I’m No Lady

Steve Harvey promised to empower me.

I woke up Saturday morning dreading the task at hand. I knew I could no longer put off reading Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, the latest relationship book my mother purchased for me in her effort to hasten the arrival of her grandbabies.

But first, the master procrastinator that I am, I made my self some tea and turned on CNN.

I wasn’t surprised when T.J. announced that they were going to rerun their interview with Steve Harvey that morning. T.J. has had a crush on me for quite some time, it was evident that he read my blog, knew I was planning on reading Steve’s book this weekend and thought I would find his interview helpful.

I agreed, plus it had the added advantage of keeping me from actually having to read the book for a few minutes more. From the interview I learned that men show their love for women with the three P’s: Profess, Provide and Protect. Steve also told me that he didn’t just pull all of this advice out of his rear-end, but that it comes from years and years (and years) of talking to men about women and relationships.

Steve also looked me in the eyes and promised his book would empower me.

Feeling newly invigorated, I mean what woman couldn’t use a little empowering on a rainy Saturday morning, I sat back on my couch and started reading.

Oh dear lord.

I will say this -- Steve made one really good point (and I believe this was part of the thinking like a man section). Women need standards and we need to make those standards clear early on and we need to recognize that we can’t change men, no matter how much we want to or try.

This makes perfect sense to me. If you want to get married and have children, you should find out pretty early on in a relationship if that is something your mate wants as well. If not, you should stop wasting your time and move on to the next one.

But that is it for the “I am woman, hear me roar” part of the book. The rest of it discusses what it means to be a lady.

And I think this is the part that really offends most women. Well, that or being compared to fried fish. Personally, I am not really sure which bothered me more.

Now, for Steve, acting like a lady means allowing a man to buy you dinner and open your door and hang things in your house and move heavy equipment. It also means cooking your man meals (I guess this means my mom would be better off buying me a cookbook than another how to find love book), and taking care of your kids and not wearing a t-shirt to bed every night.

On that last point, if you do wear a t-shirt to bed every night and you are always too tired (you know from holding down a full-time job and then coming home and cooking and cleaning and raising children) to have sex, know that your man is going to cheat on you. But don’t worry, when you discover his indiscretion and throw his ass out on the curb, he will do whatever it takes to get you back (if he is a real man) and when he does, he will be a better husband, but more importantly, you will be a better wife.

How taking that lying, cheating sack of shit back meets with the standards you are suppose to have is beyond me. But this isn’t the only discrepancy in the book, so I guess we are just to take Steve’s word for it.

Looking back on my past few “relationships” through Steve’s eyes I could see where I went wrong. I offered to pay my share on the two dates I had with the Republican, I never let Houdini help around my apartment, and not only did I pick the restaurant that Scooter and I went to, I brought the wine. And then there was Wharton.

Oh wait, I never made Wharton cuddle after sex or talk about his feelings, and she always paid when we went out. Yeah, I am not really sure where we went wrong. Oh, right, we had sex before the 90 day probationary period was up; another big no-no according to the Book of Steve.