Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411290004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MURRY FRYMER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``Relationship'' guru John Gray has sold books in numbers that other writers can only fantasize about. His ``Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus'' has been on the New York Times best-seller list for something like 73 weeks now and sold better than 2.1 million copies.
Apparently there are countless women who see in him something unique - a man who understands women.
Hundreds of thousands of such women (and not a few men) have attended his lectures, seminars and workshops all over the country, paying hundreds of dollars apiece to bask in his charismatic wisdom. The man clearly knows something.
But he's a slow learner. The wide-eyed Marin, Calif.-based Gray, now 42, spent nine years as a celibate monk, then decided that his yogi was not God.
So he turned to sex and found out he liked that better.
While having sex, Gray began considering how different women were from himself.
For example: ``If a man respects a woman's primary need to be heard, she will respond by becoming equally respectful of his wishes.''
And: ``When a woman is angry with a man, the most powerful message he can send her is that she has a right to be angry.''
Such understanding runs through Gray's latest epic, ``What Your Mother Couldn't Tell You & Your Father Didn't Know,'' another catchy title. Undoubtedly, women, who buy the overwhelming majority of such books, will be pleased.
Women in this book are all about love, all about feelings, all about nurturing, all about warmth and sharing and ... did I mention love? Men talk to solve problems; women talk to evoke feelings.
We learn that a woman needs to be touched 10 times a day for her self-esteem. A man needs sex for his. Once a woman lets a man touch her in a sexual way, he will never be satisfied touching her in the nurturing way she covets.
``Modern women give too much and feel overworked while men give only what their fathers gave and expect the same measure of support.''
What is so smooth in all this is the pretense that all women and all men are alike. That once you understand the gender, you can go right home and be, well, as understanding as John Gray is.
Gray, by the way, is the man who, after having a woman offer herself to him in a hotel room, went home and, he writes, asked his wife whether she would mind if he had occasional extramarital sex.
``It would just be for fun,'' he told her, ``and I will be very discreet.''
After his wife wept in that wonderful way that women have of weeping when men want to cheat on them, Gray writes, ``In that moment, I knew that Bonnie loved me ... she needed monogamy as a requirement for growing in love.''
Well, is he understanding or what? And he writes beautifully, even if it is beautifully banal.
Bonnie, by the way, is Gray's second wife. His first, Barbara De Angelis, is author of ``Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know.''
They divorced while giving workshops together on ``Making Love Work.''
That was because, he says, she was cheating on him with her macrobiotic consultant.
``When my marriage failed, I had to re-evaluate everything I knew about relationship skills,'' he writes.
And then, later, remarried and re-evaluated, he asked Bonnie if she minded if he fooled around in various hotel rooms.
The man is from Mars.
Murry Frymer writes from Earth for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
by CNB