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omen are complicated creatures. You need stuff. Lots of it. And you expect your man to provide it, even if you haven’t explained what it is you need
and want, or even if what you needed and wanted five minutes ago is wholly different from what you need and want now. In fact, I’ve said over and over again jokingly that the only way a woman can truly be completely satisfied is to get herself four different men—an old one, an ugly one, a Mandingo, and a gay guy. Now the four of them combined? They got you covered.
The old man—he’ll sit around the house with you, spend his pension check on you, hug you, hold you, give you comfort, and won’t expect any sex from you because, well, he can’t get it up no way. From him, you get financial security. The ugly one? He’ll go above and beyond the call of duty to help you out: he’ll take the kids to their lessons after school, run you down to the grocery store, wash the car on the weekends, babysit the cat—whatever you need, he’ll provide it because he’s just happy someone as beautiful as you is paying him any kind of attention. From him, you get “me time.” He frees you up to do all the things you need time to do. And then there’s the Mandingo man. You need a big ol’ Mandingo man. You know what you gonna get from him. He’s big, he’s not that smart, can’t hold a good conversation, got muscles popping out from his eyebrows to his pinkie toe and when you see him, you know he’s going to put your back out. That’s all you want from him, and he makes sure he gives it to you real good. Mindblowing sex—that’s what you get from Mandingo. And then you need a gay guy—someone you can go shopping with, who doesn’t want anything from you but gossip and details about what the old man bought you, which errands you sent the ugly guy to take care of, and exactly how Mandingo had you doing monkey flips for a week. See, the gay guy gives you all the conversation you need (smile).
Four guys, supplying each of your needs should bring you happiness. I say should because for women, happiness isn’t guar-anteed, even once their needs have been met. We fully recognize that you maintain the right to change at any time the perimeters, conditions, and specifics of what, exactly, will make you happy, and we try to adjust accordingly, and usually can’t.
Now men, by contrast, are very simple creatures. It really doesn’t take much to make us happy. In fact, there are only three things that pretty much every man needs—support, love, and “The Cookie.” Three things—that’s it. And I’m here to tell you that yes, it’s that simple. What we need never weakens or wavers—hardly ever gets more demanding or harder to
achieve. In fact, I’d argue that it’s easy for a woman to give her man support, love, and sex because it’s in her makeup—support and love are things that women dole out innately and freely. You just call it something else: nurturing. And if you love a man enough to nurture him, then I’d argue you love him enough to be intimate with him. So those three things come natural to you. And this is all your man wants from you. Let me break it down.
We have to feel like somebody’s got our back—like we’re the king, even if we’re not. You have to understand that when we walk out the door, the entire world is standing at the ready to beat us down. Black, white, yellow, striped, every man leaves
the house ready to battle. He might have a job where three people can walk by his desk and give him a pink slip at any given moment—change his life in the flash of an eye. The guy in the position beneath your man’s may be just searching for a way to undermine him, so he can get the bigger pay—and he doesn’t give a damn about whether what he says and does can put your man’s job in jeopardy. Your man could be driving down the street minding his own business and get pulled over and something could happen that he has no control over, or someone may try to come and take what he’s got. In other words, a man is constantly on the lookout, sizing up the next man, standing at the ready to defend his and all of his gains ( that would include you ).
So when we walk back in our house, we want to be able to let our guard down. All we want, really, is to hear you say, “Baby, how was your day? Thank you for making it happen for us. This family needs you and wants you and is happy to have you.” We’ve got to feel like we’re king, even if we don’t act kingly. Trust me, the more you make us feel like we’re special, the more we’ll give in return. We’ll just try harder. Plain and simple. Take a page from my mother: every Sunday morning, my daddy cut my hair for church, and when I got out of that chair, and lotioned up and put on my suit and my shoes and walked into the living room where my mother was waiting for me, she would take one look at me and say, “Look at that boy’s haircut—boy, you clean!” or “Look at you, boy—you sharp when you go to church!” I internalized the message—if I got a fresh haircut and I put on a nice suit, my mother would compliment me, and I would walk out of the house with my shoulders squared and head held high because my mother said I looked good and she was encouraging me to be presentable. And my father’s chest was out as far as mine because every Sunday, she reminded him that he made it all possible; she kissed and thanked him every Sunday.
A man needs that from his woman—he needs her to say, “Baby, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you do for me and the kids.” Those simple words give us the strength to keep on doing right by you and the family. From working harder on the job, to bringing home that paycheck, to something as simple as throwing some meat on the grill on Saturday evenings or folding up a load of the laundry, we’ll do it more often if there is reward in it. That reward doesn’t cost you one red penny. It simply comes from the heart: Thank you, baby. I appreciate you. You don’t know how important that is for your man; that little bit of encouragement makes him want to do more. You think because we’re hard and we don’t want to cuddle that we don’t need that encouragement, but we do. And the woman who comes along and says, “You so big and strong and you’re everything I need,” well, we’re going to go get some more of that!
woman’s love. A woman’s love is emotional, nurturing, heartfelt—sweet and kind and all encompassing. You can slice a knife through it, it’s so thick. And when she’s in love with you, she is loyal to you—she can’t see herself with someone else, because for her, no one else will do. That’s a woman’s love.
rstand that our love is wholly different from a
But for men, love is loyalty. We want you to show your love to us by being loyal. That means that no matter what, you’re going to stand beside us. We get laid off, we know you’re going to stay, even if we’re not drawing a paycheck. You get around your girlfriends, you’re going to say with great enthusiasm, “That’s my man. I’m loyal to him.” Idris Elba, Denzel, Usher, or the like walks into the room, money dripping from their suit jacket, floating on air and glistening and all that? You’re going to hold on to our hand a little tighter and say from the bottom of your heart, “I don’t want any of those shiny, rich, fine men because my man is the only one for me!” (We can only hope that’s what you’ll say—smile.)
That’s loyalty—our kind of love. To men, they are one and the same. The kind of love you require is beautiful, but our love isn’t like your love. It’s different, though it’s still love. And a man’s love is a very powerful thing. It’s amazing love. If your loyalty is real and unimpeachable, that man will kill concrete for you. He ain’t going no damn where. r. Men. Need. Sex. We love it. Ain’t nothin’ on
this planet like it, nothing else we want that bad on a continuous basis, nothing else we simply cannot live without. Take our house, take our job, the ’69 Impala, our last pair of gators, but please—puh-leeze—don’t hold out on the cookie. We don’t care about anything else; we need the cookie. We need to be physically engaged with the woman we love, the woman who is loyal to us and supports us, and the way that we do that is by making love. The emotional stuff—the talking, the cuddling, the holding hands, and bonding, that’s y’all’s thing. We’ll do those things because we know it’s important to you. But please understand: the way we men connect is by having sex. Period. It’s how we plug in, recharge, and reconnect. I don’t know of a man who doesn’t need this. Ask any guy if sex is important in a relationship and the one who says no is lying. I just haven’t met that guy yet. When you meet him, let’s get him in to the Smithsonian—he’s that special and rare. But the rest of us men? We need sex like we need air.
You got about a good month at best without it. And then he’s going to get it from somewhere else (unless you’re carrying his child). I’m telling you: gangs are built on support and loyalty; dudes go out and form gangs built on those two things right there. The only thing missing is sex, and that’s where the girl gang members come in. It’s the same thing with motorcycle And can’t one of them survive without sex. Oh, he’ll work with you if you have an off week—if he loves you, that is. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t bother to try to get your cookie—he’d just go on and get it from somewhere else. But if he’s into you, and you’re cutting back, rationing it out, you’re not doing what you did when you all first started dating, he’s going to line up someone who will. Please believe me when I tell you this: he will tell everybody, “This is my girl right here,” but meanwhile, he will have another woman lined up and waiting to give him what he needs and wants—the cookie.
clubs, the country club, the Elks, the Masons, frats—the whole of a man’s world is built on these three principles. There’s not one day of the week that we are not waking up in the pursuit of it. Let’s say you’re not a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi, or you’re an almighty member of Omega Psi Phi, and someone who hasn’t pledged their undying support and love to frat on a line for at least six weeks—be that person putting on their colors and let them find out you haven’t pledged, that you didn’t cross over. Do you know what the hell would happen if those boys found out you’re not frat? Messing with their loyalty—their colors? Man, not nary a day. Be a Crip and go to a Blood’s house and see what happens. Try going into that country club and you’re not a member. Loyalty. Support. That’s what men are made of.
Don’t get it wrong—we’re not animals. We know things change, the baby comes and the doctor says we have to wait six weeks, or your monthly is on the way, your hormones are acting up and you’re not in the mood. But the excuses can’t go on forever. You can play your man short if you want to. No matter how much a man loves his wife, his family, his house, his role as the man of the house, the one who’s bringing in all the money into family account, maybe even putting a little extra into yours, if you mess around and start shelling out the cookie in crumbs, it’s going to be a problem.
Speaking of my own experience, I recently turned fifty and I’m telling you right now, don’t play me short in this area. At my age, I’ll work with you for a little longer, because I’m busy, I got a company to run, I got a schedule to keep, I’m on the road, on the stage, on the radio, writing books, acting, supporting my own charity and working with others. I’m on the run. And at my age, I can’t afford to mess up—mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Hell is no longer an option for me. I’m doing what I can to get to the Gate, and it could be any day now. If I start messing around, I might have a stroke and miss out on my homegoing. But the truth is, if I can’t go home and relieve my stress, there is a problem. If I’ve talked to the Lord and tried to get you motivated to give me some of the cookie and you’re still coming up with reasons why you just can’t be intimate with me, something is going to change.
And I’m ready to bet things aren’t so different in your household. You might have been up all night for a week with a sick child, gotten up early to get the other onto the school bus before
What that same friend of mine didn’t know, though, was that her husband was tired of the “shoulder tap,” too. In his mind, he’d also worked all day—just as hard as her. And though he may not have done all the exact things she’d done during the course of the evening at home, he, too, put in work around the house, and, like her, needed to wind down from his day. She liked watching television. He liked to have sex. She was always too tired to have sex. He was tired of not having sex. So while she unwound to her favorite shows, he unwound out of the house—with another woman.
you hit the road for that rush-hour commute to work, gone to battle with your co-workers and boss for eight hours with nothing but a fifteen-minute break to swallow an inadequate, unsatisfying lunch, and then hit the rush-hour traffic back home to start your second job—the feeding and care of your kids. There’s dinner to be cooked, and homework to be checked, and laundry to be done, and the list goes on. By the time your man checks in with you, the last thing on your mind is giving a positive response to what a friend of mine called “the shoulder tap.” “You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “It’s when you finally drop into the bed exhausted, and you’re halfway through your favorite show you watch when you just want to zone out, and here he comes, tapping you on your shoulder, asking for sex. It’s just annoying.”
Now, I’m not saying what he did was right. But as a man, I can understand the logic behind what he eventually ended up doing. And if I were in their bedroom before all of the ugliness from his cheating ways went down, I would have given them what I’ve found to be some very sage advice: acknowledge the ones you love. That means that if a man sees his woman had a hard day and she could stand some more help around the house to make the evenings go more smoothly, her man needs to step up his game. If she cooks, he does the dishes. If she gets the kids’ clothes ready for tomorrow, he gets their homework ready for tomorrow. If she gets the kids off to bed, he gets his wife off in bed by setting the mood—straightening up, running her a bath, letting her settle in with a glass of wine, whatever it takes to make it clear to her that having sex with the woman he loves is not only a release, but an act of love. And she, perhaps, will be more willing to reciprocate—not with annoyance, but with the sheer giddiness in knowing how it feels to feel wanted.
But understand that no man is going to wine and dine his wife every night in order to have sex with her. That’s unreasonable. Sometimes, he’s just going to want to have you, no frills— without being forced to feel like he’s added another “chore” to your list of things to do. Every man needs that from his woman.
Every last one of us.
T o sum up, we’ve got to have these three things—support, loyalty, and sex—from you or we’re going to go. You can shop
You may not like what I’m saying, but ask any man about these words and whether they’re true, and that man will tell you this one simple thing: it’s true. Support. Loyalty. The cookie. If you supply these three things, you’ll have on your hands a man who will do anything you needfor us, cook dinner every night, and make sure our favorite peanut butter is in the cabinet to show us that you’re paying attention and you care. But what we really need from you when our day goes bad is those three things. You give me that when I come home, and I’ll go back out there and fight this war for you. The moment a woman isn’t doing those three things for her man, I can promise you he’ll get somebody who will. We cannot survive without these things—not for ninety days, we can’t.