When I was in the middle of my first miscarriage, my husband went to the store and bought a new kitchen faucet. Ours had been broken for weeks, and he hadn’t mentioned the idea of fixing it once. But for whatever reason… we left our doctor’s appointment and drove straight to Lowes. That new faucet rode in the backseat with us as we quickly drove back to the hospital, and then returned home without our baby. I was an emotional shattered wreck. Our families met us at our house. My mom brought food. Our friends called… and my husband?
When we got home, my husband carried the faucet inside the house and fixed the kitchen sink.
I learned something very important in that moment. Men don’t just enjoy fixing things. They need to fix things. My husband’s hands needed to remind him that he was still capable of making things right. I wish that I had fully understood the depth of this truth. I wish that I really knew what I had seen take place that day.
My husband came home from work the other day completely exhausted. The house was a wreck, the kids were both sick, and I was stressed beyond belief. I just wanted to share my heart with someone who would understand. I just needed someone to say, “You did a great job. It’s going to be okay.”
So, I told my husband all about my day. I told him everything that had gone wrong. I told him everything that still needed to be done, and I told him how I felt about it. I have to be honest. I felt so much better after talking through it with him.
But then, something just unimaginable happened. My husband started giving me advice on all of the ways that I could have made my day easier. He told me all of the things he would have done differently. He pointed out all of the things that I could have done so that I wasn’t so tired and stressed and overwhelmed.
I was instantly defensive.
Not only did I fail to get, “You did a great job, and it’s going to be okay.” I got a lecture on how to improve!? I was sad and hurt and thought to myself, “Ummm. You weren’t here, buddy. I was. I was the one making the tough calls. I was the one that was in the middle of it. And the next time you ARE here to make the decisions, you can handle it your way… but until then… this isn’t batting practice, and I don’t need to know all of the ways I can improve my swing!”
Instead of thinking those things, I should have pulled out an old dusty image from the back of my mind. I should have remembered walking into the kitchen to find my husband’s legs sticking out from under the sink just trying to make things right again.
I should have recognized that my husband wasn’t criticizing. He was doing what he knew to do… he was trying to help me. He was trying to fix it.
I do not know one man who has ever woken up and said, “Today, I’m going to let everyone down. I’m going to feel like a failure in every aspect of my life. Everything that I touch will break. Everything that I try to fix will fall apart. Everything that I thought I was good at will prove me wrong. Today, I will come home a failure.”
Nope. I do not know one man who has ever started his day with those words as his mantra. But I do know that sometimes life has a way of making our husbands feel this way. Sometimes they feel like they just cannot “fix it.”
They arrive home, and in our attempts to share our hearts and grow our relationships we share the stories of our day. We share our struggles with the kids. We share our struggles with the bills. We share our struggles with our friends and other relationships. But they just see a big old stack of problems that they feel like they need to solve.
It would do us both a bunch of good if I began every story like this, “I’m going to tell you something. When I am done talking, I want you to tell me that you love me and that I’m doing a good job even if you see a million ways that I could have done it differently.”
It would help our marriage tremendously if I could recognize that from now until the end of time he will ALWAYS be trying to “fix it.” Even if all I want him to do is listen.
So, to the husbands who just might have stumbled across this blog (and who have read this far), I would like to say… we really do just want you to listen. We don’t want you to do anything about it. If that means that you wait patiently as we share our day and then you throw it out… do it. Save the details. Chunk the obligation. I promise, we really aren’t asking you to mull over all the ways that we could have handled that situation with our BFF differently. (We mostly just want you to tell us that we were right.) Hint: A good number of discussions with your wife will end very well if you just say, “I love you, and you are doing a great job.” – Just be smart with your placement of that phrase. Don’t say it after she mentions that you’re out of toilet paper. She might catch on…
And to the wives who are hoping that their husbands are reading right along, can we make a promise to ourselves today? Can we extend grace to those guys we love so much? Can we remember that with every story, every complaint and every worry we are adding to their lists of things to make right? Let’s make the decision today to be thankful for the hardworking fellas that devote so much of themselves to us and our families. Let’s nod our heads and listen to their great advice even when we want to tell them where they can throw it. Because if they didn’t love us, they wouldn’t even try. They wouldn’t even care enough to help.
So, let’s make our marriages even better. And today, it might just begin by not doing anything at all.
