Ladies, if you think you understand men, think again. My podcast guest, Alison Armstrong shares what brings out the best and worst in men!
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Alison Armstrong’s exploration of human behavior began in 1991 with a decision to find out what brings out the best and worst in men. This naturally led to studying women’s behavior and making vital connections between the two. Alison offers practical, partnership-based alternatives to what we’re instinctively compelled to do. She continues to give millions of people access to more fulfilling lives, loving relationships, stronger families and productive organizations.
In this episode of Last First Date Radio:
- What brings out the best in and worst in men
- What traits do men value in a woman
- What men and women get wrong about each other
- Communication tools that help men and women connect more deeply
EP 637: Alison Armstrong – What Brings Out the Best and Worst in Men
This conversation was so good, I’m sharing the entire transcript instead of the highlights.
[00:03:19.620] – Sandy
We can talk about a lot of things, but I think that the work that you do, helping women and men understand each other is so crucial. It’s been crucial built in my own life, and it’s been really important to the people that I serve. So first, I want to just get the backstory about what motivated you to study this work and find out what brings out the best and worst in men in particular, which is where you started, right?
[00:03:49.070] – Alison
I have to ask, have you read or listened to the Queens Code?
[00:03:53.450] – Sandy
Yes. That was the first exposure I had to you.
[00:03:57.100] – Alison
That was the first exposure. Okay. So Just because it makes it easier, but for your audience, what happens to Kimberly in that first chapter happened to me. It was my colleague in a seminar, and the leader was talking about relationships, and she raised her hand and launched an attack on men. Why are they wonderful in the beginning? Then turn into these terrible people in the ways that she expressed it. His response to her was to say, Oh, I see. You’re a frog farmer. She tapped her foot and finally said, So what do you mean by that? He said, Some women turn frogs into princes. You, my dear, turn princes into frogs. My life flashed before me. It was February of 1991. I was 30 years old. I was divorced, almost. We were getting divorced. Had a one-and-a-half-year-old son. I thought men were horrible. I thought they didn’t care about what I needed or were actively withholding it, that they couldn’t be trusted, especially a romantic relationship. But the way that I saw my father at the time was very similar. When he said that to her. I was glad. I was glad to find out.
It rang as truth. I was glad to find out that there was something I was doing that was bringing out that worst in men because the alternative was that men were who I thought they were. I so needed them to not be who I thought they were. I wanted to be really married, like a union part got each other’s back, same team, married, not the funny situation I was in. We were barely roommates. I wanted I have a bigger family. That can easily set us on looking for the wonderful man, the exception to the rule, and to find out that maybe it wasn’t the way I thought it was at all. I was ecstatic. I’d been involved in transformation since I was 19 years old, and I knew I could transform myself. I’d been trying to change men, probably since I was 10 years old. With very little success. But I didn’t know where to go because I knew everybody I knew. I was just like my mom. I was just like my friends. I was just like my colleagues. I was just like all the women on television. Then this question popped into my head.
It’s so funny how they pop right here. It might as well be a bubble in a cartoon. The question was, what if men are responding to women? That was the beginning of me finding out if men are responding to women, what are they responding to? And making the correlation between our ways of being and their reaction and our specific behaviors, and their responses. And in the process, also seeing, and this was by observation and then verifying with men, did you do that because of this? Then in the process, also finding out ways that men are not responding to men at all. That it doesn’t matter how much they like you, love you, respect you, admire you, think they need you, want you, crazy about you. They have a saying, A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. They consider to do other than the right thing because of how they feel is dishonorable. No matter that they love you, they got to do the right thing, which one of the beautiful things about them is if they think they can’t give you what you need, it would be dishonorable to stay with you, be dishonorable to pursue you.
It’d be dishonorable to marry you, even though you’re begging or screaming at them to marry you. It would be dishonorable. No, I can’t give you what you need. That was the beginning. That was the beginning of 1991. I honestly, Sandy, thought it would take 2-3 months to learn everything worth knowing about men because I was sure I would have bet my life on that they were shallow, they had no feelings, so it didn’t matter what I did. I couldn’t hurt their feelings. I questioned whether they had souls. I knew absolutely that they were lesser human beings than women. Absolutely, the world would be a better place if people just did what women said.
[00:09:20.050] – Sandy
So that we’d all live on the planet where Wonder Woman comes from?
[00:09:24.630] – Alison
Well, and depending on which Wonder Woman movie you’re watching, that’s a scary planet, too. Yeah, we’re all blessed and cursed with being human because I just keep digging down and digging down. Now I’m at planetary instincts, male and female, to focused and open, to pack and herd, to wait. These behaviors, you find in the pine tree outside my window and to the bacteria that probably made me sick. All the way, Oh, yeah. This is not higher consciousness. This is survival at its most persistent and ugly. Without awareness of that, we’ll keep doing what we’re compelled to do instead of going, Wait, if I’m compelled to do this, it’s probably going to make it worse.
[00:10:34.680] – Sandy
Yeah. And then so many people are struggling, and they’re lonely, and they’re bitter. I grew up in a home where my father was bipolar. So he had a lot of mental health issues, and it made it very difficult to live with him. So I understand my mother’s frustration, but there was so much emasculation going on. And I didn’t realize the messages I had until much, much later, probably when I read the Queen’s Code. But I married a man who turned out to be very similar to my father, and the frustration, but then staying and staying and staying in a relationship that wasn’t working and thinking, Well, that’s all he’s capable of. There is no better match for me. I had a very narrow view view of what love was, what relationships could be, who men were. So I totally get it. I think that so many people see men, so many women see men as harmful as just so many things that they’re not, but they don’t realize their part in it. And I’m giving a workshop tonight on rejection. So one of the women in the group, I gave them an assignment to look at some past rejections and reflect on them.
She was saying what she learned from her last relationship was become friends with a man first, don’t jump into sex, and basically, protect your heart, so just do all these things, and then you won’t get hurt again. And so what would you say to somebody who learned learn lessons like that from a past relationship where they got involved with somebody and they got rejected?
[00:12:36.140] – Alison
I have so many thoughts. First of all, I’m not sure if technically we can be rejected unless someone says, I reject you. A man may have sorted himself out, which I think is why due diligence is so important. My process of due diligence is Listen very closely. Watch for flags. Watch for heebie-jeebies. Watch for niggling haunt. Then even if you love all the words, Now, watch the action because what’s real is going to show up an action that can’t be manufactured. Is it congruent? Are the words and the actions congruent? When they’re incongruent, get out the microscope. What? Wait a second. But allow for maybe, Maybe I didn’t hear you the way that you meant. How I interpreted when you said this was that you said that you would call me Saturday night, I interpreted it as you would call me Saturday night. So sometime in what qualifies as night, I would receive a call from you, and I didn’t. I need you to call me when you say you’re going to call me, or if you can’t call me when you say you’re going to call me, then at least you send a message saying, I’m sorry, I know I said I would call you, and I can’t.
Acknowledge you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. Can you give me that? But so often we just step over. Or we’re just off with the head. I practice three chances. The first is when I ask for what I need. The second was when I follow up and say, I really meant it. The third is, do you want one more chance? Because this is a deal breaker. The fourth is, you didn’t. We’re not going to try to do this. First, the clarity about your boundaries, what you will live with and not live with, what you won’t live without, however you want to say, deal breakers, boundaries, ultimatums, the clarity about that. Then the muscle, practicing, treat every interaction like a workout, no matter how cute he is. Do you speak your truth? No matter how rich he is, do you speak your truth? I call it early and often. Tell someone the truth before you care too much about what they think of it, whatever it is. If they go, Oh, I’m not your person, then say, Thank you. Thanks for telling the truth about that. Because if you’re not my person, then I’m not your person.
That’s the thing I think people miss. They think the one got away. Well, if there was such a thing as the one, how could they have gotten away? How could you… I blew it with the one. Well, if they were the one, how could you blow it? You might have done something and how you behaved, but then how they interact with you about it worked and you were better off for it. I Yeah. I was called terminally honest, and I know I’m annoyingly logical. The reason why I’m saying it, because I really am responding to what you asked, is guard your heart. Guard your heart as a strategy that you might as well have something on your chest. You might as well walk around with a deflector on your chest because everybody can tell, because there’s no love emanating, there’s no receptivity available, which is the fourth most attractive quality in a woman and when men cannot live without. And so what I found, and I had to rediscover this after my husband died five and a half years ago, was what if If A, my heart can’t be broken. What if it can be bruised, battered, squished?
But what if… I won’t say I’m heartbroken. I won’t. I’ll say I’m heart sick, maybe. But what if it can’t be broken? Then what if we know what our boundaries are and we’re loyal to what we need, and we know the moment the boundary needs to come up, and I just discovered this since I was made single, that the more I’ve demonstrated to myself that I’m loyal to my boundaries and that I can instantaneously set and defend them if necessary, now I’m truly receptive. I am not on guard. I’m not on guard because I know if necessary, there are spikes that will come out of the floor instantaneously. I must that. I developed that strength through natural horsemanship, and then singlehood after Greg died. It took a while to build the muscle. We squint. No, this is fine. This is fine. But the more we, eyes wide open, and what I was sharing with you earlier, seeing, Oh, I was squinting. Oh, I so wanted that to be what I wanted it to be, and I was squinting and overlooking and thinking, I’ll deal with that later. All right, that’s on me. Walking around the world open-hearted to every human being, that’s policy.
But it’s not idealistic. It’s trusting myself. I don’t have to trust in the goodness of everybody else. I trust myself. Even when I’m slow in the uptake sometimes because it’s quinting, I return to the trust in myself. There was something, so you said, Guard your heart. Oh, sex is not the problem. And how soon you have sex is not the problem. Number one question on our understanding sex and intimacy panel, the women would ask is when is too soon to have sex for the first time still end up with a commitment, which we think that they’re locked together, right? Yeah. And that is ancient. That is the virgin bride. Protect the virginity of your daughters or no one will marry them. And then you won’t get the dowry or whatever. This won’t work out. They’re going to save the whole family. So protect the virginity. It’s instinctual to withhold sex and be strategic about it. But it’s actually before and after that has us have sex at what could be too soon. One is the effects of sexual chemistry, what I would call too much chemistry, which makes both men and women stupid and reckless.
Procreate is the number one instinct. It trumps protect. We all risk our lives to have sex. We risk our lives, our lifestyles, our Our health, our emotions. It’s what’s driving the sex. My husband was not my type, and I didn’t actually become physically attracted to him until a few months into dating. But we’d had sex, and they’re like, How could you have sex? I’m like, It’s called affection? It’s called a great affection for him. It wasn’t driven by, I got to have you. People think I’m against chemistry. No, chemistry is wonderful. Just last year, I did looking for chemistry and connection because we can cause both. We can choose to have extraordinary chemistry. We can choose to have extraordinary connection. They’re not out of our power. It’s what got you in debate that usually is what causes the trouble. If it’s crazy chemistry that gets you in debate, you’re already cuckoo. You’re already not doing due diligence. You’re already not looking for the long term compatibility that you say you want. Then the effects, depending on how old we are, how much estrogen we have, affects how much oxytocin, any… Let’s see. The written word will cause a release of oxytocin in a woman’s phone.
This is why I tell them to get out of the messaging zone, A-S-A-P. You want to get on the phone, besides which a woman’s voice has the biggest impact on a man. So get on the phone. Then the second thing is it’s the bonding hormone. So especially if we’re still fertile, instinct will tell us to follow that man around until we find out for sure we’re not pregnant. Okay. And then our period starts and we’re like, Like, Eew, I don’t even like that guy. What happened to me? I’ve been in a fog. Yeah, an oxytocin, bonding fog, instinctual. Got together, two different tribes in the full moon, followed him home She was pregnant, got to their house and went, Oh, this is gross. So sex is not the bad guy, and how soon we have sex is not the bad guy. I do, however, think if you can’t talk about sex before you have it, don’t have it. You don’t trust them enough to talk about it. You don’t have enough of your senses and your clarity and understand what you need to talk about it. Talk about it. Frankly, with my sweetheart, love, supporter, now housemate, after three years of living in his backyard, I moved into his house.
We had sex within hours of meeting each other in person for the first time as we planned. It was not accidental. It was planned. But we’d had hours of getting to know each other and even resolving conflicts and doing the erotic blueprints and sharing the results and even questioning, wait, for you to get that result, you would have had to say yes to this category And there’s some things in that category I don’t do. So which ones are you looking for?
[00:24:04.210] – Sandy
I love that. Yes.
[00:24:07.920] – Alison
If you… Yeah, talk about it.
[00:24:11.190] – Sandy
Talk about it. Everything.
[00:24:13.650] – Alison
Well, especially if you know I knew so many men in my age group, right? So I was 58 when I was widowed, and they’re already men in my age group and older. My husband was 11 years older, so I was open to that age group. But so many of them have had an incident of ED, of erectile dysfunction. So many women don’t understand how that old business works as we get older and that they’re not going to be a teenage pop-up. Anything happens, boing, boing, boing. No, there’s no volunteer. I call it the Erection Partnership. I swore it for sex in the first conversation because too many men in my age group had signed off sex because they’d had an incident where they couldn’t perform and they were humiliated. They lost so badly. They were, I’m looking for affection. I’m looking for companionship. I’m looking for enjoyment. We’ll hold each other, but no. They don’t often reveal that before three months into it, and you wonder, why do we still have our clothes on all the time? Or why do we only do these certain things, but nothing else? They don’t reveal it. I pursued that conversation in a way that I was practicing just being safe.
I could be safe because I hadn’t hitched my wagon to this person yet. I hadn’t decided they were the one. I wasn’t protecting anything. If they couldn’t accept things like, My dead husband is still very much part of my life, and he probably picked you. I told Dan that in the first five minutes of our conversation and waited to see and thought in my head, if you’re going to run, run now. And there’s about a half hour, he didn’t run. He was quiet, and I thought he was going to run. And then he said, I can feel him. Nice. Yes, that’s what I thought. Oh, wow. He did still work because my husband is still providing for my family and my friends. He’s a very busy, disincorporated person. But if someone can’t be with that, it wasn’t going to go away. It wasn’t going to change me or change him. What’s unchangeable about you? Or what do you think someone’s going to break up with you over? What have People have broken up with you over? And you know you’re still that person. How about bring it up? And if they’re going to run, run now instead of after you’re in love and bought a house together and have three children, and now they break up with you for the reason that you’re afraid of in the first place that you’d concealed all those years.
So it was within a half an hour, we were talking about sex. Okay, so sex is something you’re looking for? Yeah. Nice.
[00:27:30.560] – Sandy
Nice.
[00:27:31.510] – Alison
Good. Great. We didn’t go more into that one at the time. It’s confirming we’re monogamous people. We have a monogamous lean. We’re committed to the monogamy thing. Okay, good. All right. But it’s just… Yeah, so that thing, the strategy, so much of our… I mean, we have to make conclusions so that we can make strategies, and then our minds search for what validates the strategy, and We can miss the truth. We can miss the truth of the person in front of us.
[00:28:05.090] – Sandy
Yes, for sure. That was a great answer too. I mean, people have faulty thinking, and they take their experiences and they interpret them in a way that keeps them safe, but it doesn’t bring them connection and love. And the funny thing is that when I started my career- I just fell in love with you all over again. Oh, Allison.
[00:28:32.100] – Alison
Yes. They interpret things in a way that makes them feel safe or that they can make themselves safe. But it doesn’t produce the result.
[00:28:42.260] – Sandy
No, it just puts a wall around you. And I got it.
[00:28:45.750] – Alison
Bravo, Sandy.
[00:28:48.000] – Sandy
Before I even understood all of this, I came up with an analogy that I used in my TEDx Talk, which was in 2013. I had just started my career, And this came to me that I had dated a guy who told me that he was like a Tootsie pop, that he was hard on the outside and soft and bushy on the inside. And I had this epiphany that I was that Tootsie Pup. And so it’s like the frog farmer. I was that really tough exterior person because I didn’t really know myself. I didn’t have the boundaries. I didn’t have communication skills. I didn’t have my core values I didn’t know any of that. And so the conclusion I had after every heartbreak was, get tougher. Be that Teflon shield that will make sure that I won’t get hurt. And that’s how I chose my husband. I chose a man who chose me, who loved me, who said he was going to keep me safe, and who was obsessed with me. I was not obsessed with him. I had a lot of questions, but I truly thought he would keep me safe, and that is not what happened.
So the whole analogy of the Tootsie pop was like, Oh, I need to be a different candy bar. So I came up with the heat bar, which is tough on the inside and soft and yielding on the outside.
[00:30:21.440] – Alison
That’s true. Sweet chocolate covering. Yeah. And then the carmely sweetness and then Yeah.
[00:30:35.830] – Sandy
Right. And so when I realized that I had to get really clear, like you said, then you can guard what’s important to you by speaking up early and not letting yourself have that squinty eye look at the person in front of you just because they’re really good-looking and hot and they chose you and maybe they’re younger. And for whatever reason, we end up in bed with these people who then are completely incompatible with us, not having these discussions, not calling people out on their behavior and saying, When you said you were going to call me. I mean, I see this. This is like what’s killing so many people’s lives is accepting crappy behavior, not speaking up, saying they’re confused by the behavior of this person, but never saying it’s not okay This is not working for me. Let’s talk about aging. We just have a few minutes left, but most of my audience is older. You talked about ED before. Are there any other changes that happen as people age that changes how men and women relate to each other?
[00:31:51.630] – Alison
Oh, my gosh. Just a small question.
[00:31:54.780] – Sandy
Just a small question.
[00:31:56.860] – Alison
Okay. Here’s a small answer. The way that estrogen and testosterone configures the brain. Testosterone creates compartmentalization, single focus, and limited number of connections between their verbal centers and everything else. Estrogen creates no compartments, creates diffused awareness, right? Pores in every direction. Perfect, perfect perception for a gatherer who has to wander out in a meadow and simultaneously be scanning for danger while finding anything useful, medicinal, edible, or that will be edible in the future, and how soon do I need to come back and get it before the bears? And and that basically every part of the brain is connected to the verbal centers of the brain. Imagine if we’re like that from day 21 of gestation, when the hormones kick in until we get into our… It’s going to vary, right? But into our 50s, It’s happening in the ’50s, definitely has happened in the ’60s, where the testosterone in men, it has naturally fallen off unless they’re doing bioidenticals, which is a whole other story. The verbal centers are getting set up. The compartmentalization, the walls are coming down. The verbal centers are getting connected to other parts. They can talk about their feelings, their emotions.
Their knowledge pours out of them, sometimes in a really annoying in a way in unsolicited advice that they seem to not be able to not give. Yes, and they start paying attention to connection, and they don’t want to have sex if we’re not in love, if their heart’s not in dear. This is not a performance. Then women, our estrogen has disappeared with the ovum as they dissolved and we have none left. The half of our testosterone that we depended upon from the ovum, that’s gone, too. Now we only have the testosterone from our adrenal glands and the estrogen, little bits of estrogen that our bodies can make or that we might ingest things that support it. I’m I’m not knowledgeable in that, but I know people are. The estrogen is stored in the fat deposits of our body, but in cultures where the idea is to be as skinny as you possibly can, you’re not going to be able to hang on to your estrogen, so your skin is going to get papery and fluids are going to dry up and you’ll be a skinny raisin. Eat fat, lots of good healthy fat, have some cheeks on you.
If someone doesn’t love your curves, that’s their problem because they’re your curves. If you want to know if your body type appeals to somebody, honestly, just take your body type and add the word porn on it and search on Google, and you will find out people pay to look at body curves. Every type of body. Every type of… Men cannot decide what their body type is. They don’t get to choose. It just is what it is. And if they’re made fun of it, they’re made fun of it. But somebody loves you just the way you are. I have a friend who, as her brand new husband, left for deployment, put his arms around her, grabbed a hold of her rear end and said, This could be bigger when I get back. Yeah,. Oh, yeah. So these things are swapping. So as we get older, now the brain configurations We’re swapping and we become more focused. Our children may think we’re ignoring them like my youngest did. I was 36 when she was born and she thought I was ignoring her. No, baby. It’s single focus. I have become I was just making dinner. We have to watch.
We have to watch because even when you get it wired, then we change. I guess just to keep us on our toes, Sandy, nobody gets to see it late. Sexuality changes. Often, I couldn’t wait to be 60 years old because I had so many students in their 60s, and my observation was, Oh, my gosh, they’re unstoppable. I want to be that. I so wanted to be that. I can’t wait to be that. It’s true. I got into a big kerfuffle with Dan about one of my deal breakers. As we got it sorted out, what’s the plan and what’s going to happen, and what’s he going to be accountable for, I said, I love you. He I said, I love you, too. I looked at him and I said, But you don’t like me right now. He wanted to say something different, but he goes, Truth is my second-highest value. So he said, No, I don’t. I checked. I scanned all the way down, all the way up. I was totally fine with that. As a younger woman with a lot of estrogen, that would cause a panic attack. He doesn’t like me. I’m going to die.
If the bear shows up and we have bears, he’s not going to protect me. I’m all right with that. Oh, my gosh. This is hot. And it’s what has older women be so attractive to men, the self-confidence, the directness. They say the courage to be authentic. It takes less and less courage to be authentic. Why would I be anything but authentic? That’s a waste of time. For women who get older and think this means you’re less beautiful, less attractive, less desirable, the thinking of that will make that true. But it’s not inherently true.
[00:38:45.800] – Sandy
I love that. I agree with you. And that is a wonderful way to end our conversation today. We could have gone on for 10 more hours. I just love talking to you. I think you’re so full of wisdom. And I think it’s so important for women and men to pay attention to the work you do because we get it wrong so often and we can get it right. We can have more love, more connection, and more positive relationships if we just learn to get out of our own way and learn the skills that it takes, really, because so much as the mindset and what we are faulty thinking has gotten in the way of healthy relationships. So thank you for the work you do.
[00:39:34.950] – Alison
You’re welcome. And thank you for seeing me. It means a lot.
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