Rabbi Simcha Cohen
It is remarkable how the Almighty brings together a man and a woman – so different in their very nature – through the needs that bind them.
Here is a situation familiar to many of us. In conversation with her husband, a wife tells him about a problem she is facing, describes how her day went, or shares some concerns about the future. At first he listens attentively, but after a while he clutches his head in his hands and says, “Quiet! I want some quiet!” Or, without any theatrical gestures, he simply says to her, “All right, I understand, but why do you have to shout?” And she replies, “I don't understand what you want: I didn't even raise my voice?!”
Anxiety
Why does a husband react this way to his wife's complaints? As we saw in the example above, this reaction can occur even when his wife is neither shouting nor even raising her voice.
The Almighty has instilled in human beings feelings whose purpose is to prompt them to act to improve their own condition or prevent harm or damage. We are familiar with the feeling of hunger, which signals the need to eat, and the feeling of compassion that arises at the sight of another person's suffering and makes us rush to their aid. Human beings have an instinctive aversion to rotten and spoiled foods with unpleasant odors that could harm their health.
Similarly, the Almighty has instilled in human beings a feeling of “anxiety” that is triggered when a baby cries nearby. When a mother hears the crying, her whole being immediately springs into action, helping her protect and assist the baby. This mobilization is brought about by a certain hormone that is released at the sound of a child's crying. In the father, however, this hormone is released to a much lesser degree – especially if his wife is nearby and he is sure she will attend to the child.
A similar process (though not a hormonal one) also occurs in men:
the mechanism of male anxiety is triggered when a husband notices or hears that his wife is distressed: she is suffering from something or is unhappy with what is happening to her.
The purpose of this anxiety, which the husband seeks to relieve, is to prompt him to protect his wife, care for her, and meet her unmet needs so that she feels good. So when a husband hears about his wife's problems, he is overcome by anxiety, and to describe this feeling, he uses an expression that, at first glance, seems unrelated to the topic of conversation: “I want some quiet!” With these words he expresses, albeit imprecisely, the discomfort his anxious state causes him and his desire for calm. He says this instead of telling her, “I'm emotionally tense. I need to calm down,” or, in other words, “It ‘stresses me out’ that you're having a hard time.” This is also why men often respond to their wives' accounts by saying, “The main thing is for you to calm down.”
When a husband is overcome by anxiety as a result of hearing his wife's account, he can choose one of two courses of action: either help his wife resolve her problems, in which case the anxiety will disappear on its own, or ignore his wife's problems and turn to his own affairs or entertainment to distance himself from the problems that generate anxiety in him.
Interestingly, a husband's level of anxiety is directly proportional to the difficulty of his wife's problem, but inversely proportional to his readiness and willingness to help her.
For example, when he is ready and able to act to resolve her problems, his anxiety will decrease noticeably. Since anxiety is built into a man's psyche to help him assist his wife, once he is ready to help her, the need for this feeling disappears, just as hunger disappears when a person has eaten their fill: after all, the purpose of hunger is precisely to make them seek food.
But when a husband has no desire to help his wife, the anxiety continues to create inner tension. The most painful feeling arises when he wants to help but is unable to do so. In that case, added to the tension we have been discussing is a painful sense of failure. He feels he has failed as a husband, whose duty is to protect his wife: she has problems, yet he cannot reach out and help her.
People with a strong sense of responsibility also experience higher levels of anxiety.
In other words, because he is the kind of person who “must” make sure everything around him is in order, it is understandably difficult for him to accept that things are not going well for his wife. Anxiety also increases in people who are sensitive to criticism, because they mistakenly interpret their wife's accounts of her problems as criticism directed at them, when she simply wanted to share what was happening.
The mechanism of male anxiety, which is triggered when a man hears about his wife's problems, often works in a paradoxical way, especially during the first months of married life. During this period, many men come to think that they are not suited to married life and cannot be good husbands.
The reason for this feeling lies in a constantly recurring process: a wife tells her husband about her problems, and he begins to feel that he is “inadequate.” He tries to encourage her, saying, for example, that the pain will pass, or that the woman who hurt her meant no harm, suggesting that she get some sleep if she is tired, or saying that, in general, if she simply thinks about having a husband who loves her, everything will pass. None of these attempts helps calm his wife. On the contrary, after hearing such words of encouragement, she concludes that he does not understand her problems deeply enough. As a result, she continues to describe her unpleasant feelings in even darker terms, and her husband only becomes more convinced that he is failing in married life.
What triggers anxiety in a man?
Undoubtedly, a whole range of factors. For example, when a woman expresses dissatisfaction with his actions, his parents, herself, her work, her cooking, the weather, and so on. But notice that a husband is also overcome by anxiety when he comes home and his wife greets him with a worried expression, saying, “I was so worried about you!” These words often even irritate him: “Why were you worried? What happened?!” In other words, unlike a woman, who is pleased to hear that her husband was worried about her and understands this concern as “I care about you,” a man does not like hearing such statements. To him, they mean, “I felt bad because I was worried about you, and it's your fault,” although she meant nothing of the kind.
Based on a man's own experience, an association becomes ingrained in his mind: someone who tells their spouse about their problems makes that spouse feel uncomfortable. So a husband usually does not tell his wife about his problems, because he fears these accounts will upset her, and that is the last thing he would want.
The effect of the anxiety mechanism is also apparent when a wife criticizes her husband. In this case he suffers twice over: from the criticism directed at him and from the subconscious feeling that his wife is distressed.