I never went to school to be a marriage counselor. I respect the ones who paid the dues to be in the business. I used counselors before and it didn’t work for me. It wasn’t their fault, because even after talking to a few pastors to help my last marriage, it just wasn’t meant to be. In the process of growing in life and accepting reality, I learned something valuable. There is this expectation from most women and counselors that a man will talk about his feelings and problems like a woman would. Counselors will say in conflict resolution, “Don’t start a sentence saying, “You.” Say, “I feel.” I learned that this skit is not reality. Men do not think like this or speak like this. That’s in general and let’s not go into the different cultures of men.
Women may say, “You should have said it like this.” This is not reality. We can’t speak or think this way. It’s not natural, normal or even teachable in most cases. Before I get the hate mail, I understand there is a better way to say what we say about how we really feel. The timing to speak about things is very important for both. Most of us are not the nurturing, kindhearted, empathetic, emotional, and sensitive guys that the world may want. It is something that we can get better with, but it is a process. These things I mentioned are all the best things about women. We weren’t blessed with these things out the gate. I think it comes when we have grandkids. Not sure about that.
To tell a man to speak about his feelings in a time of anger or even during a counseling session, will not sound like he is speaking about his feelings. It will definitely come off as complaining, anger, or dislike because we get frustrated very easy. The list of things people argue about have been enough to divide many marriages. I’m not saying the man is right about what he needs to express his feelings or anger about. I am saying, don’t expect counseling that says, to explain his feelings to actually work. If there is a counselor reading this, I’m not trying to offend you.
I am 46 and calmed down a lot and have learned to accept the things that are human nature and deal with them the best as I can. I accept the blessing of women and their feminine characteristics. I don’t even think counseling should start off about the list of problems. Once the differences between men and women are discussed, we can understand how these things don’t change quickly. Then we can learn and decide if we are willing to live with it, or experience the same things with someone else. Normally, it takes an act of God or a lot of life experiences for someone to change what is natural in their reaction and response to an argument. Some go the route of blaming a chemical imbalance or being bipolar. Then you get drugs involved and that’s another story. The answer is to educate about the sexes. Learn about the consequences of our actions and even consequences of our expectations.
Time, experience and education in the male and female mindset is the key to understanding and handling things better. Words have so much power. The tongue is not easily tamed. As I write this, there is much more I can say, but let’s end this here. I hope this has helped someone. To begin the journey to fixing a problem, we must face the simple fact that, we are different for a reason. Only this kind of challenge can bring out the best of who we are, for the other, when we aren’t so frustrated at what is normal for most.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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