Heeding the Words of my Wife

Over the weekend I made a passing comment to my wife and another regular Piebald Life/Facebook Note reader that I'd gotten fewer comments recently.

Their rather direct and honest answer: because I was posting from talks I was giving rather than more personal reflections.

So, acting on this information, here's something that's been rolling around in my head from last week.

I was meeting with an older, wiser man over lunch last week and he was encouraging me to do some life and career inventory. He encouraged me to ask a couple of 'hook' questions, among them the very basic question: "who am I?" That one was harder to answer on the spot than I thought it would be.

But the thing that has stuck with me was his encouragement to ask my wife Kelly to answer these questions along with me.

"Get her to write down her answers," he said, "most guys in their first ten to fifteen years of marriage haven't figured out how to listen to their wives yet."

Ouch. Intuitively, I knew that to be true. Both in my own personal experience and in knowing some of my friends marriages, us guys have a hard time really hearing our wives.

"Now granted," he continued, "some of that is because their wives haven't found their voices yet."

Also true. And it makes me wonder about the inter-relationship between us husbands learning to listen, to encourage, to "call forth" our wives voices.

Of course, there's exceptions to everything. Plenty of you wives have plenty of voice, thank you very much. And some men that I know do an excellent job genuinely hearing their wives.

But for many of us, there's a growth curve here in our marriages. I wonder how much is lost in terms of quality of relating and healthy processes due to all these misses...in my own marriage over the past eleven years and in the marriages of folks around me.

But hey, I changed my post for today! Look at me! I'm listening!