The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands

Cafe Society
21

As the I-Ching says; You hold together with the wrong people

Perhaps you need to re-evaluate the kind of man you are attracted to and want after, because that kind of man is the one who will treat you this way.

Along that road, you should examine the “basic obligations” you are asking them to fulfill and see if they are real needs, realistic expectations and whether you can live without asking for them. No, I don’t mean every basic obligation, but if there are some that no man has wanted to fill for you, then you need to look it square in the face and ask yourself just what you are expecting.

And ask if the type of man you go after is capable of these things.

Change your wants, change yourself, change the kind of man you want. And things will improve.

I know that sounds like a lot, but all I’m saying is that you need a little objective introspection. If you can get past the ego hurdle, it really isn’t as hard or as painful as it first appears.

22

I can see several sides to this.

First off, I, too, object to the book’s title.

The message contained in the book is fairly simple (at least, judging by what little I’ve read about it – I don’t own the book). And it’s easy to trivialize that, or to think “I just paid twenty bucks to learn this?” And finally, the message doesn’t seem to be gender-specific – it applies to husbands and wives, or any two life-partners.

However. That simple message is often ignored (at least in my experience).

I divorced my first wife after an eight-year marriage. We were best friends before the marriage, and stayed best friends throughout much of the marriage. But the last three years or so, things changed dramatically.

My ex-wife didn’t work outside the home; she kept the house, and watched the children. That was by mutual agreement. The last couple of years of the marriage, I would come home from work, change clothes, and play with/watch the children until their bedtime. Once the kids went to bed, I did laundry, vacuumed, and other assorted chores/household repairs that needed to be done. On weekends, I would cut the grass, go to the grocery store (with all the kids in tow), and fulfill other obligations like coaching the oldest’s baseball team. I did all this because my ex-wife “never had time to get all this done” and “needed some time away from the kids every once in a while.”

I began dropping hints that we needed some time to ourselves occasionally, but for whatever reason we never arranged to have our parents (both sets of whom lived in the same town we did) watch the kids for a Saturday afternoon so we could eat out or see a movie or whatever. Sex became a non-entity; in the final year of our marriage, we had sex four times. I constantly felt like the fifth wheel on a four-wheel car. I begged several times for us to do something, anything, to get back that spark. Nothing ever happened.

Finally, I left. And lo and behold, I started learning stuff. Like the reason we could never ask her parents to watch the kids on the weekends was because her parents were watching the kids during the week, while I was at work. Or that she was constantly belittling me to our friends, deriding my efforts to help her with the housework. Or that the reason housework was never done was because once the kids were shipped off to her parents’ house, she sat around and read books or watched television.

In other words, it was more important to my ex-wife that she have time to herself than it was for me or us to have time. Eventually, I reached a point where I just couldn’t do it any more – I was essentially a single parent with a roommate.

So, yeah, the message is simple. But oftentimes those simple messages are the ones that we can forget the quickest.

23

I guess I’m super lucky, naive or both, but how do you “forget” to love and appreciate someone?

I don’t get it. He’s my husband and I love him. Always. I’m not saying we don’t disagree or bicker over things but I never forget that I love him unconditionally.

My mother used to say “I always love you, but I don’t like you too much today” if I was crabby or bad.

I ALWAYS LOVE YOU.

24

That’s a key point in the book. So many women try to be SuperMom they forget about their husbands. It’s so important to run the kids here and there and do the shopping and volunteer at the Y and then the husband is put on the back burner. It’s okay for a man to be neglected for some women, but god forbid the women should be neglected by the husband.

25

I don’t think it’s a matter of forgetting, so much as taking things for granted. My ex-wife took it for granted that I would always handle as much of the marriage, house and kid chores as I possibly could, while neglecting to do much of the same herself. Sometimes it takes a jolt (or an outside observer) to make you realize that you’re not pulling your own load in a partnership.

If you want the partnership to continue, you try to fix things once that realization has occurred. If you don’t care much about the partnership, you’ll just keep your head down and hope the other partner never realizes that you’re slacking off.

26

Isn’t Dr. Laura’s advice moot in such a relationship, then? Would such a person as your ex-wife read her book and understand what was going wrong?

Or if (as you seem to be saying), your ex didn’t care about the relationship anymore, would she just ignore it and go on keeping her head down?

I guess, like jarbabyj, I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had such a self-destructing relationship as the the one you’ve described. I can’t imagine not appreciating my wife for what she does every day, and I can’t imagine not telling her so. It’s just second nature to me, and it seems to be to her as well.

It seems to me that, if you love someone and want to be with them, the showing of appreciation and love comes with that naturally. If you’ve stopped doing that, then isn’t it pretty much over already?

I still don’t much see the point of the book, but maybe I’m not in a position to see it, being in the relationship I am in.

27

I think thats the problem: some people actually need to told this.

I also think the honor and commitment angle is an important one. You can live in a marriage quite happily without “True Love” if you respect and deal honorably with your spouse. And to tell you the truth, I think True Love is 9/10s the above, anyway.

28

Jesus, you gotta be kidding. That train left the station decades ago.

Um, and why would they not be sharing them? Maybe it’s because when men do share their feelings, their feelings get demeaned and degraded in ways women would never do to each other. What, because we rarely burst out crying when insulted means we’re obliged to accept subtle (or not so subtle) emotional ridicule? Moreover, I’ve noticed that women often try to “reinterpret”, or bend mens’ feelings into something that is more along the lines of what they feel instead of accepting mens’ feelings at face value. WTF? Worse still is womens’ analysis of mens’ feelings as a springboard to changing mens’ feelings into more “appropriate” ones. WTF?

I also share other posters contempt for her condescending statements “men are simple creatures”. Although not stated, the implication (I don’t feel I’m going out on a limb here, I have seen this attitude in women before) is that “simple” means “less evolved”. I don’t buy that. I turn it around: “women are overly complicated”. How’s that better?

Art

29

For me, personally, the book was simply confirmation of the way I’ve always treated my husband. And I didn’t really need the confirmation because I know the “simple rules” Dr. L states are really true and workable (assuming you are dealing with a decent, stand-up guy). I know this based on my happy marriage of 18 years compared to the unhappy (or now-extinct) marriages of some of my friends who have told me over the years that I am “too nice” to my husband. How the hell can you be “too nice” to someone you love? I think many people get into the habit of bickering and nagging. My husband and I do NOT bicker. And I do NOT nag. We have had disagreements, of course – even the odd actual arguement – but the normal course of our relationship is smooth. I think this is largely because we both try to see the other person’s side AND we both allow for imperfections.

The sex thing (which many of the book’s critics have seized upon): There are two people in a marriage. Why should the desires of the person who doesn’t want sex always trump the needs of the person who does? When were first married, my husband had a very strong sex drive – he wanted it every day, usually twice. I, meanwhile, was running a house and dealing with two babies, one of whom was disabled. I was tired. So, because I only wanted it once in while, he should do without most of the time? Instead, I made a deal with him – he could have sex on demand, but most of the time it was going to be of the quick-and-dirty variety. And, when I really was in the mood, I’d let him know and we’d get a little more inventive. When the kids were really little, I was only really in the mood a couple of times a month, yet we had 1 or 2 quickies a day. Why not? It only took 5 or 10 minutes, it didn’t hurt me in any way, and it made him happy WAY out of disproportion to the minor inconvenience to me. As the kids have grown older, I’ve gotten a lot of my own sex drive back. And, as my husband has grown older, his sex drive has slipped a bit. Currently, we do the quickie thing a couple of times a week and something a little more involved a couple of times a week. After almost 20 years we still have sex 4 or 5 times a week, which I think is pretty damned good. Now, I have a friend who was married about the same time I was. Her husband also would have liked to have sex every day. But she was tired. And my solution (which I shared with her when she complained about her husband’s constant “demands”) was too “degrading.” So, they had sex when she wanted it – every couple of months – and her husband just did without the rest of the time. She’d even get pissed if she caught him looking at porn – she almost left him once when she caught him masturbating to a borrowed skin-flick. Apparently, if she wasn’t interested, everyone in the household needed to just detach their genitals! I talked her out of leaving him (“What’s he supposed to do if you won’t give it up? Explode?”) and they are still together. But they sleep in separate rooms (because he snores) and have a cool, cordial relationship instead of a warm, loving one. Maybe it works for them. But I can’t help thinking I have the better situation.

Dr. L, in my opinion got some things wrong in this book. Specifically, her contention that these problems in marriage have grown somehow out of the women’s movement – she thinks everything can be laid at the door of our liberal society. She’s really a one-trick pony in that regard. I think these identical problems (nagging, bickering, unhappiness and disconnectedness) have always been a part of many marriages. It’s human nature to want your own needs put first and to think your own opinions more worthy of merit. But if you want to live happily with someone else you have to respect their needs and opinions, too. This is common sense, which is what this book is full of.

Unfortunately, it’s common sense as related by Dr. L – who I admit can come across as a bit of a harpy. This book, believe it or not, is much less strident than her previous ones (especially the last one about child-raising which was often downright mean. Currently her show has been leaned towards marriage questions – obviously to give her the chance to hawk the book. I’m finding that somewhat annoying. And her advice to callers hasn’t been quite so balanced as her advice in the books. She’s leaned a little too far to the side of the men, in my opinion. Last week she took two very similar calls – one from a girl who was afraid her boyfriend was going to buy her an engagement ring she wouldn’t like, and one from a woman whose feeling were hurt because she had given her husband a gift he didn’t like. The girl was told to learn to love her ugly engagment ring because it came from her boyfriend’s heart. The other woman was told to “get over it” and give her husband a different gift if he didn’t like the first one!

But the book isn’t like that. It’s much more nuanced than you’d give it credit for if you’ve only heard her on her show – where, frankly, she’s often not at her best. All right, all right – on her show, she’s often a judgmental, mouth-breathing, snap-tempered lunatic. But the book has some good points and good suggestions – especially if you apply the advice across both genders. Basically what Dr. L is saying in the book is this: realize that your spouse is not you. He or she is a separate person with separate feelings and perceptions. And his or her feelings and perceptions are not wrong, they’re just different from yours. And that is good advice, whoever it originates from.

30

“Men must have sex in order to feel love?”

E-yeah. Right. :rolleyes:

31

So why do you need to get a book to tell you that what you’re doing is right?

I just can’t believe people need to buy a book to learn that. More simply, I can’t believe people just don’t KNOW that.

32

Again, based solely on my own experience, I believe it’s possible to love a relationship more than one loves a person.

My ex-wife had a great situation for a while, and I think she learned to take that for granted. She loved the relationship (and its attendant benefits to her) more than she loved me.

I believe in some cases a person can recognize their selfishness and correct their behavior, if they still love their partner.

My wife, the lovely and talented Aries28, and I try to recognize the work the other puts into the marriage. If you take the time to do that, I think that helps the relationship grow stronger.

Is it common sense? Sure. But I don’t think that means it’s common practice.

33

Well, I didn’t need it. Actually, my husband bought it for me as a gift, because he knows that I wanted it – even though he hates Dr. Laura himself and can’t even stay in the same room when her radio show is on. . He had heard about it on an FM station’s morning show. Of course, they were talking about the sex chapter. Anyway, as I read the book, I kept giving him snippets from it and he kept responding, “But you do that anyway.” or “We already do that.” One funny thing, though. He’s taken to calling quickies, “DLS” for “Dr. Laura Sex.” So, he’ll say, “How about some of that DLS?” instead of “How about a quickie?” Cute, huh?

Yeah, I find it kind of hard to fathom, too. But I actually do know people who honestly don’t know realize that their spouse is a separate person with separate feelings and perceptions. And they honestly *don’t[/] realize that their spouse’s feelings and perceptions are not wrong, they’re just different from theirs. And, even when they’re told this, some of them still don’t believe or credit it. I don’t know why we’re so surprised by this – after all, the motto of the Straight Dope spells it right out: Fighting ignorance of all kinds is taking longer than we thought. Of course, no book is going to help all of these ignorant people. But it might help some of them.

34

Dale Carnegie wrote that people thrive on recognition and appreciation before Dr. Laura was born. The fact that she repeats that rule now only shows that she has read Carnegie. The fact that people now praise her insight only shows that Carnegie was right.