Rabbi Simcha Cohen
A wife's need—for her husband to sympathize with her problems—conflicts with a man's need. She needs him to agree that she is having a hard time, while he needs his wife to radiate a positive attitude.
This conflict causes a great many emotional problems between husbands and wives.
The following example illustrates this conflict very well. After closing a successful deal, a husband returns home in excellent spirits. He is beaming and cannot wait to share his success with his wife. Radiant, he enters the house and greets her joyfully. She is, of course, very glad that he has come home, but she receives him with a pained expression and says “Hello” in a mournful tone. Her husband's joy begins to evaporate, but he nevertheless bravely asks: “How are you?” “I'm very tired.” Hearing this, he immediately responds: “Well, then go and rest.”
The spontaneous “go and rest” that most men offer when their wives tell them they are tired is inappropriate. Their response reflects a basic ignorance of a woman's psychology and a lack of understanding of her emotional needs.
Doesn't a wife know for herself that when a tired person rests, their tiredness goes away? Does she need to wait for her husband to return so that he can teach her this simple truth?! And what about when a wife tells her husband, “It's hot today,” and he replies, “It isn't hot at all,” in a tone as though this statement cools the air and makes it easier for her to breathe?! And when a wife complains of pain, her husband may reply: “It's nothing serious; it will pass. My mother sometimes has pains like that too, and yours probably does as well.”
His mistake lies in incorrectly interpreting what his wife meant by the words “I'm tired” and in failing to understand her feelings.
While she needs a simple assurance from her husband that he understands her tiredness and takes her problems to heart, his goal-oriented thinking leads him to interpret her words as a request for a practical solution to the problem rather than a desire to share with him. “If she doesn't want to solve the problem, why is she telling me that she's tired?!” So he immediately pulls a practical, easy, and simple solution (in his opinion) out of his pocket: “Go and rest.” He ignores the fact that such an obvious idea has undoubtedly already occurred to her, but was rejected for some reason.
Moreover, his proposed solution, “go and rest,” not only failed to solve her problem, but made it even worse. His wife wanted to feel that her husband understood her and acknowledged not only that she was tired, but also that she was having a hard time. Instead, what she hears in his answer is that, from his perspective, the problem is small, and even much smaller than she imagined—after all, there is a very simple solution: go and rest.
Furthermore, the wife may think that her husband is doing more than simply failing to sympathize with her feelings: his response and advice contain a measure of criticism, a hint that she is “exaggerating” or is even to blame for her own tiredness, because instead of following his advice and going to rest, she prefers to complain and suffer.
Along the same lines, when she says “It's hot today” and he replies “It isn't all that hot,” she takes his words to mean that he does not feel the difficulty.
After all, his response can be understood as though he were saying: “Why are you being so fussy? It isn't all that hot! Besides, if you're so hot, you can easily solve the problem by turning on the air conditioner.” And when he comforts her about the pains she complains of, she does not hear the sympathy she so badly needs in his words: “You're in pain? It's nothing serious! All women have something that hurts! And if you're suffering that much, go to the doctor: I can't help you in any case.”
As we have already said, a wife tells her husband about a problem so that he will understand what she means and respond with words that show he understands and acknowledges that the problem exists. When he responds appropriately, with sympathy, she feels that he is attached to her. Here, however, he has not merely failed to show any understanding of her difficulties—worse still, he thinks that his simple advice can “free” his wife from her “imaginary” problems. It goes without saying that after such a conversation, the woman will not feel emotionally satisfied; her inner need to share her problems with her husband will only grow.
There is another reason that leads a husband to respond to his wife’s words in a way that runs counter to her needs and to minimize the difficulties she describes.
It is a man’s need to feel that his wife is happy and satisfied with everything. This need leads him to give her practical advice intended to ease her material or psychological problems. But, as we have already said, offering “solutions” instead of expressing understanding and agreement only intensifies her distress.
It should be noted that one consequence of a husband’s lack of understanding and empathy for his wife’s problems may be angry outbursts on her part. When a woman feels that her husband does not empathize with her difficulties, she raises her voice more than usual, subconsciously assuming that if she shouts, he will understand how hard things are for her. The problem becomes even more complicated because her husband has no idea that this is the reason for her shouting, and he concludes that “my wife cannot cope with problems that anyone could handle.”
In all these situations, we clearly see difficulties in the relationship between husband and wife that arise from no one’s ill intentions, but result from differences and conflicts in the psychological makeup of men and women, and especially from their conflicting expectations of one another. This is one of the most serious psychological problems: a wife needs her husband to acknowledge that things are hard for her, while a husband needs his wife to tell him how happy she is.