Eight out of ten men I meet are unhappy with their marriage. The chances are that if you’re unhappy, so is your wife. Unfortunately, both you and your wife may go along with this pattern for years or decades without doing anything about it. What’s worse is that your children will pick up on your relationship challenges and develop the same patterns themselves. You are their best role models for a healthy and happy relationship. My wife and I faced many challenges for the first several years of our marriage. It was frustrating, energy consuming and even painful at times. And then we found one question that transformed our marriage for the better almost instantly. It helped us take our worst days and turn them into some of the best days in our marriage.
No One Teaches You To Be Good At Marriage
Being “good” at marriage requires you to be a good and even great man and husband. No one teaches you how to do that throughout your life unless your dad was conscious enough to teach you. If your dad didn’t teach you, then you’re kinda stuck learning it on your own. You definitely won’t learn it from school and most of your friends probably have the same challenges.
But rest assured that you can be a great husband and that having a great marriage is a skill. Most people think a great marriage should be effortless. The chances of that are slim. Your marriage requires deliberate and intentionally effort to keep it strong and fulfilling. This skill must be learned. The most important element to this skill, is the ability to meet her needs. And your wife’s ability to meet your needs.
It’s All About Needs
Being in a happy marriage is about meeting each other’s needs. Bottom line. If she’s meeting your needs and you’re meeting hers, you are both happy. When either of you don’t meet each other’s needs, the problems start. You start to resent her and she starts to resent you. This resentment starts off small and then eventually grows. You may even have unconscious resentment in your relationship which is the worst type. You continue to live like nothing is wrong but inside you have a level of dislike or even disgust for the other person.
The Problem with Conventional Marriage Solutions
You must meet each other’s needs and do it consistently. But with everything happening in your life that takes your attention away from your relationship, it can be tough to do. Your career, bills, being a good father and a good son, all take energy away from meeting your wife’s needs. She’s facing the same pressures as well most likely.
What most couples do at this point is they try to do extensive work, meaning that they try to improve their relationship by using a series of tactics or techniques they read or learn from a book or course. They may even go to a marriage counsellor. I don’t have anything against marriage counsellors but I know that many of them have bigger marriage challenges than you or they’re not even in a healthy marriage. Long story short, you add additional complexity to your relationship. You’re told to sit down and express your feelings and share a laundry list of what you want from each other. This works great if you do it at the right time when you have little going on in the rest of your life. What are the chances of that? But if you do it at the wrong time, you’re just adding more work. More work requires more energy and creates more frustration. Instead you need to keep it simple.
The One Question That Changes It All
“Keep it simple stupid” is the one of the wisest sayings of all time. The simpler you keep your marriage, the better off you will be. No husband or even wife wants to do 50 things for their partner every day. What you need to do is break it down to one thing and ask the one question “What is the ONE THING you need from me today?” This is the best question my wife and I have ever used to dramatically improve our relationship and I’m sure it can work in yours as well.
When you ask your wife to narrow it down to one thing, she will ask you for the what’s most important to her for that day. Sometimes my wife just wants a hug; sometimes she wants lots of hugs; sometimes she wants good sex; sometimes she wants a night on the town. Whatever it is, it’s easy for me to do because it’s just one thing. I don’t forget, I don’t make excuses, I just do it. And she does the same for me. It’s amazing! You can’t screw up on this.
Each day for the next 30 days, be intentional about asking her this question. Whatever she asks for, give it to her. In return, she needs to do the same. If you both do this for the next month, your marriage will dramatically improve.
For more insight on being the man your wife needs you to be, check out this episode of The Male Entrepreneur podcast by clicking here: https://purdeepsangha.com/podcast/episode-80-be-the-man-she-wants-you-to-be/
All the best!
Purdeep
P.S. To get your FREE copy of The Complete Man book prior to official release text the word “free” to (888) 210-5566.
