Be a good listener.

I don’t think of my blog as an advice blog, per se, but the piece of advice I’m offering today is to be a good listener.  This skill will aid you greatly in your ability to attract someone of the opposite sex.

When you are a good listener, others will perceive you as:

• sympathetic
• tolerant
• patient
• kind
• sweet
• nurturing
• trustworthy
• enjoyable to be around

Being a good listener enables you to relate to other people – and if you’re not relating to other people, it’s going to be hard to get into a relationship of any value.

This skill is especially crucial for women, because men typically don’t have anyone to confide in emotionally.  I think a lot of women either forget or aren’t aware that male friendships aren’t like female friendships.  Female friendships usually center around talking, and usually that talking is about feelings and relationships.  It’s very unusual for women to get together to talk about problem-solving if it’s in a purely social setting (as opposed to a work meeting).  Men, on the other hand, relate by doing, which is probably why my male coworkers thought it was absurd that I would categorize female friends as either “talking friends” or “activity friends.”  To them, a friend was just a friend.  (One coworker even went so far as to proclaim, “If you can’t do more than two activities with a friend, that person isn’t a friend!  You need to get different friends!”)

Anyhow, women usually have more than one person that they confide in, so if one person isn’t sympathetic enough, there’s always someone else to turn to.  This isn’t so for men.  That, in a man’s mind, is one of the motivating factors in getting a wife.  So you can imagine that the prospect of coming home to a woman who doesn’t listen – the one person who is supposed to listen – is a huge downer and would be a serious deterrent to considering marriage with her.

The equally negative flip side to not being a good listener is that this tends to go hand-in-hand with talking at people.  If you’re not listening to the other person, you’re probably thinking about yourself and what you want to talk about instead.  So when it’s your turn to talk, no matter how well-intentioned you might be, the other person just hears that you don’t care about what’s going on with them and are more wrapped up in yourself.

Sometimes to be a good listener, all you have to do is listen.  The other person may just need to unburden himself without any commentary from you.  And if you prove to be a good listener, he may come back to you.

Just to be clear – I’m not advocating being anyone’s doormat and letting them use you as their emotional dumping ground while offering nothing back in the way of friendship.  I am also DEFINITELY not advocating being the repository for someone else’s self-made drama.  But listening IS a critical skill in getting and maintaining a relationship, and I have seen too many women who otherwise have good qualities unknowingly basically remove themselves from the MMP because they lack this ability.