Why Do Men Avoid Getting Relationship Help?
Husbands Really Want To Make Their Wives Happy
You both feel the disconnection. You feel like roommates. You may even be sleeping in separate rooms. You come to a point where one of you doesn’t want to live this way any longer. You seek help with your marriage. Women will usually take the first step to find marriage help. When she tells her husband, he is not really okay with the idea at all. The mere thought of sharing your thoughts and feelings is alarming. That is because he’s faced with letting a third party know that his wife is unhappy and that equates to his feeling like a failure.
Men don’t dislike seeking marriage help because they might have to talk about emotions. What they hate is that getting marriage help forces them to experience that most dreaded emotional state to a man—feeling like a failure. Most men dread failure, particularly as providers, protectors, and lovers; their wives’ unhappiness makes them feel like failures. Husbands want to make their wives happy.
The need to ward off feelings of failure is why many men seem annoyed when their wives are unhappy, rather than ready to sit down and have a long, revealing talk about “feelings.” It helps explain why they’re more inclined to blame their partners for being too sensitive, too demanding, too selfish, too critical. Such blame temporarily relieves their shame, protects them from emotional reflection, and gives them a sense of empowerment. They can blame people and still be tough and in control. Unfortunately, being in continual blame-mode renders them powerless to engage with their wives or their marriage professional such as a therapist, counselor, or marriage coach, or to improve their relationships.
Having relationship skills in hand empowers them to be the kind of partners they want to be. Men really do want to have a warm and close marriage as much as their wives do, but the way they go about connecting is different. Marriage help shows the couple how their innate styles differ and how they can reconcile their differences to achieve the connection they both want. Men really do want to make their wives happy.
Emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. They have a richly detailed love map—they know the major events in each other’s history, and they keep updating their information as their spouse’s world changes. He could tell you how she’s feeling about her boss. She knows that he fears being too much like his father and considers himself a “free spirit.” They know each other’s goals, worries, and hopes.
Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a long-lasting romance. Without the belief that your spouse is worthy of honor and respect, where is the basis for a rewarding relationship? By reminding yourself of your spouse’s positive qualities—even as you grapple with each other’s flaws—and expressing out loud your fondness and admiration, you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating.
In marriage people periodically make “bids” for their partner’s attention, affection, humor, or support. People either turn toward one another after these bids or they turn away. Turning toward is the basis of emotional connection, romance, passion, and a good sex life.
The happiest, most stable marriages are those in which the husband treats his wife with respect and does not resist power sharing and decision making with her. When the couple disagrees, these husbands actively search for common ground rather than insisting on getting their way. It’s just as important for wives to treat their husbands with honor and respect. But our data indicate that the vast majority of wives—even in unstable marriages—already do that. Too often men do not return the favor.
Many perpetual conflicts that are gridlocked have an existential base of unexpressed dreams behind each person’s stubborn position. In happy marriages, partners incorporate each other’s goals into their concept of what their marriage is about. These goals can be as concrete as wanting to live in a certain kind of house or intangible, such as wanting to view life as a grand adventure. The bottom line in getting past gridlock is not necessarily to become a part of each other’s dreams but to honor these dreams.
Marriage can have an intentional sense of shared purpose, meaning, family values, and cultural legacy that forms a shared inner life. Each couple and each family creates its own microculture with customs (like Sunday dinner out), rituals (like a champagne toast after the birth of a baby), and myths—the stories the couple tells themselves that explain their marriage. This culture incorporates both of their dreams, and it is flexible enough to change as husband and wife grow and develop. When a marriage has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is less intense and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to gridlock.
