by A R Bernard
If you’d rather solve problems than express your feelings about those problems, you’re not alone. Most men are like that. But as a husband, your duty is clear: to protect your wife physically, financially, and emotionally. So you’ll need to learn to express your emotions early and often, even if you’d rather be the strong-and-silent type.
What’s Needed: The Willingness to Discuss Feelings
For Wives
If your husband seems emotionally distant, or if he seems focused on work first and everything else second, don’t take it personally. God made your man that way. Please remember that your husband may not be ignoring you; he may be trying hard to fix something by himself.
What’s Needed: Understanding
3. Everyday Activities
For Husbands
As a man, you’ve got a to-do list that you think needs to be done now. Not so fast! If your wife takes a little longer than you’d prefer, don’t be impatient. After all, think of how patient she’s been with you.
What’s Needed: Patience
For Wives
When it comes to everyday chores such as shopping, you may like taking your time, and you may misinterpret your husband’s impatience as rudeness. In truth, he’s only trying to do things the best way he knows how. So be patient with his impatience and respectful of his time.
What’s Needed: Empathy
4. Decision Making
For Husbands
When you’re about to make a major decision, remember that God designed your wife to help you. You’ll make better decisions if you ask for her opinion first.
What’s Needed: Humility and a Spirit of Cooperation
For Wives
When your husband doesn’t ask for your opinion first, remember that God designed your man to be decisive, and sometimes he’s going to be very decisive.
What’s Needed: Understanding
5. The Need for Both Solitude and Togetherness
For Husbands
Before you retreat to your man cave and zone out, check in with your wife. She may need your companionship, and as her protector, you shouldn’t ignore—or resent—her needs.
What’s Needed: Concern and Unselfishness
For Wives
When you feel the need for your husband’s companionship, don’t expect him to be a mind reader—tell him how you feel, and find positive ways to communicate your needs. The tone and timing of your communication will determine how he responds. Together you both can find a balance between solitude and together time.
What’s Needed: Cooperation and Positive Communication
After God created Eve, He made yet another declaration: In a single, elegant sentence, the Creator summed up the institution of marriage. God said, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen 2:24 KJV).
With this pronouncement, God endorsed the traditional marriage: a man and a woman, holding tightly to each other, becoming as one.
In today’s temptation-filled world, “becoming as one” is relatively easy, but holding tightly to each other for a lifetime is considerably harder. Holding to the principles we find in Scripture and being mindful of patterns in human behavior will help us build and maintain that lifetime bond.
So what sort of man does it take to be the kind of husband that God expects and women want?
It starts with maturity.
— QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION —
Did the strategies in this chapter strike you as helpful? In what ways do you see them playing out in your own relationship?
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— PRAYER —
FOR MEN: Dear God, I know You uniquely made my wife and me in Your image. Help me to celebrate the differences between us and allow us to come together with our own strengths and weaknesses to be stronger together. In Your name I pray, Amen.
FOR WOMEN: Dear God, please help me to love and accept the differences between my husband and me. Help us to celebrate them and, as a team, become stronger together than by ourselves. In Your name I pray, Amen.
— 4 —
TRAIT #1: MATURITY
“Maturity is when you stop making excuses and start making changes.”
—Anonymous
Every woman craves relationship with a real man. Think about it. She might be temporarily satisfied with someone less mature, but at the end of the day, a woman wants to be with a Real Man.
That’s why I believe the first essential trait all women want from a man is maturity. The patterns and principles given by the Creator to mankind at the dawn of human history form the foundation of a successful life and a successful marriage. The Word of God is our source of faith, and our rule of conduct is based upon these principles. For those who choose to study the Bible in depth, the message becomes clear: God’s universe unfolds in a specific way, according to His perfect design. When we accept the Creator’s blueprint and live by it, we are blessed. When we do otherwise, we bear the cost.
We should study Scripture in order to understand the principles that God is trying to teach us and discover the patterns He wants us to know. Once we comprehend these universal laws, we can take the things we’ve learned and weave them into the fabric of our daily lives.
Now remember, God does everything according to a pattern and based on a principle.
A principle is a broad and basic truth, a permanent feature on the human landscape; it doesn’t change with popular culture or social mores. Even if societal values shift, even if cultural norms are completely overturned, even if an entire population believes otherwise, God’s principles cannot be altered. His laws are as old as time itself. His truths never change.
One of our Father’s basic principles has to do with maturity—what maturity is and what it isn’t. So let me make one thing clear at the outset: growing older isn’t the same thing as growing up. As Edwin Louis Cole noted, “Being a male is a matter of birth. Being a man is a matter of choice.” Many grown-ups behave like children, and vice versa. In truth, the process of growing up has remarkably little to do with the aging process.
Maturity doesn’t come with age; it begins with the acceptance of responsibility.
Gloria is a successful intellectual property attorney. At a lunch meeting with her and another highly successful developer in New York, we talked about Gloria’s experience with her ex-husband. These are her words:
I just wish he would grow up!
“When we met he was so eager to marry and start a family. However, upon reflection, it seems he was more interested in the appearance of a responsible family man rather than truly being one. He wanted the fanfare of a fabulous island wedding, to impress others with letters to his unborn son, to decorate the nursery, curate a sneaker collection for his future fashion icon. He often spoke of how he would be present unlike his own father. However, within months after our son’s birth, his promises and visions of fatherhood seemed to erode.
“He was unable or unwilling to self-regulate for the good of our family and impulse seemed to dictate every decision around money or time. Financially, he was irresponsible. I leveraged my credit to secure a business loan for him and support his dreams. He used that loan partially for the business and partially to court other women with expensive dinners and shoes and to buy expensive watches and other luxury goods for himself. He was more concerned with building his appearance of wealth than building real wealth for our family. Each poor decision he made compromised our ability to create the life we had imagined together before marriage. It will take five years postdivorce for us to settle that debt, and now we’re that much further behind in saving for our son’s college tuition.
“As for allocating time with our son, I don’t believe he has made the sacrifices that come with the decision to parent a child. While he is certainly more present than his father was in his life, and I am so grateful that he has a loving relationship with our son, he parents out of convenience. Although he has t
wo weekends a month with our son, he feels unable to commit to a set schedule because of his work schedule. Rather than committing to a schedule and missing the social or ‘work’ events that might happen on those four days of the month, he fits our son in when it’s convenient for him. He would argue that he must be present with his business clients or he could risk losing their business, which would then compromise his ability to provide financially for our son.
“Conversely, I am always parenting whether convenient or not. When his schedule changes or our son is sick, I’m the one having to figure it out and make alternate plans. I too am a working professional with many demands on my time. I am often perplexed that my ex-husband never asks if he can make alternate arrangements for our son even if it means changing his plans. He just assumes, rightfully or wrongfully, that I will handle it.
“I just wish he would grow up and fully be a present father whether convenient or not.”
Maturity isn’t a function of the calendar; it’s a matter of accountability. We don’t begin to mature until we accept personal responsibility for our words, our thoughts, our motives, our actions, and our attitudes. So a sixty-year-old who refuses to accept responsibility is less mature than a twenty-year-old who does.
People who hold themselves accountable tend to grow up in a hurry. They expect more of themselves, they make fewer mistakes, they get things done, and they lead by example. These folks are the “grown-ups in the room,” not the perpetual Peter Pans who continuously deflect accountability.
Here’s a simple formula for growing up, whatever your age: accept personal responsibility for the things you say, the thoughts you think, and the things you do. If you make a mistake (which you inevitably will from time to time), don’t blame your society, or your culture, or your friends, or your family; look only to the person whose face appears in the mirror.
“Real maturity means having zero tolerance for anything that is not of God.”
—VIVIAN C.
When you steadfastly refuse to blame others—when you step up and assume responsibility for the things you do and the results you achieve—you’ll transform yourself from child to adult. This transformation may take time, and it may seem difficult at first, but it’s well worth the effort because perpetual childhood is difficult, costly, and an unsatisfying way to live.
MATURITY REQUIRES CHANGE
Edwin Louis Cole observed that, “Change is the only constant in maturity.” And he was right. In order to mature, men and women must be willing to change—there’s simply no other way to grow up. To mature spiritually and emotionally, people must change the way they speak, the way they think, and the way they behave. But some folks simply aren’t willing to do that. They’d prefer to stay stuck in adolescence, operating under the mistaken belief that the teenage years are the best years. These perpetual “youngsters” seem determined to behave like juveniles, even if the birth certificate says they’re old enough to collect Social Security.
You can always tell when people haven’t matured because they’re using the same words they’ve always used, expressing the same opinions they’ve always expressed, thinking the same thoughts, and being guided by the same motives. They’re engaging in the same actions, and they’re displaying the same attitudes. If you knew them in high school, you know them today because the only thing that’s changed since then is the number of years they’ve been on the planet. Otherwise, it’s the same ol’ same old.
When people become stuck in a teenage state of mind, they tend to behave impulsively; they tend to shirk responsibility; they tend to cut corners and push limits, hoping not to get caught. But eventually they do get caught. Yet even then, when the consequences of bad behavior become apparent, their response is predictably immature. Instead of accepting responsibility (and learning a lesson), immature people complain loudly about the unfairness of it all and blame somebody else. These perpetual teenagers may grow old, but they never grow up.
“My husband is mature, which means he isn’t interested in ‘bad boy’ behavior. He has a strong sense of who he is, so he isn’t influenced by other people’s negative behavior.”
—KERRY B.
Behaving immaturely seems fun, at first. Avoiding responsibility seems easy, for a while. And the good times do indeed roll, temporarily. But the good times don’t last forever because life isn’t a perpetual party, no matter what the perpetual partiers may think. As it turns out, immaturity is expensive. Very expensive.
The costs of immaturity accrue day by day, month by month, and year by year. And when the bill finally comes due, it must be paid not only by the person who racked up the debt, but also by the family members who must try, as best they can, to repair the damage.
So it’s no wonder, then, that maturity is first thing that women want in a man. Wise women want to spend their lives with fully grown men, not with aging adolescents. Women want men who are willing to change.
Change is the essence of maturation. You’ll never mature in life unless you’re willing to change. You may live to be one hundred years old, but if you’re still behaving like a ten-year-old, you’re not fully grown.
Rick Warren observed, “Change always starts in your mind. The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act.” Simply put, thoughts precede actions. When you begin thinking like an adult, you’ll begin behaving like one, too.
“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.”
—GAIL M.
The possibility for change begins the moment you realize you still have much to learn. But not everybody thinks that way. People who think they already know it all see no reason to learn, no reason to grow, no reason to mature. People who think they have all the answers probably aren’t even asking the right questions. If a person says, “It’s my way or the highway,” the way in question probably has plenty of potholes. One of those potholes is a personality trait that’s a permanent impediment to spiritual growth and emotional health. That trait is stubbornness.
Stubborn people will always be ignorant people. Why? Because they refuse to even contemplate the possibility of change. It doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much power they wield. Stubborn people refuse to adapt, and they refuse to learn because they mistakenly believe that they already know everything that needs to be known. So they remain trapped in a cycle of immaturity and destructiveness.
Stubborn people are compelled to deny personal responsibility. To do otherwise would be to admit that their way isn’t the right way. So, they maintain (wrongly) that it’s always the other guy’s fault. Instead of acknowledging truth and searching for solutions, stubborn folks refute reality by shifting the blame elsewhere. This pass-the-buck strategy actually works for a while, but eventually the truth does what it always does: the truth reveals itself for all the world to see. That’s when the price of stubbornness must be paid in full.
To avoid the consequences of stubbornness, you must be willing to change. But you will never change until you’re willing to confront the truth about your words, your thoughts, your motives, your actions, and your attitudes. Unless you are willing to assess yourself objectively (and often), you’ll keep making the same old mistakes and suffering the same old consequences that result from the same poor decisions.
To make mature decisions you need two things: values and principles.
VALUES AND PRINCIPLES
Your values are those things that you consider most important in life. Values are the things you stand for. Values are the things you’ll pay the price for, perhaps the ultimate price. In the most extreme situations, you’ll be willing to die for the values you hold dear. Dr. King said that if a man doesn’t have something to die for, he has nothing to live for. How true. If you’re guided by the values that God promises to reward, you’ll reap the blessings that He has promised to those who choose to obey Him. But if the things you value are not from God, no amount of wishful thinking will spare y
ou from the consequences.
Principles are the set of moral rules that help you determine right from wrong. Principles help you define the things that add to your life (the assets) and avoid the things that take away from your life (the liabilities). Some principles are straightforward; others are not. The devil lives in the gray area.
It’s easy to make decisions when things are black or white. It’s simple to make the right call when the facts are clear, when the consequences are certain, and when the results are predetermined. But when the lines between right and wrong become blurred, the devil gains a foothold and temptation appears, sometimes out of nowhere. Satan (often disguised as someone or something that looks very attractive) knocks on your door and makes you an offer. To avoid trouble, you must say no to Satan’s sales pitch by resisting the temptation he’s placed on your doorstep. To resist that temptation quickly and confidently, you’ll need a set of principles that you’ve acquired in advance.
“Apply God’s principles, keep your heart pure, and you will succeed.”
—EDWIN LOUIS COLE
The principles you need to navigate through life aren’t deep, dark secrets known only to a few. Nor are these concepts difficult to understand. To the contrary, the principles that God wants you to live by are the same rules for life that you were taught as a child. Over the years, you’ve heard these truths time and again from parents and grandparents, from teachers and preachers, from friends, family members, and mentors. Not surprisingly, these are the same concepts that you encounter whenever you study your Bible. These principles are so familiar that we’ve developed popular sayings that sum them up, such as “You reap what you sow,” “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” “Actions speak louder than words,” “There’s no time like the present,” and “Honesty is the best policy.” These are but a few of the truisms that, while they may seem trite (because you’ve heard them so often), serve as essential guidelines for life.