Don’t get me wrong. I like womanizers. Of course, most women enjoy them in the moment–if we didn’t, they wouldn’t be so successful. Hell, we wouldn’t have a name for them. But the tide turns. Womanizers don’t stay. And then a lot of women get angry that the man hasn’t kept all those promises he never made.
I have no tolerance for liars, in romance or in any other area. But in my experience, womanizers don’t life. They don’t make promises. They simply make a woman feel so good that she starts to think it can only be love (no matter what the guy says).
Nonsense.
Of course we all like to feel like we’re the only woman in teh world, but there’s a big difference between feeling it and thinking it. If he doesn’t liek and she doesn’t develop delusions, everyone can walk away happy and with fond memories. His will probably fade more quickly than hers, but whatever. The beauty of the relationship, if you can call it that, is that it’s all fantasy. 
It’s a movie-style relationship in which it’s always sunset or an afternoon at the beach, in which even the occasional rain storm provides the perfect backdrop for the moment and no one ever gets blotchy or has a migraine or uses the bathroom.
But there’s no real connection. The unreality of it, the escape, the fact that it has nothing to do with real life, is the draw.
So it surprised me greatly when Mike suggested that the “strategy” of a successful womanizer should be the same as the strategy of a man looking for a serious relationship. He described that strategy as simply listening to a woman and finding out what she wants. A good first step for either goal, perhaps…but then what?
The womanizer’s next step is to become that thing, if only for a moment. And that works because it’s only a game, the grown-up version of playing at being married or royalty or cowboys and Indians for an afternoon. The womanizer can BE what he’s determined the woman wants because he won’t ahve to live it. When the novelty of the role he’s playing wears off, he’ll simply move on down the road.
The man who triest to learn what a woman wants and become that thing in order to build a relationship, on the other hand, is doomed from the start. You can build a short-term romance on misdirection, but you can’t build a relationship with smoke and mirrors. One day, he’ll have to let his guard down and be himself, and then he’ll no longer be what she wants. Or, he’ll manage to sustain the facade and thus sustain a “relationship” that isn’t one at all.
Photo Courtesy of Dynamite Imagery
For the record, I didn’t advise anyone to become something they are not or pretend to be anything. I simply said that if you want to be a player or be in a relationship the key would be to pay attention to what women want.
I suppose the difference is that a womanizer would never say, “I can’t give you what you want, you should move on”. Well, he might say it when he is done.
Nope, that’s not the difference at all. Womanizers are frequently honest up front about what they have to offer. The difference is that a womanizer can get what HE wants by reading a woman and reacting to what he reads, whereas a man looking for a real relationship cannot.