Be More Affectionate
Before we talk about how to express affection to your wife, I want to review the job description of being a good husband.
- Love, honor, and respect her
- Be sexually and emotionally faithful to her.
- Listen without being judgmental
- Support and nurture her ambitions outside the home
- Make good faith efforts to understand how differently she is emotionally
- Be honest at all times and always do what you say you will do
- Share child care and domestic work
Be Affectionate
To your wife, affection means more than cuddling or holding her hands, and it definitely means more than wham-bam-thank-you ma’am. She desires a sense of closeness from you because knowing you are close to her is paramount for her being able to stay in a relationship with you. For those of you that might need this simplified; if your wife does not feel connected to you, she will leave you at some level.
No matter where you have been in your marriage, you can show up for work today. You can begin, right now to protect your career as a husband by treating this day as if it were your first day on a new job called marriage.
Action Plan
- Forget Hollywood stereotypes, and don’t try to be a hero in some romance novel. Instead, apply some of your natural strengths to your job as a married man and see immediate improvement.
- Focus on the benefits of marriage, not the day to day frustrations.
- Show your wife the same traits that make you valuable as an employee: focus, discipline, reliability, devotion, loyalty, stability, intelligence, and flexibility.
- Be determined to get better at this job of being a husband.
- Learn from your mistakes and don’t get your eyes stuck in the rear view mirror of regrets.
- Commit yourself to the duties and responsibilities of your marital job description and reassess your progress as you go along.
Thank you to Scott Haltzman, M.D., and his excellent ideas from The Secrets of Happily Married Men. This article is adapted from that resource. Another couple of resources I like is For Men Only and For Women Only by Shauti & Jeff Feldhahn