It's Wednesday, the day when we talk marriage! I introduce a topic, and then you follow up either by commenting or by writing your own post and then linking up! I'm taking the summer a little easier these days, so I've asked Rob Thorpe of Huzband to guest post today, to let us in on men's minds.

photo © 2011 Wesley Nitsckie | more info (via: Wylio)

I Corinthians 7:33-34 says, “one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

Pleasing one’s spouse assumes you know what it takes to please them – you know their needs and are deliberate about trying to meet them. Husbands and wives both have needs, and they get way off base assuming their spouse has the same ones they do. Sadly, most wives today think their man only has one need….want to hazard a guess? Yes, he does have that need, and it is a God-given physical and emotional need. But today, let’s talk about another need he is much more reluctant to discuss.

Deep down inside your husband has the same basic needs that you do – spiritual, emotional and relational. His physical needs may get top billing, but God created him with deep needs in other areas. Truth is – he doesn’t usually know how to articulate them, or is embarrassed to do so.

You already know that women tend to be more emotionally open than men....and women are more comfortable with their emotions. But your husband has real emotional needs too. Women tend to see feelings and behavior as the same. They act on their feelings. If a woman is angry, she behaves in that way. If she is elated, it's expressed in her behavior. Usually a woman's behavior is an open window to her emotions. But most men are not that way. They tend to hide their emotions. Men tend to embrace the philosophy that says that real men control of their emotions. This was usually reinforced early in his life by his father, grandfather, teachers and coaches.

Truth is - men are very emotional...we can be deeply moved by movies, music and beauty! Like you, we also have a deep need both to love and feel loved. And the love that is most precious to us, other than God's love, is our wife’s love.

In Shaunti Feldhan’s great book, For Women Only, she reports the results of a large survey of husbands that were asked the question – “What is the primary thing you wish your wife knew?” The overwhelming response was – “How much I love her”.

Over several years of counseling and mentoring husbands, I have heard firsthand accounts of husbands saying things like - “I want her to know that I love her with all his heart and soul." Others have said repeatedly, I love it when she is happy and hate it when she is sad or hurting." We may not admit it to our friends, or even speak it to you – but, the love of our wife is critical to our survival!

In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl shared the account of his time in a concentration camp during World War II. He says that one particularly chilling night he and the other exhausted prisoners were forced to walk through snow to work the frozen ground with pickaxes until morning. Though few words were spoken, one of the emaciated men whispered, "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what's happening to us." Silence followed the man's remark, but Frankl writes, "...

each of us was thinking of his wife.....I looked at the sky where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved."

Next to an abiding faith in God, Frankl says the love of their wives gave men strength to rise from their crowded cots and face another pain-filled day. You see, contrary to popular opinion, men do have emotional needs....they need to feel loved by their wives if they are to go out and "slay the dragon" each Monday morning. We husbands may not face Nazi prison camps...but as Thoreau put it men live "...lives of quiet desperation" as we face the hopelessness and exhaustion and a hard-edged world week in and week out.

So wives, please look behind the facade. We desperately need a wife who loves us so well that the memory of your smiling face and the echo of her encouraging words will keep us going in the face of our daily adversity. We need you more than you know.

Now, what advice do you have for us today? Write your own Wifey Wednesday post that links back to here, and then leave the link of THAT POST in the Mcklinky below. Thanks!

Labels: husbands, intimacy, loving, marriage, wifey wednesdays

I’ve been learning some things too and I’m pretty excited about it since they’re things I never envisioned myself learning to do. I changed the oil in our Suburban this past weekend. If that doesn’t impress, I also changed the brakes! If my husband hadn’t hurt his wrist recently, I probably never would’ve taken the time to learn how to do such a thing, but I’m glad I did. The older I get, the more I appreciate how important it is for women as well as men to be well-rounded and equipped to handle whatever the task at hand may be, rather than tagging every chore as “men’s work” or “women’s work.” We saved our family some of the money my husband works hard to earn with my willingness to step outside my comfort zone and do what needed to be done. Now that I’m done bragging on my awesome womanliness....

Labels: homemaking, husbands

In leading marriage seminars across the country for the last few years, it has come to my attention that one of the scariest questions for a man to hear from the one he loves is this: “What are you thinking about?”

As I wrote in this column earlier this summer, men are like waffles. Their brains are filled with little boxes, where they keep things like work, and children, and wives, and fishing, all neatly separated, and ne’er any two shall meet. Women, on the other hand, have all the boxes jumbled up and knocked over, so everything is intertwined.

What many women don’t realize, however, is that for most men, the biggest box in their brain actually holds nothing at all. That’s right: it’s completely empty. Men are capable of thinking about nothing.

And in the middle of this lack of thought, many men, new at relationships, may make a big mistake when they hear that dreaded question. They may tell the truth.

“Nothing,” they admit.

It is not very long until they realize why this was a big mistake. Women, you see, are incapable of thinking about nothing. We’re always thinking about something. So if men say they’re thinking about nothing, we immediately assume they’re lying. They must either be thinking about you-know-what, or they’re thinking about something we think is stupid.

So we start to drill them on it. And as Bill Farrel, the author of that brilliant book Men are Like Waffles, Women are Like Spaghetti, explains, men then frantically hop to any adjacent box they can find in order to latch on to an acceptable answer.

“You’re right! I was thinking about something. I was thinking about hunting.”

“Oh,” she replies, placated. “Are you going to pay for a deer license this year?”.

“No,” he admits, scrambling to explain why he was thinking about hunting if he’s not planning on hunting. And so it goes, for about a decade or two before women realize that perhaps he is, indeed, thinking about nothing. He’s not criticizing us, or holding something back, or refusing to admit feelings. He just may honestly not have any feelings at this particular moment.

We women may lambaste men for being so uncaring and shallow, but if you look carefully at women’s behaviour, you’ll see that secretly we’re envious. What, after all, do women spend their lives doing at the gym? We’re trying desperately to think about nothing, too!

We meditate. We take yoga. You don’t see very many men taking yoga, do you? It’s not just because they don’t like stretching those groin muscles, either. It’s because they’ve already achieved nothingness. Women can only dream.

When yoga doesn’t work, we exercise to endeavour to reach some sort of mental discipline. But as our heart rate rises, so do our brain patterns. “My heart’s pumping fast. I wonder what my cholesterol is? I wonder what my husband’s is? We really should eat more fish, but it’s expensive. I found a spare twenty in my jeans after they went through the dryer today. I found one of Johnny’s toys, too. He really needs to clean up his room.” And so on, and so on.

We can’t turn it off, which is why we’re always feeling guilty. It’s like we live with a TV inside our brains, constantly playing scenes of what we should be doing. Each scene leads to the next one. If only our brains were nicely compartmentalized, we’d probably enjoy greater peace, as would the men in our lives. But then we women wouldn’t be nearly as complicated, and where’s the challenge in that? I’ll never achieve nothingness, and my husband will just have to live with it—if he gets around to thinking about it, of course.

Labels: columns, husbands, loving, marriage

Labels: husbands, hygiene, intimacy, marriage