that. I think it is a little bit skewed.
From the men’s point of view this is damaging as well because
they are left with thinking if she is too easy, maybe she isn’t
high status enough for me.
STEVE: It seems to be lose-lose, doesn’t it? It seems like
there is almost a guillotine over the neck to the person who
says if I am going to be emotionally real with this person who I
like now, that that somehow is the indicator that they are the
weaker person by not continuing to play aloof, that somehow they
are putting everything on the line. There is a real
fear—especially with women, as you were saying, Kim—that that is
going to make them not look like the catch that they were
pretending to be. All the sudden, it feels like there is a lot
of dishonesty in the relationship. And what kind of basis is
that?
KIM: And even if you get it straight in your mind, like I
hope you will by the end of this show when we get to the end of
Skeleton Woman - as we will in a minute. But there will still
be a lot of people with misconceptions out there. In the
beginning with you and I, I didn’t give you my phone number. Oh
no, I gave you my phone number but I didn’t take yours. I had
refused to take yours after we first met.
STEVE: I tried to give it to you.
KIM: You tried to give me your phone number, and I went no,
you are going to call me. I guess I was sending you a bit of a
challenge, which I think you liked. Even though it still took
you three weeks to call me…
STEVE: Was it three weeks?
KIM: Yes.
STEVE: OK…sorry about that.
KIM: (laughing) You rat…and if I had taken your phone number,
I would have called you the next day. I wouldn’t have been able
to help myself. So I knew and that’s why I didn’t take your
phone number. I knew I was going to want to chase you too much.
STEVE: Well, I had hooked you.
KIM: Yeah, you truly did. But you hadn’t acknowledged that
yet at all.
STEVE: No, no.
KIM: I think I felt bad about that then—I don’t know—I can’t
remember how good my understanding of relationships was then.
But I know a lot of women feel very powerless that they are the
ones in their heart that feels like chasing the guy. They
really like the guy, and really want him. I think it’s really
important for men to understand they really shouldn’t worry if
it was easy in the beginning getting her into bed. It just
means she likes him.
STEVE: Yeah, which is a good sign!
KIM: There is a lot more than that. We kind of go more into
this in my ebook Honey for the Bees about woman’s sexuality.
STEVE: And of course we are not suggesting that anyone be too
easy to get, because that is emotional stupidity. Trying to be
too easy. There is an either end extreme that is not good.
KIM: You don’t want to be chasing people and you want to be
thinking about your self-worth and that that self-worth is built
on something real and not just on emotional games. There is a
lot more to your self-worth than just playing aloof or playing
hard to get. This takes us back to Skeleton Woman .
What is it that finally makes him feel like shedding the tear?
What is it that finally evokes the man’s empathy so he feels for
the skeleton and then the relationship begins? Because it is
the man feeling empathy and shedding the tear that is the true
beginning of the relationship. I know a lot of women feel very
helpless and hopeless about this because they haven’t been able
to elicit any kind of empathy from their male partners. I think
this is actually one of those paradoxes of love—and love is full
of paradoxes—where a lot of women have it the wrong way around.
They think the more they show they are damaged and hurt, and the
more they show him how much he’s hurt them, and how damaged they
are…
STEVE: The more scary they can be when they are the skeleton
on the end of the line..
KIM: Yes men do find that scary don't they?
But the women think it is going to make him feel sorry for her
and say, “look what I’ve done” and feel bad about it.
STEVE: Thinking that is somehow going to flip the empathy
switch on.
KIM: Yes, saying I’m hurt, I’m hurt so you should feel
empathy toward me, which is quite logical really I guess, but I
don’t think there really is anything logical about love. In
actual fact I think the opposite is the truth. What elicits the
empathy in the man is when he sees the skeleton, or when he sees
her, and he sees the qualities in her that first made him want
to catch her. Because he is the one that first put the hook in
her. He did actually make the first move. He is the one that
smiled at her. He is the one who did whatever to encourage….
STEVE: He was the one out fishing.
KIM: He was the one out fishing. He was the fisherman.
When he sees those initial qualities, when he sees her strength
of character, when he sees her worth, this is the point where
then he goes “oh, yeah” and he remembers he hooked her.
STEVE: There is my hook, I can see it.
KIM: I remember I did really see this woman as being more
than worthy of me, being maybe even better than me, being
someone who was strong and solid and who is going to support
me. Then in that moment as well he sees what he’s done. He
goes “look what I’ve done. I haven’t acknowledged those
qualities in her and I have actually just dragged her along
behind me by running away”. I think this is very important and
it gets down to what we really try and teach in all of our work
and in our ebooks. That in increasing your EQ (your Emotional
Intelligence) and working on filling your developmental gaps,
working to becoame someone who is very able to deal with
insults, put downs and bad behavior and stay calm and whole and
know how to stand up for yourself…these are all very simple
things you can learn that are going to increase your worth and
value as a person in ways that are very obvious to your partner,
in ways that are going to show very quickly and is going to be
much more likely to elicit an empathetic response from your
partner than you showing your partner how damaged and weak you
are. Because nobody wants to be left responsible for taking
care of somebody who they feel is an emotional cripple. This is
just going to make your partner continue to run away. If you
want the empathy, you actually have to show them your
strengths. You have to start working on building your own
strengths and your own worth and raising your status, perhaps,
in his eyes.
STEVE: Absolutely. If I can just put that in another way:
When the Skeleton Woman is hooked and she is being noisy (and
we use that as a metaphor for somebody who is trying to use
guilt as a way of making her partner feel empathy) from a
woman’s perspective she is trying to put across this idea that
he is the perpetrator of her sadness. But what he is reading
and seeing and feeling instead is I am the victim of her
madness.
KIM: Yes, this skeleton is chasing me!
STEVE: Yeah, exactly.
KIM: Because he hasn’t acknowledged that he has hooked her.
STEVE: That’s right. At this point he hasn’t acknowledged
that he has hooked her (that was really good). He feels like he
is the victim so he is in that kind of defensive mode. And of
course the woman is feeling like he is the perpetrator because
he has hooked her. So that leaves very little room for
reflection from either person. It is that moment of reflection
that the man gets to the point where she stops running. He
stops running and she stops running. She stops being scary and
there is that moment for reflection. Before that, when people
are in that adversarial position—am I the victim or am I the
perpetrator—there is that confusion and there is little room for
reflection. That is where we are not moving forward in a
relationship. I really, really love this metaphor with this
fairytale, Kim. It’s really explained a lot in our
relationship, and it was great once we both read that and could
talk about it. And it’s great we are now sharing that with our
audience here.
KIM: We are going to open up a blog discussion page on this
topic on this and I would really love people to write in. If
you’ve got a story please share it with us. Go on our blog
discussion page and share what you think.
Maybe it’s different in different countries. Maybe we’ve got it
wrong. But from where I am sitting most of the relationships I
have seen it is usually the woman in the relationship who has
done the chasing, and often for years. I think a lot of
unnecessary pain has come from these misunderstandings about how
the real courtship ritual works with people. And it’s just as
painful for men as it is for women. I think both end up being
victims of this misunderstanding, of having our fairytales
twisted and distorted. I don’t know how many people end up
being victims of this misunderstanding, of having our fairytales
twisted and distorted. I don’t know if anyone did this to be
malicious. I just think they just thought this story makes a
good Hollywood plot and …
STEVE: People want to be entertained…
KIM: And it works as a plot to keep people on the edge of
their seat because maybe there is a bit of wish fulfillment in
there. I don’t know where we got our story so wrong, but I
really hope that today after hearing what we’ve had to share
with Skeleton Woman and our perspective on it any listeners who
are having problems in their relationships, where there is a
lack of rapport, where there is abuse, where the relationship is
eroded and you haven’t been able to get things back on track,
you might question some of these ideas. You might think does my
partner really need years of therapy…. or do I really need my
partner to court me all over again and for it to be like a
fairytale.. is she really lacking in status because she was too
easy in the beginning… am I really not a real man because I
didn’t do the chasing? I would really like to challenge these
ideas in your thinking and to look at it and ask instead "where
can I work on filling my own developmental gaps?" Where can I
increase my worth as a person. What are the small things I can
do to become more emotionally intelligent. All of these are
laid out in clear exercises in our ebooks and the products we
have to offer. It’s not a magic wand. This is personal
development that you work on. But I know with you, Steve, I
very quickly felt when I started to take control back of my
feelings, I noticed you just right away sat back up on your
haunches like something is changing here.
STEVE: Absolutely. I think there was something we touched on
earlier was we moved past that game of are you the perpetrator
or are you the victim of all the discord in our relationship.
Once you did manage to step back and take control of what was
going on in your own life a bit more, Kim.
KIM: And take responsibility for myself.
STEVE: Yeah, and show me that you weren’t going to play games
anymore. You were just ready to take some small steps and you
realized you needed to. Well, it gave me the option to then go
OK I can do this too and I am going to need to do this.
The stakes are pretty high here for me.
KIM: It’s hard to generalize about these things, but I think
men in general are fairly pragmatic about what they want out of
a woman in a relationship, you know? They are not maybe as
prone to the fantasy idea of it’s doesn’t matter whether we poor
and we live in a single bed—all we need is love. Men value
strength. They value strength of character. They value those
types of things, which are really not difficult things to work
on and they are not insurmountable challenges. They are
challenges to learn how to regulate your emotions better. It is
a challenge, it’s not easy—but it’s not an insurmountable
challenge like getting your partner into therapy for years, you
know? They are actually very doable. I had a fantastic
testimony we had come in just last week, Steve, that I thought
was very interesting.
The woman said that she had bought our ebooks and started on our
program. She started doing the exercises and then about halfway
through she just went oh, and gave up on it for whatever reason,
this isn’t working, whatever. She just decided she wasn’t going
to do it and went on. She started doing something else but she
said she realized a couple months later that what she had
learned already made it impossible for her to go back and do
things as badly as she was doing them before, especially in
terms of not losing her temper and having better respect for
herself and how she managed situations. She said I must have
taken on lots more of this on a subconscious level than I
realized, because after a couple of months had gone by she
realized her relationship had completely changed. She hadn’t
even been trying to do it anymore. She thought she had given up
on the whole thing. But once she had seen the truth it is very
hard to put yourself back into the darkness.
STEVE: And those small steps she had taken obviously were
very powerful.
KIM: To be more responsible for herself.
STEVE: Absolutely.
KIM: It might not have changed her partner’s behavior toward
her immediately, but a couple months down the line she is going
wow, he is not fighting with me anymore. All the bad behavior
is gone. He is even opening up and sharing with me about
himself. She suddenly went, wow actually that did work.
STEVE: That’s wonderful. I didn’t get that testimonial. You
will have to share that one with me.
KIM: Yeah, we just love all the testimonials we get.
STEVE: So look, the small steps are really powerful and
that’s what we don’t see either in a film, getting back to the
movie idea. When you have read a book and you see a film, you
think hang on all those small things in between didn’t happen.
You know, a movie is a movie. A movie is a story chopped down
into 90 minutes. It is really very difficult.
KIM: It doesn’t make great entertainment in a movie seeing
someone challenging their partner to take turns in a
conversation or challenging their pattern to learn to not lose
their temper, but these are the things that actually do build a
very solid relationship and a very successful life.
STEVE: Absolutely. And movies are based on formulas. And
there aren’t really formulas in relationships. There are just
little steps you can take—just like flexing a muscle. You have
to exercise it and flex it and keep it active. It’s not a magic
formula.
KIM: And everybody has gaps in different places. We have a
gap finder exercise in The Love Safety Net Workup. Not
everybody is the same. We are always in different places.
There is no formula for that.
STEVE: Absolutely. We are going to have to wrap up, Kim.
Should we just read out our web address? What is the best web
address we can read out?
KIM: Narcissismcured.com and we have also got a new site,
which is therules.info, which I just put up after all the
response about our ideas about the rules.
STEVE: So that is HYPERLINK
http://www.therules.info.
KIM: Or
http://www.narcissismcured.com (which I know is hard to
spell but Google will help you). Thanks for listening.
STEVE: Thanks for listening to The Love Safety Net. See you
next time.
KIM: Bye.
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