Summary: Herb Goldberg's latest book What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (recommended in book threads here on TRP) discusses relationship dynamics at length, from the sobering viewpoint of a practicing psychologist. Most of the book focuses on the negatives, with chapter titles like "Predicting the endpoints of a relationship from its romantic beginnings", "Why women don't apologize for things they've done, while men apologize for things they didn't do", and "When nice guys are hated". The chapter on family roles is particularly bleak. The book ends on a cautiously optimistic note, with a very brief chapter listing the following suggestions.

Body:

  • Never act or make decisions in a relationship based on an impulse or overpowering emotion. The impulse will subside and the emotion will change, and you will be left responsible for the decision you made or the action you took.
  • When you're feeling desperate about a relationship, you're either misreading it, being rejected, or being manipulated. Healthy relationships do not create out-of-control or desperate feelings.
  • All relationship problems are two-way streets. If you feel primarily guilty or responsible, you're being manipulated. In the same vein, if you're feeling yourself to be the victim, you're not seeing your part in creating the problem.
  • A relationship with a woman who blames you for its problems cannot grow and will most assuredly deteriorate into a nightmare of emotional explosions. A healthy relationship is known by its lack of blaming and guilt.
  • When a woman is rejecting you and doesn't need you, you can hardly do anything right; when she wants you, you can hardly do anything wrong.
  • If a woman "falls in love" with you when her life is in trouble, her feelings toward you will change dramatically when that trouble dissipates. Women become intensely romantic when they are most in need of being rescued, and those feelings readily turn to hostility when women feel they won't get what they want, or they no longer need it.
  • For women, romance is an unconscious holiday from their fear and anger toward men.
  • "What did I do wrong?" is rarely the correct question in trying to understand your relationship. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the answer that way. It's not what you did that created the relationship problems, it's the process, or how, of the interaction that creates its deeper feelings. You'll never find the answer if you focus on the content or the what.
  • Relationships that happen quickly and easily are based on fantasy and will go into major crisis just as quickly. Authentic relationships, given the differences in men and women's process, develop unevenly and slowly. The higher the initial romantic high and the fantasy of a magical connection, the deeper and more painful the final crash will be.
  • Because of the actor/reactor dynamic of male/female relationships, the inevitable endpoint of every traditional relationship is an angry woman and a guilt-ridden man. Specifically, a woman with a sense of righteous blaming and of having been abused, and a man with self-hatred and guilt over feeling responsible.
  • In relationships, it doesn't matter what you intend or mean; it only matters how you are experienced. A woman's reality is a logical starting point for a man's "understanding."
  • Never try to reason a woman out of her feelings, and never try to use detached logic to explain yourself. It will only intensify her anger because she will experience you as distancing and defensive.
  • Allowing a woman to be abusive by accusing you and raging at you is not a form of loving her. Set boundaries demanding self-respect and hold them. If the relationship has substance, it will improve. If it is contingent on unhealthy dynamics for its survival and lacks substance, setting boundaries will cause the relationship to fall apart and die.
  • If you feel the need to always do things for her and to spend money in order to hold and please her, you are in a bottomless well where it will never be enough.
  • After commitment, particularly marriage, the power shifts to the woman and everything changes because she now has the security to become critical and blaming of you and to allow deeper real feelings to be expressed.
  • The prognosis for a relationship in trouble is in direct proportion to each person's ability to see their part in creating its problems. If one partner sees him- or herself as abused and victimized and blames the other, no real change or deeper improvement can be expected.
  • Listen carefully to the way she describes the men in her past. That is how you will be described. In relationships, history repeats itself. It is a masculine delusion that you can love her better than the men before and that she will treat you differently than she did her past lovers. If she cheated to be with you, it is highly probable that she will cheat on you eventually as well.
  • When a woman says you're the best lover she's ever had, your ego is being stroked. Sex is rarely the kind of experience that women can compare men on. Sexual excitement comes from her feelings and fantasies about you, not from your prowess. If the feelings are there, she will experience you as a wonderful lover, and if they're not, there's little you will be able to do to excite her.
  • Women crave closeness to the same degree that men crave space and freedom. Intimacy is a feminine euphemism for fusion craving designed to quell her tensions, just as freedom and space are masculine euphemisms for the disconnection a man needs to quell his tensions. Each partner needs to take responsibility of the insatiability of their need and not blame the other.
  • If she talks about wanting to be intimate, ask yourself if that means that you can be fully honest about your feelings and still be loved. If the answer is "no," her concept of intimacy may have more to do with the fulfillment of her needs and not with being close to the real you.
  • A liberated woman can be known by how she relates, not on what her intellectual ideals or attitudes about relationships are. Toxic feminism is composed of liberated ideology combined with traditional process and the resulting irresolvable binds that they create. A healthy relationship in the face of these contradicting elements may be impossible.
  • Just because a woman has a career does not mean that she does not want to be rescued and provided for, nor does it mean that she won't want to give up her career once she's in a committed relationship.
  • Here is a major craziness or paradox in relationships: If you don't try to satisfy a woman's needs, you arouse her frustration and anger. If you do try to satisfy her needs, you may arouse her contempt or irritation because you will fail and she will see how hopeless things are. Therefore, it is better for her to fantasize what might be if you only tried (hope remains) than for you to try and inevitably fail.
  • Women objectify men according to their power symbols, just as men objectify women according to their physical symbols.
  • Women have no greater genuine capacity for love than men do. It only seems that they do because their focus on relationships and personal closeness is usually greater than men's.
  • You can have everything in common with a woman, but it will mean nothing if the process of the relationship is polarized. Polarized process erodes and destroys the best content and causes every relationship to seem and feel like the same frustrating ones of the past.

Conclusion: Goldberg's work is very sobering. Those who want more can read some of his books for free at OpenLibrary.