During those relationships I had done my best, my very best to please these ladies. I took them out to dinner, we cooked together in her house or in my house, and I took them with me on business trips to Paris, Munich and London. We walked the cities, we visited the museums, attended special events, in short we were having a great time. Walking in the woods, along the beach everything. Making then laugh. Having a lot of fun together. Being real good company. Acting like a man should act. Taking initiative. Being the perfect gentleman. And being a good lover. What more could a woman want?

And yes, they were very grateful to me. They were good company, they were great in bed and we laughed a lot. So I am not complaining for I got my “share”, so to speak. They taught me a lot. For I am very curious person. And I always ask way did you do this, why did you act like that, why did you behave in such and such a way. What do you expect of a man and what do you think he expects of you? And, as you all know, real, loving relationships are the best mirrors in life. You learn as much about your partner as you learn about yourself. So I learned a lot.

I closely observed “my” women. Studied how they behaved. How they talked. What they did when they were happy or angry. How they viewed their relationship. What they liked and what they did not like. What they did not understand. And we talked about it. This was very enlightening, and it taught me that men and women are really different species. They come, as John Gray so clearly put it, from different planets. The women come from Venus and the Men come from Mars.

But now, after two emancipation cycles, where we all learned that women are equal to men, which nobody in the western world will doubt any more, something strange has happened. We men, I am one of them as you know; we men know that women are different. Basically different. Their brains are wired differently, their hormones are different, everything is different. And we, at least most of us, have accepted that women are different. If they act in a way that is completely beyond us, we just say: “Ah well, you know, she is a woman”.

But the reverse is not true. Sure, the women know that men are different. They know, but they don’t accept that men are different. They expect men to behave, to think, to communicate and to act as they do. And if they don’t, there must be something wrong with them. They simply can’t accept that men are different. This is basically what causes most of the problems in present day relationships.

And I wrote a book about it. In Dutch. Again my native language. With many examples. Practical situations. Sometimes hilarious situations, sometimes very sad situations. And I gave the men the best advise I could on how to cope with these situations. As you can imagine the book was rather critical on women. And here we come to one of the last taboos in the Netherlands. “Thou shalt not criticize thy women”. That is not done. So the book is published, but it was not distributed to the bookstores.

And I must say that in some columns I was a bit too cynical. Well you know, most men know only too well that the most important surviving mechanism in these types of situations is “humour”. But I went a little too far and humour became, in a few articles, cynical. Then the women turned their back on me. And I said too often: “all women”, where I should have said “most women”. Well dear ladies, I stand corrected and I will change my style.  But the stories will remain