ThePast - The Generous Husband

Defensiveness: Another Marriage Killer

by The Generous Husband | Jan 2, 2024 | Audio, Big Deal Post, Marriage Killer, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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Yesterday I said being too busy was a big marriage killer. Today, another one: defensiveness.

I’ve been guilty of this most of my marriage, and I can see how it’s hurt my wife. I still feel it inside on occasion, but most of the time I am able to keep it under control or rein it in before it gets bad.

For me, being defensive is a knee-jerk reaction from my childhood. My mother was demanding, and I often felt accused in some way. I know now there were better ways of handling it, but back then it was a way to protect myself. Today, it’s a habit that’s not doing me any favours.

My wife is reasonable. She doesn’t attack me, so being defensive is neither necessary nor helpful. And when she questions me, she has what seems like a good reason to do that. So either she misunderstands, or I need to think about my words and actions.

Even if your wife does edge on attacking you on occasion, defensiveness is not the answer. Yes, you should address the issue and correct as needed. But defensiveness is argumentative. It is generally rejected because it’s argumentative, and it brings about fights and hard feelings.

Because it’s such a reflex reaction, this marriage harming act is difficult to change. But if you work at it, you can beat it.

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Modern Marriage: More Work, But Also More Rewarding

by The Generous Husband | Dec 21, 2023 | Audio, Good Marriage, Seeing Clearly, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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Over on Quora, someone asked why so many men don’t want to get married today. Most of the early answers were from guys who seem to want the kind of marriage they think their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had. Their answers were actually a good explanation for why so many women don’t want to get married today.

Some guys have this idea that in the past, the wife took care of the home and the kids, had sex on demand, and only expected hubby to bring home the bacon and give them occasional kind words. To be fair, it’s how media often portrays marriages in days gone by. But this isn’t how it was. Women worked their butts off, and they were not always cheerful about it. As for sex, plenty of women said no, and those who never did provided hurry-up-and-get-it-over sex.

As I’ve said before, women used to put up with bad marriages because they didn’t have any good options. They were living the best of the bad choices available to them.

I doubt the guys who want that kind of marriage follow a blog called The Generous Husband. But how much are we effected by the false claims of what marriage used to be? Do we wonder if perhaps we could have had it better in the past? Do we think modern marriage means we’re getting cheated?

Yes, a modern marriage demands more of the husband than was the case in the past. But on the flip side, what a modern marriage can be is so much better than anything our grandfathers ever had. It’s more work to keep a wife who has options, but what we gain from a woman who wants to be with us is so much better.

The next time someone tells you modern ideas have destroyed marriage, or that feminists have made it difficult to be a man, stop and think. Ask yourself if what is being presented is based on a false understanding of the past. I’m not denying marriage is under attack, but some of what we think “they” have done comes from a false narrative about how thing were in the past.

The truth is, there’s never been a better time to be married. The marriage you can have is far better than what any of your forefathers had. If you’re willing to put in a bit more effort than they did, you can have so much more.

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FF: Breaking Free From Your Past: Gaining Control When Stress Hits

by The Generous Husband | Dec 1, 2023 | Audio, Be a grownup, Change, Do It For Her, Friday Flashback, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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Do you have a handle on your past, and what it can cause you to do or not do? When you feel the urge to react out of your past, are able to choose not to follow those urges. And if you can usually do that, do you maintain control under stress?

What we learn early in life becomes deeply rooted in our minds. These “early lessons” tend to surface when we’re stressed, or tired, or we feel out of control or threatened. When circumstances push us to our limit, self-control weakens, and we may react out of our oldest fears. This can cause us to feel threatened when there’s no real threat, or see disrespect when there’s no disrespect. We may not feel the love and concern of others, even though they are trying to express those things.

Over the next weeks, I’ll talk more about this, and what we can do about it. The first step is to own it when we slip into the past and say or do something unwarranted. Don’t excuse or blame, just admit you let the stress get to you and you did something you wish you hadn’t done. Honestly, owning it when you blow it can make your wife feel better. It’s not a solution, and you need to deal with any fallout from what you said or did, but owning your stuff shows you’re a grown up whose trying to improve.

[This post first appeared July 13, 2012.]

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Friday Flashback: Examine the Roots of Your Marriage Expectations

by The Generous Husband | Nov 10, 2023 | Audio, Friday Flashback, Seeing Clearly, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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What do you want from your marriage? How do you want your marriage to be? Why do you want what you want? What is the root of your desires?

If your desires for your marriage come out of brokenness or fear, your desires can’t be completely healthy.

If there was a lot of conflict in your home when you were growing up, and you are desperate to avoid conflict in your marriage; you might rule with an iron fist, give in to anything your wife wants, or run from any hint of conflict.
If your mother didn’t respect your father, you may be hypersensitive about respect and see disrespect where there is none.
If your father treated your mother badly you may be so afraid of being the same way that you abdicate your duty as husband.
If your family didn’t spend much time together, you may enforce an unhealthy level of “togetherness”.
If your mother was controlling, you may see your wife as controlling when she is not, and you may reject acceptable and necessary questions as an invasion of privacy or a lack of trust.
If you’re afraid your wife will leave you (especially if you think you do not deserve her, and fear she will figure it out) you may do all manner of crazy things.

In general, why you want things is an important question to ask yourself. It is also often a very good way of finding unreasonable desires or expectations.

[This post first appeared July 5, 2012.]

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Understanding Your Wife’s Tolerance Levels

by The Generous Husband | Sep 26, 2023 | Audio, Her Needs, Seeing Clearly, ThePast, Your Needs, ZIMAGE

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I have, far too slowly, learned that my wife has different tolerances than I have. When I say tolerances, I mean how long she will put up with something, or how bad it has to get before she loses it. In some place she is more tolerant than I am, in others she is less tolerant.

Some of it makes sense. She is willing to go a bit longer without sex than I am, and the difference in our sex drives is a part of that. She will put up with more bad behaviour from some people than I will, because of her personality.

With other things, I can’t tell you why one of us is less tolerant than the other. No doubt much of it comes down to selfishness, sin, and junk from our past. But the bottom line is, we differ on how much we will put up with in many areas.

In some areas we would all do well to be more tolerant, and when it comes to things like sin, there are places where some of us are far too tolerant. But individual tolerance differences between you and your wife are not about right and wrong. They are about you being two different people.

It’s a good idea to figure out where your wife is less tolerant than you are. Knowing when she is about to hit her limit means you can avoid doing that, and can help when others are about to cross her line. Understanding where you will put up with less than her is also a good plan.

One other warning. Some women put up with things not because their tolerance is high, but because they were taught women are expected to put up with things they don’t like. This is a form of abuse, and if your wife has been abused this way, please don’t do more of that to her. If she seems willing to take a lot in some area, it’s possible she hates it but is afraid to say anything. A loving husband makes sure he never takes advantage of such an injury.

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Overcoming Our Training

by The Generous Husband | Mar 9, 2023 | Audio, Change, Links to good stuff, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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I’ve been playing with an AI art generator, thinking it could provide me with some post images. So far, it’s not been much help. The image here was generated with the prompt “middle age couple on couch kissing”.

The image it okay, but there’s more to the story. This was try sixteen out of twenty. It was the only one that showed anything close to a kiss. Beyond that, I would not call this couple middle age. Every one of the men’s hair was at least half grey or white. Two were partly bald, but none more than that. Half the women were the age of the men, but the other half were decades younger than the man. Then there was the image of two women rubbing noses as a man behind one of them was smelling her hair. And of forty-one individuals in the images, the only one who was not lilly white was the hair sniffer.

The problem is the training set used to teach the AI. Imagine if I had tried my prompt on a program trained on porn. To get what I wanted, I would have had to ask for a “clothed couple” and specified kissing on the mouth. Even then, I doubt I would have generated something I could show here. What if I tried it on a program trained entirely on Disney animated movies?

So what, you’re wondering, does this have to do with marriage? You and I are a lot like AI programs. What we think and do is strongly influenced by our “training set”. And unlike an AI, we can’t wipe our memory and start over. As we add new data that does change things, but the old is still there, and human nature is to default to what we learned first.

This means some of the fights you have with your wife are because one or both of you reacted from a flawed training set rather than logically examining the information and making an unbiased decision. You allowed your expectations and fears to colour what you thought.

The advantage you have over an AI is that you can question yourself. You can ask if you keep getting the same answer because of what your wife is doing and saying, or because your training set is making you see things that aren’t there.

A post worth reading:

ScienceDaily | Robots turn racist and sexist with flawed AI, study finds ◄ Neural networks built from biased Internet data teach robots to enact toxic stereotypes

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That’s Not Who She Is

by The Generous Husband | Dec 20, 2022 | Her Needs, ThePast, Understanding Her, YOU4HER, ZIMAGE

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There have been times in our marriage when Lori has said or done something that hurt me. Early on those events were terrifying. What if I was seeing a hint of who she really was? What if she had been faking it and was going to become my worse nightmare?

But as the months and then years went by, I learned who she was. When you live with someone, you can’t hide your true self for very long. I shared a home or apartment with a few guys before I got married, and Lori and I have lived in community with various people. If they’re not who they have pretended to be you start seeing the cracks in their facade a few months in. A year or two down the road you know the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For decades now I have known who Lori is. I know she is generous and loving. I know she is kind. I also know her broken places. So now when she does something that hurts me, my first thought is “That’s not who she is“. She is not a person who intentionally hurts others. If anything she is too concerned about hurting others. So if she hurts me that means either she has run into one of her broken places or she is reacting to me hurting her. Or both. With that in mind, I try to calm myself and figure out what is happening. Then I can apologise and/or we can talk bout it, as seems needed.

The next time your wife acts in an unusual way, ask yourself why. Is it you? Is it her past? Is it stress or being too tired? Might it be her hormones?

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Paul & Lori
c/o The Marriage Bed, Inc.
4641 Lyons Hill Road
Springdale, WA 99173

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Are Zombies Attacking Your Marriage?

by The Generous Husband | Oct 18, 2022 | Audio, Communication, Seeing Clearly, ThePast, ZIMAGE

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The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ~ William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun

Faulkner is correct – our past is never really dead. When we try to bury it, it crawls out and comes back like a zombie.

This can be especially difficult in marriage since both husband and wife have a past. That’s twice the potential zombies coming to eat your happy marriage.

The solution to this problem is to come to terms with your past. Confess and repent as needed. Forgive all those who need it, starting by forgiving yourself. Stop beating yourself up about what you did or what you didn’t do that you think you should have done. Use your past as a way of learning how you should behave and do better in the future. If you can’t do this on your own, get help.

If you have things in your past that your wife doesn’t know about and you fear her finding out, deal with it by telling her about those things. It’s much better coming from you than someone else. Be gentle and give her time to process and deal with your past, but get rid of the secrets.

Zombies can’t take the light of day. Deal with them so they stop stalking you and your marriage.

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