Inside every frog hides a prince
Once upon a time there was a 30-year-old lovely divorcee who could not figure out why her girlfriends always landed fabulous princes and she always wound up with frogs. Frustrated and lonely, the young mother turned to a personal-growth seminar hoping to find some answers. What she found was a fairy godfather in the audience who softly sized her up.
“You’re a frog farmer,” he explained. “Some women turn frogs into princes. You, my dear, turn princes into frogs.”
The comment made the divorcee’s heart hurt, but the more she thought about it, the more she agreed. Eventually, she gleaned one kernel of truth: “Every man is both a prince and a frog and we [women] have so much to do with which we get.”
That was 12 years ago. Since then Alison Armstrong (the divorcee) met and married a prince, and has been sharing her wisdom with thousands of women across the country.
In 1995, she formed an educational company, PAX Programs Inc., which offers weekend workshops called “Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women” and seminars including “Understanding Men 101,” which Armstrong twice led last month in Los Angeles. (To learn more about PAX Programs, go to www.UnderstandMen.com).
The payoff of the “Understanding Men” session “comes with a price,” Armstrong, 42, warns. “You and I live in a culture that has made a profession out of being mad at men. The more you understand men, the harder it is to be mad at them. It cost me my righteous indignation!”
Armstrong’s theory deals with a man’s social and identity development and how his behavior is affected by the stage he is in. She divides men into three categories: knights, whose ages range from 11 to early 30s; princes, 30s to early 40s; and kings, who are mid-40s to infinity and beyond. Here’s what you should know about each.
Knights, essentially, are about adventure and finding challenges. They are very skilled at providing fun and excitement, are most attracted to fun-loving women to whom they are very sexually attracted. Even when they marry or become fathers at this stage, they tend to perceive their marriages and parenthood as an adventure.
Princes are focused on kingdom building and are painfully aware that they are not kings yet. They are the least available in terms of time. A king is a man who knows who he is, what he is interested in and what he wants to provide. These are the men who best can meet a woman’s need to be cared for.
“The key is to detect which stage a man is in early,” Armstrong told the group of 100 women of varying ages, ethnicities and relationship status. “You may just decide you want to spend time with the thrill-seeking knight or that you’d rather spend your time with a prince or a king. You’ll be all that much happier for it. You’ll get more of what you need with less effort.”
That’s because once a woman understands where her man is coming from -- and that it has nothing to do with her -- she will stop trying to change him or blame herself.
There is an important difference between inspiring a man to become the best man he can be and changing who he is. The former involves love, nurturing and acceptance. The other is about measuring him against unrealistic ideals.
Once a woman becomes aware of this difference, she is more likely to bring out the prince in her man. More important, she will understand and love herself more.
The end.