For over thirty years, I have helped successful women make their dream of love come true. Here is how I got here, and why it matters so much to me.
Me, back when everyone thought I just needed to try harder.
I was an intuitive kid. I could feel things other people seemed to miss. But in school, the harder I worked, the more I heard the same word. Lazy. You're not trying.
I knew that wasn't true. I was trying as hard as I knew how. I just couldn't explain what was wrong.
Then a psychologist tested me and gave me an answer. I had a learning disability. And once she named it, she showed me ways to work around it.
That moment changed my whole world. For the first time, someone had looked closer instead of telling me to try harder. I never forgot what that felt like.
Somewhere in here, a professor changed the direction of my whole life.
I took a counseling class almost by accident, and the professor made it come alive.
He showed me something I have believed ever since. That abstract problems, even problems inside relationships, really do have solutions. You just have to know how to look for them.
I walked out of that class knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
This was when I learned that "hopeless" usually just means no one has looked closely enough yet.
A mother brought me her son. He had a severe mental illness, and she told me, with everything in her, that she would do whatever it took. Her son was not going to spend his life in an institution.
We worked together for three or four years. And I watched that young man go from being severely impaired to enrolling in college.
That mother taught me something I have carried into every relationship I have worked on since. Almost any problem has a solution, if someone is willing to do the work and someone else knows where to look.
One woman asked for my help. Then she told all her friends. I never looked back.
She was thirty-five. Successful, warm, and completely unable to figure out why she couldn't get married. She asked for my help. I gave her a few things to try, and they worked. So she told her friends.
And that is when my real calling found me. Suddenly I had a steady stream of women, thirty-five to forty-five, who were dating constantly and still couldn't find lasting love, or who were in relationships and couldn't understand why they kept slipping away.
I realized I could tell these women something almost no one else could. What was actually happening inside the man. The thing he was feeling but could never put into words.
The women in my office kept telling me to write it down. So I did.
After a couple of years, those women kept telling me the same thing. You have to write this down.
So I did. The Woman Men Adore sold over two hundred thousand copies, and I went on to write several more.
What started as advice across my desk became something I could put into the hands of women I would never meet.
My boys. The best thing I ever had a hand in.
Along the way I got married and became a father to triplet boys. Raising them is one of the great joys of my life. As they grew, I began doing more and more of my work online, so I could reach women anywhere.
And then I went through a divorce.
I am not going to pretend that was anything other than painful. It taught me something I had only understood from the other side of the desk until then. How much it hurts to give everything you have to a relationship and still watch it fall apart.
It also taught me that it truly takes two people to make a relationship work. I made a promise to myself to learn from that pain instead of being defined by it. And I have never forgotten how it feels to be the one who is struggling.
Still doing the one thing I was put here to do.
These last few years, my heart has been with a particular woman. She has known love before. She has been through heartache or a marriage that did not last. And she can feel that she still has a window to find her partner, the real one, before that window closes.
She is willing to do the work. And here is what I have come to believe most of all. Her past pain is not a mark against her. It is the very thing that will let her build something wonderful this time. She knows what matters now. She knows what she will not settle for.
That is the woman I serve, like Shelly. And after everything, finding the real problem and showing her the way through, that is still the thing I was put here to do.
Shelly, on her wedding day.
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