Last weekend I went to a course called Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women. I’m not sure I’m either celebrating or satisfied just yet, but it was an interesting course.

The basic idea is that we (women) tend to judge men by comparing them to what the ideal woman would do, but they are not women. So we criticize and poke fun at all the “stupid” things men do, when sometimes they are not stupid at all, just not the things we would do.

There were various strategies shared for getting men to do what you want – not of the manipulative variety, but more the right way to phrase requests so they appeal to a man’s natural tendency to want to do things for us, instead of sabotaging ourselves with our word choices as we so often do.

We aren’t allowed to share our class notes, so I won’t go into more detail, but as time goes by I may share some stories of having tried the techniques and how well they worked. I can already say that I’ve had some success with this in getting a certain person who often doesn’t reply to email, to reply to the ones that really matter. That’s progress already.