Women are “leaving the door open for a guy to get away with something…Here’s what’s happened over the years,” says comic and radio host Steve Harvey. “Women’s standards and requirements have lowered over the years. And as men, we know that. We have taken advantage of it. We’ve created terms that we feed to women that allow us to exist as we do,” he told Belinda Luscome when discussing his New York Times best seller, co-authored with Denene Millner, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. For example, Harvey said (and I’m abbreviating) …

1. We created the term “nagging.” There’s really no such

 thing as nagging. As soon as a woman starts registering her complaint, we call it nagging. We let you know it will drive us away. 

2. When you first meet a man, so you don’t ask a lot of personal questions, and questions about his business, we created the term gold-digger. Now why would a woman not be concerned about her financial future?

3. Three things men want from women: support, loyalty and “the cookie” (sex): “We’ll take a lot of things from a woman. But we have to have these three things. You take away any one of them, you lose a man’s affection.”

4. Three ways men show love to women: profess, provide and protect: “We have to define love in some kind of way. The problem with women is they have this great spectrum of what love is, and they want it reciprocated the same way they give it out. But we men can only nurture to a certain degree. It’s not in our DNA … We want to profess our love. We tell everyone,” he told an Atlanta audience.

5. “Men are driven by who they are, what they do, and how much they make. … These three things make up the basic DNA of manhood–the three accomplishments every man must achieve before he feels like he’s truly fulfilled his destiny as a man…, and until he’s achieved his goal in those three areas, the man you’re dating, committed to, or married to will be too busy to focus on you” Harvey wrote in the book.

“I’ve had two divorces myself. I understand. What I was never able to convey until I got a little older was why I was missing in action… trying so hard to be somebody … not as emotionally involved,” says Harvey who adds that he “could have written it (his book) in “about 35 pages…. because we’re guys. We are that simple,” he added in the interview.

Sometimes Harvey he sounds like he’s offering 1950s Mad Men-era advice, yet not as much as Whitey Casey in The Man Plan. It gets men nodding and some women giving heated responses to him on call-in talk shows:

• Take your husbands last name. It supports men’s desire to protect women.

• Men still expect women to keep a clean home.

• It is ok if women don’t know how to cook as long as they “cook” in the bedroom.

Three things to ask a man “to decide if he is worth keeping”, suggests Harvey, are (and these are just as valuable in reverse for men to ask women) are his:

1.  Short-term goals and whether they match his long-term goals.

2.  Views on family and kids.

3. Relationship with his mom

I would add:

4. Relationship to his friends

5. Views on money, especially on spending and saving.

6. Strongest values: what most matters to him in character traits and behavior.