Marriage counseling commonly focuses on what’s not working in the relationship, which means complaining about what you’re not getting and what you don’t like. What you focus on expands, so that’s only going to increase the things you don’t like about your relationship. It doesn’t take long before you feel that the negatives outweigh the positives.
Intimacy skills focus on expressing your pure desires—without manipulation or expectation—out loud to your husband. Shifting your focus to what you want instead of what you don’t is a great way to create more of what you want. Plus it’s fun to think about what would delight you and to honor those desires. Expressing a pure desire doesn’t mean that you will always get what you want, but it’s a great start.
When you’re tempted to complain, instead ask yourself, “What is my unexpressed desire behind this complaint?”
“You are a living magnet. What you attract into your life is in harmony with your dominant thoughts.”
—Brian Tracy, Author and Motivational Speaker
Imagine if every time you expressed a desire to your husband, he started thinking about how he could delight you by meeting that desire. In this chapter is everything you need to inspire him to do just that.
Your husband really wants to make you happy. If you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because I’ve asked thousands of men how important it is to make their wives happy, and they all have the same answer: “It’s very important.”
If you think your man is an exception to this rule, it’s likely that you haven’t seen that side of him for a while because he’s been so busy defending himself from inadvertent criticism, control, or disrespect. That’s what I see over and over with my clients. But when we wives clean up our side of the street by relinquishing control and being respectful of our guy (I’ll explain exactly how to do that in Chapter 8), his desire to make us happy re-emerges stronger than ever.
After I became a relationship coach, I started to have even more respect and admiration for men because my clients were constantly telling me sweet stories about their husbands doing chivalrous, romantic things for them. It became so obvious to me that men just want to make us women happy. What’s not to love?
I’m willing to bet that your husband wants to make you happy too. If you’re not convinced of this, I understand. I was skeptical myself at first. You won’t know for sure until you experiment a little with the Six Intimacy Skills and see what happens. Here’s the hypothesis to start with: You don’t have to persuade, manipulate, argue, nag, or coerce him into doing something to make you happy, because he already wants to be your hero. He just needs to know what you want.
When you express your desires, you are giving your guy information that he needs to please you. You can’t always get what you want—especially if, like me, you sometimes want two contradictory things at the same time. But when you acknowledge your desires out loud, it’s definitely a step toward feeling cherished.
When I talk about expressing your desires purely—without expectation or manipulation—it doesn’t mean that you have to figure out how to say them in a specific way so that he’ll do what you want. You simply say what you would love, and then let go of the results. The way to express your desires is to simply say “I want…” or “I would love…” and fill in whatever appeals to you in that moment.
For example, instead of “Don’t you want to have a big family?” you’d say, “I would love to have a big family.” Instead of saying “We should try to get home early because we have to work tomorrow” (which is a nice way of telling him what to do), you could say, “I would love to get to bed early tonight.”
When you think about your desires, you may have in mind that they should be fulfilled in a certain way. But what if you got that new purse not because your husband got a bonus and bought it for you, but because he urged you to buy it for yourself with the tax refund? You still got the outcome you wanted, just not the way you thought it would happen.
Keeping your focus on the outcome, not how or when it happens, is key to expressing your desires in a way that inspires. Sometimes we confuse the message by saying more than we need to. As soon as you specify how something should happen, you squash the inspiration your husband naturally feels when he sees a chance to please his wife. When you tell him how to do what you want, your desire goes from being an opportunity for him to feel proud and accomplished to just another chore you’ve put on his to-do list.
When I first asked Patty to express her desire, she responded with, “I want my husband to get a better job.” But that didn’t really tell me what she wanted, because I didn’t know how his better job would impact her. So I asked, “What would you get if your husband had a better job?” The answer was that she would have more money to spend. But money is not an end result either; it’s just a means to something else we want: security, status, new shoes, or the like. So I asked her what she would get if she had more money, and this time I got the real answer: “I would love some new clothes.” Finally she was at an end result. She had taken her focus off of how it would happen.
Try to figure out what your end result is. Less is more with expressing desires. If it’s something like “a change of scenery,” “to feel accomplished,” “a new coat,” or “to work from home”—you’ve arrived at a pure desire. You’ll know you’re expressing a pure desire when it’s an outcome without an expectation.
Another common pitfall with expressing your desires in a way that inspires is that often a woman is focused on what she wants her husband to do. She comes up with desires she wants him to fulfill, like, “I want you to spend more time with me” or “I want you to help with the housework.”
The problem with these desires is that they have the word “you” in them, which immediately changes them from desires to commands. Commands diminish intimacy and lower your husband’s motivation to pay attention to what would delight you.
Saying “I want you to spend more time with me” is not only a very thinly veiled complaint (“You don’t spend enough time with me”), it’s also a trap.
What you really want is for him to want to spend time with you. You want to feel desired. If you tell your husband you want him to spend more time with you and he does, you’ll have that worrisome feeling that he’s only doing it because you asked him to, not because he really wants to. You’ll never get what you crave most that way. But if you resist saying it—even when the temptation is strong—then when he does come to you, you’ll know it’s because you’re irresistible, and that feels amazing.
Of course, wanting your husband to spend more time with you is a desire, and it’s important to honor your desires. But instead of saying it to your husband, which won’t yield the result you want, consider bringing the desire to a friend and telling her that you want your husband to spend more time with you. That way you’re still honoring the desire but aren’t hurting your chances of getting what you really want. (I’ll show you what to say to him for best results in Chapter 14.)
Let’s take another example. Telling your husband “I want you to help with the housework” is not about having a clean house. It’s about the process by which the house gets clean, which is that he has to do it. And within that is an underlying criticism that he doesn’t help out with the housework enough. Now, instead of responding to your pure desire, your husband is busy defending himself against your complaint. He’s likely to respond by reminding you that he vacuumed twice recently. This is not getting you any closer to what you want: a home free of dust bunnies.
When you find yourself tempted to express a desire with “you” in it, take a step back and ask yourself what end result you want most before you say it to your husband.
When I asked Sumaya what her desire was, she said it was for her husband to be logical when they fought. Since there’s no respectful way to say “I want you to be logical when we fight,” I asked her what she would get if he were logical when they fought. She thought for a moment and said, “I would get to win the argument!” and then she laughed, realizing that that particular desire probably wasn’t worth the price of admission. I asked her to consider the outcome she was looking for in that situation, and what finally bubbled up for her was “I would love to have peace between us. I want to not fight at all.” Her pure desire was both moving and inspiring.
When Jill decided to say to her husband, “I would love to cut back on my work hours because I want to be home with the kids more,” she thought she was expressing a pure desire. But when we next met she told me, “It didn’t work.” I asked her what she meant, and she said her husband didn’t respond to her desire by agreeing that she should cut back her work hours, so she felt justified in telling him that he didn’t care at all about what she wanted.
But saying that expressing her desires “didn’t work” told me that she had an expectation lurking underneath what sounded like a pure desire, which turned it into a demand, which her husband likely picked up on instantaneously. Husbands are smart like that.
Since she then insulted her husband for not getting on board with her desire, it appeared she was just trying to get her husband to see things her way. That’s not the same as honoring your desires. In fact, that’s the definition of an expectation or a demand: when you have a desire and you punish your partner for not delivering on it.
When Jill’s husband didn’t see things her way, she felt so hurt and disappointed that she was no longer motivated to be respectful or dignified.
I know how it is. I’ve done that too. But once I learned the difference between a pure desire and a demand, I started to see my husband really respond with enthusiasm at the possibility of making me happy.
Expressing desires is completely within your control, and whether you get the desire or not, honoring it with your words always “works.” You may not always get what you want, but you always get to honor what you want, which is the same as honoring yourself.
Everybody knows you’re not supposed to complain. For years I took that to mean that instead of voicing a complaint, I should just keep my mouth shut and suck it up, accepting things as they were even if I didn’t like them. But just knowing I shouldn’t complain didn’t stop me, until I learned how to dissect the complaint and find the desire underneath. Now I know I was missing an important aspect of this wise instruction.
It’s true that complaining is a big waste of energy. Now when I feel myself tempted to complain, I know it means I have an unexpressed desire. It’s my job to figure out what that is and express it.
It’s really easy and requires no effort whatsoever to say “I’m sick of this heat!” That’s a complaint, which I now think of as a lazy desire. The desire underneath that complaint is most likely “I’d love to cool off.” It takes a little more effort to get to that desire, and sometimes when you’re sweltering, that’s hard to muster. But once you establish a habit of expressing desires instead of complaints, you’ll start to do it automatically. The benefits to your relationship will be far-reaching.
I know it may not sound much different to say “I’d love to cool off” instead of “I’m sick of this heat!” It may seem like I’m saying the same thing in a different way, and to some extent I am. But where complaints just sort of lie there and stink up the place, desires are empowering and full of possibility. They also give your husband an opportunity to please you.
What comes to mind when you say “I’m sick of this heat!” as far as possible solutions?
Not much, right?
But when you express the desire “I want to cool off,” does your brain start coming up with ideas? I know mine does. I think of air-conditioned buildings I could visit, like malls or movie theaters. I think of finding a swimming pool or heading to the beach or a lake. I think of a cool shower, a big glass of ice water, or even turning on the sprinkler and running through it. I think of sleeping all afternoon with the shades drawn, and then getting up in the evening when it’s cooler. How about visiting a friend with air-conditioning, or going to an ice-skating rink, or making a frozen fruit smoothie for lunch? What about buying an air-conditioner? How about squirt guns and water balloons?
Granted, not all of these possibilities are practical. It’s been a long time since I ran through the sprinkler on a hot day, but I have been known to provide squirt guns and water balloons at backyard barbecues.
The point is that there are possibilities there, and thinking of them is much more appealing than focusing on how sick you are of the heat. Since everything that happens in this world starts with an idea, thinking about all these potential solutions greatly increases the chances of having an outcome that meets your desire to cool down.
How many possible solutions came out of the complaint “I’m sick of the heat!”? None. Zilch. How many arose from expressing the desire to cool off? About a dozen.
So the score is:
Desire: 12
Complaint: 0
Team Desire clearly has the momentum.
When you’re tempted to complain, identifying the outcome that you want and expressing that instead—even if you’re the only one who hears it—is more empowering, more fun, more pleasant to be around, and much likelier to result in you getting what you want.
Carly loved going to parties, but her husband was more of a stay-at-home guy. When they got invited to a party, she would start strategizing about how she was going to get him to agree to attend. She would start by complaining about how long it had been since they’d gone somewhere socially and griping that they never did anything fun. She would say, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could go to a party?” But she never really came out and said what she wanted. All he heard was complaining, so he would tune her out. And then she would get mad, both because he was ignoring her and because she wasn’t getting what she wanted, even though she had never actually said what she wanted.
Now Carly has a different approach. She says, “My cousin invited us to his birthday party, and I’d really like to go.”
These days, Carly not only has a better connection with her husband, she gets to go to a lot more parties with him. “It saves a lot of heartache,” she told me. “He doesn’t mind going to a party if he knows it will make me happy.”
What’s something you’re unhappy about right now—something you could easily complain about? It’s not hard to think of something, right? Most of us have that habit nailed. With a little practice, it’s easy enough to replace the habit of complaining with the habit of expressing your desire.
Start by asking yourself what you want—something more specific than not what you have. Instead of saying “This house is a disaster,” say “I would love this house to be tidy.” Then let the possibilities start to bubble up.
Instead of saying, “I never have enough money,” express your desire for whatever you want to spend money on, like “I would love to take dance lessons.” You can even start thinking about the kind of dance lessons you’d like to take.
Rather than wallowing in how much you hate your job, say “I want a job that I’m excited to go to.” You don’t have to know what that job would be yet. Just hang out in that possibility for a moment.
Instead of putting energy into what you don’t want and doesn’t serve you, focus your energy and attention on the outcome you do want.
Although expressing your desires in a way that inspires is a powerful practice for restoring intimacy and making you feel cherished, that doesn’t mean that everything you say to your husband has to be expressed as a desire. Sometimes you may want to make a request, like, “Would you be willing to go to the store for some milk?”
Charlotte found herself tongue-tied as she tried to write a note asking her husband to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer while she was out. “I started out saying ‘I would love it if you—’ then stopped myself because there was a ‘you’ in there and I knew that wasn’t right,” she told me. “I agonized for fifteen minutes before I finally wrote, ‘There are clothes are in the washer. I would love it if they were dry when I came home.’”
I thought that was pretty good, and I admit that’s how I phrase things most of the time too, just knowing that my husband so loves to do things he knows will make me happy. But Charlotte wouldn’t have risked a loss of intimacy by saying “Would you please move the clothes to the dryer for me?”
The difference, of course, is that when you make a request, it’s up to him to say “Okay” or possibly “No.” You’re putting the ball squarely in his court and asking for a response.
A pure desire never ends with a question mark, but a simple request does. Sometimes you may just want to ask him for a hand, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s a normal part of a relationship. Just today I asked John if he would look at my printer, which wasn’t working. He responded by saying he had a brilliant idea.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’m going to turn it off and then turn it on again,” he told me.
“That is brilliant,” I agreed. “How did you ever think of it?”
“I Googled it,” he admitted.
In marriage counseling, they typically ask you what’s not working. With intimacy skills, the first question is, “What do you desire?”
My way is really a lot more fun.