Customer Reviews

A Woman's Guide to Changing Her Man: Without His Even Knowing It

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This book by Michele Weiner-Davis is well worth reading and the ideas and advice worth acting upon. Weiner-Davis' writing style is fun, assertive impish and impertinent - in the manner of the most recent female journalist style - making the book easy and attractive to read and digest, lightening what is in fact a complex and indepth exploration. The assumptions behind her advice are solid and based on a clear and easy-to-understand view of systems theory. The thrust of the book - deciding what you want to change and then changing him by changing the way you behave - makes a lot of sense and is, after all, the only place you can start with change. The book assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader. Hence the earlier chapters lay down building blocks of concepts, preparing the reader for the final crunch or 'how to' chapters towards the end. As a result, the extent of discourse has the potential to get a bit labourious, but this does not happen because of the jocular writing style. Anyway you can always skim through the earlier chapters if you feel you know it all already. As most of us never really know it all, the book is well worthwhile.

I recently picked up the book A Woman's Guide to Changing her Man when my husband and I were having some problems.

I started reading it and almost laughed out loud!!! I immediately wanted to know WHERE DID THE AUTHOR MEET MY HUSBAND???

She described some of our interactions almost word for word. I don't think I will ever be able to argue with my husband again, because I will think of how predictable we both are and I'll end up laughing instead!!

Seriously, it is an excellent book with a lot of wonderful advice. You may think that it isn't possible to "fix" a relationship if you are the only one doing the fixing, but Weiner-Davis gives wonderful tactics to help you smooth out some of those bumps that keep rising up in your road to relationship happiness.

It's a must read!! My husband and I went from arguing and silent sulks to laughter and snuggling.

Warning: Don't let your man read this book!

I will admit that the title of this book had me thinking that changing a man is totally possible. It isn't that I want my husband to completely change I'd just like to tweak a few areas of our relationship, especially in the communication department. I'd like to have a conversation in which he doesn't say that I'm going off topic. I can't help it, I have a brain that wants to talk about multiple things and I get bored if something is discussed for too long.

I have male friends who seem to be able to converse with me with no problem but I've discovered that some men have larger corpus callosums and can relate to me better since they are using both sides of their brains. Women naturally do this but men tend to use their left brain more.

So it seems if you want to have a great conversation with a man make sure he is left-handed and a musician. At least the research shows that men who are musicians and are left-handed have a larger corpus callosum. My best conversation with men seems to be with men who play a musical instrument like the piano or a guitar. This even seems true at forums where some men tend to want to talk to me more than others. These men write poetry and don't seem to mind that I wander off and start talking about things that are off-topic in fact they seem to encourage it by going off-topic themselves.

"Isn't this fun? I love it. Shock your man into being more loving. Get him off dead center. Be unpredictable. Avoid stale, stuffy, run-of-the-mill strategies. Dare to be different." ~ pg. 159

Michele Weiner-Davis believes that some men don't want to have long conversations because they are word-saturated. She explains how you should talk to a man to get him to listen. Then she also explains how actions really do speak louder than words. A man who sees you trying to fix a plumbing problem is more likely to step in and help you. You may have nagged him to death about the problem before. Nagging definitely doesn't work in most cases! The author recommends you do other things like writing a heartfelt letter, using reverse psychology or making sure your man is satisfied in bed. It might sound a bit manipulative at times but I've seen some of the things in this book work.

While this book was written almost twenty years ago it is still very relevant today. At the start of the book I kept laughing. In the end this book really is not about changing a man, it is about being super creative and changing yourself. Michele Weiner-Davis also encourages women to stop being so dependent on men and to get a life of their own. This makes men stop and take notice. It also inspires them to chase you down because you become more like the woman they remember when they first started loving you.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to stop fighting, avoid a painful divorce or solve recurring problems. I really felt that the author understood my life and had information that I could put to use immediately. I read a lot of books on relationships and this one has some secrets and tips I haven't seen in other books.

~The Rebecca Review