Understanding and Choosing a Man

Understanding and Choosing a Man
20
May
In our culture it has become increasingly difficult to navigate the rules for dating, engagement and marriage.  This article was written for a talk given to a women’s small group on how our Christianity should impact our choices in our dating and marriage relationships. I hope you enjoy it.
I want to give four things about understanding a man that cover a broad swipe but I think they are all user friendly.  To understand a man, you must be clear about what drives a man inside.   I want to tell you what the key is about what drives a man inside.  Men are the ultimate action figures.  That’s what they are.  They are action oriented.  They’re not relationally oriented, they are action oriented.  What drives a man more than anything else is that they long …they long…they think about it and feel it all through their life…how am I going to be successful.
That’s the slogan of masculinity.  It’s performance that counts.  Men must perform.  And what they want to know is…am I doing well?  They are constantly looking because they want to be good at something.  They define themselves by action.  But there are some problems with being an action figure.  Let me give you two of them.  First, men struggle with their identity in that regard.  It’s one thing to want to perform; it’s another thing to to perform successfully.  Do you remember the nursery rhyme mirror, mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?  And the witch would look in the mirror to see if she was the fairest and Snow White would appear and she would just get furious.  Men have mirrors to tell them whether they are performing well.  Christian men have three.  Non-Christian men I think have two.
Let’s pick the two that all men have.    The two mirrors are this:  the work that he does; and the woman that he relates to.  Every day he looks in those mirrors and in one way or another he goes…Am I doing good?  And how the work responds back to him will help him to find whether he is doing okay.  And how his woman looks back to him, what shows on her face tells him whether he’s doing well.  If he feels like he is doing well, he’ll work even harder.  But I know a lot of women who constantly, in just little ways, even with good men, will reflect the 10% that they are not doing well on, and completely emasculate their identity at the core for the 90% that they are doing pretty good on.  It’s because men are so action oriented.
The past in a man sometimes will disfigure what he chooses to chase after.  If he grew up under a real perfectionist dad or a real dominating mom … or early on in his business career he had some failures…that can distort and make this performance even more intense or more disfigured.  If you know your husband or boyfriend and no matter how well he does, he still doesn’t feel like he’s good enough…it’d be good to check into his past.  Because what might be back there is some parents that no matter how many A’s he made, they were always saying…’well you made a B+ in this class’ or how high he jumped…you could jump just a little higher.  And those kind of guys, need extra encouragement about their worth and about their performance.  But I just want you to know that men struggle with their identity in relationship to performance because for them it’s performance that counts.

Men also struggle with their role in life.  The great anthropologist, Margaret Mead said this “the chief goal of every society on earth is to find appropriate roles for its men”.  That’s an amazing statement.  In other words, undefined men – men who don’t know what their role is, and by the way, we’re living in a generation right now where men have no definitions for what to go after.  Men are always on a quest to know what they need to do. Those roles are critical and men struggle with their role just like they struggle with their identity.  But here’s what I want you to know.  If you want to understand a man, just know even if they are not acting right with you…that what drives them is to be successful.  They are going to look at their work and their woman most often to discover their identity.

If they are a Christian man they get a third mirror and that third mirror is, of course, the word of God.  They can ask, “Am I doing okay?” and they can open up the scripture and if they are doing some of those things it radiates back approval from God.

Secondly, to encourage a man you need to know what his key needs are. There are all kinds of books on the needs of men and women, and I’ve read a lot of them but I want to give you just four that I think would be consistent in most books, and most research on how to deal with a man.  When you touch these needs, you’re touching him at the core.  The first is this…A man needs admiration and respect.  This goes along with the first insight I gave you about the drive to success.  Because what men need most is to hear that they are doing well.  So, when you as a woman, reflect back into his face your approval of what he’s doing, in a sense its birthing a sense of security in him.  He needs a cheer leader all his life.  You look at Friday night, watching the guys out performing and you’ve got, the girls on the sideline cheering.  That’s a metaphor of engaging a man.  He wants to perform and he wants you to cheer.
Now, every woman can answer this phrase.  If your boyfriend or your husband met you tonight and you wanted him to say some special words to you that would really make you feel good, what are the words you want to hear?  What are the three words every woman wants to hear?  Come on…I love you.  That’s right.  But every time they say it they score, right?  They have impact into your life because you want to hear that because we as women have such a relational emphasis.  So, it closes that gap of intimacy and it reassures about the relationship.  That is why those words are so important.  Interestingly enough though, when you give those words back to a guy they don’t register at the same level.  Now, they are important, I don’t want to demean them in any way.  But they are not the words that the man wants to hear at the core.
You know it’s real interesting when you open up the scriptures. Because there’s a guy 2000 years ago with no psychological or social credentials.  He is a Pharisee – Paul and yet he writes this great chapter on love and marriage in Ephesians 5, and it says this in verse 25:  “Husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church.  He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean washed by baptism and God’s word.” Then in verse 33 we read “So Again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself and the wife must respect her husband”   Paul keeps mentioning loving your wife, loving your wife.  He was a smart guy.  He had learned the language.
So tell me what surprises you? It doesn’t say anything about loving your husband does it?  Isn’t that interesting?  In fact, you can go all the way through the Bible from cover to cover and except for one little participle phrase in Titus 2 where it says to the older women to love your husbands.  It never, ever mentions to a woman about loving her husband.  You know why, because that’s not what he needs at the core.  But it does say in Ephesians to the woman… “Let the wife see to it that she respects her husband.”  Here’s what I want you to hear.  If you want to give the same impact to a man that a man gives to you when he says I love you, you will say to him “I’m proud of you.”  That will score…big points.
I’m not saying that you are not authentic when you say “I love you” to your husband.  But as you look at his performance, where there are successes, where there are achievements, where he’s doing well, where do you see him sacrificing…what he needs is for you to walk up and put your arms around him, or lean over and grab his hand and say… “I just want you to know, I was watching you with our son.  Or I was watching you with this employee at work and how you handled that…I just want you to know I am so proud of you.”  Wow.  He’ll walk away with the exact same feeling you walk away with when he draws you close, puts his arms around you and says “honey I love you.”  Men need admiration and respect.  Listen ladies, they will never, ever stop needing it.  Just like you’ll never ever stop needing I love you.  And that’s why a woman who is constantly criticizing her husband’s performance is just crushing him at the most primal place because men are action figures and performance driven.
Secondly he needs support.  I mention that because that’s one of the things that jump out at you in Genesis 2 when it calls the woman a helper.  She is a helper because the guy needs help.  Remember the Rocky movies?  Rocky needed support. He needed Adrian to fill his gaps.   Let me just give you a couple of areas where he needs help the most.   He needs your help, in his work.  He needs to know that you’re interested what he does for a living.  He wants to know that you want to help him succeed.
Willard Harley in his book His Needs, Her Needs talks about the fact that “when a man marries a woman, he is assuming she is a woman who will be interested in his life vision.  And if she’s not or she takes it for granted, or if she doesn’t know anything about it, then that marriage will fall into trouble.”  So, what happens often times, is that in a marriage a woman will know her husband is an accountant but not know the employees or the pressures that he’s under or not be able to dialogue with him. Yet it’s so important that he feels your support because there is going to come a time in his life where he is going to make certain moves in his work and he’s going to want your counsel or your input. So if you’re clueless about it, it just discourages him because he thought you’d be a part of his life vision.
He also needs your support in the seasons of life.  The seasons will change so will how you support him.  So, for instance, every man follows kind of a common pattern.  For most men, when they hit about 30 they are going to make some major vocational change.  It may be that they are working for dad and at about 30 they decide to leave dad and dad doesn’t want him to go out and start his own company.  Or they will have worked under somebody in the job market and after a while they’ve kind of gotten their feet on the ground they really find out what they want to do and they want to quit that job and go somewhere else.  In that moment, when he comes home and he tells you, “hey I think I’m going to quit my job.”  Well, that jumps into one of your great needs, security.    And there are women who go… “no you can’t do that.”  And yet, right there he needs you to say “go for it.  Take the leap…perform…I believe in you.”  Then when he gets into his 40’s he will go through this soul searching that is often called a mid-life crisis.  He will wonder if what he’s done has been worth it and if all the emphasis he’s given in that direction has really made a difference.   It is important for you to stabilizing him in that somewhat unsteady time.  And then later, in another season of life when he begins to move off life’s stage…maybe he’s been the head of the company or the chief mechanic, or he’s been the football coach and he’s thinking about retiring.  You know, his work was so important and now he’s giving it up.  It’s at this time that questions about his masculinity will come racing in.  Maybe he’s done really well and so he’s going to retire at midlife. At that moment, it’s like he’s run up to the edge of the Grand Canyon and just thrown himself out there because he can’t define himself anymore.  People don’t salute him the way that they used to.  And at those moments, without his work or while he is trying to redefine himself, he needs you like never before to reflect back his worth and his value in that season of life.  Do you know what you call that…help.  You need to support him.
Thirdly, he needs companionship.  In survey after survey, companionship is the second highest rated need of a man.  By companionship we’re not talking about conversational companionship – that’s what you need.  You know, let’s talk.  He needs recreational companionship.  Here’s what I mean by that.  A man wants you to approve of things that he does recreationally; and know that you enjoy them and approve of them and even better that you want to participate at some level in them.    That doesn’t mean that you have to go stalk deer in the mountains, but you know what would be helpful?  It would be good for you know something about that and you’re excited when the guy is going off in the woods and you’re not rolling your eyeballs going “oh he’s going huntin again.”  Now, if he participates in these things to an extreme that might need to be talked about.  But normally I’m talking about just things that guys like to do.
One of the things that Tim and I like to do is golf together.  I enjoy it as much as he does. And honestly I think he’s disappointed when I choose not to go and he ends up just going with the guys. With golf we find this place where we can play together.  People who play together stay together.  Also, we both love to travel.  But, you know I look into some homes and the world is divided.  There are two countries there.  They don’t participate in either one’s recreations.  That’s called loneliness and isolation.  I would just encourage you as a good step, if there’s just one thing that your boyfriend or your husband enjoys and maybe you’re not feeling as much connected with him as you have in the past…look at what that is and say “how can I step into his world and enjoy it with him?”   You know what? You’ll be surprised.  At first he may be surprised.  It will affirm him in ways that you don’t understand.  It’s like the friend of mine whose husband bought a Harley just recently. It’s been fun for my friend to go with him on motorcycle rides and they go to the bike nights and they have fun. Sometimes I’ve seen guys buy toys like that and their wives are like “oh, come on… you’re just going through a midlife crisis.”   But ladies I’m telling you we need to be smart and find something we enjoy doing with him.  That’s engaging a man.
Fourthly, (and you knew I would get to this) he needs physical responsiveness. Yes I’m talking about sex! Now in the same surveys, recreational companionship is the number two need of a man, physical responsiveness is the number one need of a man.  Men are physical creatures.  You speak to them in ways that are just incredibly powerful when you speak to them through the physical.  But I want to give you two little insights.  There should be a difference in this department between just dating and being married.

First of all in dating we need to draw boundaries.   This is extremely important in the 21st Century where there are no boundaries.    A touch, a hug, a kiss are powerful in a dating relationship to a guy.  It begins a cycle of movement and that is how men relate as physical creatures.  I know there have been those who have come to a place where you say, “well gosh, if that’s the case we probably shouldn’t have any physical contact.”

1 Corinthians 7 addresses thist in Paul’s day.  Paul says these words, “Now concerning the things about which you wrote“.  Obviously the Corinthians were writing Paul asking him some questions about the men/women relationship. Now if you study anything about Corinth you start to understand why they were asking him questions because at the top of the Acrocorinth, the mountain above Corinth was a giant temple, world renowned for temple prostitutes.  It was the San Francisco of the ancient world.  Sexual licensees were everywhere.  In fact, temple prostitutes would march through the city every day in their sandals and in the sand they would leave the words follow me.  “Follow me.  Let’s go have a good time.”  Sailors, soldiers, politicians from all over the world came to Corinth to have a good time.  So, these Corinthians were really asking now that they were Christians, how do we live in relationship to one another, especially man and woman.  So Paul says, “Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it’s good for a man not to touch a woman.”  He goes on to explain what he means by that.  I’ve had a lot of singles look at that verse and say…”we can’t touch each other?”  That’s not what its saying.  As you go on and read, what you begin to understand is that it’s not a prohibition that you can’t hold hands or hug or anything like that.  It is however, a strong statement about drawing boundaries.  Draw boundaries.  Sexual immorality is off limits.  You’ll read that right there in 1 Corinthians 7; Paul is saying that you should have nothing in the relationship that is going to cause you to be focused on the physical.  You need to understand that there are some encouragement’s, like the hug and the kiss in a relationship before marriage.  But you have to draw tight boundaries, and of course to the guys I’d say you need to be a leader in the boundary.  But for the woman, regardless of where the guy is, and  regardless of whether he’s going to draw boundaries, you need to know what the boundaries are and they need to be clear to the person you date.
Then, concerning those who are married I would say this… not to draw boundaries.  I would say to a woman, stay attractive and stay physical.  When I say stay attractive, please hear me, it means to look something like your husband wants you to look.  I know there are some women who will say “he has no right tell me how I should look.”  I guess you could make a case for that.  But on the other hand, as a helpmate who understands how important this need is, wouldn’t you want in some way to engage him with his most intense need?  The other thing to understand is that a man does not engage a woman sexually for his personal needs.  That’s just a small part of it.  Remember men are performers.  They want to know they can give you pleasure.  Did you know that?  That’s the number one thing a guy wants to know in the sexual relationship…do I perform well with you?  They’ll never say it but they’re like little kids, asking “how’d I do?”   And the wise woman, will be one who’s willing to say “Hey you’re doing good!”  I promise you that you have made his day!  That goes way beyond what pleasure he got out of it.  Remember he’s an action figure.  So, for you over the course of a life of a marriage my advice is to stay attractive as best you can and stay physical with him.  Understand that it meets your man at his deepest place

The next thing I want to talk about for a bit is choosing a man.  You have no idea how many hours I’ve sat in the counseling office talking to women about this topic. And here is how it goes.  Either they are dating and they don’t know if they are making the right choice or they are dating and it’s not going well, or… they are married and they realize they’ve chosen poorly and they are now reaping the consequences of that choice, or they are in a divorce situation because they didn’t think about these things ahead of time. Etc., etc, etc.
Those of you who are single, divorced or widowed listen up!!!.  To choose a man, you need to know three pieces of information besides love.  We’re going to assume the love.  You’ve fallen in love, okay.  Now you’re wondering how should I engage this guy deeper?  Maybe you’re thinking about marriage at this point.  There are three critical pieces of advice that I would hope for you singles to hold close to you.  If you are a parent of a teenager this is what you would want your daughters to know.
First, you want to know this young man’s home life growing up.  You don’t want to wait until you’re about to get married and ask “tell me about your mom and dad.”   And I’m talking about not just knowing his parents  like friends.  You want to do that, and everybody usually does that.  I’m talking about knowing what it was like growing up with that dad and that mom.  You want to know whether they had a good marriage that he’s respects.  If they did have a good marriage that he’s going to follow as a model, then how did that look?  Because that is probably the script  he’s going to follow.  And so you need to know how that relates.  Also you want to understand what pain he suffered there.  I want you to know a lot of young men today suffered a ton of pain in their family of origin.  They are confused by it. And often times they are going to come into marriage with this package of pain that I call the suitcase of unfinished business.  They are going to lock the key to that suitcase, but when they come home and interact with you they’re going to  be carrying that suitcase and they’ll operate out of that suitcase.  They don’t want to let you in there because they don’t want to go in there.  But how they interact with you and the kids and their own life is coming out of that suitcase.  It might be the perfectionist dad that beat them down or the dad that abandoned them when they were 13 and ran off with another woman, or a parent who never encouraged them and was emotionally distant.  Maybe it was a mom who was overbearing, so overbearing it just crushed his masculinity.  You’re thinking “it’s just his personality.”  No its not.  It’s this big, massive pain that has been stuffed into that suitcase.  So you better know his home life before you get attached to him.  What you learn there is going to tell you a lot about what you’re going to expect on the other side of marriage.
Secondly, you want to know whether he is a believer or what.  If he’s not a believer, then what is he?  When you take a Christian who is excited about Christ and a person who is just excited about a woman but has no belief system and you put them together there’s bound to be a problem.  Because at some point you are going to have to decide what you are going to value in your home and how you are going to raise your children.  And when that time comes a non-believer is not going to understand why it is so important to you and there’s going to be conflict.  That’s why the scriptures say; don’t be joined together with an unbeliever.  Now those are strong words.  But you know one of the number one things we counsel at the church with woman about is the lack of religion in their husband’s life.  Or they may have another faith that believes so differently that it just clashes with the faith of the wife.  And there is constant tension there.  If you are going to choose a man, you need to know what he is spiritually.  You’d better take it seriously.
Lastly, to choose a man, you need to know past performance.   Past performance is your best eye into future performance.  If your job was to hire people you wouldn’t say “OH-look at him!  He’s so good looking and hey he’s driving a really great car-I think I’ll hire him.”  No-you would get applications and you would get resumes and you would call their references. The best thing you can do before you hire an employee is find out how they performed not just in a job but all the way back in their life.  Because their past performance, going back to when they were in high school and in college and with those previous people employers …that’s the best predictor of future performance.  So  looking back is your best eye to the future.  You want to know what’s his integrity like?  The best way you know his integrity is by how he has spoken to you and kept his word, how he’s treated you in a physical way, how he’s looked after you.  If he’s taken advantage of you or is constantly pressing you to do things you shouldn’t do- there is no integrity.  It doesn’t matter what he says. It’s what he actually does!  When it comes to finances, if he has constant money problems-WARNING<WARNING!  I’m going to tell you when you get married, don’t expect anything different than money problems.  Or when you look at his communication skills, if before marriage he can’t share anything about himself, if he’s secretive about things, if he has difficulty communicating, then it doesn’t prohibit you from getting married, just know that’s what the performance is going to be on the other side.  Why is it that before marriage we say “Oh he’s just the strong silent type”  and then we marry him and before long you’re in my office complaining,  “he never talks to me!”  What a surprise!!   If he has poor work habits, doesn’t clean up after himself, then don’t expect him to change, because that’s who he is.  It’s real important to know that, or know what you’re getting into.  Now, does that say that the guy can’t ever change?  No.  It doesn’t say that.  He may change.  But, I just don’t want you to be surprised that somehow when he put the wedding ring on your hand that he’s going to turn into the white knight.  No – he’s probably going to be a lot like he was before hand, and that’s not just in a dating relationship.  I’m telling you that you need to go back to what he did in high school…what he did in college…or how he’s been in the work place…or what his friends are like.  Those are just signals to find what kind of individual you’re getting connected with.  There’s a famous saying that says “women get married with the hopes that their man will change and men get married hoping that their wives won’t.”  But what happens when we get married and we can’t change him?  We become unhappy, nagging, not so wonderful wives.  And he’s thinking-“I don’t know what her problem is. She knew I was like this before we got married and she was just fine with it.  Now she wants me to change.  What happened to that sweet gal I married?”
Finally, let me give you what I call the top ten no-no’s with men.
  1. First, never commit to a man on what he could be…because you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to make him into the could be.
  2. Never have sex with a man before marriage because sex before marriage is not women’s liberation, it’s a man’s liberation and a woman’s downfall.  Remember, his number one need is physical responsiveness and part of that physical responsiveness is just a natural drive to complete himself with a woman.  If you give that up with no commitment, then what you’ve done is eliminate the great reward of the relationship.  That’s what we’ve done in the 21st Century and we laugh about it and we think about those who are abstinence oriented  are like dinosaurs of the past.  If you were part of even half the counseling that I am part of, and you knew what is taking place in our country, in life after life of a young woman, you would understand that this is one of the greatest transgressions on femininity EVER!  It just undercuts the core of the relationship.  Guys, are out there thinking, that there are no boundaries and now we are living in the age where men are the least committed I’ve ever seen them.  So, I’m just going to tell you that as a statement of wisdom:  Premarital sex pacifies a man from being noble.  That’s what it does.
  3. Never submit to anything immoral or illegal with a man.  I say that specifically to those of you that are married.  That’s not submission, that’s abuse…and you do not have to do it.  Don’t ever, by the way, sign documents you don’t understand.  Don’t ever do that.  You need to thoroughly understand them and what the implications are, and you have a right to ask what it means.  You have a right to say “no”.
  4. Never stay silent about abuse.  Seek outside help.  Marriage is not a contract for silence.  If there is any kind of abuse going on, you need to expose it to key people -a church and a pastoral staff is a great place for the first step.  If you don’t have that, it might be to a significant friend.  It could be, if necessary, to some official – even legal official.  But you should never stay silent about abuse!
  5. Fifth, never nag.  There are better ways to address a problem.  The opposite of cheer-leading is jeer-leading.   And the worst thing for a man is to look in a mirror that is always putting him down, always picking at his flaws.  In most marriages, even marriages ending in divorce, the reality is – and social scientists will tell you this – most of those marriages, even the ones that ended in divorce, are good marriages.  It’s just that the couple focused on what was wrong with each other rather than enjoying what was right about each other.  They got in this endless cycle of pointing out each other’s flaws rather than emphasizing the positive.  If there are things that are wrong, they should be addressed, but never in a context void of encouragement.  Nagging doesn’t really get you there.  By the way, the scriptures in 1 Peter encourage a woman not to do that.   It says in verse 3: “Your Godly lives will speak to them (your husbands) better than any words.”    It doesn’t mean that you have to put up with stuff.  Like I said, if there is stuff going on that’s illegal you can seek outside help.   If there is abuse, immediately seek help.  If there is stuff that is problematic, then I think it is important to go talk to a pastor or counselor.  If the husband says I’m not going to go talk, you go anyway.  You have a right to do that.  Silence is not golden; it’s yellow (cowardly).  Marriage is not a sealed container where you can’t ever talk to anybody about what is really going on.  So, it’s real important that generally in a marriage you need to emphasize the positive, not the negative.  And for a man that is an action figure, I think that is even more important.
  6. Never embarrass your man in public.  Ladies, men are performers.  We’ve talked about that.  They want to be winners.  And when you embarrass them, here’s what you say to them.  “You’re a loser. ”  Look at Proverbs 12:4.  It says, “An excellent wife is a crown to her husband but she who shames him is like rottenness to his bones”.  Ladies, I want you to know, nothing can anger a man more than when you’re in public with him and he’s talking about something that’s real exciting to him; maybe it’s a sporting event or maybe it’s a hunting trip that he took and you’re back there rolling your eyes.  You may not think he sees it but he feels it.  You embarrass him when you correct him in public or make fun when he’s telling some story that he’s real excited about. If he’s talking about a building project and you say…”yeah when he finishes we’ll probably have to have a construction team come in and redo it.”  That undercuts him to his friends and undercuts him in public…nothing makes a man more angry than that.  Its rottenness to his bones.  So ladies, let me encourage you…never, ever embarrass your man in public.  Always be someone who builds him up, encourages him. If he is saying something that is exaggerated or out of line, wait until a private moment to make it right.
  7. Never stop cheering for your man, even when he has flaws.  Ladies, let me tell you.  There is no perfect marriage.  There is none.  Often times we women romanticize about some perfect marriage that is out there, and we idealize other couples.  We say-“Oh- I wish our marriage was like so and so-they just seem like they have the perfect marriage.”  But I’m here to tell you every marriage has flaws, and every husband and every woman who is a wife has flaws.  So, it is important for you in marriage to carry that perspective and understand what he is good at, not just what he isn’t good at.  So often it’s easy to see the glass as half empty rather than half full.  I want you to know as you look at your husband, in most marriages that I know of, most men are good at a lot of things and maybe not so good at just a few things.  But woman who overly idealize a marriage will overlook all the good and just focus then on the bad.  What they’ll end up doing is constantly correcting, constantly making their husband feel like he is a failure even though he is doing so many wonderful things.  But they’ll just pick up on the few things that he’s not so good at.  So let me just encourage you.  You can wisely address the flaws.  But what your husband most needs is for you to be his greatest cheerleader.
  8. Number eight, never treat sex and marriage casually.  It is critical for him.  Successful sex for a man is what it means to you ladies not what it means to him. So I want you to know that how you respond to him sexually, it’s absolutely critical to his masculine self-esteem.  It’s the wise woman who will always make the sexual relationship a vital part of the marriage because it reaffirms a man as a man at the most critical point and that’s how he’s experiencing you.
  9. Never assume his job is not your business.  You know, in the bestselling book Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel Levinson, he talks about how a man often marries a woman who he believes will nourish his life vision.  In other words, she will see his dreams as her dreams too.  Unfortunately, for many men after they get married, their wives can just assume that their husband’s business is their business, the man’s business not the wives’ business. But nothing could be further from the truth.  How you interact with his job is important to him.  So, you need to understand how your husband is experiencing life in the workplace.  You need to know the pressures he under, the people that he interacts with.  You need to be able to listen when he comes home and wants to talk about his job but you’re listening intelligently because you’re up to speed on where he’s been, and what he’s experiencing and what’s going on in his world.  You need to be interested.  Always assume that his business is your business.
  10. Lastly, never ever fall more in love with the kids than you do with your husband.  Listen, as the years go by for wives that is easy to do.  It’s easy to get so involved with the kids lives that you forget about that most important other…your husband.  I want to encourage you…it’s the wise woman who stays in love and nurtures that relationship with her husband above all other relationships including the kids. She keeps dating her husband.  She keeps romancing her husband.  She keeps surprising her husband.  She stays attentive to her man.  Do things together alone without the kids from time to time to stoke the fires of that most unique relationship which is supposed to last a lifetime.  One day, the last child will leave and ladies you want to be glad, not sad, when that moment happens.  Because in that moment, it’s going to be just you and your husband and what you want to have there is a well-developed relationship that has been well oiled even when the kids were there.

Those are the ten no-no’s for helping you better interact with the man in your life.  As I said in the beginning, much of the happiness that a woman will achieve in this life is in direct proportion to how well that she engages in the opposite sex – her man.

About the Author

Lori Hommer