I read it about 8 years ago, and I liked that it provided reasons for everything that women and I do. It validated my habits like "man-cave" time, and I had a lot of issues with internal validation while growing up. So it was a good tool for that; it provided a connection to someone else who knew what you were going through in the tough bits of a relationship. When you want to just yell at someone else, you can look at the book and realize, "It's ok to feel the way I feel right now." I needed help with that at the time.

The problem was that I would cite it a lot. If I got into an argument, I would remember a paragraph somewhere in the book and rush through it to reference it. It became a rule-book for me. Most of the women I dated absolutely hated that idea. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was extremely incompatible with the women I was dating at the time, yet I tried to make the square peg fit.

Now, I was also very objectifying and misogynistic, so having rules helped me to treat and look at women as "other" vs. "human". It took a while, but over the years I've been noticing that it's totally OK to not be attracted to certain qualities in another human being. I don't need a book to justify patterns (some of which are really shitty from a humanistic standpoint). I only need to understand that there are certain things that I will like about a partner and certain things that I won't like, but ultimately I need to focus on my own life and see what matches up to that. Also, all of my feelings are valid. I think if, in the context of a relationship, both sides maintain the ethos "all feelings are valid", arguments will be avoidable.

I like this Buddhist concept: if you use a raft to cross a river, you don't bring the raft with you after you reach the shore. You dismantle it and take what you need -- The book helped me at the time, but I realized its concepts were overly compartmentalizing and a hindrance after a while.

TL;DR: The book helped me to force relationships and maintain codependence while experience taught me to just focus on who I am and let women come and go. Much. Less. Stressful.