The Secrets of Happily Married Women

How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less

Scott Haltzman, Theresa Foy DiGeronimo

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470401804, 9780787996123
• eBook ISBN: 9781118039601
• Edition: 1

From the authors of the best-selling The Secrets of Happily Married Men comes the much-anticipated follow-up book The Secrets of Happily Married Women. In their first book, Dr. Haltzman and his coauthor Theresa Foy DiGeronmio outlined a recipe for men about growing a happy marriage: treat marriage with the same sense of purpose, resolve, and single-minded devotion that they have for their job. Although that workplace formula works well for men, an entirely different set of criteria resonate with women.

In The Secrets of Happily Married Women, Dr. Haltzman tells us stories from real women who are happy in their relationships. These women know how to get more out of their partners by doing less, by not trying so hard to make men perfect, not dragging them to couples therapy, not expecting them to think or behave like a woman. These are women from Dr. Haltzman's clinical practice and culled from thousands of contributors to his Web site www.HappilyMarriedWomen.com. They have learned to understand how men really work and tap into men's powerful hard-wired desire to please women and "be a better man."

1

Know Your Husband

When Rosa and Lucas stepped into my office for our last session, it was obvious that this was one happy couple. There’s something in the way that happily married people look at each other and treat each other. They don’t wear signs announcing their state of bliss, but still, everyone knows.

But it hadn’t started out that way for Rosa and Lucas. At our first meeting, after routine hellos, Rosa began to explain why they had come.

She told me that she had met Lucas during a code blue at a New York City hospital. At the time, she had been a nurse there for three years, and he was a new surgical intern. She had recently ended a previous marriage, so was wary when this mild-mannered doctor struck up a conversation with her and eventually asked her out.

In the early days of their romantic relationship, Lucas was sensitive, warm, and very attentive and loving. This was the kind of man Rosa had been looking for.

“I wanted to know everything about him,” she said, “what made him tick, what made him afraid, what made him happy.” Rosa thought she had all the answers by the time they celebrated their wedding day. But, a few months later, she began to get frustrated that Lucas seemed to be more devoted to the hospital than to her. Finally, they ended up having a heated argument over what Rosa called his obsessive dedication to his work, his self-absorption, and his cruel negligence of his wife.

When she finished berating him, she was shocked at the words he threw back at her: “You knew who I was when you married me. Now you want me to change. This is who I am. Why can’t you accept that?” How could he make such a hurtful comment and still claim to love her?

“If he really loves me,” she said looking at him rather than me, “he’d stop working so much and spend more time with me. Right?”

From Rosa’s point of view, the answer was an obvious yes. Either Lucas signs on to work fewer hours or the marriage is over. Rosa was hanging on to an either-or view of how husbands should behave; at that point, she was not a good example of a happily married woman

So when she came to my office hoping I could save her marriage by making Lucas change, my first step was to introduce her to Secret 1: Know Your Husband. Understand his true nature—and then use that information to your advantage.

THE CORE NATURE OF MEN

By getting to know a man’s inborn traits, a woman can enjoy his strengths as well as better understand his weaknesses. At the same time, this knowledge puts her in a position where she can use her mysterious yet wonderful feminine nature to bring out the best in this man she loves.

Of course, in some cases there are things that a man has to agree to change or the marriage may not be able to be saved. If he’s shooting heroin, blowing money on scratch tickets, going to strip clubs, or using violence in the household, then the Popeye motto, “I yam who I yam,” just doesn’t cut it. But in most other cases, any marriage will be a happier one if the husband and wife capitalize on the things that make them “who I am” and make them both feel whole and proud (and focus less on the things that do not!).

In this chapter, we’ll take a close look at the nature of a typical male, a nature honed through millennia of biological and societal conditioning, and explore ways that you can both enjoy who he is and gently persuade him to be even better.

Who Is This Guy?

With that goal in mind, you can (as Rosa did) begin to ask yourself, “Who is this guy?” “What makes him tick?” “Why does he act the way he does?” In the answers, you may find that your husband has some funny, weird, annoying, and idiosyncratic ways of doing things that are quite different from the way you do things—not necessarily “wrong,” just uniquely his.

As soon as Rosa learned to better read Lucas’s male nature, she was able to give less time and emotional energy to the impossible task of making her man change because she wanted him to, and to put more emphasis on getting him to want to change. It wasn’t long before Lucas chose to drop those excessive overtime hours and run home to his new wife, now a very happily married woman. How did she get him to do that? Well, that’s the secret I’m ready to share.

Secret 1 will explore seven of the many reasons why men see the world differently than women, and how knowing those differences gives women the remarkable opportunity to get exactly what they want and need out of their marriages:

1. Men need to feel cared for.

2. Men need acknowledgment of their efforts.

3. Men have trouble verbalizing love and regret.

4. Men need to protect their families.

5. Men need to be right and in control.

6. Men need action.

7. Men have an undeniably strong attraction to females.

When I think about the uncanny ability of a good woman to change a man’s tendency to have a self-centered, ego-driven nature, I’m reminded of that scene in the movie As Good as It Gets when Jack Nicholson’s character says to Helen Hunt’s character, “You make me want to be a better man.” It is her reply that explains why it’s worth the effort to teach men how to be more than they think they can be. She says simply, “That’s maybe the best compliment of my life.”

There. That is the magic power women have: to touch a man so deeply by caring for him that he wants to be more and better. At their core, men are hardwired to want to please their mate and make them happy. Understanding your man’s nature will help you touch the core of who he is and get back from him all that you need to be happily married.

Consider the following, not as rules, but as guidelines that might differentiate you from your husband and give you insight into the many ways you can use a man’s nature to strengthen your marriage.

Of course, many women have these same drives. And, naturally, all these needs are not equally strong in all men. But the goal is to avoid marital disappointment, frustration, tension, and even divorce by accepting the fact that men and women have different physical and psychological strengths and weaknesses. This understanding can be used to support the two opposing pillars needed to give a marriage a strong structure on which to build.

REMEMBER THIS

It Starts in the Brain

Any discussion of human behavior has to include the main engine behind all thoughts and actions: the brain.

So when I talk about the brain, please remember that I am talking in broad generalizations; just as every person is different, every brain is different. To begin: There are two lobes of the brain. In most individuals, even left-handers, the left brain controls the understanding and speaking of words, the fine details of images and words, logic, mathematical sequencing, and orderliness.

The right side of the brain has a different area of specialization. Rather than appreciate the exact semantics of speech, or see the fine details of items, the right side of the brain is more big picture and holistic. The brain’s centers for creativity and emotional interpretation are found in the cortex of the right brain. Music and creative movement are generated from the right side of the brain.

As a fetus’s brain develops in a mother’s uterus, it will begin to shape itself based on whether the growing child is a boy or a girl. Although the expression of gender traits varies from one person to the next, the hormones androgen and estrogen act on the brain to produce “typical male” or “typical female” brain types. These differences include the following:

• The male brain is 10 percent larger in mass than the female brain. (Men’s heads and bodies are also larger.) Much of this larger brain consists of white matter, which shields the brain cells from trauma and keeps information running quickly along the whole cell.

• The female brain contains more gray matter than the male brain, and these gray-matter cells tend to have more connections between them. Due to these additional connectors, the cells in the female brain are more likely to interact with many other cells simultaneously.

• The visual-spatial region of the right cerebral cortex is thicker in males in the area associated with interpreting sensory data, such as measuring, doing mechanical design, perceiving direction, map reading, and working with blocks or other objects (like the car engine). In females, there are more nerve cells in the left half of the brain where language is processed.

• The brain’s two distinct hemispheres are connected by a group of fibers called the corpus callosum. In women, parts of the corpus callosum are larger than they are in men. These more fully developed pathways between the two brain hemispheres may help women to better integrate information from the logical (left) brain with the intuitive (right) brain.

As you read the rest of this book, keep these differences in mind. Differences in brain structure are microscopic, but they can sometimes result in monumental differences in behavior.

So read on, and get a snapshot of who your man really is. With that understanding, you too will soon be doing less work and getting more love.

MEN NEED TO FEEL CARED FOR

Men need to feel cared for? Oh no, you and your man may say. A man wants to be the one who cares for his family. He is not the weak partner who needs someone to care for him! Well, yes and no. Yes, men do want to pamper their wives and be in charge of things (as I’ll explain later in this chapter), but there’s no denying that many of them also have a strong need to be cared for by their wives. If men didn’t want to be taken care of, we would not be so accustomed to hearing women say, “He’s such a baby when he gets sick” and “He acts like he thinks I’m his mother and will indulge all his needs” and “Sometimes I feel like my husband is my third (or fourth, or fifth) child.” Sound familiar? Most men do have distinct moments when they express dependency on a mother figure and a desire to be taken care of. This is common and natural among men.

I confess to having this need myself at times. On Tuesday nights I work late, usually until after 8:00 P.M. Because I don’t get a chance to eat dinner until I come home, I hold on to the secret hope that when I arrive at the end of that long day, my wife will have some leftovers heated up for me. More often than not, Tuesday is pizza-delivery night in my house. When Susan thinks to warm up the oven and put a few slices in before I get home, it makes me feel taken care of. I’m not talking about an intellectualized process; it’s an instinctual thing.

If a man has the need to be taken care of and his wife doesn’t understand it, avoids or denies it, or refuses to respond in any way, he’s likely to feel a sense of loss or unhappiness—even though he may be unaware of exactly why. Somewhere inside his psyche he wants to know that his wife is willing to do things to make his life more comfortable.

Nurture or Nature?

I know; I know. You’re absolutely right to be wondering at this point, “What about me?” I’m sure you’d too feel happy to have clean socks without having to do the laundry, so you might well be asking why your husband doesn’t do that for you to nurture your needs.

He definitely should nurture your needs too, but there are reasons that a man, more than a woman, needs to be shown how to do that through his mate’s example—and those reasons are rooted in both nature and nurture philosophies.

Most men are raised by women who take care of their domestic needs. They grow to expect this kind of caring from the women who love them. Most guys I work with identify their mothers as their main nurturer in their childhood; few of those guys had been encouraged in their upbringing to be caregivers.

“Hold on a minute,” you say. “Girls are raised by women too, and they too get their socks washed by their mothers. So why don’t they grow up looking for that same kind of care and attention from their mates?” Good question, and one good answer points to estrogen. There’s evidence that females are wired to be the ones who have more to give emotionally. In one study, one-day-old females responded more strongly than males to the sound of a human in distress. One-week-old baby girls, but not baby boys, can distinguish an infant’s cry from other noise, and four-month-old girls, but not boys, can distinguish photographs of those they know from those they don’t know.¹ I just don’t believe that these infants “learned” how to play gender roles as early as the first day of life. I think the difference is hardwired.

As they grow, girls are five times more likely to play with dolls, and much of their imagination is tied into tending to their “baby.” Compare this to how boys play with their action figures, and I’m sure you’ll agree that caregiving is much more natural to girls.

These findings and others quite similar indicate to me that right from birth, females have a more highly developed intuitive sense—they are gifted at reading the feelings and thoughts of others, detecting emotional clues, and responding in appropriate ways. Until the last two generations, most career women were in teaching or nursing—two very giving professions. Some say women gravitate to these types of careers that are extensions of the maternal role; others say that women have been relegated to them. Either way, there is a strong cultural and social history behind women’s role as the ca...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Know Your Husband
• Chapter 2 - Nurture His Needs—and Yours
• Chapter 3 - Fight Better
• Chapter 4 - Talk Less
• Chapter 5 - Have Lots of Sex
• Chapter 6 - Take Charge of Your Own Happiness
• Chapter 7 - Heal Thyself
• Epilogue
• Notes
• About the Authors