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I’ve been reading this very interesting book called The Casanova Complex by Peter Trachtenberg. The author categorizes men in terms of how they deal with relationships. The classifications are Hitters, Drifters, Romantics, Nesters, Jugglers, and Tomcats. While reading this book I can really identify with the traits of these different classifications either now or at some point in my life and I feel that just about all men either now or have in the past shared such traits. Then it begins to become clear to me that this Peter guy probably made a bunch of money just writing about the male gender and gift wrapped them into male shortcomings and sold it to the general public. Here is an excerpt from the book. Tell me what you think.

The Forbidden Zone

No matter how intrusive they find their partners becoming, nesters rarely express their fears or resentments. To do so as the relationship progresses is even harder than in the earlier phases. “Once I’ve been around a woman for any length of time,” Derek says, “I very often can’t speak my real feelings. Once the relationship’s started, women have a stake in you, expectations about where this thing will go.” Once more, Derek’s vision of commitment as imprisonment or castration is self-fulfilling: now that he is involved with a woman, he cannot be honest with her. Instead, he is forced to perpetuate a masquerade of enthusiasm even as his misgivings increase, to go on yielding when every instinct tells him to rebel. For nesters, romantic involvement carries a burden of eternal and dishonest compliance. To love women is to lose themselves.

We cannot speak our true feelings without sometimes hurting others or risking a hurtful response from them. Such conflict is especially fearful to nesters, who will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. “I’m a profound procrastinator,” says Derek. “I always did my term papers at absolutely the last minute. If I have a date coming up two weeks from now and know I won’t be able to make it, I’ll put off the unpleasantness of breaking it until it’s far worse because I’m doing it at the last minute.”

For the nester, confronting a lover carries a twofold risk. She might reject him, and for such a man rejection is nothing less than annihilation. And he himself might get angry, perhaps too angry, losing his self-control and even his sanity. Many nesters, therefore, express their anger only when intoxicated, in a sudden, volcanic outburst that sometimes escalates into violence. In those cases, all the fears about anger and its consequences are fulfilled. Even to fantasize about such an outburst is terrifying. Safer, then, to shun anger altogether, to turn conflict into a forbidden zone and leave all roads that might lead to it untraveled.

But those roads are fearfully interconnected: to avoid conflict eventually means avoiding anything that might provoke it. Passion, which touches so closely on rage, must be replaced by neutral routine. “When you live with someone, you lose all sexual spontaneity,” Derek laments. “The spark just dies.” Intimate conversation must give way to small talk as the topics that really matter are increasingly fraught with resentment. Ultimately, the loved one herself becomes suspect, for the mere sight of her now raises a host of unspoken irritations. Nesters frequently experience their repressed anger as boredom - Derek’s sensation of being stuck with “a Walkman over my ears that plays the same two tapes over and over” - for boredom is at once safer than true anger and annihilates its object more completely: a person you are angry with still commands your interest; a person who bores you is only in the way. In time, the nester’s dread of conflict contaminates every aspect of his relationship, smothering all its vitality beneath a blanket of the noncommittal and the inoffensive.

~Peter Trachtenberg, The Casanova Complex~