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August 2007
Mars and Venus on a Date
A guide to romance
Author: John Gray
Publisher: Vermillion London
RRP: £6.99 (paperback)
Review by: Joy Francis
Finding your soul mate is an enduring quest that never fails to make an appearance in aspirant women’s magazines and is the focus of many motivational self help books. As such it has created many author millionaires. John Gray is no exception.
The author of 12 bestsellers, including the now legendary
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Gray has elevated the male/female = soul mate equation to a new level of global awareness. Despite selling (and still selling) in its hundreds of thousands, Men are from Mars... felt like an arduous road trip to Mars without a map which left me cold and wondering how on earth men and women ever connected. The book, I concluded, was more for men, not women.
So it was with some scepticism that I ventured to read Mars and Venus on a Date. Instead of sighing with frustration and raising my eyebrows with incredulity, I laughed and cringed in recognition and nodded at the practical suggestions to enable a better understanding of some of the pitfalls men and women fall into during the dating game.
An attempt to help men and women navigate the dating maze with more confidence, the book’s 22 chapters don’t have to be read sequentially to make sense. With headings such as ‘Finding the right person for you’, ‘Men advertise, Women share’ to ‘Men are like blowtorches and Women are like ovens’ you could be forgiven for thinking you were being transported back in time - pre-feminism – to when ‘men were men and women were in the kitchen’. But once you start reading, most of the resistance to the messages falls away.
Under each chapter there are examples of real people in recognisable situations to illustrate how and why a breakdown in communication between the sexes occurs. There are subheadings galore to stop you losing track at any stage: how to say no, when to get involved is a mistake or when to ask for support, are a few examples, which gives it the air of a ‘dating bible’ that you pick up in times of need.
Not everything will meet with your approval and may challenge your values such as the view that many single people mistakenly believe that if you love someone, you should want to have a relationship with them, and the language sometimes feels uninspiring. But there is more wheat than chaff among the 370-pages.
Gray spends a great deal of time challenging stock perceptions:
The first challenge in the process of dating is to give up searching for your soul mate and instead focus on preparing yourself so that you can recognise your soul mate when he or she appears.
This is best illustrated in the heart and most useful part of the book – the five stages of dating: attraction, uncertainty, exclusivity, intimacy and engagement. Gray argues that because men and women don’t often understand how they are different, which isn’t helped by the rise in ‘lads mags’ and the over sexualisation of women in the media and film, there is a tendency to misinterpret each other’s signals. He also addresses the changing roles of men and women. Gray argues that women’s growing independence means that they require men to primarily meet their emotional, mental and spiritual needs while men are still adjusting to the new power dynamic.
Mars and Venus on a Date came out of thousands of Men are from Mars...relationship seminars with men, women and couples in the US and Europe - and it shows. Gray has got a better balance in Mars and Venus on a Date and despite many men and women being in the closet about their struggles with dating, it is worth stepping out and giving this book a peek.
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