Hi, my name is Paul Friedman. I founded The Marriage Foundation and today's
topic is how to be a better husband and I'm going to ask you to not be
defensive and to really pay attention because I can help you. I started out as
a divorce mediator so I've seen it all. I've been saving marriages for decades I
know what's up. I know the differences between men and women. I know that the
psychological approach doesn't work because it's so narrow, it doesn't really
help but I have information that can really help you become a better husband
and I'm going to share that with you. Let's start with why you got married in
the first place and why your wife got married to you. There's a compound
reason. The big sort of overarching reason people get married is to be
happier, right? Simplistic but true and then you got to
go, what brings happiness? Now, I could give you a lot of mundane answers but in
the context of marriage they are irrelevant, what really brings happiness
to all of us. Every single one of us is unconditional love. Now, it's more
difficult for men to experience love than it is for women. We're biologically
restrained from that where women because of their biology they're tapped into
their heart and I always use this example because I think it's funny.
Let's pretend that you found out you were pregnant.
You went to the doctor and he said, "I've got some interesting news for
you. I don't know how it happened but you're pregnant." Your first reaction
would likely be, "Well, cut it out. Take it out of me. What the heck is going on here?"
Or something along those lines but a woman let's say, she went to
the doctor and the doctor said, "I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is you're pregnant." And your wife would go, "Oh." And then he'd say
"But this is really bizarre, inside of you growing inside of you
is a duck." She will go, "Huh," why? because women have to take care of these
children. Men typically don't have the patience. We can only take it for so long.
Now, you could say, "Wait, not me." Well, come on. It's much more difficult for men to
have the patience to nurture and care for someone who's not able to take care
of themselves especially our own kids. This is just the way it is and there's a
reason for it. We're not biologically designed to do that. So unconditional
love is still what we wanted when we got married and we turned to our wives for
that. What did they turn to us for? Well, we have something that biologically
dictates a need. They're not physically as strong. We have bodies, we have
physical bodies. You just can't get away from that and the female body is very
strong in many respects but not for basic primitive defense.
There's probably hardly any women in the world who could beat you armwrestling
no matter how much they've trained. You have a masculine body, they have a female
body. So in their deep subconscious, what's going on is they married you for
obvious protection. Okay good. Now, I'm going to tell you what you're doing wrong
chances are. So imagine that you hired a bodyguard and Bruno's been with you for
20 years and you become friends but he's your bodyguard. One day you're walking
down the street and he becomes over familiar with you. He takes out his gun
it goes, "I could easily blast you away." He's fired, man. There's no
chance you're going to keep him around so your wife married you for protection. You
get mad at her for some ridiculous reason, your ego got poked, you don't like
what she said and you just pulled out a gun. You have to be
extremely careful to not take your sword out of its scabbard, you are there to
protect your wife and family. You are not there to use your power, your strength on
them. You could snarl at someone else but not her and you probably have. You can
even use a mean voice on other people but not on your wife and not on your
daughters. This is something that they don't teach us but this is reality and
if you think about the logic of this it's impossible for it not to be true.
And when I discovered this and I started helping men with this, they were blown
away. You gotta put that away and it wouldn't
hurt to bring it to the floor and have a discussion and say, "I just learned this
and I'm never going to do this again and I'm sorry for the past." Now
it doesn't heal the past. One of the troubles with real life is that whatever
damage we've done in the past remains. The good news is you have a whole new
future. A lot of people go, "Well, that's not fair. I'm changing. I've
changed." And I go look, if you drive your car off the side of the cliff and
you're 10 feet down in the first, second and you go, "Oops, I made a mistake. I'm
never going to do that again." It doesn't matter that cars going to hit and the
damage will be done but it doesn't mean you shouldn't change your driving habits.
You shouldn't change your habits in your marriage.
The first step obviously is to put away any kind of threatening anything
from her point of view. You gotta stop that. There is another aspect that you
have to stop and I call this over-familiarity. What happens is in
every marriage, we start to relate to each other as if we're old friends
but not in a friendly way we noticed the flaws, we notice the mistakes and we
behave impolitely. We're rude basically, we don't behave the way when we first
started dating and we were very attentive, very careful, very appreciative
smiled, complimented and we stopped doing that.
You need to reverse that. You need to behave in a way that reflects that you
now know more about her the good stuff and you want to take care of her because
she married you for protection and you want to make her your princess your
queen so that's what we'll do it and then she will be free to love you. You
will see quickly if you change your behavior how quickly she responds
because women have this hard quality that's why we marry him and we want that.
I have zero tolerance for myself, 100% tolerance for my wife. Now you may go
"that's not fair" and I'm telling you, "I don't care, it works."
My wife is amazing. She makes mistakes, she's emotional -- I'm not so she will
sometimes fall into an emotional place and say something that I
could take the wrong way but I refused to. I smile, I wait for it to pass. I'm not
her judge, I'm her husband. Now look, a lot of men I'm just going to be
candid wait too long before they start doing the research you're doing now.
Their marriage is already falling apart. If that's the case for you, look at The
Marriage Foundations course for men, look at it. Write to our counselors. The
counselors -- it's a free service and they're not going to push anything on you
that you don't need and they're going to be honest with you about how well it may
work in your situation but we're a foundation. We're nonprofit, we're not
here to make a buck. We're here to help you so take advantage of us. I hope
I've given you some good ideas. You could subscribe to this. You could share it, you
could look at the other videos and articles. You could like this. You could
put in a comment. You could write to our counselors -- it might be a good idea and
other than that blessings to you, blessings to your wife
and blessings to your family. We're here to help you. Take advantage of us. I
really hope you do. All right, God bless!