What Women Need To Know About Talking to Men

After being married for more than twenty years, I think that the number one reason that couples argue is due to a lack of basic communication skills with the opposite sex.

Men are Like Waffles and Women are Like Spaghetti

Every engaged and married couple should read the book, Men are Like Waffles and Women are Like Spaghetti. Singles should read the “for singles” version. Much of what I talk about here is based on ideas from that book even though it’s been years since I’ve read it.

The basic premise of the book is that men’s internal lives are divided up into boxes and they think about the world in these boxes (i.e. like the boxes on a waffle) while the various parts of women’s internal lives are all tied together (like spaghetti).

These differences lead to different communication styles.

Lines? What Lines

The first thing that women need to understand is that most men don’t read between the lines.

In fact, we don’t even know there is anything between the lines. For the most part, men are wired to solve problems. The ones who were good at solving problems survived and passed the genes on to our kids. The ones who weren’t eaten by lions a long time ago.

So, women, when you sit down with your man to tell him about the hard day you had and how someone was mean to you at work, he’s trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Who does he need to beat up, what strategies can he impart to you so he can make your day better, and quite often “What is the problem”.

What this means is that you need to give your man some verbal clues.

When I was first married, my wife would think of something that she might want to do twenty years from now (e.g. “I think it would be great to build a gazebo in the backyard”) and I would freak out. “I can’t build a gazebo and I don’t have the money for a gazebo.” Then my wife would react to my freaking out in the process.

Finally, we realized that she needed to preface things with “You don’t need to do anything about this. It’s just an idea that I was thinking about for somewhere down the road …”

Your Husband Lives in a Series of Boxes

We mentioned boxes up above. Your husband has a car box, a vacation box, a football box, a kids box, a wife box, and many other boxes in his head. This is how he was able to go out and put himself in life endangering situations many years ago and then come home be social without freaking out over the horror of war or the stress of hunting for food while being hunted himself by predators.

That affects you in many ways when you are trying to communicate:

1) By default, he is going to try to troubleshoot anything that he verbally recognizes as a problem. This is why women constantly think that men are trying to “fix them.”

2) When he’s not sure which box he’s in, he’s going to get frustrated.  If you start a conversation talking about vacation and end up asking him about your kids’ Christmas presents, he’s going to get confused.

3) Because it takes him a while to figure out what box he’s in, there are times when it will take him a while to engage the idea and come to a conclusion.
There are a couple of side effects of this:

Talking on a day to day basis

Your husband walks into the house. You’ve missed him and you want to talk about your day at work or the day you had with the kids. You want him to know you and understand you. So you wait for him by the front door to share your whole day with the person that you love.

A man walks into his house.  He’s tired.  He’s being thinking about problems at work all day.  As he’s gotten closer to home, a lot of times, he’s started thinking about problems to fix at home — the back gate is sagging, a piece of chair rail is loose upstairs, I have to pay for Christmas presents somehow.

He walks into his house and all of a sudden, before he has a chance to do anything, his wife starts to dump all her problems on him.   Already overwhelmed, he starts trying to figure out how to solve these new issues.  When he offers his brilliant solution to one problem, you get angry and say “Stop trying to fix me.”  Totally confused, he retreats to his nothing box and just stares at you or storms  out of the room.

Help Him

Your husband walks in and sees you sitting on the couch.  He trembles a little as he sets down his stuff and walks over.  What is happening?  Will you argue again? What is he supposed to fix?

When he sits down, give him the clue he needs.

“Hi, honey.  Let me tell you about my day.  You don’t have to fix any problems.  I just want to tell you all of the things that happened to me so I can feel close to you.”

Ah, the pressure is off.  I can just listen to you talk.

Now about halfway through the talk, your husband forgets and starts to help solve one of your problems (that you don’t need solves).

Rather than jump down his throat for trying to fix you, you calmly say, “Oh.  I don’t need you to fix this, honey.  I just want to tell you about it so you understand what my day was like.”

But didn’t you already tell him that?  Yes, you did.  But remember, we are hardwired to FIX THINGS.  It is our default setting and since we don’t come with physical switches, we need to be verbally contextswitched by you.

End it with a hug. It sounds dumb, but physical thanks lets your husband know that he did something good and will make him come back for more conversation tomorrow.

Use This Approach in Other Situations

Any time you physically walk up to your husband to have a conversation, let him know what’s going on.

“I just had an idea for something that I might want to do down the road and wanted to tell you about it. It’s nothing we need to worry about right now.”

“Hey, I think we’ve got a problem with Johnny. It’s not a big problem so we don’t have to freak out about it, but I noticed that he’s doing such and such.”

If Your Husband Starts the Conversation, Try to Stay in the Box

You know how shocked you are when your husband actually starts a conversation that doesn’t involve sex? If he has then it indicates that he has something that he really wants to talk about. He’s been sitting in one of his boxes and he’s finally dug down deep and decided that something needs to be talked through.

So try to stay in the box.

If he’s talking about your next vacation, don’t go all spaghetti on him and tell him about the time that you went on vacation and your Aunt Maddy. Let him give his spiel and mentally make notes of your questions instead of interrupting him as he goes.

Every time that you have a positive communication counter with your man, it will make the next one more positive for both of you and turn potential negative experiences in your marriage into positive experiences. Read the whole book I mentioned above though. It’s full of both theoretical and practical wisdom on communication.