Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy [Hardcover]

Dalma Heyn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2005

The bestselling author of The Erotic Silence of the American Wife is back with another provocative peek at women’s secret lives.

Have you ever looked at one of your women friends and asked yourself, "She’s so terrific--why is she with him?" In her newest book, Dalma Heyn examines a rising trend in today’s relationships--the coupling of high-achieving women with men Heyn terms "Drama Kings," weaker men who are drawn to the women’s strength but ultimately attempt to sabotage it. These men create chaos in relationships, driving the women crazy in the process.

Weaving examples from history, literature, and popular culture with clinical research she has conducted over several decades, Heyn illuminates an exploding phenomenon that’s just reaching public consciousness. She details the telling traits of Drama Kings, such as "The Visitor," "The Proprietor," and "The Hit-and-Run Lover." She arms readers with the warning signs and offers strategies to handle the sagas that inevitably will develop in these relationships.

Heyn ultimately delivers a hopeful and encouraging message: More and more women, instead of leaving these draining relationships in despair and misery, are taking their experiences with Drama Kings and turning them to their advantage, emerging even stronger and better equipped to enjoy richer lives––whether on their own or with the true love non-Drama King who is on the horizon.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Based on interviews with 100 middle-class women, Heyn (The Erotic Silence of the American Wife) explores yet another classification of dysfunctional males. Drama Kings are defined as men who have remained "[s]tuck in a my-needs-come-first understanding of relationships." According to the author, women are getting stronger while Drama Kings, afraid of attachment and commitment, create scenes that sabotage intimacy. Heyn presents four categories of these losers, but their descriptions sound like old complaints about men forced into new packaging. The Visitor is a loner who believes "the way to a woman's heart is through her genitals." The Proprietor is a jealous bully who demands constant attention. In contrast, the Easy-going Guy makes up fake girlfriends in order to avoid moving forward in a relationship. The Hit and Run Lover pretends to want closeness, but leaves without warning if there is the smallest problem. Heyn's upbeat message is that, although women can be tricked by Drama Kings, they often leave them, emerging stronger from the encounter and ready for an independent life. Self-help devotees may be engaged by the author's anecdotal style, but her stance that she is writing a feminist text to support strong women rather than a simple relationship guide is not fully convincing .
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Review

“Strong women, beware. You are more susceptible than most to the advances of the so-called ‘drama kings’—men for whom relationships always devolve into melodrama and rob the strength of the women involved. . . . [Heyn] presents a compelling portrait of the five types of drama kings—toxic personalities all.” —San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Ms. Heyn has a keen nose for social change. . . . She has detected a plague of drama kings and records their pernicious attributes so that wary women can spot them in time and bar the door.” —The New York Times

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books; First Printing edition (October 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579548881
• ISBN-13: 978-1579548889
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,820,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dalma Heyn is the author of number of bestselling books: The Erotic Silence of The American Wife;  Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives; and Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy; and most recently, she is the co-author, with her husband Richard Marek, of A Godsend: A Love Story For Grownups. Her books have been published worldwide and translated into 34 languages.

Dalma Heyn is a psychotherapist, a speaker, and a passionate advocate for women. Her books investigate the deepest places in our culture and our psyches to reveal the truth of women's experience, rather than reporting on how their experience is interpreted or judged.  Dalma listens to  women, rather than to what experts, or the culture, say about women.  Readers feel the difference.

In Dalma's own words: "For many years I've written books in which women express their deepest feelings about the tricky and often paralyzing negotiation between intimacy and self; between pleasure and pleasing. My books, both nonfiction and fiction, look at an evolving culture and its new choices for women; and the evolving women who are expressing a bold new vision for the place of love, marriage, spirituality and accomplishment in their lives."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Oxygen!, November 12, 2005

By 

amba "amba12" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy (Hardcover)

I've always believed that one's sharpest criticisms of others are really truest of oneself, and the previous reviewer of this book, Ellie Reasoner, provides a comic example of that. She said that DRAMA KINGS "set off to validate its own agenda and that's what it did." But, actually, that's what SHE did. It looks like she decided in advance what kind of book this is and then didn't bother to read it. Because actually, Dalma Heyn quite agrees with Reasoner. She doesn't remotely "expect a relationship to contain no flaws," she's not recommending trying to "change the behavior of any man," she doesn't claim that ALL men are "Drama Kings," and her bottom line, too, is, "if he's a jerk, get out of the relationship . . . ditch and move on." If you're in your 30s or 40s, strong, independent, eager to be interdependent, and DATING, you'll run into a lot of "drama kings" simply because that's what's left out there. There are plenty of great men, but naturally they're almost all taken!

To me, Heyn's work is oxygen. It's the only place I know where I can still find, in utterly contemporary form, the exhilaration I felt at the very beginning of feminism -- before it got all militant and strident and dogmatic, when it was just pure discovery, and recognition, and expression of the paralyzingly inexpressible. When it was spell-unbinding.

Heyn's first two books were about the mysterious loss of self that women in the 1980s and '90s still often experienced in their relationships with men, especially in marriage. "Marriage Shock" was about the asexual domesticity and dependency that could descend on a vital, independent young woman at the altar or soon after, and its roots in a long-ago historical moment when women's very survival came to depend on pleasing a man. "The Erotic Silence of the American Wife" was about how an affair could be, to paraphrase Kafka, the axe that shattered that frozen sea. It wasn't that the SEX in affairs was fresh and forbidden and therefore hot. It was that the SELF in affairs was natural and uncensored. What happened to women in marriage wasn't their husbands' fault. It was a kind of cultural spell that possessed and dispossessed them both.

Both books were perceived as dangerous. I remember being surprised by the wild misfit between the reviews and what was in the books. Heyn's honesty seemed to panic people to the point where they couldn't hear what she was actually saying. When "Erotic Silence" came out, she was pilloried for advocating affairs -- when what she really advocated was going into marriage with your eyes open to the danger, so you wouldn't lose yourself in the first place. With "Marriage Shock," she was attacked for encouraging women to walk out of marriage -- when all she had done was, first, point out that young women, who had already known the taste of self-possession, were in fact walking out of marriages earlier and earlier; and then, suggest that the way to save marriage was to make it hospitable to whole women.

The news in DRAMA KINGS is that women are just about past that now. They no longer give themselves up in love for much longer than a heartbeat. Instead, they try to give themselves -- huge difference! -- but often to men who are faking rather than taking, "20th-century men" who are attracted to 21st-century women's new strength yet are also driven to sabotage it. When these relationships don't work out, the women Heyn interviewed don't feel like victims. They absorb the experience and stride onward, stronger. Having loved, they're augmented rather than diminished, and readier for the reciprocal real thing if and when it comes along. If it doesn't -- well, they'll marry life!

This book is the exact opposite of all those shrill and gloomy jeremiads -- Maureen Dowd's being the latest -- about how women are paying a high price for having snatched the forbidden fruit of ambition and independence; how if you're educated and over 40 you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a man. "Women don't need men any more," Dal says. "They just want them." And that makes all the difference.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3.50 stars - Been there done that, February 14, 2006

By 

Antimony3 (Budd Lake, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy (Hardcover)

At first, I really thought this was going to be a great book. The female author has a great tone and tongue and cheeek way of writing but...its just "okay". It is not deserving of all of the 5-star reviews that I see on here. In a nutshell, "Drama Kings" does not provide enough info on how to identify this behavior or how to disengage yourself from such an individual. Some reviewers seem to think that contents of this book are groundbreaking -- hardly. This book is about commitment-phobic men. It is material that has been covered in a hundred or so other books. This book would be good for a book club reading as it will definitely provoke discussion, however if you are really interested in this topic, I would strongly recommend reading "Men Who Can't Love" by Steven Carter & Julia Sokol.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drama Kings, November 3, 2005

By 

Judith A. Miles (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy (Hardcover)

"Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy" by Dalma Heyn is a great "can't put down" read, albeit a potentially uncomfortabe one for those women who are currently involved with and feel stuck in a relationship with someone who manifests the signs of a Drama King. Regardless of one's status, I believe that most, if not all women, will recognize the various syndromes, unfortunately, because they no doubt have experienced
the confusion and disappointments that accompany a relationship with a Drama King, regardless of type.

And, while delving into these issues may be neither a welcome or a pleasant diversion (far easier to just ignore the Drama King signs and hunker down with the familiar), the theories set forth in the book will give any woman with some intelligence a wake-up call in terms of evaluating her own dissatisfaction and what she can do to transform it into something positive, which for the healthy woman with self-esteem most likely would lead to termination of the relationship and moving on, whether as an independent, self-sufficient person or in a relationship with a more highly evolved man.

The book may be revolutionary in it analyses but, notwithstanding the discomfort it may potentially create, the read is well worth the effort, regardless of what a woman may elect to do in the future. In my own view, I think that Drama Kings should be read by every young woman about to embark on a relationship because it will give her the appropriate tools with which to assess a potential relationship as well as by those women who are frustrated in their attempts to make their current relationships more satisfying and meaningful. Hopefully, it will become a classic among womens' literature.