What Do Men Want

I believe that God was intending for us to learn a little something about the sexes when he created them. As many already know, Eden was a paradise, a well-favored garden filled with the highest forms of vegetation and animal life. But even in all its impressiveness and splendor, there was still something missing. So God created man, Adam, and then Eve, woman (the pinnacle of His creative week) to beautify and tend His garden. In essence, to complete it.

I imagine that their change in living situation after being cast out was a tough adjustment and that Adam, like all of us, surely had days of stress, confusion and headache. After all, work is hard and back then he didn’t have things like power tools, Hemi engines, or football to get him through the day. But he did have someone with whom he could always find lasting sanctuary and peace - Eve.

Eve was peace for Adam in whose presence he found renewed purpose, meaning and focus. You see, a man really doesn’t want to be alone and feels manlier when he has at his side a woman to protect, provide for and find comfort in.

Men are all about proving worth and wanting to be the best at what they do. But for whom really? 

The bros can say good job but when a woman notices there’s a big difference for her image gets immediately tattooed on his mind bringing with it added perfection to everything else he touches.

Such projects and aims are what comprise the attention of many men today. They are very task-oriented and thrive in an environment of ‘things to do’. But they also desire peace and stillness at times from which they can think through their problems or, as is more often the case, to not think through them at all. Finding the right balance is key here because many men choose to live at either extreme rather than in the middle. And for a woman, this can be a very hard thing to deal with.

But, through her unwavering love, devotion and charity for her man’s efforts, whether they be great or small, can she feed his sense of worth and value with daily doses of praise and admiration.

More than anything else, a woman needs to recognize a man’s accomplishments and daily efforts as something he does for the good of the relationship, or family, and that to deride him for his objectives or overlook them completely is like having the princess tell the rescuing knight that his chase was for naught for she is just fine without him.

A man needs to feel like an everyday champion and warrior who, after surviving another battle of the day, finds at home the applause of his family who once more makes it all worthwhile. On a side note, women are also champions, especially mothers, and deserve the same level of adulation as a five-star general.

Again, a man, like a piece of iron in rain, begins to canker and rust when the heroics of his day have gone unnoticed or been dismissed as nothing of real value. When he comes home and sees his breath in the air due to the cold indifference of a spouse who no longer cares for his own labors and sacrifices, his resolve is weakened and he retreats inward.

A man needs a woman who will say to him, “I believe in you,” “I’m so proud of you,” “You’re the best.” Such words of confidence really bring out the best in him. If he is always greeted by an iceberg he does what anyone else would do in like situation, tighten up.

Men need and really want to express themselves, to reveal their ideas and plans with the hope of winning approval and even admiration. But when a man has been humiliated or had his feelings dismissed, questioned or ridiculed, he becomes more reclusive and reserved out of fear of further discredit, for in his mind his very manhood is on trial. Nothing but the absolute certainty that his ideas and feelings will be met with appreciation and real interest will induce him to come out of his shell and express himself.

He prefers peace and operates best when he, and his home, are not at war. Sometimes it is he who brings the very storm in but in any relationship a change in one’s own attitude and demeanor invariably influences change in the other. If one be the hurricane, let the other be the eye of it.

Men want favor and esteem and, as God first declared, can’t do it alone. They want to feel appreciated and valued but even more to have it expressed freely and affectionately by - YOU.

What Do Women Want

Sigmund Freud once wrote, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?”

So, what is the answer? Does she want appreciation? Sympathy? Respect? Personal freedoms? I believe so. But the greatest of them is something more moving and emotional.

A woman wants to be chosen. That’s it.

It is true that those closest to us, namely our parents, can do many things for us. They can love and appreciate us but they cannot really choose us. It is precisely because they are our parents that we consider much of the praise and adoration they give us to be nothing more than a genetic obligation, complements which are usually returned by a rolling of the eyes than with a bright and lasting smile.

Don’t misunderstand me. What is conveyed by our parents has a real and lasting impact and is nothing to be discounted or viewed as fleeting. However, there is a real tangible difference between a parent telling their daughter she is beautiful and then a complete stranger saying the same thing. Even though the words are the same the feeling is very different. The former one says it regularly while the latter one tells you unexpectedly.

Think about it. When a man suddenly singles you out of a room filled with twenty other women to tell you that you are the most beautiful one then you must be something special. And, it therefore must be true.

This notion of choice is primarily why so many women dream of marriage. Why? Because marriage provides the one thing that a woman wants the most, namely, to be chosen. For on that day a woman can hear from a man the words, “I choose you.” “Yes, there are many beautiful women. But you are the most beautiful. There are many caring women. But you are the most caring. And to you I now publicly declare that the other 3.3 billion women in the world are not as special. You are the most special to me and I love YOU.”

To this day I have yet to see a bride frown on her wedding day. There is truly something to be said about being chosen that brings out a woman’s best, which in all actuality is her highest self for she lives to love and be loved.

But, for far too many women, the happiness once felt on that chosen day lasts for about as long. The love and adoration so readily shown in the beginning has become hidden from view and sound leaving the prior chosen one alone in a relationship now bereft of any emotional feeling or closeness.

And in its place lies the groom, grown quiet and distant through work and TV in total neglect of the woman he once told an audience he would forever live ‘to have and to hold.’

A scripture tells us that “the woman is the glory of the man.” If that is the case, and the women in our lives have become resentful, distant and strange, then the fault lies with us in our choosing to shelve the ‘person’ we once chose for the ‘things’ we now choose more.

Noticing a woman helps her to come alive and brings with it a new excitement in getting up in the morning to make herself beautiful, for there is someone who makes it worth it all. With it also comes a new incentive to please, impress and desire.

I often think of how many marriages could be restored if a man would just show his wife proper attention – if he would bring her flowers, tell her she is beautiful or pen a love letter. Such acts of chivalry would put a new vitality into a disintegrating marriage and make a knight out of a man for the queen that is his woman.

Truly, a woman’s need for love and attention is deep and serious. A poem reads:

Blow me a kiss from across the room, Say I look nice, when I’m not. Touch my hair as you pass my chair, Little things mean a lot…Give me your hand when I’ve lost the way, Give me your shoulder to cry on. Whether the day is bright or gray, Give me your heart to rely on. Give me the warmth of a secret smile, To show me you haven’t forgot. For now and forever, for always and ever, Little things mean a lot.”

Happiness is a choice. So why not make the woman in your life yours again?                       

Keep Courtship Alive

“And they lived happily ever after.” Such is the ending to many great and classic literary masterpieces regarding love. And love, more easily than any of our other emotions, has always excited our interest and imagination. It is no wonder then why these legends continue to capture our attention because of their focus on the desperate longing of two people kept apart only to be brought together in the bonds of matrimony in the end.

Though, despite true love’s first kiss, so little is known of the choice couple after the wedding. Were they able to preserve their love and experience actual fulfillment? Were their post-marital days as blissful and satisfying as their premarital?

Present divorce rates have come to be too high for us to believe that merely falling in love and getting married assure a couple’s happily ever after. So why are so many marriages failing? And is it possible to reverse this trend?

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I have come to know that marital satisfaction and love can live on in their highest forms as long as both partners work together to do one thing:

Keep courtship alive. 

Courtship is the pulse in marriage. Without one, love grows cold and dies. It is too easy to let familiarity kill the courtship spirit whose victims are always the lover in the husband and the sweetheart in the wife.

Before marriage, we all present our Friday night personalities – fun, spontaneous, active - only from then on to tame the same qualities into a Monday morning persona - dull, repetitive, tiresome. Many marriages terminate for this very reason because one or both of the partners take the other for granted, with each person becoming involved in his or her own interests rather than in the needs of the relationship as if all the energy exerted before marriage ceases to exist under the false presumption that happiness now flows automatically from their union.

Marriage, like any other relationship, needs regular attention. Like a hungry animal, it needs to be fed constantly. We must monitor its pulse often if it is not to die. Our attitude must ever be one of giving rather than taking, of loving not sparing, in appreciating more than cheapening.

When love grows cold, it is because it has been starved out while its enemy - familiarity - sits full and heavy between two lovers now grown apart. The wrong animal has been fed.

So many partners, devoid of courtship and favor, drift aimlessly apart upon the Sea of Monotony, left alone with only the memories of happier times, when a husband’s smile would exile a doubt or a wife’s embrace restore confidence.

William George Jordan once stated: “Love cannot live long on its past; it is its present that counts as a real force, and, like all other habits it intensifies by exercise. It is not fair to have all the roses before marriage, and only their memory and thorns afterwards.”

For some it may not be that their love for each other is less; they may even love each other more in a deeper, truer and stronger way and hold a great wealth of affection, but they do not keep it in circulation which, if blocked, results in flatline for the relationship.

Still, for others they may feel they’re too old to do special things for each other and express appreciation. Does one no longer require food simply because they are 65? Does giving up work mean love is also complete?

So how do we keep courtship alive? Here are a few suggestions:

Remember the highs in your marriage and what brought you both together. Tell your spouse why you chose to be with him or her over everyone else. Be creative and write romantic cards. Schedule time alone. Be spontaneous in your delivery of affections. Come home with flowers one day for no other reason than to express your love. Go on a weekly date. Talk about your relationship daily – face to face – with all social media devices and applications turned OFF! Write letters of encouragement and read them aloud to each other. Finally, give honest compliments and remember that the praising of one’s character carries greater weight than a respect for one’s appearance.

Winston Churchill once said that he could live for two months on a good compliment. I am confident that if the same time-frame were applied to marriage then its own life expectancy would be considerably extended when such praise is given multiple times daily!

Thus, by keeping courtship alive after marriage, it is very possible that two people, committed to their love, can in reality live after the manner of all fairy tale couples - happily ever after.