A marriage counselor might take a neutral approach to the conflicts in your marriage, letting you and your husband bruise each other in each session. Or she may even present divorce as a better option than staying married, since you’re so unhappy.
The Six Intimacy Skills empower you to revitalize your marriage so you feel desired, cherished, and adored every day, for life. Nobody wants a divorce from that.
If you have threatened to leave your husband, that threat is terrifying him. You might think he doesn’t care, but he does. He’s taking it very personally that you’re not happy, and it’s making him defensive and nervous every day. The odds of regaining a strong connection under those circumstances are very low, which means that things have little chance of getting better. Therefore, one of the first steps to revitalizing your relationship is getting off the fence.
But it can be scary to jump down too. If your goal is to get off the fence gracefully, land on the married side, and feel inspired about doing it, you’ll need to know how to turn the clock back to the beginning of the relationship. I’ll explain more about that in Chapter 18, but for now, ask yourself this: Would you want to be in a relationship with the man who wooed you? Think back to what your husband was like when you first met and he was always making you laugh, telling you how wonderful you are, and bringing you presents to show he was thinking of you. Would you want to be in a relationship with that guy? Because he’s the guy who will show up once you begin implementing the Six Intimacy Skills.
You may be so thoroughly put off by your husband right now that you can’t remember what you ever liked about him. If you’re anything like I was, you secretly believe that you are smarter than your husband, and you’ve probably gone around gathering evidence for this, like the time he hired the crooked contractor, the time he overpaid for the car, or the time he missed the freeway exit and took you twenty minutes out of your way. You think of these instances as proof that he is not capable or competent. You quietly make a case that, of the two of you, you’re the smarter one.
Because of this, you’ve been trying to teach him how to improve in certain areas. You tell yourself that you’re trying to help. You’re trying to save money. You’re trying to make sure he has a good relationship with the kids or that you don’t run out of propane or that the colored clothes don’t get bleached. But the end result is that you’re emasculating your husband, who very likely does things completely differently than you would—unless he’s trying to do them your way to keep the peace.
But even if he is doing things your way, chances are that he’s not happy about it. And you’re actually not either, not really. If that’s what you really wanted, you could have saved everyone a lot of trouble and just married yourself. But you didn’t—you married someone who had a different point of view.
Men tend to do a lot of things differently than women do. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it can be difficult for us women to wrap our brains around their methods.
There are many situations where you and your husband have different approaches, like handling finances, child-rearing, and lovemaking. There are myriad everyday things—kitchen cleanup, car maintenance, retirement planning, laundry—where you might see the world differently than he does.
One way to cope is to decide that your way is right and his is wrong. You can be outwardly tolerant about this, rolling your eyes only to yourself when the bathroom sink is still dirty and the floor is covered with dust bunnies. But when the stakes seem high, it’s pretty hard to keep your superiority complex under wraps. After all, it could result in a higher tax bill, disappointed kids, or damaged cars if you don’t show him how to do things the right way—your way.
It starts out innocently enough—with a suggestion. If he washed the whites in hot water instead of warm, they’d come out cleaner, you say. You’re just being helpful, because you happen to know better in this instance. But so much of what we consider “helpful” in wife language actually comes across as critical to your husband. What he hears is, “I don’t like your way. You should do it my way.”
Let’s say your husband grunts and accommodates your suggestion but goes back to his old ways the next time he starts the laundry. You might decide to remind him again, thinking he just forgot. What’s the harm in that? Most women don’t see any.
But most men do. They would consider that exchange emasculating and think of you as a nag.
In 2012 the Wall Street Journal ran an article called, “Meet the Marriage Killer” by Elizabeth Bernstein about how nagging causes more divorces than affairs do. I thought of my own marriage when we were on the brink of divorce, and I have to admit, we were a great example of that. I was causing all the damage. There was no need for another woman to entice my husband, because I was already ruining it all by myself.
What was also disturbing about this article was that they had experts give suggestions on how to stop nagging, but, weirdly, the suggestions were just variations of nagging that would not help create better intimacy or get things done. Here’s one suggestion from the article: “Explain why your request is important to you. ‘I worry about our finances when you pay the bill late. We can’t afford to pay late fees.’”
Here’s how I know that’s bad advice: I’ve tried it myself. Repeatedly. And it got me wall-to-wall hostility—not promptly paid bills and a grateful peck on the cheek like I imagined. I’m not sure if it was the part where I implied that I didn’t trust him to be responsible that irritated my husband or the part where I explained what a late fee is and why I didn’t want to pay one (as if that wasn’t terribly disrespectful). Either way, indulging my anxiety and doubting him instead of remembering that I married a smart, capable guy didn’t serve either of us very well. What I wanted was an intimate, passionate, peaceful partner, but instead I treated him like a child who needed constant supervision.
Now I no longer remind my husband to pay bills, and he doesn’t forget to pay them. The guy was making car payments since before I got my driver’s license, so I’m not sure where I got the idea that he might stop doing that once we were married. When I started respecting him by expecting the best outcome, my anxiety melted away because it was unfounded.
Here’s another “helpful” tip from that same Wall Street Journal article: “Set a timeframe. Ask when your partner can expect to finish the task. (‘Can you change the car oil this weekend?’) Let him tell you when it works best for him to do it.”
The suggestion here is that somehow he will feel less resistant to your attempts to control him if you simply ask him when he wants to meet your demands. But it’s not my experience that my husband jumps up to do something cheerfully just because I’ve given him a time frame in which I expect him to do it.
My husband is smart enough to notice me trying to control him like I’m his boss or his mother—instead of his lover—no matter how clever my wording. Experience tells me that if I try to get him to change the oil “this weekend,” I’ll end up with a husband who is completely committed to not changing the oil, because he doesn’t want to be controlled, managed, or mothered. It’s simply not a respectful or dignified way for a wife to behave.
Today I hardly even think about little chores like oil changes and bill paying. My husband takes care of all those things and is always thinking up new and amazing ways to please me every day. I don’t ask him to do that—he does it on his own because he wants to delight me. The result is that everything gets done and we both feel loved.
However, it wouldn’t be that way if I had listened to marriage counselors or the Wall Street Journal. It’s so sad how we have been so poorly trained to communicate in our relationships! I caused myself plenty of distress by doing the very things that the experts said to do, attempting to reduce the conflict in my marriage. I see terrible advice like that everywhere I look.
One really powerful way to feel hopeful and inspired is to realize that you probably never had the right information about how to get back to a playful, passionate relationship before now. Remember, there’s no Relationships 101 in schools. Where were we supposed to learn about how to have a great marriage? From Cosmo and Glamour?
But imagine what you could accomplish with the right information. What if you had all the skills to really bring back the magic you felt in the beginning? Wouldn’t that make you a lot more excited to try?
One common mistake I see women making in their relationships is asking the guy where the relationship is headed. That never works, because we women are the ones who decide the course of the relationship.
Tawnya had separated from her husband but was continuing to see him occasionally, and they were still engaged sexually, which I thought was a great sign for them. When you’re looking to revitalize intimacy on an emotional level, having it still exist on the physical level is a good start. But Tawnya wasn’t so sure. “I just end up feeling anxious after he leaves, because I don’t know if this marriage is going to make it, but he’s still getting sex out of it. Sometimes it feels like the relationship is over and we’re just friends with benefits. What should I do? Should I ask him how he feels?”
That was her question: “Should I ask him how he feels?” I redirected her to her own desires by asking, “How do you feel? What do you want?”
She said, “Well, I don’t know if this is going to work out or not,” which is not a feeling or a desire.
I asked her again, “What is it that you want to happen, if you could wave a magic wand?”
“I want my marriage back,” she finally admitted. “I want us to get back together.”
Now we had the information that really mattered: her desire, not how he felt.
Most husbands would rather we never ask them how they feel. It’s not respectful to the male culture. Most men don’t like to talk about their feelings, because that’s not their area of strength. Men tend to be good thinkers, and women are generally better at feeling and expressing their feelings.
If you’re not paying attention to your desires and feelings, and instead are saying to your husband, “What do you want? How do you feel?” you’re completely lost. And the reason you’re so lost is because you’re scared. You don’t want to admit that you feel lonely or that you miss him, because that feels vulnerable. You don’t want to be the first to say “I want to be a couple again,” because it’s emotionally risky. It seems safer to make him say it first.
I suggested that Tawnya say something along the lines of, “I’m really missing you, and whenever I see you, I enjoy it so much. It makes me wish we could go back to the way it was when we were husband and wife under the same roof. I would be so happy if we could do that.”
Tawnya let out a nervous laugh when I said that. “That is what I want,” she admitted. “But I don’t think I can say that.”
That’s the challenge about being respectful: Sometimes it’s pretty scary. In fact, practicing intimacy skills in general takes a heck of a lot of courage. You can’t reconnect with your husband by asking him what he thinks is going to happen. Relationships are up to the woman, so if you’re asking him, you’re asking the wrong person. Your power lies in expressing your desires in a respectful way.
The most common mistake I see women making in relationships is the same one that I made for years before I finally, painfully realized what I was doing. And even then, I couldn’t stop right away—not until I developed a system to help me.
The trouble starts the fateful day we decide to be helpful. We think we’re just giving a useful suggestion, sharing something we know that he apparently does not. But what we’re really doing is letting him know we don’t think he could figure it out on his own. The “helpful” suggestion is rife with disrespect. But the wife often doesn’t realize this. She is convinced that she’s just trying to help.
Husbands respond very poorly to disrespect, even if wives don’t realize they’re being disrespectful.
For men, respect is like oxygen. It’s that important. So the minute a wife is disrespectful, her husband gets defensive. He is trying to shore up his own sense of himself. He may do this by dismissing her or demeaning what she said. He might say something like “You don’t know what you’re talking about” or “Give it a rest” or even “Shut up.”
Now the wife—who was only trying to be helpful—is hurt. So she also responds from a defensive position, perhaps by telling him to stop being so mean.
Things are not improving—they are escalating. Now the husband says something mean back, and they are engaged in a full-blown fight. Both husband and wife get hurt.
This happens over and over, so many times that both of them begin to feel totally hopeless. I can tell when women are stuck in this cycle because they usually describe their husband as cranky, cold, or clueless. They talk about what a terrible temper he has or how distant he is—always watching TV, playing video games, or looking at his phone.
They have no inkling, no concept of how much they have contributed to this hostility.
I’m not saying that you’re responsible or that it’s all your fault. However, you have a lot of influence over the culture of your marriage, and when you change the way you talk to your husband, he will respond to you differently. If you go out of your way to be as respectful to him as possible, you’re going to get a much better response. He’s going to be a lot less hostile because he has so much less to prove and so much less to defend against.
One of the most tragic situations that I commonly see is a woman saying, “I had to divorce him because he was so mean and grumpy all the time. I was miserable and he was miserable, so clearly we weren’t compatible.” Really what happened is that she was being unwittingly disrespectful and her husband was responding in an angry, defensive manner.
I call this the “helpful-hurt-hopeless” cycle, and the only way to permanently disrupt it is at the beginning: Stop being helpful. Remember, “helpful” in wife language translates into “critical” in husband language.
If that sounds extreme to you, it did to me too, initially. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate that it’s actually more enjoyable to be the Goddess of Fun and Light than it is to be the woman who knows everything. When I stop trying to be helpful, I can relax and have fun with my husband again. The same will happen for you when you decide to keep your helpfulness to a minimum.