Foreword

In my practice as a trauma therapist, I have noticed an interesting trend with every patient I’ve worked with. There have always been prominent relationship issues present in their personal lives. No one has ever come into my office to address other issues who didn’t also have serious relationship issues. People who came to me with self-esteem and body image issues turned out to have communication problems with their partners, for instance. Some people came to me suffering from anxiety after traumatic accidents, only to eventually reveal that the hardest thing they were dealing with was that their partner was not caring enough during their rehabilitation, which was more hurtful to them than the actual injuries they dealt with.

It is very unfortunate that knowledge about gender differences and relationship dynamics between men and women is not widespread because it results in a range of personal problems and disorders (or exacerbates unrelated ones). It seems to me that the majority of people nowadays are so concerned with seeing equality in everything that they have forgotten about seeing equity, which is where we all meet each other’s needs and feel valued, respected, and accepted for who we are as individuals in the highest possible way.

Compared to men, who are more single-tasked, women have a stronger ability to quickly switch between their right and left lobes in the brain or even have them activated simultaneously. Consequently, they are better able to perceive and process emotion and logic, coming to conclusions quickly and calling it a gut feeling (a.k.a. “women’s intuition”), which can feel alien to men, who feel that women can be poor at rationally assessing how they decided something so quickly or explaining their conclusions in explicit terms men will understand. I consider myself hypersensitive to this facet of feminine nature. My professional training in classical singing, particularly in the art of opera, has polished my mastery of simultaneously activating logic and emotion and elevated it into a complex system of self-awareness. My unique engagement in operatic art and psychotherapy has resulted in a highly personal journey of observing, analyzing, and understanding myself as a woman, and I have placed a high priority on assessing my feminine experience of life rationally and coherently for men and women alike.

The author of this book is a highly intellectual man who, for as long as I have known him, has been in a state of constant self-development. I can say with a high degree of confidence that his number one goal in life is to help people understand important things, in his signature style, that they cannot easily learn about from any other source. It requires a huge amount of self-awareness and self-study to notice every mistake, every imperfect facet of the past, as the author has attempted to do for himself, and make a public statement and choice about how he wants to grow from it and the man he aspires to be.

Though this book is written from a very personalized masculine perspective, bravely provided by Gregory V. Diehl, I believe it is a huge step forward for people to learn healthy relationship dynamics, understand fundamental differences between men and women, and accept that gender dynamics are a vitally important and inseparable part of our lives that cannot be avoided. In that regard, it is similar to learning about health, finances, or the environment. We can sit in ignorance and pretend it does not personally affect us or matter much in the grand scheme, but we will pay the price for our ignorance of the principles at play in our lives. The author has undertaken a monumental task by self-analyzing and reflecting on his own experiences and comparing them with permanent fixtures in global human mythology. He has a preternatural talent for educating and expressing the complex and incomprehensible as comprehensibly as possible to the public.

This book shows that there are certain qualities that highly masculine men desperately need from highly feminine women (and vice versa). These qualities and the need for them reveal the essence of t