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I believe that when we as men are both enlightened and skillful in our relationships with women, something powerful happens. Stronger intimacy between couples creates stronger love, better kids, better families, and ultimately a better world.

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My perspective has been formed from thousands of observations and hundreds of interviews with thriving couples where the men are extraordinarily successful in their relationships with women.

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I've always, since I was a young man been driven by having great relationships with women. Would have gotten a few A's in college instead of C’s all the way through if I hadn't spent so much damn time chasing women. From the age of 21 to about 30 I was out several nights a week at the clubs. I turned 21 in ‘77, and disco was raging in the clubs all over the world. This was long long before anyone was around to give you functional advice on relationships with women. My honest motivations with women; being close to them, being intimate with them, having sex with them, and simply enjoying their company has been a strong theme over the course of my adult life. Profoundly crushed into a ball by them many times, mountaintop blissful heights of love and joy at others, I still believe “women are the only works of art”.

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On a completely different path: growing up to incredible parents in a one streetlight mountain town at times living off the grid, early on I focused on making money and exploring outside of that (to my view) magical place. Working full time since the age of thirteen, at fifteen I made the decision to head off the mountain down to a super rough inner city high school as a youthful commitment to colorblindness. Years later student body president at the university, then youngest stockbroker on the West Coast with the third largest brokerage firm in the US, and into my early 30s as the number one commercial sales rep in the world within a Fortune 100 company.

 

II was always very careful to keep my personal and professional worlds in separate lanes. No one in the corporate world knew anything about my personal life, which was a marvelous decision to succeed inside the shark tanks. They knew I was a sweet professional smart guy, and pretty much nothing else about me. To give flavor, no one ever saw me take a drink nor I ever made a single sexual comment in 35 years of corporate experience. Yeah, that squeaky vanilla milquetoast clean.

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Over time holding that firewall up began to wear on me because my personal life was ridiculously different than my professional life. My personal life was wild, full of amazing women, music, fast machines and boat life. My professional life where almost all of my time was burned, was like a purpose-built cardboard cutout thin slice of my truth.

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So in my early 40s I had this breakaway bright idea to get into the nightclub business in parallel with my ongoing corporate day job, where for two or three nights a week I could completely be myself, living with authenticity who I was out loud. I became close to a completely different community of people that could know me for who I actually was unfiltered. This was a fantastic decision for me. It became an alternate universe sandbox for me to professionally play in which I am involved with to this day.

 

The Real Lessons Begin Now:

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Imagine yourself in the swirl of nightlife, you've got 600 people in the club and your job is to scan every detail of within it’s walls. You'll see a tapestry of people. Groups of lively guys, groups of laughing gals, and intimate couples, each absorbed in their own unique experiences. There's so much to take in as you're watching the night go on. In your role as manager you need to be vividly aware of what's going on in every corner of that club, making sure that everyone's happy and catching trouble before it starts. Seasoned professionals at this develop an uncanny ‘precog’ sixth sense about what's going to happen next and where.

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So of course in the beginning, being who I was, I was naturally oriented towards: ‘So who are the fine women in the club tonight?’ That's where my focus drifted amidst the chaos of my responsibilities. I'm a guy, what else do you expect?

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Over the course of those early years, something very different began to reveal to me.  Amongst the spining cacophony of all these people in the club, I noticed something emerging clear as daylight to me. A few of the couples each night appeared to have a really unique vibe going on. It was hard to describe at first. Yet they did stand out as separated distinctly from everything and everyone else. Almost shining in some way?

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Organically without thinking about it much, I began to scan for those standout couples each night. Sure enough, they were almost always there.  Over time I could easily find them in the crowd. Then naturally in my role as host or manager, it was easy for me to greet them. And from the heart of my always analytical curiosity, start conversations with them. I did this for years. I love examining the best in people. It was true then, and obviously still is fascinating to me.

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Over the span of years, casual conversations evolved into informal interviews. Hundreds of them. In time clear patterns of why these couples were special began to emerge. The early patterns were basic, but clearly there to be seen. The building blocks of this book were announcing their arrival.

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Now I gotta admit my orientation back then was 'So who are these glowing women inside of these great couples?' Fast forward, today I’m kind of embarrassed about that sincere blind side I held for the first years of my nightlife journey. Embarrassed by how long it took for me see the elusive obvious, to what turned out to be the far more powerful frame.

 

The spotlight shift was this - “So hey? What is it about those men that these amazing women have chosen?” 

 

And something crazy happened.

 

All of these men crossing my path that were killing it in their relationships with women quickly began to appear similar. How the hell could that be true? Hundreds of guys. Their thought processes, their viewpoint on their relationships with women, their behaviors in regards to women. All similar. You could have thrown me on the ground stunned. 

 

It was as if each of them on their own had broken the code. And as I dug deeper into the interviews, It was clear that they had broken the code. Remember that these are not normal guys that have problems making anything work with women. These are guys who have zero problems living in a world of abundance in relationships with women.  They knew what they were doing, and interestingly - their women also clearly knew what they were doing.

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That shift in focus has been my study for the last twenty years. The study of men both in couples and single men, that are genuinely extraordinarily successful in their relationships with women.

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Of course, while traveling this gentleman’s journey of relationships, I have seen and experienced many things that stretch the limits of credulity in the telling. But this book is not about my own wild ride.

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The wisdom presented in The Gentleman's Almanac is not my own. It is the wisdom extracted from those hundreds of men and women by their examples and tales. I am merely the witness; it is their genius alone that directed this body of work from their shining demonstrations of brilliance.

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