feelings - The Generous Husband

Friday Flashback: Understanding and Valuing Feelings in Marriage

by The Generous Husband | Jun 9, 2023 | Friday Flashback, Good Marriage, Intimacy, Reader Requested/Inspired, Seeing Clearly

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In a comment, one of you asked for “some encouragement on emotional intimacy.” As in feeling something without using your hands. You know, that emotional junk women want all the time. Okay, just kidding – it’s an important issue. Let’s start with some groundwork on feelings.

Many men were raised to think emotions were wrong, or silly, and certainly not to be trusted. Some of us are afraid of our feelings, or afraid of what others will think if we’re “too emotional”. We think feelings are unmanly, and we must beat them down and keep them in their place. Most of us are wary of feelings – we don’t trust them much.

Certainly, those ruled by their feelings are in a bad place. Feelings can be completely out of sync with reality. The fact someone does not “feel” loved doesn’t mean they are not loved. Likewise with feeling or not feeling respected, desired, needed, and so on. However, this doesn’t mean feelings are useless, something to ignore. Our feelings affect our bodies and minds, even when we try to ignore them. Feelings can impact heath for both good and bad, and ignoring feelings won’t make them any less harmful. Additionally, our feelings will colour our thinking, even if we try to suppress them. In short, feelings will have an effect no matter what, so it’s better to admit they exist and deal with them than to be a slave to what they do to us subconsciously.

The goal, I think, is our minds making rational decisions based on all the information available – which includes our feelings. We need to realise that while feelings are not always rational, they sometimes warn us of things we don’t perceive with our conscious mind. Sometimes a feeling is the first, or only, warning we get about something. It can be our subconscious mind making connections out of bits of seemingly unconnected data. As this can be a bit hit or miss, it’s foolish to go just on feelings – but just as foolish to ignore feelings.

By the way, women as a group are more feeling driven than men. This means they are likely to see things we miss, and also more likely to be dragged off by their feelings. A wise man learns to listen to his wife’s feelings, not dismissing them lightly. This is especially true when she has “a bad feeling” about someone. Science has shown women as a whole are better than men at picking up clues about a person’s character and intentions. She’s not always right, but odds are she is right more often than you are in this area. Unless your experience with your wife has shown this is not the case, I suggest you do not ignore her when she has a bad feeling about someone or something.

[This post first appeared May 4, 2012.]

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Understanding and Valuing Feelings in Marriage

by The Generous Husband | May 4, 2012 | Good Marriage, Intimacy, Reader Requested/Inspired, Seeing Clearly

In a comment, one of you asked for “some encouragement on emotional intimacy.” As in feeling something without using your hands. You know, that emotional junk women want all the time. Okay, just kidding – it’s an important issue. Let’s start with some groundwork on feelings.

Many men were raised to think emotions were wrong, or silly, and certainly not to be trusted. Some of us are afraid of our feelings, or afraid of what others will think if we’re “too emotional”. We think feelings are unmanly, and we must beat them down and keep them in their place. Most of us are wary of feelings – we don’t trust them much.

Certainly, those ruled by their feelings are in a bad place. Feelings can be completely out of sync with reality. The fact someone does not “feel” loved doesn’t mean they are not loved. Likewise with feeling or not feeling respected, desired, needed, and so on. However, this doesn’t mean feelings are useless, something to ignore. Our feelings affect our bodies and minds, even when we try to ignore them. Feelings can impact heath for both good and bad, and ignoring feelings won’t make them any less harmful. Additionally, our feelings will colour our thinking, even if we try to suppress them. In short, feelings will have an effect no matter what, so it’s better to admit they exist and deal with them than to be a slave to what they do to us subconsciously.

The goal, I think, is our minds making rational decisions based on all the information available – which includes our feelings. We need to realise that while feelings are not always rational, they sometimes warn us of things we don’t perceive with our conscious mind. Sometimes a feeling is the first, or only, warning we get about something. It can be our subconscious mind making connections out of bits of seemingly unconnected data. As this can be a bit hit or miss, it’s foolish to go just on feelings – but just as foolish to ignore feelings.

By the way, women as a group are more feeling driven than men. This means they are likely to see things we miss, and also more likely to be dragged off by their feelings. A wise man learns to listen to his wife’s feelings, not dismissing them lightly. This is especially true when she has “a bad feeling” about someone. Science has shown women as a whole are better than men at picking up clues about a person’s character and intentions. She’s not always right, but odds are she is right more often than you are in this area. Unless your experience with your wife has shown this is not the case, I suggest you do not ignore her when she has a bad feeling about someone or something.

Image Credit: © olly | stock.adobe.com
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We’re donation supported Thanks for your help!
This post may contain affiliate links, see my disclosure for info.

Partnership: I got your back

by The Generous Husband | Mar 8, 2012 | 1 + 1 = 1, Series

Couple back to back © Gabriel Blaj | Dreamstime.com

I got your back

Are you there for your bride, no matter what? Do you feel she is there for you in the same way? Partnership is about supporting and encouraging each other. It’s also about accountability, protection, and publicly honouring each other.

This can be done by choice. If you like your spouse you may do much of this because of your emotions, but that’s not the best way. Choose to be supportive. Choose to give her the benefit of the doubt. Choose to encourage and lift her up even when you feel like crap. Learn to provide loving accountability, and to do what makes her feel protected.

Additionally, never, ever, ever talk bad about her to anyone. If there are real problems and you need to talk, find someone who won’t share what you say, and will call you on it if you move from fact to feelings in what you say. Beyond this, don’t say anything negative about her to others, even in private. Honour her with your words, all the time, with everyone. Even better, make a point of saying nice things about her, of praising her in front of others – both when she is there and when she is not.

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Friendship: I like you

by The Generous Husband | Mar 6, 2012 | Good Marriage, Series

Friendship is a vital part of marriage. If you have committed to your spouse, and made a choice to love, but you are not friends, you will never have a happy marriage. Friendship is about liking your spouse. You enjoy being together, doing things together, sharing your time and space with each other. Being friends means you would choose to spend time together even if you did not “have to”.

This one is a lot more difficult than choosing to love because our emotions and thoughts are involved. We don’t want to spend time with someone if we are mad at them, or feel they have cheated us, failed us, or expect too much from us. You can choose to act like friends, but that does not make you friends.

If you are not feeling much like friends, think back to when you did. What has changed? What about you, what about her, what about your circumstances, has changed? As we mature we don’t look for the same things in friends; if you are still expecting or offering the same kind of friendship you and your bride had years ago I bet one or both of you is frustrated. Be ready to scrap what is no longer working. Find things to do together you both enjoy. Maybe that means one of you learning to enjoy what the other already likes, maybe it means finding something new. Stick with it, keep trying things, find ways to be together and have fun.

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Love: I choose you

by The Generous Husband | Mar 5, 2012 | 1 + 1 = 1, Good Marriage, Series

The roller coaster of love

I have always seen love as a choice, not a feeling. I choose to love my bride – it was and is an act of my will. I realise many define love differently, but an act of our will is still a very important, no matter what we choose to call it.

Because love is a choice, I can’t “fall out of love”. If I “don’t love you the way I used to” that means I choose to make a change – it’s on me. I don’t love her less when I am tired, stressed, or grumpy. I don’t love her more when she does what I want, or less when she does not.

When love is a choice, you are not going to find yourself “in love with two women”. If that happens, it means you made a (very bad) choice. Any feelings or urges for another woman are just that. If those feelings or urges are “promoted” to love, it’s because you choose to do so. Besides, if love as a commitment includes choosing fidelity; you can’t “love two women”.

I suspect many don’t think of love as a choice. This leaves them, and their marriages, subject to feelings, whims, fears, and distractions. If you choose each other, for better or worse, come what may, you can get off the roller coaster some call love.

Respect – take three

by The Generous Husband | Oct 19, 2011 | Marriage Killer

My previous two posts on respect – Blindly driving a marriage to its death, and then blaming the victim and Hitting a nerve with the ladies – have elicited a lot of comments and e-mails.

It seems the issue of perception and reality is huge. If I feel you don’t respect me, does that mean you do not respect me? NO, it does not. What you feel, and what I think you feel, are two different things. I could be wrong both ways – feeling disrespected by someone who does not disrespect me, or feeling respected by someone who actually does not respect me. To me this is far from an irrelevant issue!

Let’s look at two possibilities if I feel you don’t respect me, when in fact you do:

If I say, “I don’t feel respected” that gives us something we can work with. You can ask why I don’t feel respected, and when you understand you can choose to change what you do because you want to communicate what you actually feel.
If I say, “You do not respect me” you can either drop the issue or try to change my mind. However, if I am convinced you respect me, your words may have no effect. So I am then accusing you of something that is not true, and accusing you of lying when you deny it. That does not make you feel good – in fact, it makes you feel disrespected! You are left with no good choice, and you might just write me off as unreasonable.

The second one happens to more than a few wives, and it leaves them with good reason to see their husband as unreasonable and impossible to please. Rather than being able to deal with the things that make him feel disrespected, they are stuck arguing whether or not she respects him. How is she supposed to work with, much less respect, someone who tells her what she thinks and accuses her of lying when she is not lying? All of this because he decided his feelings were facts rather than admitting they are just feelings.

If you feel disrespected when your wife does something, you can state as an “indisputable fact” that her actions show disrespect, or you can tell her that her actions make you feel disrespected. To me the second option is clearly better! Aside from being more open to a solution, you are stating a fact about you, rather than telling her something about herself that very well may be false.

As to gender, I think the reason I see far more of this from men than women is that women are relational and feeling, while men tend to be more analytical. Most women readily accept that the same thing can evoke different feelings in different people, and that the intent behind an action can vary from person to person. Men are far more likely to see things as one-size-fits-all: action ABC always means intent XYZ.

Tomorrow – what to do about it.