“Nice guys” in love often find themselves playing the role of the hero, or the savior, to the women that they become involved with in relationship. These nice guys guys often seek out women who are “broken birds,” or relationship partners that are attractive because their flaws create an attractive project to the nice guy hero.

So many men fall into the hero role, and end up creating a lot of relationship misery for themselves. This is not a truly loving relationship; this is a neurotic relationship that serves to reinforce the nice guy’s identity about needing to be needed. When a nice guy is needed by a broken bird, it makes that guy feel wanted, needed, and special.

Broken birds can often never be fixed, although they may look very appealing and beautiful on the outside. The appeal to be with or fix a broken bird blinds most nice guys to what’s really going on. It prevents true relationship, in the sense that two people are relating to each other as full human beings, and not as roles being played. Nice guys and broken birds interact with only versions of themselves, and not as people in love. It may feel like love, but it’s codependency.

As long as the nice guy is committed to trying to fix the broken bird, he is doomed to fail every time. Like I said, broken birds cannot be fixed. But when they do get fixed — if that happens — then that upsets the equilibrium of the relationship. When one person does something different, the whole system is forced into changing itself. What does this mean? Well, if you’re a nice guy with a broken bird, you will be forced into needing to learn how to reinvent your relationship with your partner. Or, just as often, the broken bird will end up mending its wings and flying away, unless the nice guy does first.

That latter scenario would entail a major change in the way a man redefines himself, and that would mean to lose the hero’s cape. He would need to learn how to have a meaningful relationship without needing to fix or man and his partner, and these are structural changes. So long as these structural changes go unattended, the attraction or seduction to engage in a relationship with a broken bird is highly tempting.

(This article originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix Online’s August 14, 2009 edition.)

I’m not mourning the death of the traditional dating experience quite yet, but I do see the heavy use of social media speeding it up.

Social media is now everywhere. Facebook boasts more than 250 million active users, and Oprah recently ushered Twitter into mainstream status. Is the heavy use of social media another death knell for traditional dating as we know it?

I think that the forces of texting, smart-phone use and social media addiction, combined with a wider cultural acceptance of “hooking up” (read: sexual encounters without the need for traditional relationships or intimacy), are making it much more difficult to really get to know someone in the way that the dating process did previously.

Although communication is light-speed and readily available, I don’t know that it helps us understand dating and mating any better. We’re talking a lot, but are we really saying much at all sometimes? For the daters that I talk with, it seems even harder to connect with someone in a meaningful way, now that we’re all wired, active and interconnected. Loneliness still festers, even if it’s digitally.

As evidenced by popular dating Web sites, like JDate, Match.com and eHarmony, we want to put on our very best face to prospective buyers. I think the same idea carries over to the use of social media, where that invisible electronic buffer allows us to show only those parts of us that we want others to see, and keep hidden the rest.

In some ways, revealing oneself on a social media site is more instantaneous and easier to do from behind a keyboard than in front of a live person.

But how much are we really revealing? Did the “archaic” dating process allow us the slow “meet and greet” process that social media simply excludes?

The mystery of getting to know one another as a time-honored process is simply too lengthy and too time-consuming. For many formerly “traditional” daters, going on a date with a guy or girl is simply outmoded, considering that they can communicate directly with them in 140 characters or less. Why spend the money and time on dinner and a movie when we could be getting to know someone online in a more efficient manner?

The evolution of the Internet and social media forecasts some very interesting changes happening with the way that we date and create relationships. I hope we can still take the time out to get to know people the way we used to in the past. In more than 140 characters.

Jason Fierstein, MA, LPC, is a counselor for men and couples who practices in Phoenix. Call 602-309-0568 to set up an appointment, or visit phoenixmenscounseling.com for more information.

When we get in our own way, it’s hard to do a post-mortem on what exactly went wrong, and it’s even tougher to look at what we did or did not do to contribute to it. Whether our relationship failed, whether we are lazy in pursuing our professional passions, or whether we haven’t learned to bring more friendship into our lives, it’s easy to blame the outside world and hard to take responsibility for making those changes that we need to take in pursuit of our own happiness and satisfaction. A lot of times, we just simply don’t know what we want. Or, were too scared to go get what we want. There is distance between us and expressing our values.

Wavering on our values is a big part of where we get in our own way. It’s hard to make the changes that we really want to see for our lives — the way we envision ourselves in the future — when we compromise those things that are at the core of our being — our values.

Getting in touch with what we truly value is really tough for many men. For a lot of guys, life just kind of “takes over”, and we let life live us instead of us living our own lives. We live from the outside, not the inside, and when that happens, we set ourselves up for a whole world of pain and problems. But, when we are living in accordance with those values, life just kind of “lines up”. We live from the inside, not the outside anymore. We create a certain flow to our lives that feels easier and cleaner, just by identifying, activating and lining up with our key values.

Some guys value learning to be a better father. For some, it’s learning to communicate their needs and feelings more clearly, and to not react so defensively or angrily with their partner. For others, living one’s values means developing hobbies and interests outside of our work, or to simply live in a more organized and efficient way. Whenever the value is, the degree to which that created life is lived in a clean, easy and organic way is reflected by the degree to which we are lined up with those values we prize.

Are you living those values that are closest to your heart? If not, the deeper question is, what roadblocks and barriers are challenges to you living those values? Are they external barriers, or internal, or both? Just starting the process of identification of both the values that you hold, and the challenges to lining up with them, is the beginning of living those values. It’s the start of making the changes that will bring you the happiness that you seek for your life.

Comments welcome. I’m interested to know how you live – or don’t – your own personal values.

If you suspect that the use of pornography is coming between you and your wife or girlfriend, it probably is. It’s not something that’s totally comfortable for guys to talk about with their women, and yet for a lot of couples, it’s the elephant in the room.

Some of the stats on pornography are staggering. More than 70% of men from 18 to 34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month (comScore Media Metrix). This stat especially stood out to me: 70% of all online porn access occurs during the 9-5 workday (Message labs monthly report march 2004).

If we’re that willing to risk our wives leaving us, and our bosses firing us, it must be pretty addictive to get online and surf for porn. But why?

Men are visually-oriented creatures, so there is a natural attraction to porn. From an evolutionary standpoint, men are attracted physically to women who they deem fit to mate with, and the most potentially successful genetic carriers of their DNA.

But in the 21st century, we continue to operate with those outmoded evolutionary responses. On a deep level, we are concerned about survival, but day-to-day, we have much less to worry about than our ancestors did.

We now live in a culture that has stripped sexuality down to the visual basics, and has removed intimacy and emotionality from the equation. In fact, most cultural vehicles — from movies to music to magazines — promote a sort of hypersexuality which continues to erode the other elements needed in healthy and functioning sexuality.

This is where men and emotional intimacy problems come in. Mens’ attraction to visually oriented things (like Internet porn), and combined with emotional withdrawal and avoidance, this creates a perfect storm of relationship problems. Men will retreat to porn as a way to not deal with the emotional intimacy problems that they are experiencing within their relationship. This creates a vicious cycle, because porn use further aggravates the problem is already inherent within a marriage or relationship.

This is a dangerous issue because many spouses may or may not know that their guy is using (or addicted to) porn as a surrogate for their relationship intimacy. Men may not even know that it’s a problem for themselves, but the first step is just to name the problem. Realizing that this is an issue for many guys is just too much; women need to know that this is an issue, and it may be a major contributing factor to the unhealthiness of their relationship as it is now.

Help is out there. Starting a conversation with your spouse or mate is a difficult thing to do, but if you identify your relationship success and intimacy as deeper, stronger values for you and your mate, then you may prioritize those things over continued avoidance and porn use. helping yourself is identifying those values that you hold closest to your heart, and not compromising on the junk food when it becomes a problem for you and her together.

Making up stories and assumptions about people and about situations often times get us into trouble. When  our minds go to devising stories — as colorful and intriguing as they are — they’re often times wrong. This presents a major problem when dealing with other people, because through these assumptions and stories we engage with the world.

What ends up happening is we create the reality that we didn’t really want in the first place. Like the books when I was growing up, it’s a grown-up version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series. You know, the books where you can pick from a different variety of endings. Unlike the books though, sometimes it’s hard to retrace our steps and select a different ending. This is especially true when we keep picking the same ending over and over and over again.

Learning to live in the present moment counteracts the tendency to live within our heads, where those stories and assumptions often come to life. When were in relationship, it’s easy to grasp onto those stories about our partner, and we work to convince ourselves that it’s true. Although our partner probably triggers our own process, we cling onto history and use historical reference points as a way to ensure that our partner will act that way again in the future. This is limiting, and ends up creating a future that’s no different from the past. Those stories and assumptions are created in our minds and reside in the past or the future, whereas ideally, we should be living in the present moment (where our minds cannot).

What helps is checking out those stories and assumptions that you have about someone else with that person. Investigating through communication is always better for grounding in reality then is living through the filters that we create for our life. Understanding the fears, worries, and pain that lie within us emotionally is important, because it’s those feelings that drive and create those are rational stories and assumptions that we then place on to the people that we love. It’s the emotions that drive us to create those realities that we think are true, and yet are not.

(This is an excerpt from my upcoming e-book tentatively titled “The Nice Guy’s Textbook:
On Love, Life, and Getting a Spine.” Coming soon and will be available at my site – www.phoenixmenscounseling.com.)

Anger and nice guys don’t mix. Because nice guys and stuff their emotions, it makes sense that both of their anger, too. nice guys get angry because their needs aren’t being met, but they’re not in the community that the people who make them angry. That’s the whole thing for nice guys: they’re not going to express their anger because it will lead to devastating to actually express the anger to the recipient. Instead, nice guys will swallow their anger, where it ends up mutating into much worse problems for the host nice guy.

So what happens to the anger when nice guy swallow it? A lot of things. Because the anger is not being communicated directly to the people that need here at, it stays put within a nice guy. But anger needs to come out in some way, and it often comes out through the forms of sarcasm, criticism, self-criticism, superiority, judgmentality, and on the other end of spectrum, rage and acting out physically.

A lot of nice guys are also smart guys. Smart guys being who they are often reside in their heads most of the time. The very skills and abilities that smart guys have used to create success in their lives, such as in their professional lives, are the worst skills to deal with anger. Smart guys also have the unique ability to intellectualize their anger, and this is another form of fermenting that anger loves. When I talk to guys who come in because they can’t deal with their anger, we always end up talking about how they try to “think their way out of their anger”, but it never works. I was asked them “so how is it worked for you up until this point?” These guys usually say, “well, not to good. on here and counseling now aren’t I?”

This tendency to intellectualize our anger is a real problem. We become hamsters in our own mental wheels, spinning ourselves into a mental oblivion. We also try to apply those same election will skills to solving our marriage and relationship problems, and those skills and tools are about not very successful to fixing those problems.

When nice guys get mad after having said “yes”, they tend to stuff that voice within them that really doesn’t want to say “yes”. By not saying ‘no’, these guys swallow what they really want because they’re too afraid that and they’ll be rejected by saying ‘no’. And this phenomenon plays out in all sorts of areas of the guy’s life: work, friendships, intimate relationships, within family relationships and on and on.

Stuffing anger is a real problem, because anger slowly builds up over time when it gets stuffed. Each incident of stuffing one’s anger and not saying no creates a compounding effect, where people to comes more difficult to say no and anger festers even more. Others may even notice that we where anger on our faces or in our behavior, and not know why. We may not even know why we’re angry, and not connect the dots to know that by not saying no to others when we don’t mean it, creates this cause-and-effect relationship.

If there is no time to waste, use one or more of the seven short steps to turn around the tempo in your relationship or marriage. Many guys that I talk with call me at the 11th hour, when it may or may not be too late to save their relationship. They go in a panic mode, and wants to do whatever they can to save their relationship. The simple fact: it’s not as easy as that. But try telling that to some of these desperate guys.

Here’s seven short steps to improving your chances for relationship success, and hopefully staving off some more sour times for you and her. Here we go:

1. Listen well. if she feels heard, and she feels like you’re not trying to fix it, you’re doing well.
2. Take ownership or responsibility. You’ve probably helped contribute to the situation.
3. Understand your role. Don’t just apologize because you think that’s what she wants to hear, and for something that you didn’t do. It’s phony, and she’ll see through it.
4. Prioritize her. A lot of times, well-intentioned guys prioritize other things, like their friends, career, ESPN, or anything else but her.
5. Improve your ability to give her affection, whether it’s verbal, physical, or sexual. They’re all related.
6. Understand what she needs from you, and do it.
7. Time, energy and variety: prioritize her by creating time for her, put some energy into the planning and try to infuse some variety into activities that you spend with her. Try something new each time.

I hope that these seven short tips trigger something in you want to do a little bit different. Relationships are a lot of work, and those that think that just cruising through a relationship is okay, it ain’t. Relationships,  like everything else in our lives, yield great gains when attended to on daily basis.

All too often, I talk with guys and couples who are having issues with one or more of the three of these issues. It’s like guys have one foot in their relationship or marriage, and one foot out. Many problems stem from the use of porn, infidelity or emotional cheating, and yet there are causes to these things as well.

Most of these types of problems, I believe, come from the failure for guys to connect to their emotional selves.  When we as men can’t connect to our emotions or know what they are, there is a higher chance that they will seek gratification in some form or another from an outside source.

It’s known now that the number one reason men cheat is not about the sex: it’s about emotional disconnection, or lack of intimacy. When guys are disconnected from themselves emotionally, it makes sense that I’ll be disconnected from their partners, wives or girlfriends. That’s when the cracks start to appear within a relationship. It may be subtle, but those cracks widen over time.

As the emotional canyon widens, many distractions then have an opportunity to seize hold of a guys’ wandering mind. The guy may not know it, but he is probably emotionally disconnected and is seeking that emotional gratification from one of those outside sources. So what we see are things like hitting use of pornography, extramarital affairs, improper interpersonal interactions (like flirting or the like), or creating emotional affairs with members of the opposite sex outside of the primary relationship.

The problems usually come to a head when the marriage or relationship is about to end, and often this happens when one partner stumbles upon the well guarded truth of the other, which makes it so much worse. It’s like adding fuel to the fire, and the chances of rebuilding that trust become excruciatingly hard.

One of the things that I feel so committed to in my work as a counselor and therapist for men is to help guys become more emotionally connected with themselves, so that they can be able to connect emotionally with the women they love. It’s through this lack of emotional intelligence, or emotional blindness, that we disconnect and the problems between us start to take hold.

Money helps, but if you don’t have the right foundation to creating a marriage or relationship, you are building a house cards. I talk with too many guys who still are committed to the idea that working their asses off, making money, and providing the right lifestyle for themselves and their wives or girlfriends is what is going to create happiness and a successful relationship. Wrong.

Money is never all satisfying. Even though it has evolutionary roots, the idea of being a mate who can acquire access to resources (i.e. money) has its limitations. And yet guys don’t seem to get this. They seem to think that they can buy their mate’s happiness, which may be true in a fleeting sense.  The sense of material acquisition can never be fully experience — there always has to be more. Money cannot become a surrogate for lack of the emotional connection or expression, or as a substitute for love and respect.

When we fight about money, it may be true that were fighting about other issues in our relationships. When we have no money, that may be absurd proposition, but I think that money is often the materialization of power and control dynamics within a relationship or household. When we try to gain control or power over our mate (to distract us from our own powerlessness or feelings of being out of control), there are various ways that we can do this. Sex and money are two common “power currencies” that keep tension between two people who are vying for more power and control in their relationship.

The psychology of money between couples is very subtle, and requires a keen eye and willingness to change behaviors to remedy this type of problem. Even just considering that money, or the lack of it, is the tip of the iceberg, and has many primary causes and secondary symptoms is a great start. Seeing money in this way, as a form of a psychological currency, is difficult, but it may shed some perspective on the way that you have traditionally dealt with it in your relationships.

If there could be a point in time where a couple realizes that there is a problem, I would have to say that one that I hear more often than not is when the guy ends up with his fist through the wall, or does a number of other scary behaviors that frighten or intimidate their partner. In this blog post, I want to talk about  the volcanic anger that guys experience, and how to help stave it off before it erupts.

I’m not just talking about “those guys.” One universal phenomenon that I see with many men is that they say that “I’m not that guy.” A lot of men are quick to push away the label of “angry guy”, because “that’s just not me.”

I think that there is a difference between being angry, and identifying yourself as an angry guy. The two are different. Having an experience of anger is different from taking on the identity of “angry guy.” the angry guys are always other guys — the violent types that have their fragile, crying women backed up into the corner, cowering in fear. You know who I’m talking about.

Once we get past that distinction, I’m interested to know what happens between point A and point B. This is the hard part because we unconsciously get sucked into reactivity when we get angry, and for many people, it’s extremely difficult to slowdown and become mindful of the thoughts and feelings that arise in us when our partner triggers that anger in us. It’s like she’s lighting the fuse, and it’s a matter of time until the explosion. The reactive experience seems out of our control, and then our fist ends up in the wall.

I could talk about ways to cool down, like simple breathing or “going to take a walk”, but that doesn’t relieve you of the experience of anger.

What’s really important is to get in touch with the anger and to see it as an experience that you’re having, no different than happiness or sadness or whatever. To see it as an experience instead of your identity, it creates more ease about allowing yourself to have that experience. So many guys that I talk with are afraid of their anger, and thus afraid of being “that angry guy.”

The ideal situation is to extinguish the lit fuse while it’s creeping up towards detonating your bomb. How do you do this? It’s critical to stay connected to your wife or girlfriend, get in touch with your anger (bonus: getting in touch with the physical sensation of anger in your heart or chest panel as it comes up and speaking from that place)  and to communicate what is happening with you in the present moment.

To speak from your anger, and not to react against it, is so key. Being able to speak your needs and that you’re angry, by simply saying “I’m furious” or “I’m so angry at you”, are things that will actually bring you closer, and shorten the distance between you and her. It sounds a little strange, but so is putting up this through the wall. Ultimately, counseling is cheaper than drywall repair.