Is Your Husband Happy?

Reading a blog about loneliness, I stumbled upon a comment from one frustrated husband. These are the words that somehow struck me the most and emerged me into a lengthy bout of pondering: “My wife does her best to null any joy or excitement”. Women are known to complain more about issues they have in their relationships: expressing feelings, untangling a twisted knot of emotional problems, self-digging to a point of losing touch with reality and then dumping the findings on whoever would listen – all of these are more typical of a feminine nature. I’m not trying to present men as some shallow species incapable of deep feelings, it’s just that those feelings are mostly hidden so well it’s easy to fall into fallacy of thinking that men can take up any emotional burden and still be okay. Is it really so?

I often get annoyed when Jonathan gets into this peculiar dreaming mood. He starts talking about all the things he would never do as if he is all ready to start execution of his grand plans tomorrow. It goes like “first we’ll travel to Europe, stop by in Italy, visit Scandinavian countries…” I can’t help it but put some cold water on his overheated dream button: I dismiss his dreams by strong reasoning and logic. In eight years we’ve been together we went traveling once and it took a lot of efforts on my side. As I follow my urge to bring him back to the real world, the light of joy fades away from his face: he is defeated, quiet and unhappy. He retreats into his inner world from which I am now banned. Once I heard him murmur: “ Let me dream, won’t you…”

That’s just one of the examples but I can think of many more when I was the one to “null his joy and excitement”. Yet he never complains and I proudly carry my rightness, convinced I did him lots of good. It daunted on me lately that I don’t want to be right any more, I want him to be happy. And even if I am not the source of his happiness all the time, at least I can try and give some space so that the springs of joys would emerge from underground. We may very conveniently think that they owe us happiness but we owe them nothing in return: we can do all the nagging and criticizing in the world and still be loved unconditionally. It doesn’t take much to be judgmental, it takes a lot of will to support something you don’t necessarily agree with. Unless you want to be that sort of wife, the one who is always right, the joy-killer.