The ONE Thing Every Woman Needs To Know About Men

Sabrina Bendory is a renowned relationship expert, dating coach, and best-selling author of Detached: How To Let Go, Heal, and Become Irresistible. Here, she lets women in on a little secret: what men want and need in a partner.

I constantly get asked to share the number one thing I’ve learned about men since I got into this business. I also wrote a book called 10 Things Every Woman Needs to Know About Men, and when it came out the only question I got asked was: “So what’s the number-one thing I need to know?”

I used to have a few answers to this question, but in recent years it’s become clear to me that there really is only one. There is one core thing to understand about men, and when you get it, everything else makes sense. It is the one thing that changed my relationship when I really realized what it means.

What it comes down to is how vital it is for a man to feel significant, like he’s having a meaningful impact. You may have heard this before, but there is such a difference between hearing something and internalizing it.

Masculine energy is typically goal-oriented and focused. This is something we’ve all heard before, and most women know that men aren’t as skilled at multitasking as we are. But let’s go deeper and look at the reason.

The reason men are so focused and single-minded is because a man gains his sense of significance based on his ability to have an impact on the world. This doesn’t mean relationships aren’t important to men (they are), but in order for a man to feel good about himself and his life, he needs to feel significant, he needs to feel like he’s winning. And when he feels like a winner, he can be the best man possible in a relationship. When he feels like a loser, he is at his absolute worst.

Even though I knew all about this concept, that didn’t stop me from making my now husband feel like a loser when we were engaged and going through a rough patch. I couldn’t quite help it. It was a stressful time and I felt like he was adding to my stress instead of helping me to alleviate it.

I know that I can be a direct, harsh, sometimes critical person. I see it as being a perfectionist, as striving for excellence. Sometimes this is a good thing, but other times it can be a very negative thing.

When I was engaged and dealing with all the stress that comes with planning a wedding, I moved on my own into our new apartment a few months before the big day and was greeted by something out of a horror movie: it was massively infested with roaches.

It was awful and disgusting and I was barely sleeping or eating, and I became angry and resentful because I didn’t think he was being sympathetic or supportive enough based on what I had to deal with (his comment, “Relax, they’re just bugs,” really pushed me to a new level of seeing red).

I also felt like he was making wedding planning more stressful. He gave me a hard time about almost every aspect of the wedding, and I got mad at him for being so difficult and unsupportive. I was also mad that he wasn’t as loving towards me as he used to be and that he now seemed uncomfortable around me. I was having a hard time and just needed him to be nice to me!

OK, long story short, we were both at fault in our own way. Both of us were being difficult and neither one of us was being empathetic to the other.

Things changed one day when, for once, we were discussing our issues lovingly and without blame and resentment, and he said to me, “I feel like I’m always failing you. Like I can never do anything right and everything I do is going to upset you or make you disappointed in me. That’s why it’s hard for me to be loving and comfortable around you.”

It was a big slap-in-the-face moment. Here I was, this wise and worldly relationships expert, writing about how important it is to show a man appreciation and how important it is for a man to feel like a winner, and I was making the love of my life feel like a worthless loser.

I’m not saying he was totally innocent; he did do things that hurt me and he made a difficult time in my life even more difficult, but I still didn’t handle it right.

I would get mad at him for expressing his feelings because it stressed me out, when really I should have listened to and acknowledged him. I didn’t see the good intentions behind the ways he was trying to be there for me because I was so mad about all the things he was doing that I didn’t like.

After we had that talk, I shifted gears and instead of making him feel bad about what he wasn’t doing right, I lovingly showed my appreciation for what he was doing right. (This ties into a concept I’ve mentioned several times throughout this book: the only person you can change is yourself. I could have stayed mad and simmered in resentment because of what he did wrong, but where would that have gotten us?)

When a man feels like he’s “winning” at making you happy, he goes out of his way to make you happy. After I changed my response to him, the entire relationship dynamic changed. He was so sweet and loving and so supportive and helpful in dealing with our unwanted houseguests. While at first the roaches put a strain on our relationship, once we started communicating properly and giving each other what the other needed (for him, feeling like a winner; for me, getting support and empathy), the whole ordeal ended up bringing us closer… seriously!

This is just one little example that illustrates a much larger point. Resentment is poison for a relationship. Maybe you’re mad at him and maybe it’s justified, but harshly criticizing him or focusing on the negative will only make him feel like a loser. Once he feels like a loser, he’ll start resenting you, which will in turn cause him to do things that make you resent him, and the cycle will continue.

Someone needs to be the one to put a stop to it. While it isn’t always easy, it is so worth it and will make such an incredible difference in your relationship. Being compassionate and loving is always the solution. Being negative and critical always causes more problems than it solves.