Jeff and I flew to Chicago and drove across the border into Indiana for a 6-hour marriage conference at Faith Church, today. It was a productive long day with over 100 couples, and we both had to race out afterwards: jeff to catch the last flight out so he could get back for a talk tomorrow morning and me for a church service near Chicago that I had to be at just one hour after the Dyer event ended!
The thing that most struck me today, was that on a Saturday - all day - more than 100 men loved their wives enough to sit in a room and listen to and talk about ‘relationship’ stuff: which does NOT come naturally to most men. The other thing that most struck me was to realize that during the question and answer time at the end, that women - even if they’ve been married for decades - still don’t realize that! Jeff and I structured the day to spend the first hour and a half explaining to women most of the things they may not realize about their husbands, and the next hour and a half telling men about their wives. We did workshops and case studies, and then - to keep everyone awake - we saved both sides of the ’sex’ subject until after lunch! But during the Q&A time at the end, one of the first questions was from a very nice lady who said she and her husband had been married for nearly 30 years and had lots of kids . and she wondered why we were ‘putting more responsibility’ on the women than on the men. She said we were saying it was all the women’s job to do the hard things, and the men were being given a ‘pass.’
I hear this frequently in my women’s events and in my Amazon reviews and things like that, but up until today I’ve always assumed it was because I’m purposefully one-sided and say that right at the beginning. (I say the book and the women’s talk is about learning THEM so we can change US, and that there’s another book for the men to be one-sided!) But I realized when this lady was asking that question - and she was very sweet about it, but nevertheless, she was serious - that we women simply find it hard to grasp that the stuff we are asking the men to do is just as touch and challenging for them! It sounds simple to us because we’re hearing about things we understand intimately - ourselves! Jeff and I pointed out that we had spent a precisely equal amount of time on what women need as what men need, and said “We guarantee that for the men sitting here, they have learned just as many things that surprised them and are feeling just as overwhelmed and think they have been tasked with just as many difficult things to do as the women have.” And when we said that, all the men broke into spontaneous applause.
It struck me afresh that there is something in our hearts as women that has a really difficult time realizing how hard our men do work on our relationship, and just how easy it is for us to miss it.