Steve Harvey Says He Is No Relationship Expert, Has Being a Man ‘Down Pat’

Steve Harvey is experiencing an unexpected boon right now, as his hit Think Like a Man has knocked the dominant Hunger Games off the top of the box-office charts.

Harvey’s book of nearly the same name “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” precipitated the film, and it’s almost comical that something as quietly feminist as Hunger Games (in it, heroine Katniss Everdeen just happens to be a female, and just happens to be a bad ass, and neither issue is ever really congratulated or overly notable in the film’s universe) was followed by something as blatantly misogynist as Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Man.

I have to admit off the bat, I haven’t read the book, and find the premise (essentially that women must refashion themselves as secretly cunning yet outwardly passive to snag the marriage brass ring) to be offensive on its face. But Steve Harvey’s advice has been a bestseller in book form, and the film has gone on to dominate as well- at least for this week- demonstrating there’s no shortage of women that will buy into such offensive notions or at least allow themselves to be entertained by a rom-com based on the idea that being anything other than who you are is a good way to attract a mate.

One of the other, amusing aspects of the whole success of the book and then film thing is that Steve Harvey himself has been married three times. So… maybe he married women who didn’t act like ladies and think like men? Maybe they thought like ladies and every so often asked Harvey to get them a sandwich? Unacceptable.

Harvey concedes that he didn’t write the tome as a relationship expert, and explains what he believes he did wrong in previous relationships:

“People say, ‘He’s a relationship expert,’ but the expertise that I have is that I’m an expert on how men think. If I was an expert at relationships, I wouldn’t be in my third marriage! (laughs). But I got being a man down pat.”

Steve Harvey continues:

“I went about [marriage] the wrong way. I never sat down with my father and talked about who to pick, how to pick, how to hang in there when it gets tough. We didn’t have a lot of talks about it, so I kept trying. I got way off track a few times. I made a lot of mistakes, but those mistakes got me to this point.”

At the end of the Reuters interview, Steve Harvey does have some non-sexist advice for his fans based on his own experiences. When asked about his current success, the talk show host again hits on the perserverance theme, saying that after 11 sucky jobs, “when it came time to do uncomfortable things to be successful, I was pretty good at it.”