SWM005: Why your husband can’t tell you what he needs

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This episode answers the question why can’t my husband just tell me what he needs. It is the other side of last week’s episode. Check out the show notes here for more details and links.

Men generally struggle to express a need, to their friends, to their wife, to anyone. The result is that a lot of men go through life fairly alone with very little support, because they do not know how to ask for it and often do not realise they should.

There are three reasons. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness, and men are taught not to show weakness to anyone, frequently including themselves. Asking requires knowing what you need, and most men are not self-aware enough to have worked that out. And even when a man does know, he often lacks the vocabulary to say it in a way that survives the trip across the room.

Husbands: recognise that having a need is not a weakness, and that identifying it is a strength. Work on self-awareness, on saying it without it landing as an attack, and on burying some pride. Wives: offer support that is not patronising and does not sound like a mother helping a son, make suggestions rather than prescriptions, listen for what he is trying to say rather than what he managed to say, and model what asking looks like.