Customer Reviews

What Women and Men Really Want: Creating Deeper Understanding and Love in Our Relationships

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...this is a good place to start. Lots of useful and practical and insightful info about why women and men are they way we are--and without all the Mars and Venus stereotypical crap. The book proceeds through a series of discussions that occurred in a group conducted by the authors. Very readable. -- Craig Chalquist, M.S., creator of the Thineownself self-exploration site.

I found this book to largely be a waste of time for me. I was referred to it and there were a large number of positive reviews at the time I bought it, so I proceeded to scan through it just in case. I have read other books about relationships (including John Gray's "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus") and found the book to be repetitive of well-known concepts and a bit naive.

Initially I was skeptical if the camping trip was reality or fabricated, and as the story wore on, it seemed that there were too many handy coincidents and all the dialogues sounded very edited, if not actually manufactured. I won't dwell on this since I have no proof. But the purpose of the camping trip is clearly to elicit comments from the men and women on the trip regarding their complaints of the opposite gender. I have heard all this stuff before numerous times and really didn't feel it was necessary to wade through the so-called camping trip for 220 pages when a concise summary would take just 20 pages.

When they finally got to the point of summarizing what the campers had said so far, and tried to make a conclusion out of it all, they were also answering the question the title poses. So there, on page 229, in a very brief paragraph, it says that men and women just want to be respected and have their needs met. Duh! There was no elaboration on this at all, in fact, the authors just sort of threw it on the ground and walked away like they didn't know what else to say.

The following chapters get much more into the authors' philosophies while still trying to maintain the camping trip atmosphere. They do this by starting each chapter with a bit of dialog from the campers, then launching into what they really want to cover. Such as ancient mythology regarding men and women, or other therpists' approaches.

Like I said, I just didn't learn anything new from this book and felt that it used a very roundabout way of making points with this camping trip. If you are the new to this topic and you like things to be dramatized in order to drive the points home, you might like the book.