Dalma Heyn is the author of “Drama Kings” or, more precisely, The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy… Drama Kings. Published by Rodale, there’s a lot to like about this book that helps us understand why some smart women don’t make smart choices when it comes to the men in their lives.

The following are EXCERPTS from Drama Kings:

“Why Do They Stay?”

If you’re still wondering why you and other strong women put so much time into doomed relationships with Drama Kings, why you and they don’t pack their bags sooner, you’re not alone. I’m asked the question all the time. “Why do strong women stay in relationships that drain and exhaust them? Why don’t they just leave?”

Strong women stay in relationships with Drama Kings as long as they do — which isn’t necessarily very long — because they want relationships. They love men and desire them. They want love. They want sex. They care what men think of them, and they want all the intimacy and involvement that partnership promises. They don’t want to be alone. They know they live in a world still set up to be easier for couples than for singles. They hope that with increased commitment, time, and change, even rocky, weird, and dysfunctional relationships with Drama Kings can improve and develop into a new story, a narrative of deeper attachment, cooperation, intimacy, reciprocity, and continuing strength for them both. They’re willing to work at it.

Sometimes they stay simply because they’d rather have a weird, rocky, and dysfunctional relationship for a while than have none. Everyone knows by now, since every developmental study shows us so, that girls and women flourish when connected to others and ensconced in relationships. So we women have a tendency to put enormous energy into our love affairs, sometimes overdoing it when our partners put in too little. Even the very strongest and most independent of us sometimes temporarily resort to the tactic of trying to assure a good relationship by using the old “feminine” conduct-book skills — accommodation, pleasing, deferring, silence, and, yes, manipulation — because, particularly with Drama Kings, it’s the only way we can think of to have the sex and fun we want, the love and connection, and maybe marriage and kids, too. It’s part of attaching to want to stay attached.

Strong women may stay longer than they planned to with Drama Kings because they don’t respond to stress according to the well-known fight-or-flight model but to a newly articulated “tend-and-befriend” model developed by UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor, PhD, and a team of colleagues. Noticing that almost all the studies on response to stress have been conducted on male animals who do illustrate the fight-or-flight paradigm, Dr. Taylor observed that the people she’d worked with for thirty years in her health practice do not. Women, she and her colleagues have speculated, respond to stressful situations by protecting themselves and their young (the “tend” part of the model) through nurturance and seeking support from others (the “befriend” part). Male dominance behavior seems to be involved with androgen hormones like testosterone, while female dominance appears to be linked to oxytocin, a hormone that actually inhibits aggression and fear and stimulates relaxation and the desire for social contact in survival situations as well as in breastfeeding, sex, and cuddling — the opposite of fight or flight!

So rather than leaving when things get tough, a woman’s survival mechanism may prompt her to invest more energy in trying to connect or to stay put and increase her contact with friends — a possibility supported by research in humans and animals.

Stay put for a while, that is.

I have a better question for you, though. Why do women leave? All the women I interviewed for this book who’d been with Drama Kings left before the two-year mark. This is not the old story of men leaving women. This is not middle-aged husbands looking for younger women, not males fed up with “needy” women who they believe perceive them as meal tickets, not young men looking to have their cake and eat it, too, who are leaving in great numbers. Women are leaving men. Marriage statistics are telling: Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by the wife! How could a truth that has so dramatically transformed our country’s domestic landscape so elude the trend watchers?

When I reported the statistics a decade ago — after all, it’s a fact I didn’t make up; it’s right there in government brochures — I was laughed at. I’d go on the air, disclose what women were saying, and then be asked the same old question even as I answered it: “So, then, if women are so unhappy, why do they stay?”

I’d repeat, “They don’t. That’s the point. They’re walking out the door.”

They still are today. As a result, much has changed. Married-couple households, which accounted for 80 percent of the population in the 1950s, now account for only 50.7 percent; married couples with children, once the cozy composition of almost all American households, now make up a mere quarter of them and will probably decrease to a fifth by 2010; families with husbands who make the money and wives who work in the home account for a measly one-tenth of all households. These domestic changes were spearheaded by women. One paper reiterating statistics about women leaving concludes, “While these statistics alone do not compel a conclusion that women anticipate advantages to being single rather than remaining in the marriage, they do raise that reasonable hypothesis.”

As an American, a woman, and a wife, I wonder whether any other institution with similar cockeyed statistics could escape notice. If sixty-five percent of women schoolteachers fled the academy, or if the same number of female soldiers left the army, wouldn’t the culture be alarmed? Wouldn’t we start asking new questions instead of old, irrelevant ones?

If an exodus from any other treasured and important institution were led by one gender, wouldn’t there be a serious national effort to discover what made them flee or to redress their grievances, find incentives to encourage them to stay? Women’s wholesale retreat — from Drama Kings but also from other men — is all the more startling because relationships are the habitat in which so many young women believe they want to be, and marriage is the environment they grow up assuming will be the most nurturing. After all, ninety percent of American women marry at least once before their fiftieth birthdays, and they do so expecting to thrive — and intending to stay.

Here’s another statistic: Single women are far less depressed than married women. And single men are far more depressed than married men. If many of these men are Drama Kings, then the group of people in our society who are most in need of the balm of intimacy are the least able to let it reach them.

At the time I first heard these numbers, I was interviewing married women, hearing so many of them struggle to articulate why they felt as disenfranchised or alienated in marriage as they might in an institution in which they’re emphatically unwelcome, such as the Vatican. I remember thinking then that no billion-dollar initiatives “to support marriage” make sense unless it’s clear what part needs support. What needs fixing in marriage is the same as that which needs fixing in relationships with Drama Kings: the part that isn’t working for women. Men, far more often than women, thrive in marriage. Men, far more often than women, wilt and wither physically and psychologically outside of wedlock. It’s men who find the institution of marriage to be the nurturant, comfortable place it’s reputed to be for women — thus, it’s men more often than women who remarry surprisingly quickly after they’re divorced or widowed, and men, beneficiaries of the old system, who are not hurt by its inertia.

Marriage isn’t just an institution, then, it’s as male an institution as the NFL. And if marriage proponents really want to tackle the issue of why so many of the strongest women are hanging up their wives’ uniforms years before crossing into the end zone, they had better take notice.

On Saying Goodbye to a Drama King

Charles left her, just left altogether with no satisfactory explanation. Just announced, after six months of a hot-house infatuation that had swept her off her feet, “Sorry, Miranda, this isn’t working” — said it not even kindly, at that — and said he wanted out. He wasn’t interested in hearing why Miranda thought that in fact it was working; that it was a relationship and relationships needed a little working out now and again. No, he didn’t want to hear it. For him, it was the end. Discussion over.

And he never came back.

It always seems unthinkable, this scenario in which a lover not only leaves, but leaves abruptly; runs you over like a train, as if whatever you had together was a meaningless diversion and you, well, you were just something to be left on the side of the curb like roadkill. In all my years of writing about love, this form of goodbye is the one that draws the most letters from readers.

Or maybe you weren’t dumped by a Hit & Run lover but are limping along with someone I call The Visitor — a man who comes and goes at whim and cannot commit to anything other than a measly, “Hey, so, maybe we’ll get together a week from Tuesday, if I don’t have to work and if my mother isn’t coming into town? Or maybe another night that week, maybe? Or something? Whatever.” He’s someone who ascends on you for food, drink, sex — and may or may not stop by again sometime soon, as if you were the owner of a Bed & Breakfast, and you run a good enough establishment for him to return sometime to be served and nurtured again, but only at his leisure.

How do you ever find closure when you’ve been decimated by a Hit & Run? How do you find love with a Visitor who can’t even commit to a definite date? How do you, a 21st century woman, busy and happy and self-sufficient and more successful than women ever were before, extract love and commitment from a 20th century man? For yes, these men — I call them Drama Kings because they’re solo performers, one-man shows who still long for an ancient, man-centric universe — still think the world revolves around them. They still think women are put on earth to please them — but haven’t the talent nor the inclination to return the favor.

How do you cut your losses? I’ll tell you how. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. You remind yourself that you’re lucky to get out. That these guys are exhausting and will always drain you dry. You are too busy, and much too evolved, for this nonsense.

You do not call the Hit & Run lover on his cell phone to locate him, nor to find out why you were so unceremoniously dumped. (You’ll only be humiliated over again. You’ll only hear the most chilling replies — “Oh, it’s you. Um, yeah I know I left you on the side of the road, but I’m busy.” Or, “No, I really don’t want to talk about it.”) You do not try to make a Visitor become a grown-up man who can commit to something more than a “Whatever.” You remember one thing, and one thing only: You do not NEED this man. You have a roof over your head. You are a smart, darling, self-sufficient, loving woman who wants a smart, darling loving man. He is out there, but this one is not the one.

When you’re hurt by a Drama King — of which The Hit & Run and the Visitor are but two of five types — you’ve been hurt by a man who doesn’t care how he behaves. Who doesn’t care to become deeply attached. Like a skilled performer, he only pretended he wanted a relationship, pretended he was fit for love, but in the end, sabotaged them both.

So before we focus on your heartbreak, I want to remind you: Why do you always feel exhausted with Drama Kings? Because they sap your energy. Why do you always feel lonely in your relationship with them? Because they refuse to get close. Why do you always feel anxious and sort of weirdly needy? Because my friend, they aren’t giving you what you need. And never will.

So do not idealize him, and do not blame yourself. You escaped! You avoided spending more time with a love fraud! I once spoke with a woman who’d been dumped as unceremoniously as Miranda was, and listened to her litany of self-blame — she’d “wasted years of my life” with this man; she’d “made a mess” of the relationship, she “should have known it wouldn’t work out.” Awash in misery, I couldn’t get her to rejoice in the fact that she had a chance, now, to find a man able and willing to love her back.

Today, though, I find women recovering quickly and not beating themselves up. Best of all — I find them saying they feel better than they did before they wrestled with their Drama Kings! The hundreds of women I’ve spoken with over the years do NOT stay permanently depleted by these guys: In fact, post-Drama King, strong women only get stronger. They seem to have developed steadily, cumulatively, through their relationships with Drama Kings — no matter how long it lasted or how dramatically it ended. It’s as if the adult woman’s self grows more resilient, more durable — stronger — through even the knottiest, nuttiest relationships — just as a child’s self grows. Kids get through developmental difficulties by working through issues of attachment — and so, I believe, do adults. It’s as though the developing personality is like kindling, needing to rub against another personality in order to create the spark that ignites the ever-growing self. That’s why you will move on from your Drama King ready for love sooner than you think — growing ever more proficient at finding a man who’s able to share center stage; and able to love you back.

Avoiding a Drama King in the future requires holding on to the sense memory of what it feels like to be with one. You have to know your responses, and pay attention to them. That’s why I always ask women, Do you feel exhausted when you’re around him? Lonely? Do you feel as if you’re banging your head against the wall whenever you try to have a discussion? You must remember these questions, and any “yes” answers, because they’re specifically associated with Drama Kings.

One more thing: When you begin to feel sad all over again, and tempted to play the self-blame game, keep this in mind. An involvement so important that you wanted it to last forever is not a “waste of time” because it did not. Few relationships last forever, and the criteria for success have to reflect the realities of the 21st century. That year-long relationship with the guy you loved in college; that fabulous sex you had with the adorable cameraman from L.A. at your first job; those three days we won’t talk about with someone you shouldn’t have been with — they matter, all of them. They not only familiarized you with different kinds of love, but different aspects of yourself in love. Most important, they told you an infinite amount about what you were working through at the time; what was irresistible to you and what was problematic; what developmental issues you were grappling with and what qualities you were searching for and trying to develop in yourself. As I said before, these relationships are what made you who you are today; they made you strong. They gave you self-knowledge. And they prepared you for a deeper, more intimate, love.

We must never, ever, devalue our effort at making love work — to say things like, “All that work for nothing,” or “I gave him the best years of my life,” as if time alone were the measure of love. We must respect the effort and the time we put in. The measure of love is your capacity to offer it openly, and to have the intimacy skills necessary to have the connection that you crave — and a man’s ability to do the same.

Most men have the same capacity.

I think that our attraction to Drama Kings, those men who haven’t caught up with us yet, men who have rigid, outdated views of love and life, may be hardwired, a built-in responsiveness to different types of familiar, traditional, masculine stereotypes. We can only move past our training by grappling with one or two. And we all do. And we all wind up exhausted and lonely and wishing we could find someone else, someone who is able to love. And then, stronger, more clearly focused, we move on.

There are fabulous 21st century men out there who know that love isn’t solely a woman’s job. They have learned intimacy skills. They know that 21st century women are very happy to please them, but that the pleasure must be returned — that women want to be pleased, too. They know, too, that the days of standing by your man no matter what are over.

Reprinted from: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy… Drama Kings by Dalma Heyn © 2005 Dalma Heyn. (November 2005;$23.95US/$31.95CAN; 1-57954-888-1) Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098.