Men's Guide to Women

BoingBook: I am here with author Wayne M Levine. He is the director of the West Coast Men’s Center in Agoura Hills, California and founder of BetterMen.org. He has put together a tremendous book called Hold on to Your NUTs: The Relationship Manual for Men.

We have tracked him down and he has graciously agreed to do an interview for us, to help you get a better feel for what his information is all about.

How are you doing today Wayne?

Wayne M Levine: Terrific, and if it is about helping men to be better men, fathers, husbands and leaders, I am all in.

BB: Excellent. That is exactly what we are here for.

Wayne, we deal with men and the challenges they face in their relationships every single day. There are millions of men out there having problems dealing with the women in their lives. Can you tell me how your book can help those guys?

Wayne M Levine: Look, most men are not comfortable in their own skin as men. They have not been initiated into manhood, they do not have close relationships with other men, and they haven’t had healthy role models. So we are boys, we grow up, we develop bad habits and all of the sudden we find ourselves in long term committed relationships and it’s suddenly a minefield, but it doesn’t have to be.

The purpose of the book is to make it very simple for men to understand that there are some things they have to do to be clear about who they are as men.

There are some tools that are very simple that men need to use to honor who they are as men in their relationships, so the result is you become a better man and you become a better man in your relationships.

BB: Wow that is pretty powerful. Well I think we will just stop the interview right there.

Wayne M Levine: ...but you do have to read the book, and you do have to commit to it, and you gotta take action and that’s what separates the boys from the men. The men are going to do something about it, the boys are just going to whine and complain about it.

I make it simple but make no mistake becoming a better man takes work so you have to be in it, you have to be all in.

BB: I would say the most common questions we get are from guys wanting to know how to talk to women or relate to them in some way. How can your book help a guy learn how to talk to women?

Wayne M Levine: The problems that men have are around listening, really. It is a listening issue and there is a reason why it is difficult for men to listen to their women. Men get into arguments all too often or run away and hide because they can’t take her bitching and complaining or whatever it is they think they are hearing.

When you slow down and start paying attention to the things that are going on in your head just before you argue and start paying attention to what is making it so difficult for you to be there and listen to her you will to see things differently in your relationship.

Most men hear their mommies yelling at them and that is why they can’t listen to their wives, you can read all the psych books you want to find out the details but the truth is that’s the way we are.

Our first model of a woman is our mom, and our first model of a relationship is our parents. We grow up with that and we have to decide for ourselves “Is that what I want my relationships to look like?” “Is that the man I want to be?”

The advice that men have been getting over the years about how to relate to women has been such crap that men are confused. There is so little good wisdom coming man to man that I understand why it is such a challenge for most men out there. This book is all about figuring out what is going on with you.

BB: Your book is clearly unlike anything else out there for guys, how did you develop the material for this book?

Wayne M Levine: A buddy of mine invited me to a men’s group open house. I went and I saw these men talking and interacting with each other in a way I had never seen before. It was the weirdest experience and I loved it. I found out this men’s weekend had an opening two weeks away so right there, that night, I said “I am going to do it.”

It was the first major decision I ever made without consulting with my wife. I was a good little boy. I learned a lot from the men’s weekend I did and from the men I was involved with for years afterwards.

I realized that I had an affinity for this work, a real passion for it. So, after years and years of creating men’s events, and figuring out what worked for me and what worked for the men in front of me, I realized I had something. This was the stuff.

I tried to deliver it in the book the way I deliver it to the men that I work with at the West Coast Men’s Center and the men that I work with over the phone when I coach them. Simple, straight, man to man.

BB: A lot of the how-to manuals and step-by-step guides out there feel like they are adding a level of complexity to a guy’s life. Your material seems to simplify a guy’s life. Was that one of your intentions, or was that just a side benefit of the program?

Wayne M Levine: It was absolutely an intention because we are very simple creatures. Food, sleep, sex, we’re good.

BB: That’s it, we’re good.

Wayne M Levine: But we’ve learned to become very complicated and that is where we have been feminized. Women are complicated, men are simple. We have, over the last several generations, grown to think and behave like women. That is why everything seems so complicated. The point is it should be simple.

Be the man you want to be, take care of your woman. She will get what she needs and you will get what you need. You don’t have to think like a woman, you just have to be a man that knows how to take care of his woman. It is very simple stuff.

BB: In your book you talk very specifically about men being afraid of their wives. I found that a very curious point to say the least. What did you mean by that?

Wayne M Levine: Well, they act afraid. I see a lot of men. They are terrified of their wives. They don’t think about it that way but they are acting that way.

What is really going on is they are afraid of losing themselves in these conversations and these arguments that they have with their women so they go to great extent to avoid the confrontation. Men avoid the discussion because they know what’s going to happen.

She can talk circles around you, whatever it is, and you become afraid. You become afraid of your own reactions.

Women hate that, they feel terrible about that. When you give a woman the power to make you feel that afraid, that is a dangerous place to be. Women don’t want that power. Men don’t want to feel emasculated.

It is really our responsibility to take that power back and you do that by learning the tools needed to be able to be an equal, but uniquely from a man’s perspective. I think a lot of the men will agree that at some level they are afraid of losing themselves and they are afraid of their women. They can change that.

BB: You also make reference to a few other emotions men are experiencing. You say a lot of men today are angry, sad or full of shame. From your experience, why are men feeling this way?

Wayne M Levine: Masculinity is not celebrated in our culture for sure. We’ve been the perpetrators for a long time now. Women are realizing that hey, we have some parity in the workplace, things are changing economically and socially, but our men are wimps.

They are saying “That’s not the man I want. I want a strong confident man. I want a man that is going to run the sex and romance in our lives. I want a man that is going to make me feel safe, take care of me even if I have a career, even if I am smart, I want a good strong man.”

Men feel like there is something wrong with them for being men because the messages we have gotten for so many years from parents, teachers, magazine articles, and the idiocy on television make us feel like there is something wrong with us for being men.

In so many different ways we are not free to be who we are, so we get angry, we get depressed, and then we start indulging our addictions. It’s an epidemic out there.

BB: When we first started we talked about the title of your book, Hold on to your N.U.T.s., can you tell us exactly what that acronym stands for?

Wayne M Levine: Yeah, Hold on to Your NUTs: The Relationship Manual for Men, that’s the full name and it stands for Nonnegotiable, Unalterable Terms.