How to be a better husband.
Here is something you may not know:
Most men I see coming to therapy are coming because of their relationships.
They want to be better partners, husbands, or fathers. The people that love them are encouraging them to get support through therapy. This says something to me: The men’s relationships are important to them, even critical to their lives. Something's getting in the way though. As a therapist who specialises in therapy for men, I’ll show you a good place to start:
Prioritise Connection
Connection is vital to the health of your marriage and disconnection is common for marriages. This is because it really does take effort to maintain a bond over time.
Connection is more than common interests and quality time.
Connection is when your relationship has a secure foundation.
Connection might look like:
feeling like you can share openly in your marriage
really listening to each other
understanding their fears and vulnerabilities
truly caring about what their wants and needs are.
Connection is about really feeling SEEN.
Unfortunately, men are less likely to prioritise relational health. Men often do not grow up with social pressures to maintain relationships and connections in the same way as women.
We more often see women as striving for relationships, especially romantic partnerships, because it is viewed as a measure of success. Now, we could talk about whether this is harmful, but what I really want to highlight here is that it may not come as natural to men to prioritise relational health and connection, as well as having had practice to maintain it. That is why we are here though!
Here are some ways to prioritise and build a stronger connection:
Get to know your wife or spouse (over and over).
Be interested in what they like even if you don’t like that thing.
“Tell me about the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”
“How is that book you’ve been reading?”
Be curious about how they are managing life, like work, kids or other relationships.
“How was your day?”
“What was that like?”
“Are you managing okay?”
REALLY listen and understand your spouse.
Repeat back to them; Reflect: “What I heard you say is…”
Don’t give advice, unless that is what they are looking for.
Create opportunities to have quality time.
Can you make it so they are not occupied with other things? ex. babysitter, offer to complete a task that’s nagging them in back of their brain.
Get creative in carving out pockets of time, even small ones.
Don’t be afraid to schedule for quality time or intimacy.
Ask how your wife / husband / spouse receives love.
Put it in your own words: “What makes you feel the most loved?”
Validation?
Affection?
Quality Time?
Manage feelings.
This means a husband navigating their own experiences & communicating their needs.
I'm going to bet your wife or spouse has asked you to be more communicative and vulnerable when talking about your experiences and emotions.
They want their husband to share with them. This is how you stay connected with your husband or wife and one way of achieving emotional intimacy.
It is also how you prevent yourselves from living a life of “walking on eggshells!”
Here is where husbands might go wrong when learning to be more open and vulnerable, and talk about feelings, they:
Hold feelings in until they can’t and unleash them on their partner then are confused when their partner receives it poorly.
Rely on their spouse to provide insight into their emotional experience while also regulating their emotions.
Basically, this is leaning too heavily on your spouse to do your emotional labour. This is what I call a husband making their spouse their therapist.
Letting your emotions build and build inside you, then have them explode out of you and relaying them to your wife or spouse is not managing your emotions. Will we all need to vent in our marriage sometimes? Sure. This is different though.
What I see often is men not regulating their own emotions on the regular. This is what causes the build up, then the uncontrollable floodgates of feelings.
What also might happen, even if you are not aware of it, expect your wife or spouse to sift through your feelings and make sense of it. That job is not for them though.
Here is what managing emotions for a healthier marriage looks like instead:
Regulate your own emotions
Learn what you are feeling and why.
Connect your brain and your body; Attune to your feelings and shift in how your body is responding.
Find ways to calm yourself and cope with difficult feelings.
Get to know yourself
Understand your past experiences and how they are connected to the present.
Know what your triggers are / Things that are upsetting. What are you thinking and feeling in certain situations?
What do you need and want to feel regulated, content or calm?
Learn to communicate
Connect what you’ve learned about regulating emotions and your inner experience, and articulate it.
Your spouse wants to know what is going on with you, but they want you to have the skills to manage, so that emotional labour isn’t all on their shoulders.
Learning to regulate your emotions, about yourself, and how to communicate is a challenge if you have always struggled with it.
Unfortunately, so many men don’t get the emotional education that they need to care for themselves and relate in a healthy way to their wife or spouse.
This is because there are still gendered expectations that many men grew up with, like getting emotional means you are weak, be strong, keep sad feelings to yourself, or just don’t be affected.
This means, you may need help learning this stuff, which also means being open to new experiences, like:
Psychotherapy /Counselling
Support groups for men
Self-help books
Know how to repair.
This is probably the most important marriage advice for husbands.
You will fight and disagree within your marriage, I guarantee it.
What you want to learn is, how to make it better as a husband.
How do you deal with the disconnection in your marriage that will inevitably happen during an argument?
Tips for repair in a marriage:
Make sure you give them space to calm down (& husbands: take your time too!)
Neither of you are helpful if you are still riled up and heated. Let it simmer before you decide how to move forward.
Get comfortable with admitting your part.
Take responsibility. There is always a part we have played, even if it’s: “I’m sorry raised my voice” or “I should have let you say your part without interrupting”.
Try to hear them out.
This means letting your wife or spouse talk about their experience, even if you have issue with it.
Understand and be curious; Put yourself in their shoes.
Find a solution (if needed).
Keeping in mind what is best for us, and not what is best for “me”.
Thinking about solutions and arguments as “we are in this together” or “your problem is my problem” can be helpful to get us out of those defensive stances we take when upset.
Repair isn’t always a long drawn out talk.
Sometimes repair is simply a husband hugging their spouse or making them a cup of coffee or tea; a sign of affection. You both get the message that it got too heated and let's move on.
See invisible labour in your marriage.
Even though gender prescribed roles in heterosexual partnerships have come a long way from: wife stays home with children and manages the household, while the husband is the more detached breadwinner, we still see some effect today.
I mention this because gendered expectations can affect the health of your marriage by limiting freedom to have the marriage that works for you both, instead of what is expected.
Frankly, people in marriages and relationships don’t talk about their roles and responsibilities enough. We assume a lot!
Sometimes these unspoken roles can make husbands unaware of labour that still falls to their wife or spouse and burdens them with responsibility the husband had not thought of.
There is something called unpaid invisible labour that happens; This is most widely seen in heterosexual marriages. This is because on average, women still do more childcare and household tasks than men. Yes, this includes woman who have full-time employment.
Something I learned from a company called Fair Play Life was that partners who take on the invisible work will ask for help, but end up doing some of the labour regardless.
For example, you might ask your wife or spouse: “Hey maybe I can take the grocery shopping off your plate this week?” and you’ll think “great, I’m helping them out by taking the grocery task off their list”. Yes you are, BUT what we don’t see are the tasks that went along with this responsibility, like:
Making and maintaining the grocery list
Inventorying the fridge for what needs to be removed, used or about the expire
Anticipating what will be needed, rather than waiting for something to be emptied
Knowing what the kids need for lunches
Planning what is needed for upcoming meals
Putting all the groceries away
This is one example of many. Consider the categories of researching and deciding what the kids are doing for winter and summer breaks, communicating with school and daycare, making social plans with those other couple friends, keeping track of the calendar (including birthdays and special events), making appointments, grooming and wardrobe needs (who’s checking we all have shampoo!?) and auto maintenance.
Now, these may be tasks that are dispersed among you already, but too often we are not sitting down and talking about it. As a husband, do you know if your wife or spouse is managing their load okay?
Let’s considering each other’s capacity for responsibilities and task completion, while also making sure our spouse gets to enjoying their life too. How long has it been since they tried out a new hobby (you know, that thing that has been on their list for years but can never find the time)?
If you are not sure about the reality of unpaid invisible labour in your marriage, there is a fantastic exercise a husband can bring to their spouse’s attention. This is not an advertisement, it is simply a tool I have used personally and recommend to other husbands, wives, and relationships:
The Cards | Fair Play Life. Check it out.
Try it. I swear your wife or spouse will be so happy to see you are showing attention to the parts of your marriage that can often go unattended to: really talking about how you organise your life and relationship and whether it works for the both of you.
Disclaimer: This is general advice. Like all self-help information, it is not personal and tailored to fit for all people and situations. This content should not be taken as a substitute for individual mental health or relationship support.
