Every young man and woman reaching the age they think about marriage get waves of emotions, questions and doubts sweep over them: Will I have a good life or not? Will my home be a peaceful one? And the bottom line; what can I do so I’ll always have a peaceful home and get along with my spouse?
There are no clear cut answers or guarantees but the following tools will help you with your home and life in general:
1. People’s egos stop them from changing: someone who wants to succeed at his job will want to prove himself by bringing results. In his home he must also work to make things good. Not because he wants it to be quiet in his home but he should help his wife wholeheartedly with all his heart and soul.
Let’s look at the following situation that can happen in any home. The husband comes into the house really hot and he turns on the air conditioner. He needs it he’s really hot. But what about his wife who just shuddered from the cold? He could tell her ‘put on a sweater’ and end the story like that. But what he really should do is to enter into his wife’s world and try to understand how she feels when she suffers from the cold and runs to get a sweater. Only by going into the world of your spouse can you change yourself because then you feel their pain as if it’s your own.
There’s an expression from our sages: ‘When in love, there’s enough room on the point of a needle and when you’re not in love a giant bed 60 cubits is not big enough.’ Or as the common saying goes: ‘If there’s room in your heart, there’s room for everything.’ What does ‘room in your heart’ have to do with it? Simply that heart is where your feelings are found and if you feel for the other it’s because your heart is with them and you feel their happiness and sadness.
Our Torah Giants in each generation have such a heart and empathized with everyone who poured their hearts to them and left feeling better. That’s because they knew they were understood.
In summary: The moment I think of what the other one is going through I empathize and connect with them and can happily do what they need.
2. Lack of information:
When a new product comes to market there are already experts that can repair it if it breaks. A technician that doesn’t know the item can only harm it in his attempts to fix it. Marriage is the same. Our sages say: ‘Women are a nation onto themselves’ and this means that men are also a nation onto themselves. So why should it matter to me if they’re both different? In order for me to learn and understand what makes the ‘other nation’ tick.
Let us give a few illustrations from the word of our sages of those inherent differences so that we’ll begin to understand that it’s not reasonable to demand from our spouse what we demand from ourselves.
A. “10 measures of speech were brought down to this world, women took 9 of them.” This means that the creator made the women with traits that demand a lot of speech so that’s why they talk more. It’s a mistake to think that your wife is wasting team with all that talking. Men on the other hand speak far less and if a man finds it hard to understand his wife’s need to talk he should go into his wife’s world and imagine himself with 9 measures of speech. What would it look like?
B. “2 bodies sitting together are better that one alone”. This means a woman would prefer to sit with someone regardless of who they are than to sit alone. On a deeper level this means that a woman’s nature is to be a partner and she finds it difficult to be alone. So when her husband leaves the house or keeps his experiences to himself it’s also difficult. A woman having a hard time house will want to share it with her husband whereas the husband may want to keep his problems to himself and work them out in a quiet corner. So if your wife is ‘talking all day and shares her problems with you that’s perfectly healthy and not something to think is strange and no, she doesn’t talk with you just to bother you, G-d forbid.
C. “A woman’s embarrassment is greater than a man’s”. This means that a woman’s nature is to get embarrassed faster and more often than a man. How the children are clothed and how they look when going to school or even kindergarten is far more important to her whereas a man can put mismatched clothing on his children and not pay any attention to it for it doesn’t matter to him.
Therefore a man must try to understand his wife’s world and what she’s going through, what she’s feeling and that her whole way of thinking and her approach to life is different than his.
In summary: There are inherent organic differences between men and women that our Creator put into us so we’ve got to learn what those differences are.
Udi Glout is a marriage counselor in israel. he can be reached at: udig965@gmail.com