Six years
ago I thought everything was fine with my relationships. Sure, there were the
usual tensions between me, my wife and my adolescent children. Things were
far from perfect, but compared to the home I grew up in the situation was
pretty good.
Then my wife
and I had an argument. In a period of 24 hours everything fell apart. I
sat in my living room as one by one, my family members asked me to get
help for a problem I didn’t know I had.
A year later
I told my story in a book: What Your Husband Isn’t Telling You. In
that book I shared the secrets and frustrations that were poisoning all
my relationships. The book is written to women, but many men
have written to say how much my story has helped them understand themselves.
Here’s an excerpt:
My wife, raised as a
preacher’s daughter, learned at an early age to be very diplomatic with her
speech. On the other hand, I’m a very bold, plainspoken sort of guy. As such, I
sometimes put people off. My wife noticed this tendency early in our marriage,
so she began managing my relationships and conversations for me.
For example,
any time I spoke to her parents she would serve as a translator, smoothing out
and clarifying my words. Before I spoke to relatives on the phone she would
coach me with what to say and how to say it. She would manage my conversations
at church, quickly re-interpreting my words if she thought they had the
potential to offend. She even set herself up as an intermediary between the
kids and me. They came to her to find out what I was thinking, and I would go
to her to find out what they were thinking. All this was to ensure my
relationships ran smoothly under her expert supervision.
It got so
bad that whenever we would go out with other couples I’d barely speak.
What was the point? As soon as I opened my mouth Gina would jump in and start
“fixing” what I had just said.
When a woman
starts taking control of something, a man immediately backs off. After a few
years of having my relationships professionally managed, they began to atrophy.
I enjoyed a strong bond with my wife but I was becoming estranged from my children.
Her parents lived with us but I could hardly carry on a conversation with them.
I began to go silent in social situations and let my wife do all the talking,
since she was just going to rephrase everything I said anyway.
You would
think that I’d be angry about this. But here’s the strange part: I wasn’t even
aware it was happening. It had been going on so long it just seemed
normal.
Gina noticed
something was wrong. She began to express her concerns:
“David, you
don’t say anything in social gatherings.”
“You seem
withdrawn from the family, absorbed in your computer screen.”
“You don’t
ever spend time with friends any more.”
“You have a
scowl on your face most of the time. People were afraid to approach you, even
at church.”
A few weeks
later, Gina and I underwent joint counseling, and we both saw for the
first time what was really happening. She had essentially become my
spokesperson – my “interpreter” to the rest of the world. This irritated me on
a subconscious level – and I was fighting back by clamming up.
In Gina’s
defense, she had no idea she was doing this. She was simply playing the role
she had seen her mother play dozens of times: smoothing feathers ruffled by her
outspoken husband. Preachers get people riled up all the time, and their wives are
often expected to help clean up the mess.
So we made a
deal:
§ Gina agreed
to let me do at least half the talking when we were with friends.
§ She promised
not to jump in and re-interpret my words.
§ And most
important, she stopped serving as an intermediary between me and the kids.
If one of them asked, “What is Dad thinking?” she would say, “I don’t know – go
ask him.”
§ For my part,
I agreed not to come to her for information about other people (including our
children).
§ I promosed
to rekindle some relationships with friends and give them my undivided
attention whenever we were speaking.
§ I agreed to
be more diplomatic with what I say (still working on that one).
Here we sit
six years later. With Gina out of the middle of our family, all our
relationships have improved. We spend regular time with other couples – and
everybody gets a chance to talk. The smile is back on my face – and our
marriage has never been stronger.
Men retreat
when they feel unwanted or unneeded. Help your husband find his voice. Stop
managing his conversations and relationships.
