FOR MEN ONLY (5 page)

Actually, we do this, too…

Does that comment sound startlingly familiar to you? I realized that we men can understand this struggle intimately because we have a visual parallel. Every man knows what it is like to have tempting images pop up in his brain, unwanted…just like our wives have strong emotional memories or concerns pop up, unwanted. As one woman wrote in:

If all men are truly visual and can’t help it, then I think they should please understand that women are truly verbal and can’t help it. For example, the things men say to us are in mental tape archives and are as real today as they were the moment they were spoken.

“The things men say to us are in mental tape archives and are as real today as they were the moment they were spoken.”

So that’s why…

The involuntary, long-term nature of this can help explain why more than one husband has felt:

• blindsided when his wife brings up something that happened two years ago;

• surprised by a sudden flare-up of emotion attached to a memory;

• stung by unexpected heat that turns a conversation into an argument; or

• dismayed that she got hurt by something seemingly outside of the moment’s mood or context.

If you’re like me, you might think that she is unwilling to “let go” of something—an old offense or memory or grudge. That she’s choosing an “emotional” response, instead of a “rational” one—as if the two were mutually exclusive. (Hint: For women, they’re not.) What’s more likely is that her past is emotionally invading her present, and her current reaction is a quite reasonable response to the fact that
she
is feeling blindsided, surprised, stung, or dismayed by the current experience of an old problem that has never really been resolved or healed. Or perhaps there’s some current trouble that keeps invading her awareness—an open, running window that keeps painfully popping to the fore, even if she doesn’t want it there.

If her past is emotionally invading her present, her emotional reaction is a reasonable response.

Where’s the “Close” Button?

And that brings us to the most important piece of this dynamic: that most women find it difficult or impossible to close out and ignore unwanted thoughts and feelings. We’ve all heard that women don’t “compartmentalize” like we do, but I never before understood what that meant.

To illustrate, let’s go back to that conversation in our friends’ kitchen. I, too, had several things on my mind—including that I should check on the kids out in the backyard. But when I compared notes with Shaunti, we realized that I could handle those thoughts much differently than she could have in the same situation:

Jeff:
I’m talking with Alec, and think, “Should I check on the kids? Yeah, I’ll do that in about five minutes.” Then I simply put it out of my mind—like on a five-minute mental timer. I don’t give it another thought until the timer goes off.

Shaunti:
How do you
do
that? I would love to put a thought on a timer and not think about it, but it’s impossible. I simply have to function around that awareness that the kids need to be checked on or my friend is having a hard time with her marriage and needs me to call her or whatever. It never really goes away until the issue is resolved.

Of course, when I told Shaunti my timer function could actually put an issue that I didn’t want to deal with on hold and out of mind
for weeks
, her interest in my brain turned to alarm.

Our survey shows that the vast majority of women just aren’t wired to easily ignore unwanted thoughts. As one woman said: “The best I can do is to ‘minimize’ the other windows, not close them. I’m not actively thinking about those things every minute, but they aren’t gone, either. And they often pop back up and become active when I don’t want them to.”

The vast majority of women just aren’t wired to easily ignore unwanted thoughts.

On those occasions when you have multiple emotional “windows” open, how readily can you usually dismiss negative thoughts and emotions that are bothering you? [Choose One Answer]

For more than four out of five, closing out their unwanted thoughts either required effort or was impossible. (For women under age forty-five, the number rose to almost 90 percent.) The vast majority indicated that those thoughts would never really go away, or would at least keep returning, until whatever was causing them was resolved.

Which means that our usual manly advice to “Just don’t think about it” is about as helpful as another shovelful of sand in the Sahara.

We Can Relate

Here’s a way that you can almost certainly relate to what this feels like. Imagine that your company just lost its biggest client, and at 5:00 p.m. on Friday your boss says, “I’ll need to see you in my office first thing Monday morning.” If you’re like me, your weekend is ruined, and anxious thoughts wreak havoc until Monday arrives. Your normal ability to compartmentalize is compromised by the magnitude of the concern.

Women aren’t that dissimilar—it’s just that their magnitude threshold is far lower than ours. Just as you couldn’t close out the anxious thoughts about what might happen on Monday, she can’t close out all sorts of open windows.

That gives you a bit of a glimpse into how your wife feels when you have a bad argument in the morning and are at odds with each other. You can usually go off to work and put it out of your mind, but she may be completely unable to. The awareness that something is wrong is stalking her thoughts all day, until the argument is resolved and she is reassured.

You can usually go off to work and put an argument out of your mind, but she may be completely unable to.

Real-Life Example

I think we men need to have our eyes opened to the real-life examples that are all around us so we can see how this actually works and what to
do
about it. So let me pick an example that just happened last night. Shaunti was out of town with the kids, and a colleague invited me over for dinner with his wife, Donna, and two small children. When I arrived, Bob was working in another room with one of those fire-starter devices that you click to get a flame. The following conversation occurred as the adults sat down for dinner a few minutes later:

Donna:
Honey, what did you do with the fire-starter?

Bob:
I left it in the other room.

Donna:
But…the kids are in there.

Bob:
It’s okay. It would be impossible for them to figure out how to get a flame—it’s pretty difficult to use.

Donna:
But what if—

Bob:
Really, hon, there’s no way they would be strong enough to click the flame on.

Donna:
Okay…That’s true….

Previously, I wouldn’t have thought a thing about this conversation. But now, as I watched Donna across the table, I could tell—with my newly acquired, supersensitive male radar—that a window had popped open and was not going to close until something set her mind at ease. So I mentioned to Bob and Donna what I’d been learning about how women couldn’t usually just
decide
to close a window and not think about something that was bothering them.

Donna sat bolt upright. “That’s it!” she said, “That’s exactly what I’m feeling.” She pushed away from the table, moved the fire-starter out of the kids’ reach, and came back.

“Now,” she said, “I can enjoy dinner.”

Bob and I both realized that if she hadn’t been encouraged to take that ten-second action, she would have been distracted and unable to truly relax and enjoy the next hour of dinner. Even though she acknowledged that Bob was almost certainly correct that the kids couldn’t engage the fire-starter, the window would have been open and bugging her.

If she hadn’t been encouraged to “close that window,” she would have been unable to relax and enjoy dinner.

I hope you see all sorts of ramifications of this female wiring. It explains:

•
Why she seems preoccupied by “little things”
—even if you tell her to just ignore them.

•
Why she seems to have been “stewing” over an argument
—or seems (to your male mind) to feel overly insecure about a disagreement you’d already dismissed or forgotten.

•
Why she might be too tired or upset for sex.
One woman put it this way: “Try to understand—we’re carrying around a
lot
that we need to get out of our heads before we can really even feel like sex.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t even
need
my head to feel like sex.

Sequential Strategies for Sequential Minds

What’s the average taken-aback man to do?

The good news of this chapter, and this book, is that a little understanding can go a very long way. Based on our research—and on my personal experience—I recommend three positive responses:

1. Rethink your assumptions about how
she
thinks.

For example, consider: Maybe she’s
not
trying to hassle you by wanting to talk about fourteen things as soon as you come through the door after work. She really does have fourteen files open and running. And she can’t just “not think about something” that may be unresolved from the morning.

Also, if she brings up old wounds, she may not be holding on to a grudge, but actually trying to process through it so she can resolve it, close the window, and let it go.

She may not be holding on to a grudge, but actually trying to process through it so she can let it go.

In any of these cases, you can help by letting her—actually encouraging her—to process these things the way she probably needs to: by talking it through and having you listen (see chapter 5 on listening). (Note to self: If I’m smart, I’ll ask what her day was like well before bedtime.)

2. Realize you may not
be
the issue, even though you’re affected by the issue.

Well, okay, it’s
possible
you’re the problem. But more likely, now that you’re aware of all the traffic streaming through her consciousness, you can see why you shouldn’t just jump to the usual conclusion of,
Uh-oh, she thinks I did something wrong again.

(Pointer from Shaunti—If you’re not sure whether you’re the problem, or whether you just happen to be around when the problem comes up,
ask
. Something like, “Sweetheart, did I do something wrong, or are you upset about something else?”)

3. Be her hero and help her clear those distracting or painful windows so they don’t keep coming back.

Most important, remember that because it’s harder for her to just push something out of her mind, there’s more of a risk that she’ll be living in a marginally unhappy state for hours or days if something is wrong. Thankfully, you can have an important part in resolving it.

Let’s say a pop-up of some old hurt has arisen involuntarily, and she’s having trouble closing it. Maybe she’s unable to get a conflict with her boss off her mind or an old hurt from something you said has risen up in her head. Now’s the time to step up and give her a listening ear, a hug, or the reassurance she needs (see chapter 2 for how to reassure her) so she can resolve it in her mind.

Realize the futility of telling her, “Just don’t think about it,” and encourage her if she needs to take some action to close the window.

Even better, take some action yourself. Get up from the dinner table, go get her the fire-starter, and say, “I wanted to be sure you could enjoy dinner without worrying.”

Be one of the few, the proud, the in-the-know heroes.

Your woman needs emotional security and closeness with you so much that she will endure financial insecurity to get it

I
t happened the minute I decided that Shaunti was the woman I wanted to marry. As soon as I thought about popping the question and accelerating our relationship into high gear…I stalled.

Most guys I’ve talked to can relate. All my forward momentum vanished as anxiety stopped me in my tracks. The issue wasn’t her or how much I loved her or what I really wanted to happen between us—and soon.

The issue was money. It suddenly hit home: “How will I take care of a wife and provide for her financially?” I didn’t know much about relationship stuff, but I knew one thing: Women want security.

I knew one thing: Women want security.

I grew up in a small farming community in Michigan and had known plenty of financial struggles in my life. After high school I scraped by in the restaurant business for seven years before I went to college. But Shaunti was from the upper-middle-class suburbs of Washington, DC, and hadn’t experienced similar struggles. I was concerned about what she would consider a “normal” standard of living and whether I could provide it. So I waited. With that in mind, when I graduated from law school, I took a job with a big New York law firm that included a very good salary.

Finally, I figured, I could provide. So we got married and moved into a doorman building in the heart of Manhattan. In New York, doorman buildings are common but pricey. But Shaunti preferred one because it made her feel more
secure
, she said.

Aha!
I thought, confident in my manly insight into her needs.
Even if I might have preferred a different job, I’m doing what men do. I’m providing security for my wife.

Then I proceeded to work eighty-hour weeks for the next five years to pay for it all. During that time, whenever Shaunti said that I was choosing work over her or that I didn’t care about her needs, I experienced a strong and predictable reaction—I got upset.
How can she accuse me of not caring about her when I am busting my tail to prove exactly that!

Recently, when I asked a friend what he thought it meant that “women want security,” he described a common male dilemma: “It means I can’t ever stop running,” he said. “I need to do whatever I have to do to
ensure
that she doesn’t feel financially insecure. And if it means that I have to work really long hours, or stick with a job that I don’t like all that much, so be it.”

Perhaps you, too, have felt caught between a rock and a hard place, knowing that your wife wants you to provide a nice life for her and the kids, but she also wants you home by dinner. Impossible financial expectations on her part? Maybe, but
probably not
. As you’ll see in this chapter, men may be really frustrated by what they think their wives expect—but their wives may have no such expectations. In our case it turns out the doorman building in Manhattan wasn’t nearly as important as I’d thought.

Money Talks, but “Emotional Security” Sings

Our research shows that yes, women want security. But they mean something very different by it than we do. When a woman thinks of “security,” her primary thought is not about a house, a savings account, or tuition for the kids. For her, “emotional security” matters most: feeling emotionally connected and close to you, and knowing that you are there for her no matter what. Sure, providing financially is appreciated, but for most women it’s nowhere near the top of their list.

When a woman thinks of “security,” her primary thought is not about a house, a savings account, or tuition for the kids.

In fact, as one woman told us: “It’s not even on the
same
list! Feeling secure and close in the relationship is so much more important, it’s not even part of the same discussion as work or money.”

Forgive my confusion. Yes, I heard Shaunti
say
she wanted more of me. But I also heard her say that she wanted the doorman building. I assumed that she was choosing financial security over a saner and more enjoyable career for me. Her insistence that she wanted to make changes so I could be around struck me as appreciative gestures aimed at making me feel less pressured.

But now I realize—a little late—that she actually
meant
it.

On the survey, seven out of ten married women said that if they had to, they would rather endure financial struggles than distance in the relationship.

Why don’t you read that again. I know we find it impossible, but it’s true: 70 percent of married women would prefer to be financially
insecure
than endure a lack of closeness with their husbands.

In fact, even single women showed the same preference. And women who described themselves as struggling financially were even
more
likely to prefer emotional security!

If you had to choose between these two bad choices, would you rather endure: [Choose One Answer]

Among married women:

The problem here is that what seems blazingly obvious to women is barely visible for most men—or men simply don’t believe it. A few months back, a male pastor was interviewing Shaunti onstage in front of a large group of twenty-something singles. At one point, Shaunti decided to test our emerging hypothesis on this issue, turned to the women in the audience, and asked our survey question: “If you had to choose, would you rather endure financial struggles, or would you rather endure struggles arising from insecurity or a lack of closeness in your relationship?”

Nearly every female hand went up for the “I’d rather endure financial struggles” option.

Shaunti used that demonstration as a launching point and began outlining for the women how
men
think about providing. But after a few moments, the moderator interrupted.

“I’m so sorry, Shaunti,” he said, clearly flustered. “Could we back up a bit? I’m still so…shocked by what I just witnessed that I’m not hearing a word you’re saying!” Much to the women’s astonishment, men around the arena were nodding in agreement.

Women, you see, have an incredibly hard time believing that
we
think that
they
think financial security would ever be so important. As one woman asked in a focus group, “How could any man ever think we’d choose money over him?” Another said: “So in essence you guys are thinking that we are materialistic—really,
really
materialistic—and that we’d choose
things
over your happiness?!”

Uh…yeah. I guess that is what we’re saying. But apparently, we’re wrong. And for once, being wrong is very good news. Not only does the woman in your life care far more about you than anything you could provide, she’s willing to sacrifice financially to have more
of
you and more happiness
for
you.

The Inner Life of Mr. Provider

Are you still skeptical? One reason this is so hard for us to accept may have nothing to do with a woman’s wiring, but with ours. Shaunti’s research among men for
For Women Only
demonstrated that three quarters of all men are “always” or “often” conscious of their burden to provide—
and most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.

Guys can’t just demote work to some corner of our life. What we do defines us. Most days, it
is
us. That means our sense of self-worth—and a lot of other feelings—is all wrapped up in it. For example, working toward our family’s financial security is an important way we show our love. It’s not a big jump to then think, “Longer hours = more love.” And we assume the woman we love knows it!

The problem, I found, is that she
doesn’t
know it.

In fact, since what she wants is your time and attention (which creates emotional security), if you appear to give more time and attention to work, it appears that you are making work your priority. To her, that means that she is
not
your priority. That choice leaves her feeling distanced and unloved by you. Even if the main reason you’re busting your tail is to show her your love.

Thankfully, there’s a solution to this dilemma. To begin with, if security doesn’t really mean what we thought it did, let’s more closely redefine what security
does
mean to our wives.

Let’s define what “emotional security” means to our wives.

What Security Means to Her

Since most guys would never even think to put “emotional” and “security” together in the same sentence, what does such a foreign concept look like in practical terms? Here’s what we learned:

1) She feels that the two of you are close;

2) She sees that you make time together a priority;

3) She sees your commitment to her;

4) She sees that you are active in the life of the home; and even,

5) She sees you making an effort to provide (as long as that doesn’t crowd out 1–4).

Let’s briefly outline each.

1. She feels secure when you two feel close.

Creating a sense of closeness between the two of you is more important than anything else—to a woman, it is almost a synonym for emotional security. And I was encouraged to see that it was
so easy
.

For us guys, money in the bank helps us feel safe and successful. But for women, the currency that counts is more likely to be a strong sense of closeness or intimacy with their man. In other words, your wife wants to be your love
and
your best friend…to know that she is yours and you are hers.

For women, the currency that counts is a strong sense of closeness or intimacy with their man.

And here’s the surprise for us guys: Living in the same house and even having sex doesn’t necessarily mean that she feels close to you. Most married guys I know just assume a level of closeness. We share a house and a bed…how could we
not
be close?

But for our wives, proximity and sex do not equal closeness. Consider the following exchange from one focus group when we asked how women felt when men traveled away from home:

Q: Is the only cure for loneliness for him to be there?

A: Not necessarily. And anyway, it’s very easy to be lonely when he is physically there.

So what builds closeness?

So what
does
create a sense of closeness? Much of it is the little things that come along with being each other’s 1) love and 2) best friend.

1) It means that she feels you belong to and love each other.
Even small little gestures convey love and build closeness in a way I never would have thought. And they are so doable. Shaunti puts it this way:

It’s not that the little things somehow make a difference. It’s that the little things
are
the difference between feeling secure and loved, or not. The big things—some big romantic dinner for example—don’t do that as much. They are wonderful, once in a while. But they don’t come close to building the same feeling of being loved that comes from when you reach for my hand in a parking lot, or leave me a silly voice mail calling me a special nickname that’s just between us.