Take Me To Post Comment Form I was recently reading an article in a magazine about how men cope with divorce. It said that essentially, it’s harder to get over a divorce for men than it is for women. I thought this was interesting since it’s usually men who are characterized as less emotional. However, the article did say that women initiate a large portion of divorces – so they are usually ready to move on. Sadly, it’s usually the man who is clueless as to what is going on. The divorce seems to come out of nowhere and he is absolutely devastated. So what’s the problem? What does it take to make a marriage work? To tell you the truth I have no idea. I’ve been successfully married for just under three years, which isn’t very long considering my grandparents were married for over fifty. That being said, I have noticed one mistake that we husbands tend to make that can often lead to divorce. That mistake is: constantly choosing projects over our wives. They need to know that they are more important than whatever it is we are working on. It could be something as grand as finding a cure for cancer, as selfless as building her a gazebo in the back yard, or as inane as scraping up enough fake money to buy a fake piece of real estate in a video game. Whatever it is, they need to feel like they are more important. If your wife says something like, “I think you love such and such more than me!” It’s time to drop the controller and spend some time with your wife – and not crappy time either. Don’t waste it thinking about your project, actually BE with her! Speaking of what women feel, be aware that they do feel… a lot. I’ve noticed that my wife’s emotions tend to be her reality even if actual reality is different. We fellas know that all we really want to do is finish our project. It really doesn’t have anything to do with our love for our wives, however, when we neglect them in favor of work (or play or whatever) they feel abandoned and alone. So in their minds they ARE abandoned and alone. Instead of trying to talk our wives out of their feelings using logic, we have to actually deal with the feelings at hand and meet their emotional needs. From my experience, once I’ve done that, she’s okay and I can be free to go back to whatever I was doing. It’s sad how many men I’ve talked to who tell me that they’d been married for years and then, all of a sudden, their wives want a divorce! They’re completely unaware that anything was wrong. Usually these men have been ignoring their wives cues or trying to convince them that they shouldn’t feel the way they do for years until their wives have finally had enough. Again, I don’t want to come off as the “marriage expert” but it would seem that perhaps it is to our benefit to take our wives emotions seriously.