by Kay Rivera
Picture courtesy of celeb.wohoo.co.uk
No, I didn’t read the book and I only caught a glimpse of the movie on bootleg at my aunt’s house-I’m talking about Steve Harvey’s Think Like A Man, Act Like A Lady . I’ll admit, I wasn’t interested in reading the book because I wasn’t excited about another manual trying to tell women what to do and how they need to be in order to get, please, and keep a man (even though hearing from those who read it, they said it isn’t like that). Through my own personal experiences and paying attention to the experiences of the men women around me, I developed my own outlook about what it means to me to think like a man and act like a lady.
1. Do whatever makes you happy first and foremost-men do it all of the time: As women, we want to take care of the people around us and make sure they’re happy first. We have to be happy first before we can make anyone else happy.
2. Silence you conscious: When doing what makes you happy, first and foremost, some people aren’t going to like it, and if they don’t so what! One thing I’ve come to realize is that men rarely have regrets about what they do and don’t feel guilty about doing anything that makes them happy, no matter how wrong it may be.
3. Love carefully: Men have the ability to separate the physical and the emotional. They’re not really careful about whom they give themselves to physically, but when it comes to love it’s a different story. As women, we have to be careful about physical love as well as emotional love.
4. Be bold: Say what you mean and mean what you say-don’t let anyone persuade you; change your mind on your own terms. When men tell you they’re not looking for love or a relationship, we need to believe them and know that we can’t persuade them or change their mind. When we say we’re looking for a good guy who will take us out and give us some of their time, we need to stick to that and not allow ourselves to settle for less.
5. Value friendships: Women need to learn to stick together because men sure do! When male friends fall out, they can bury the hatchet over a bottle of Corona. Women will hold a grudge towards a friend over the smallest things. Also, a man isn’t putting a woman they don’t care about before their friends and family. Furthermore, they aren’t going to care about someone they just met. Women will spin their friends and family and give their time to a guy they’ve only been seeing for a short time. Keep your friends and family first until he proves he’s worthy to be on their level.
6. Dwell on the best times of your life and make having the time of your life, a way of life: I never hear or see a man dwelling on a bad situation. They’re the ones who usually are the assailants doing the burning and it seems like they just keep moving forward; even when they are burned, they don’t dwell. They do however, dwell on the awesome trip to Vegas or Miami with their friends, they’ll dwell on the time they were promoted at their job or when they won the basketball championship in high school, and the best sex they ever had. We let the bad times ruin us sometimes ladies. We have to look forward and think about the good times we had and look forward to the good times we’ll have in the future. “Life goes on no matter what, “a wise man once told me.
7. Stroke your own ego and find others who will stroke it too: There are some men who have some things they feel self-conscious about, but we’ll never know about it unless they told us. They hype themselves up to be the most amazing individual, and as long as they believe it, who can tell them otherwise? I think they’d beg to differ. Men also like to feel good, so they surround themselves with people who make them feel well, good! Women should do the same. We need to be our own personal cheer team and hang around people who contribute to our pep rally.
8. Exercise your right to choose: I almost forgot, but this is important, and directed to my sistas. The main people I see exercising the freedom to choose and date whoever they want are Black men and White women. We have to open our mind to finding love outside of our race, culture, religion etc. There are so many fish in the sea, why just limit yourself to perch when you can have salmon, tuna, and mahi mahi?
In a nutshell, these concepts that I gathered from my observations, just paying attention, could be a sure guide to happiness, stress relief, and anti-aging; it’s no wonder why a lot of men look so young. We have to take care of ourselves first and foremost and find our happiness. As women, we can sometimes become bitter at the way men live their lives, and how they do the things that they do. Not to say that men don’t have problems, but their approach is different, and it just might be the best approach, if I may say so myself. I’d say, if we can’t beat them, join them, while keeping your legs crossed, wearing your pump heel shoes, and your MAC lipstick! I know, easier said than done right?
