[love and all that] the war between men and women

Her comment ..... His comment

Women tend to be more concerned about their marriages than men. They buy most of the books on marriage to try to improve and they respond to outside advice more. They often complain about their marriages to their closest friends and sometimes to anyone who will listen. They treat marriage as a profession.

‘Complain’ is the word here. Women are forever trying to create problems where they just don’t exist because someone or some magazine told them their marriage must be bad. If they would only stop analyzing awhile and just relate to their men, everything would be much happier.

Marriage is a vibrant and lively river, not a stagnant swamp, of which getting married is only the first part. The two people in the marriage need to grow with each other and within themselves, personally. It’s essentially an onward and upward process.

It’s not unlike buying a quality car. Infinite care, long homework and patience lead you to a certain choice. Having made your choice, knowing in your heart you will always love that choice, you now do everything in your power to get it, paying as much as you need and even more. Then you can relax, sit back and enjoy what you have – you don’t expect it to start acting up and causing you problems – it’s supposed to be quality, after all.

Women file for divorce twice as often as men.

That says everything about women – restless and dissatisfied by nature. They just will not let a marriage grow by itself – they have to force it and it dies. A man has no chance.

Women usually express no hope that their husbands will ever understand what it is that frustrates them, let alone change enough to solve the problem.

What problem? If you start looking for problems, you’ll find them. For a man, it’s far simpler - she’s beautiful, he loves her, he wants to be with her, end of story. What more do people want?

Marital problems are created by husbands who do little or nothing to solve them. Wives are the major force for resolving conflicts, and when they give up trying to solve the problem, the marriage is usually over.

A man’s primary instincts are to hunt and to protect. He goes out hunting for what the family needs and then he comes home and looks for peace and quiet and loving tenderness from her. His job is to maintain stability and to prevent threats to his family, even from within. When a woman starts acting unreasonably, he must ignore it, placate her, soothe her and let time do the rest.

It is the woman who runs the family and keeps it operating, buying the food, looking after the children, cleaning the house. The man makes some of the money and does some of the work but he usually thinks he does so much more than he really does. If he does one little thing for the family, he thinks he should get a medal. The woman does things for the family 24 hours a day, with no one praising her.

When a man marries a woman, he gives up all his rights and freedoms and his resources, financial, physical and mental to the woman he loves. He gives it all. If she eventually leaves him, she takes it all and he pays and pays for the rest of his life. It’s a huge responsibility. Men take their families very seriously. Her thanks is to give him no credit, to put him under enormous pressure to improve his financial position and to constantly try to change him. Most men are emotionally exhausted from the constant battle!

The simpler role of husbands in decades past has now been replaced by a much more complex role, especially in their relationship with their wives. Women are not trying to change their men, just improve them and change the direction they are going in; in the same way women are constantly trying to improve themselves. But men don’t seem to want to improve.

For thousands of years, women have always fallen back on this ancient lie, the word ‘improve’, to justify their impossible, unreasonable and permanently dissatisfied demands. Men have always operated differently. In life, as in lovemaking, a man puts in huge bursts of energy and huge bursts of spending, to be followed by periods of quiet consolidation and relaxation. For her to expect 110% effort 24/7 shows both an ignorance of male biology and unbelievable selfishness.

The most common reason women give for leaving their husbands is "mental cruelty" often meaning indifference, failure to communicate and neglect. This includes both emotional abandonment and physical abandonment. Husbands who spend long periods away from home fall into this category. Neglect is way ahead of all the other reasons, combined, that women leave men.

Have women ever stopped to think why they are neglected in the first place? They drive their man away from them with their bitter, mocking disdain and list of faults. Only a masochist would come back for more of this.

Women need a soul mate, someone they trust who is there for them when they have a problem, who takes their feelings into account when decisions are being made; someone to whom they feel emotionally connected. Is that too much to ask?

Most husbands are mystified by this complaint. A man has to be away from home to make the money, he must take exercise to keep physically fit for her. She enjoys the results of all this pain but has no understanding, nor interest, in how it was achieved; so she turns around and complains that he’s not with her 24/7. Is that crazy or what? He’s with her as often as he possibly can.

A man has many rooms in his daily life – one for his work, one for his mates, one for his sport, one for his children and one for his wife. He visits each in turn and is happy if they’re all balanced. Trouble is, he blocks her out of all his other rooms and it goes against her whole idea of ‘partnership’. She has given him her whole future by having his child, by letting him have sole rights to her and she wouldn’t even think of making any major decisions without her partner being involved. She wants to be integrated into his entire life, not relegated to one corner of it.

A man needs the space to take care of all aspects of his life, one by one. Each, in turn, requires his undivided attention. When he’s making a decision at work, he can’t be exchanging loving words with her on the phone. How seriously would he be taken in his workplace? When he’s at home in the privacy of their bedroom, he doesn’t expect to be interrupted by his mates. It just seems so basic – why the need to even explain it?

Without integration of both partners into one unit, there can be no emotional bonding, no uniting of the spirit, no feeling of intimacy and, in the end, no sex. Each partner's feelings must be taken into account whenever they make a decision. They must avoid thoughtless habits, learn to mutually enjoy a life which is equally theirs and mutually resolve their conflicts. All of this creates marital compatibility.

Once a woman occupies every room in a man’s life, which is her fervent wish, she’ll soon take over completely and rob him of his identity as a person. A woman needs to possess a man, [she calls it ‘devotion’], to turn him into a compliant slave. He then becomes a shadow of what he once was, a wraith.

A woman wants a strong, vibrant, yet calm man who takes an active interest in her and who’ll protect her in time of need. She needs a man she can look up to and respect for his firmness, sense of direction and good humour.

Every man who ever believed that found out the truth the hard way. It was even a woman, Helen Rowland, back in 1922, who said, ‘A husband is what is left of a man when the nerve has been extracted.’ And who extracted it? The truth is that women want compliant service robots who’ll do their will, calling it ‘mutual decision making’. A husband complies because he’s been trained, over many years, that if he disagrees, she’ll cause endless trouble and so he opts for peace and quiet. As for a sense of humour, that is usually the first casualty.