You don’t speak up for yourself. You don’t take your life seriously. You don’t demand to be treated with dignity and respect. If you relate to any of the three previous statements then when it comes to relationships, you’re probably acting like a girl, not a grownup.

“A lot of women treat their romantic life as if they were girls and not women,” says Author and Relationship Coach Virginia Clark. Clark met her husband when she was 46 and married for the first time at 53.  With her company, It’s Never Too Late To Marry, she works with women in their 30s, 40s and beyond who want to get married but who are losing faith that it will happen.  “Men don’t fall in love with girls. They date girls. They bed girls.  But when they meet a real woman, she will challenge him to be the best man he can be. Many men are lazy. When they have a woman they’re inspired by, they become much better men.”

So what’s the difference between behaving like a girl in a relationship versus behaving like a woman? Cyndi Lauper said it best, “Girls just want to have fun.”

Your girlish behavior probably started back in high school but didn’t graduate when you did.  Girlish behavior translates into doing things like giving up your power to a man and idolizing him; not standing up for yourself when you’re being disrespected or abused; or sailing through life without taking yourself seriously and knowing that you have a reason to be here.  To put it bluntly, girlish behavior is not doing the work you need to do to become the best woman that you can be.

Ouch.

“When you think of yourself as a woman and not as a girl, it gives you a different sense of yourself,” says Clark. “A lot of women resist the `woman’ word because it makes them feel old, but the truth is when you come from your woman place, you’re younger at heart and secure and confident.”

Here are a few of Clark’s tips to get rid of your faulty, high-school-girl thinking:

Take Full Responsibility.

Although it may sound a little scary, taking full responsibility for your romantic life is actually very freeing. If you’ve been single for a long time and you don’t want to be, you have a blind spot. If you’re having the same bad dating experiences over and over again, or you’re unable to make a strong connection, there is something you’re not seeing so get some help.

Take courageous action.

To create change and to have a really strong loving relationship, you have to have courage. Risking rejection and being vulnerable is a risk and it’s an important one. Without vulnerability, there is not intimacy, and without intimacy, there is no true love.

Create your ideal reality.

“I absolutely think we create our reality and that when we become the best woman that we can be, we will attract the best man,” says Clark.  “There is someone out there for everyone, I have no doubt”. The more specific you are about creating the life and relationship you want, the more likely you are to get it.

Stand in your power.

A man who has a deep sense of himself will love and appreciate a powerful women. When a man has met a woman he’s inspired by, he’ll step up to the plate to win you over. Stop putting up with the wrong man, just to have a man. In the end, it’s not going to work, so if you’re interested and committed to a deep, real and loving relationship, stand in your power as a woman and watch you relationships transform.

Virginia Clark has clients in the United States and in Korea, Australia and England. CLICK HERE TO register for a complimentary “Attract the love of your life breakthrough session”.

(photo credit:  zazzle.com)

According to a study from the University of Minnesota, men become less frugal and more impulsive when they perceive a scarcity of females.

“What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates,” says Vladas Griskevicius, Ph.D., an assistant professor of marketing at the University and lead author of the study.  “What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products.”

When researchers led male participants to believe that women were scarce, the savings rates for men decreased by 42 percent. Men were also willing to borrow 84 percent more money each month.  In another study, male participants were presented with rolls of photos showing a greater number of men than women.  The men were then asked to choose between receiving some money tomorrow, or a larger amount in a month.  With women scarce in the photos, men were much more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month.

Researchers said such behavior occurs subconsciously — that participants were unaware of the male to female ratio having any effect on their behavior.

Researchers then flipped roles in the study to see how the financial choices of women were influenced.  Although women don’t spend more when there are more men in the population, their expectations of courting behavior change.  For example, the study showed that they expected men to spend more on dinner dates, Valentine’s gifts, and engagement rings.

When comparing their hypothesis with a review of real world data, researches looked at 120 U.S. cities and discovered that in communities with an abundance of single men, men showed greater ownership of credit cards and had higher debt levels.

Thanks to Business Insider for compiling a list of the world’s most eligible bachelors.  Although a date with most of the selects — Mark Zuckerberg, Stavros Niarchos III or Prince Harry to name a few — would put us firmly in the cougar camp, we’d wouldn’t mind a fix-up with a couple of the “older” gents.  Here are a few of our favorites.

Prince Carl Philip, 32

(Pictured Right.)  Phillip is second in line to the Swedish throne.  He enjoys race cars, swimming and skiing.  We enjoy looking at him.

Kevin Rose, 34

Rose is co-founder of Revision3, Digg and Pownce. He also invested in Twitter, Facebook, and Four Square.  More importantly, he’s a tea lover, which means there would be many an afternoon spent with our 3 favorite c’s, clotted cream, crumpets and cake!

Yoshikazu Tanaka, 34

Tanaka founded Gree, Japan’s largest social network.  Fortunately his English isn’t fantastic which means that as the years, and our relationship, pressed on, he would never lose his air of mystery.

You couldn’t pay us to go out with Mr. Kiss & Tell, aka John Mayer.  If his comments about his love life with Jessica Simpson didn’t bother you, we hope his flagrant use of the “n-bomb” in the same interview did.  Eligible maybe, datable?  Ew.

Read the entire article here.