Rabbi Simcha Cohen
An interesting situation can arise when a husband makes an improvement in the home intended to make his wife's life easier.
If we ask him why he did it, he will reply: “I want my wife to feel good.”
But when his wife notices that her husband is devoting his time to making her life easier, she feels a stronger emotional bond and greater closeness to him. As a result, her need to share her difficulties or the problems troubling her grows stronger, both to emphasize the closeness she feels toward him and to emphasize her contribution to their relationship: even though things are hard for me, I continue to function.
Yet to him, at first glance, her complaints suggest that despite his help, she still does not feel good.
Here we see a clear conflict between the husband's needs and the wife's needs:
the husband helps her so that he can hear that she is satisfied with everything and feels good, while the wife, seeing his good deeds and feeling the closeness and connection they have created, begins to describe exactly what is making her feel bad! As a result, the husband says to himself: “Whatever I do for her, she is still always dissatisfied!” Clearly, through her complaints she loses an important incentive that would encourage her husband to keep helping her.
But if, after her husband's help, his wife tells him how glad and happy she is, this will encourage him to help her more and more.