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Editors Note: This is a guest post from Cory Huff. Cory is an actor, director, sales manager and the author of AGoodHusband.net, a marriage advice blog for men.
Marriage is a wonderful thing. I’m happier now, after almost six years of marriage, than I have ever been in my life. I’m so grateful to my sweet wife for all of her kindness and patience. We made things way too hard when we first started our marriage. Here’s what I would recommend to simplify your marriage.
Lower Your Expectations
What’s that you say? What kind of advice is that? It’s sound doctrine, my brothers and sisters. When you’re first in love it’s easy to put your spouse on a pedestal and fail to see their faults. After being together for a while the veneer can rub thin. This isn’t a bad thing, it just means that you see the human in your wife and you love her even more.
Stop Fixing, Start Listening
This was probably the toughest thing that I had to learn as a newly married man. Most women are strong, smart, capable human beings and they appreciate being seen that way. Usually when my wife approaches me with an issue of some sort it’s because she wants me to listen to her, show that I care, and give her a little bit of encouragement. When I start telling her how to fix it she gets annoyed. We have a catchphrase for this situation – “I’m sorry honey, that sucks!”
Put her first – always
Your wife is with you more than anyone else. She is or will be the mother of your children. Plan on being married for a long time. In order to make this easier on yourself, whenever you have a choice between doing X, Y, Z or making your wife happy, choose your wife. If you feel like that is taking time away from your family or your social life, talk with your wife and set up boundaries you are both okay with.
Be Fiercely Loyal
Similar to the previous idea, but different in that if someone disparages her, defend her! Never, ever speak ill of your wife, and always back her up when it comes to raising children, interacting with family, or buying groceries.
Be Affectionate
You love her, right? Show her. Duh. Find out what she likes and do the things that she likes, not the things that you think she might like. Since people change over the years, pay attention to her changing tastes.
Make Her Laugh
You probably made her laugh when you were dating, right? You’d do anything for her then, right? Why not now? It’s been too long and you’ve forgotten how? Even better! She’ll be delighted once she figures out what you’re doing. Stand on your head, learn to juggle, find her ticklish spot, do something that helps her relieve stress and she’ll look upon you with a new found respect that you never knew was possible.
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This goes along with defend her. The hub needs to tell his mom to BACK OFF! There is nothing worse than feeling like a hub has chosen his mommy over his bride. You guys talk about being a manly man. That is not a manly man. I hear this grip from women all the time.
Women want to be desired and pursued. They want to know you would choose them over life itself. They want to be wanted. This takes your actions and your words.
AMEN LAURIE.
This is fantastic advice. My wife and I just has a HUGE argument over this. I failed her several times in every category on this list and she called me out today. I know better. I am better.
This post has put laser focus on some areas that need work. Thanks for keeping it brief and to the point. A lesson I can learn and take to heart on my own blog – where I tend to be a little long. Thanks for the posting.
Kevin, you are awesome. The best stories are the ones where people are brave enough to face a problem and fix it. We’ve all got imperfections, and it’s hard to swallow it and improve. But your commitment and willingness are already making a difference, I’m sure.
I absolutely disagree with the whole concept of this post. If you think about it, all six tips could be reduced to one: resist your inclinations. If you (either if your partner is male of female) do not feel, in this moment of your marriage, the inclination of listening or making her/him laugh just because you’re in a bad mood or for any other reason, these six advices say: betray yourself, betray your natural inclination and behave fake. PRETEND. This is the most immature advice I could imagine. Instead of behaving naturally and trying to find out what’s the problem, instead of OPENLY TALKING ABOUT IT WITH HER/HIM, instead of wondering why you’re in this “low-marriage-enthusiasm-stage”, you just decide to PRETEND. That’s pathetic.
PD: Marriage, like everything in life, has a beggining and an END. I think you have this naive childish vision of love, this very american-religious-big-bullshit fairy tale. I hope one day you can free yourselves from that enslavement and enjoy the good things of love, not the painfull ones.
Good bye and sorry for my awful english.
jose
Definitely agree with this post, but it goes both ways. BOTH husband and wife should follow these steps.
Too many times do people get hurt due to people putting their desires over the love of their spouse. Becoming part of a relationship means you give up certain luxuries of being single for hopefully something much more special and deep.
I do agree with JOSE though that this can come across as fake. However, for many years people develop habits for behaving as individuals and once you become part of a committed relationship you need to adapt to the changes required for effective communication. It can come across as pretending but really if you love someone would it really be pretending to do any of things mentioned above? You’ll want to make them laugh, put them first, be loyal and love them for who they are. If it still comes across that way then your with the wrong person because you will want to do those things for them.
Just a thought!
i love the first line – lower your expectations. hilarious
Someone who has been married only SIX years giving marriage advice!!! Get out of here. I’m with Jose and Kristy.
I have been married 17 wonderful years.
Good article.
I feel sorry for people like Jose that can’t find happiness in love.
With quite a few years of marriage behind me, I have to say these tips are valid for both sexes. OK, maybe not the “Listen – Don’t fix” one. I’m sure my husband would love me to fix more stuff rather than emotionally support him
I can’t help but think that Jose must have gone through a very nasty relationship or breakup. Hope you can find a loving, supportive partner.
I have 6 others
#1 save the money you were going to blow on a ring/wedding and buy something of real value.
#2 People change, with current divorce laws No-Fault is nothing more then a cash out and run method of separating a fool from their money.
#3 You will not know who is the right person for you until it is too late 20-30 years to late. Marry when you are old and keep the young earning years to stock pile your retirement.
#4 Marriage will not fix past problems. People use this excuse often and find that the problems just get worse because you just slammed the door on the opportunity to leave without major damage.
#5 One hand helps the other, you will never SAVE someone from themselves. This is not a partnership but a sick form of co-dependence. Save your effort for your self work. I am not talking about that “new age” crap, I mean real world skills not what colors my charkas are.
#6 Or the best way to avoid divorce. Cohabit and just don’t marry.
This article sounds like it was written by a female. Men should never marry until the divorce laws are equitable.
I never realized just how bitter many of you are!
I’m happily married, and while we’re not perfect, we respect each other and support each other. My wife is the one I always put first, and she does the same for me. It gives us strength to handle a bitter (as evidenced above…) world quite successfully.
Wrong you gave your balls willingly.
Protecting my ass in a world that will stomp on me for the fun of it is in no way ‘bitter’ sir. The ability to walk away or tell a violent person ‘theres the door’ is priceless. Just because you inprisoned yourself are you impling that we all should? To that I say No sir, the law is more equal to the fairer sex and brutal to any who would dare own a pair. Just because you gave up your rights doesn’t make it Right.
Ok, I think you misunderstood me. I would like to say to Jane and Brandon that I really like long relationships. I feel happy for Brandon, and I would love to have a long relationship, just like his. But that`s not the point. I think that a lot of people experiences love in a very radical way: either I end up with a person for my whole life, or otherwise I am a bitter and sad person until I die. There is nothing in the middle. And this conception is, for the majoritiy of the people, very frustrating. It gives you a wrong idea of yourself, a looser/winner stupid idea. It is not real. Reality is far more sophisticated, far more complex. And complexity it is a good thing. We are no stupids. We are suposed to think FOR OURSELVES.
I’m sure that if Brandon or Jane break up with their partner (I hope they don’t), they will see themselves as loosers. Instead of thinking about the great and fabulous 17 years of love (which is a beatiful thought), Brandon will only stare at the grey future ahead. I will never have this experience. I have been 10 years living with someone, and it has been perfect. And now, I’m sure new experiences will come. I’m happy for this, I’m happy for both the past and the future. Just like Brandon.
If you keep believing in this “trascendental” kind of love, most of you are probably going to be very unhappy. Of course is only my opinion. It is far more better to accept the nice unpredictability of all things. I had this professor in my college, a very very christian man, who told us this: “don’t think your life is predectible, because you will be betraying God, who is a non-predectible being.
jose
That’s the first time i post to this blog. I found it verrrrrry interesting because of the articles, they are spicy, fresh and involve real relationships. I am divorced so, I know a lit bit more now. i made mistakes but marriage takes two to tango and every relationship, right?
Anyway i follow the posts so I’be back again soon. Keep up the good work.
unfortunately my site is not yet translated in English, will be soon. I work as a wedding – event planner and have my own office in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Wow, I was reading this to see if after 14 years there was a way I could save my marriage, but I feel like the men who wrote the negative comments, they sound like my husband…,,,maybe I need to learn to give up!!
I am shocked at how many men have left negative comments. You put more faith in your job and more work in your business than you put into an institution sanctioned by God. And then you used the excuse of divorce laws to somehow back up their claims that marriage was unfair to men. Marriage isn’t about fair, it isn’t even about ‘love.’ It’s about growth and learning how to love someone more than yourself. We don’t come into marriages knowing how to be a good partner, those are things we learn on the job, like parenting, and any other worth while endeavor. When God commanded that a man should leave his family and cleave unto his wife, it wasn’t an accident. He wants you to set priorities. He wants you to learn the things that will help you grow and free you from enslavement to selfishness. If you can’t let go and put your faith in ideas bigger than and outside of yourself, you will never be happy. More than anything else, God wants you to be happy.
“An institution sanctioned by God”???? What does that mean? Is it God’s will for us not to be honest and just never say what we think? Is criticizing marriage (or criticizing in general) a new kind of sin?
What is this, the Inquisition???
Anyway, I did not criticized marriage, but faking happines into it: pretending everything is allright instead of THINKING WHY is not¡ I don’t belive in a God that has given us BRAINS and do not want us to use it. Does He want us to be some kind of alienated robots???? No, I don’t think so. I think He is pleased to see we make some mistakes, that we fail and break some stuff and then we can still go on living again: this is called LEARNING. Divorce is learning. Losing things is learning. Everything is learning.
And by the way, if God wants me to be happy, why would you, your faithfull followers, struggle so hard to make me feel GUILTY about everything? I think you should have some meeting with you Boss, don’t you? There’s some contradiction in this guilt/happiness bussines.
jose
You fake things everyday. You don’t take out your personal frustrations at your customers, and you expect that any problems your waitress has at home, she is going to treat you well and ‘fake it.’ One would think you would expect more of yourself than you do from employees and the people that serve you. And one would hope that you would give much more consideration to your spouse than you would to a customer.
May I recommend “Happiness is a Serious Problem” to you – by Dennis Prager.
Fake it until you learn how to do it without faking it.
so, H-town Honeybee, tell me, please, if I am understanding your words correctly: your advice for me and for everything else in this forum is to pretend. To behave fake. Isn’t it?
You seem to assume that I behave fake in my life, and in my work… I don’t know what you mean by that. Maybe that I’m polite with my co-workers. Maybe you have some kind of confusion between hypocrisy and good manners. I do not.
I have a question for you: have you ever been in love? Have you feel this craving, this delicious vertigo, this hole in your heart that needs to be filled? If you have, you know what I’m talking about. Love. You can’t fake it. In fact, you can’t do nothing to help it. It is impossible to fake love. Love is the opposite of faking.
I have a good book to recommend you too: Symposium. It was written some 400 years before Jesus was born. The writer was a Greek guy called Plato, and the main subject is love. Love as a path for wisdom and happiness and true knowlege.
Jose
No one is always in love. You don’t even LIKE your spouse some of the time. It takes WORK to love someone all of the time, even when they are negative and can’t find any reason – not even just for you – to try and be happy. I wasn’t talking about faking love, I was talking about faking being happy. Have you always been able to throw a curve ball? Shoot a hoop? What it takes is practice, and even when you know you can’t do it, you keep on trying. I think you are confusing love with romance, or with passion. You can’t always have romance and passion, but you can always have love. Miserable people can not bring happiness to a marriage, and will only bring their partner down unless they can learn to be happy, even when it’s not ‘natural.’
what will I achieve if I practice enough faking? Happiness o good faking? I don’t know, this is very confusing…
Ok, no more sarcasm on my part: marriage is nothing but a very traditional kind of social contract. Nowadays women work and earn money, but for thousads of years the contract was like this: I (the man) give you a place to stay and food to eat, and you give me sexual exclusivity and children. Love is a relatively new thing that only cames in the renaissence time. Some hundreds years ago.
You are right, romance is not love. But marriage has nothing to do with love either. It’s a political institution. And now politics are a bit more sophisticated than a thousand years ago, so we divorce and so on. And we pursue change and love (or romance, or whatever it is) as long as we can.
Another thing is that you seem to assume that divorced or separated people did not work enough in their former relationships. That we are somehow lazy or weak people. How do you know? It is quite self-righteous on your part, isn’t it?
I am always in love. so I am very happy.
My husband and I have been married for 40 years. Love is not always a feeling, but it can still be a choice. The remarks about pretending or betraying oneself are too simplistic. Extending myself for the well-being of my lover is a choice that keeps me growing. Through really tough times and wonderful times, I have learned that love is not a contract or a business agreement, but a gift. The list above shows some means that may be useful at times for giving that gift.
This is all great stuff. I’ve been married for 6 months now. My mother and father divorced and are both remarried now. My mother told me the best advice ever that I wish to share…”Think with your head and not with your heart when it comes to love.”
I can say this, If I followed my heart, I would have married my ex. I am very happy with my husband and we love one another. My ex ultimately was not a good person and I learned I could not “fix” him.
Wow: a lot of anger and resentment out there. I just hope those guys aren’t out trying to date women.
wow!!
how misogynistic and bitter.
sad.