50 Ways to Create Great Relationships:
How to Stop Taking and Start Giving
By Steve Chandler

Introduction: How to Handle A Woman

I remember as a boy going to New York City to see the Broadway musical Camelot, and I remember Richard Burton singing a song about the wisdom he, as King Arthur, had received from Merlin, his wizard.

The song, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, was called “How to Handle a Woman.” As a teenage boy I had more than a passing interest in the subject, and I was spellbound by the quiet, dramatic ballad. I remember the song ending with the king singing that the way to handle a woman was to “love her. Simply love her. Merely love her.” I was young but I remember that the formula sounded simple enough, and I don’t know why I didn’t just adopt it right then and there for all relationships in life, because it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary trouble.

It took me many years after seeing that play to get that formula back, but when I did, powerful things began to happen.

As I grew older and began to make my living teaching seminars, I realized that almost all of us forget to use this effective process. We end up having difficulty in even the simplest relationships because we do not use it.

So, how you handle a woman is also how to handle a teenage son and how to handle a customer and how to handle a business partner and, finally, how to handle any relationship.

But where we often seem to go wrong is in misunderstanding the mechanics of love itself. Because we associate love with feelings and because we associate the absence of love with feelings, we turn the whole idea of relationships into a “feelings” thing. Even (and especially) in the workplace. And that is our first mistake.

Because love is not a feeling. Love is a creation, and, therefore, love comes from the spirit. It comes from the highest part of every human being and it asks that we access our greatest powers of imagination. As writer Emmet Fox says, “Love is always creative and fear is always destructive.”