What is a husband? A whole man, who is one-half of a marriage. The loud, hairy half. He saw someone, fell in love, and decided to live with them for the rest of his life. Where they are headed he does not know but one thing is clear as he looks in the bathroom mirror, sucking in his gut: “I am a husband now.”
Becoming a husband is a choice. You are born a son, a brother, a second cousin once removed, but you decide to become a husband. Like many choices that the average man makes, he doesn’t put a lot of thought into it, rather he just jumps in and hopes that it will all work out.
He can’t sit down and evaluate all the pros and cons because when he’s single it’s impossible to comprehend all that’s involved. There are no classes you can take, they don’t hand out pamphlets in the jewelry store when you’re buying the ring. All he really knows for sure is that he really likes her body.
It’s a confusing time to be a husband, especially in America, because a husband’s role is in flux. This is new. This is recent. This has only been happening within my lifetime. Previously, the husband was the head of the household. It was his job to provide for his family and protect his wife and children. In return, he was the king of the castle.
That has changed.
There are no roles anymore, it’s all improv. The positive effect of progress is that after years of following the orders of idiots, wives are no longer expected to obey their husbands and a husband isn’t expected to make more money than his wife. It’s all hands on deck as everyone tries to do anything to survive. These are positive changes but have left many men confused about how they are supposed to act.
There is some perplexing information out there for guys, in magazines and on websites, filled with lists of what men should and should not do. “The Top Ten Things a Man Should Do for His Wife Without Asking,” “The Top Fifty Things a Husband Should Stop Doing Immediately,” “Why Are Men So Stupid?”, “Who Needs Men Anymore?”
The problem is that all these articles are written by women. This is a helpful expression of what women want but is not a realistic take on what men can do. What men are hearing is that a wife wants her husband to act like a man—not necessarily the man he is, but the man that she wants him to be.
Good luck.
A lot of this leads to husbands trying to fake it. If a wife wants him to be more sensitive, that’s fine, but he’s going to have to pretend. You’re talking about a different kind of animal. I would like my cat to chase Frisbees, but it’s not going to happen.
Wives ask for men to be more involved with the children, which isn’t a lot to ask. What is a lot to ask is that he care about the children as much as she does. No man can decide to be more maternal; it’s just not possible.
I love my children, but it doesn’t compare to what my wife feels. When we go out for the night, as soon as she gets in the car, she gets all misty-eyed.
“I miss them already,” she says.
I don’t even know who she’s talking about.
Here is the trickiest part of being a husband. All of the really great aspects that a husband gets out of a marriage are so emotional he can’t talk about it. He can’t. He feels it, he knows it, but to start talking about it is nearly impossible.
Guys don’t hang out with other guys and talk about how much they love their wives. If they did, the other guys would down their beers and head for the exits. We just don’t do it. We don’t cuddle up with our buddies under a blanket and spend time talking about how lucky we are and how warm we feel inside. It’s hard to even type that.
Because we don’t talk about our marriage and unearth it and evaluate it, a lot of times wives feel unloved. They feel like we aren’t paying enough attention or spending enough time working on “us.”
But a husband is working on it all the time; he’s just not talking about it. The one thing husbands have going for them in a marriage is that they are goal-oriented and that’s a real positive, because whatever we do, we want to be good at it. Therefore, we want to be the best husband we can possibly be.
Whatever that means.