masterwordsmith-unplugged

The following article is from The Daily Mail. I hope they will also feature one on what men need to know about women.

Excerpt:

You can’t read your man’s mind (however much you try) – but there are other ways to find out how he’s feeling, says marital therapist Andrew G Marshall

There are missing voices in the debate about what makes for good relationships: men’s. Women share their needs but most men remain inscrutably tight-lipped. Fortunately, as a marital therapist, I’ve spent 30 years teasing out men’s feelings and helping them make sense of what they want. By sharing this knowledge, I hope to promote happy, smooth-running relationships. But, just as importantly, if you’ve hit a bad patch, these insights can help explain why your husband has turned into a stranger and stop you descending into crisis.

1. Men outsource their emotions to women
We men have been brought up to act on, rather than examine our feelings. It doesn’t mean that we’re not capable of understanding our emotions but, on the whole, we’ve outsourced their day-to-day management to our wife. She will remind us to phone our mum, interpret what’s going on beneath the surface with our stroppy teenage daughter and come up with a strategy for defusing the rows. And if we have a real problem, such as depression or anxiety attacks, she will flag it up and send us off to one of the army of women in the caring professions.

Dangers of ignoring this truth 

What happens if the person we have the problem with is our wife? For example, we’ve slipped down her priority list and feel taken for granted. In an ideal world, we would talk to her, but what if she feels attacked or dismisses our concerns? The typical man shuts down and hopes that if he pretends the problem doesn’t exist, it won’t. As this strategy is doomed to failure, he becomes prone to what seems to be – to his wife at least – irrational anger. What he can’t say, because his wife hasn’t sat down with him and helped him understand, is what he’s annoyed about in particular – for example, her habit of contradicting him in front of the children. But more importantly, he gets annoyed with his wife for not making everything better and therefore not keeping her end of the marriage deal to ‘tend his emotional life’. In the worst cases, he starts talking to a woman at work and awards her the contract instead!

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