All you single ladies who are looking for love and commitment—listen up. Steve Harvey is offering a dose of realism, plenty of wise counsel and a bit of cautious optimism for women hoping to find a good man. Whether you take his advice is up to you.
The top-rated radio host delivers his message in a frank and eye-opening new book, Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man, released just in time for the holidays. It’s a gift that Harvey’s millions of fans would undoubtedly love to find under the tree on Christmas morning.
Harvey’s first book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, was the number two best-selling hardcover nonfiction book in America in 2009, and has now sold more than two million copies. His blend of honesty, humor and hope clearly struck a nerve with women trying to understand the sometimes mystifying behavior displayed by the male of the species.
Speaking from a man’s perspective, Harvey advises women to wise up, wash their hands of the men they’re wasting time with and put themselves in a position to find and keep a guy worth holding onto.
In particular, he warns women to avoid men bearing gifts (but not love) and men who won’t commit. In a chapter titled “Every Sugar Daddy Ain’t Sweet,” Harvey writes, “Trust me when I tell you, there is nothing sugary or sweet about giving so much of yourself to a man who, at the end of the day, is giving you so little in return.” If you’re stuck in a relationship with a Sugar Daddy, Harvey has two words of advice: Walk. Away.
A dilemma that even more women can relate to is a happy dating relationship that lasts for years but never leads to marriage. “Thing is, even as society keeps pushing on little girls, young ladies, and grown women the notion that they have to be married to be complete and secure, nobody is really preaching this to boys and men,” Harvey points out. In a chapter called “The Standoff,” he spells out a step-by-step plan to help women decide whether to stick around and work toward commitment or cash in their chips and move on.
Other sections of Straight Talk, No Chaser deal with presenting yourself well and understanding a man’s approach to dating in each decade of life, from the 20s (“He is being driven solely by his financial clock at the same time your biological clock is most likely driving you.”) to the 50s and beyond.
And finally, there’s the all-important topic of sex, or as Harvey calls it, “the cookie.” Here, the comedian-turned-relationship advisor lays it on the line with “Straight Talk” about what motivates men: “There is nothing on this planet that makes him feel better than sex. Not a hole in one on the golf course.
Not a game-winning three-point basket at the buzzer,” Harvey writes. He elaborates on the “Ninety-Day Rule,” outlined in Act Like A Lady, in which couples forgo sex at the start of a relationship. “Treat sex as if it’s something special and let the man you’re interested in know that it’s special and guess what? He’ll either leave . . . or he’ll see something special in you.”
