Let’s go back to talking about normal women. Men have a tendency to think that everything a woman does is crazy and irrational. It’s extremely difficult for men to know when normally sane women are actually truly irrational.
I’m pretty sure you’re aware of this, but it needs to be said, ‘Women menstruate and it sometimes affects their emotions.’ Premenstrual syndrome or PMS is a real medical diagnosis. It refers to a constellation of physical and mental symptoms that affect seventy-five percent of women in their childbearing years, five to eleven days before their monthly cycle. Half of the women with PMS also have a psychiatric disorder called premenstrual dysmorphic disorder or PMDD, which is a more severe and debilitating version of PMS.
The take home point of PMS is one out of three women will go bug-shit crazy for a few days to a week before her period. If you’re in a long term relationship, you need to understand that PMS often gets a lot worse after your partner turns thirty.
I’ll admit freely that someone else had the insight that I’m discussing in this chapter. I’ll call him M. M was in college dating a wonderful girl named D. They’d get along great but periodically get into a fight about something completely irrational. One day he happened to glance at a calendar and it occurred to him that their fights might have something to do with his girlfriend’s cycles.
He got out his pen and put a little dot on the days he remembered getting into fights. It was clear that they occurred on a four week cycle. Just as he was finishing making his dots, D came up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
He gave her a panicked stricken look and said, “Nothing!”
“YOU’RE MARKING MY PERIODS!”
He got totally reamed, but he says it was worth it to know when his girlfriend was hormonal. He now recommends programming your phone to warn you when you need to be careful.
Men have great difficulty distinguishing between real female rage and hormonally induced female rage. The only way to know with real certainty is to see if there is a consistent monthly pattern.
DO NOT let your woman know you’re doing this. Whether a woman has PMS or not, if she suspects you THINK she has PMS, she will hurt you badly. Women frequently joke and talk about PMS amongst themselves. You’re a man. Since you don’t get periods, you’re not allowed to talk about it.
Thirty to forty percent of guys who track their fights with their girlfriends/wives will see a monthly correlation to their fights. Knowledge is power. If you see a very consistent monthly correlation, you now have objective data that it’s about her hormones—it’s not really about her real self or you.
DO NOT tell her what you’ve found. There’s no good that can come from you telling her you have proof she is periodically crazy. You deal with this knowledge by mentally separating the fights you have when she’s not having PMS and the ones you have when she does. I know a couple of guys who have taken the previous advice and programmed their phones to remind them of the danger days. All of them claim that doing this has saved their relationships.
When she’s not having PMS and she’s angry, you take her concerns seriously and try to address them. When she’s having PMS no matter what she says and no matter how crazy it seems, your response should always be, “You’re right. I’m wrong. I’m sorry. I will change.” And then don’t change. There is absolutely no point in you changing your life or stressing out if the conflict you have your girlfriend or wife is hormonally based.
One of the most important differences between men and women is that words are much more important to them than they are to us. If your wife stopped telling you she loves you, you might get concerned (if you even notice). If you stop telling her you love her, she’ll be devastated.
A woman is more likely to stay with a man who physically abuses her and tells her he loves her than she is a man who never lays a hand on her but also never says he loves her.
If a woman tells you a white lie to appease you when you are angry, you’ll get angrier. If you tell her a white lie when she’s irrationally angry, she’ll usually calm down. You don’t have to understand why she responds differently than you. Just say the words, “You’re right. I’m wrong. I’m sorry. I will change” and see what happens.