KEY TO HER MARRIED HAPPINESS

DON’T’S FOR A WIFE

by M. P. Vora

The Home Doctor

(A Practical Guide to Good Health)

Volume No. II, number. 2 of June 1963.

Page No. 11 to 14.

• Don’t forget to tell yourself that you were once very much in love and that your original desire is to make everyday the life of your husband happier and richer.
• Don’t spare any effort to make your home very attractive and comfortable for him. He is then sure to return home earlier than expected when his work is over.
• Don’t forget to greet him with a smiling face when he returns home.
• Don’t bore him with complaints on his return from his work. This is very irritating and annoying.
• Don’t neglect to be proficient in gastrology (art of cookery). The way to man’s heart is through his stomach. Hence know his likes and cater for them.
• Don’t show unwillingness to compromise with him if you have difference of opinion.
• Don’t let a day pass without clearing differences.
• Don’t think him a dud or make him feel like two cents at home.
• Don’t make him feel that he is no good. Every man needs his wife’s encouragement in order to endure his job or difficulties.
• Don’t make joke at his expense or cut him to size in front of others. Nothing makes a man lose his face along with self respect like being ridiculed in public.
• Don’t treat him with scorn. Every man needs his wife’s affection.
• Don’t give out what is confined in you even when you get mad at him.
• Don’t fail to face difficulties with a united front.
• Don’t blame him. If you could find words of encouragement, do use them to help him to win back his self respect.
• Don’t refuse to build up his significance in the family. The wife who shows regards for her husband helps not only him but also herself and the whole family.
• Don’t make most of the major occasions without consulting your husband. Otherwise he may develop a “feeling of not counting or being an non-entity”. In turn you will be deprived of his affection and respect.
• Don’t love luxury more than your husband. It is likely to make him feel that he is a failure as a provider.
• Don’t prattle on about the good things your friends have. This is sure to make your husband wince. It implies that your hubby is a failure.
• Don’t say unkind things about him in front of your children. A man has a right, at to the respect of his children. You may kill his pride and break the strongest tie the home has.
• Don’t get too much occupied with your children and neglect the normal needs of your hubby.
• Don’t be critical of your hubby’s lack of success or point out how much better other men are doing. The less successful a man is at his job or undertaking, the more he looks for and needs his wife’s encouragement, support and recognition. If you too make him feel a failure, his pride and initiative are totally crushed.
• Don’t nag him. His pride is chipped away through constant nagging. This is a common cause of marital disharmony. A wife, who gets her way by nagging, loses in the long run. You will only drive him even harder often right into the arms of some other women who is smart enough never to nag him at all.
• Don’t attack him in the most sensitive area i.e. his self respect. A wife’s disrespect for her husband has been on the increase especially when she earns to help the family income. Many husbands suffer such humiliation in bitter silence until they can stand no more. There is a limit to how much of a beating a male ego can take. Sooner or later he is bound to react. Then he explodes in a sudden revolt which may take the form of verbal quarrel, physical attack, desertion, infidelity, divorce or alcoholism. Today, a husband has lot more emotional troubles than his fore-fathers did.
• Don’t show interest in or flirt with other men. A man is extremely touchy and his pride is always hurt by your flirtations with other men.
• Don’t fail to seek out and fulfill his emotional needs.
• Don’t fail to understand his sexual worries about himself.
• Don’t make cracks about his love-making.
• Don’t laugh at the importance your husband places upon your sexual relations. You must be always sympathetic and show keen interest. Mockery is never welcome.
• Don’t show that you are unmoved by his love-making. This is very humiliating to him.
• Don’t show undue shyness or be afraid to manifest evidence of being aroused.
• Don’t fight the frequency of his desires. He would consider you unloving, and resent you. He may turn to another woman. Show greater understanding of his needs. Sex may not be important to you but is very important to him.
• Don’t fail to take an occasional initiation in love-making.
• Don’t fail to bring variety to love-making; there is no limit to the possible variety of sexual enjoyment between two people of opposite sex. One can shift from tenderness to passion and back again.
• Don’t show disinterest in the phase of love-making or with-hold sensual caresses as a prelude.
• Don’t miss “the joy of offering”. Give yourself freely and without any reservation. Sex within the frame work of love and marriage is very valuable and serves the fulfillment of man or women as a total being. Biologically it affords the release of tension. Psychologically, through sex, one learns more about oneself. It is a way of achieving profound relatedness to another being at the same time fulfilling one’s own individuality. Sex as a mechanical act is a tragic distortion. Intensity comes not only from sexual pleasure but also from the discovery of self and of another human being and from participation in one of the greatest dramas of human existence. Therefore, a person who holds back sexually is not pure or lofty but denying the true meaning of sex and life. Remember sex is something healthy, natural and God-given. Repression often leads to psychic damage.
• Don’t neglect to admit sexual satisfaction. If you don’t do so, he is likely to be hurt. He may feel he is not much of a man. It creates worry and jealously in his mind.
• Don’t question his sexual ability. You will cripple his sexual confidence. This may lead to alcoholism, desertion, infidelity or impotence. “So closely tied together are his sex and ego that his sex interests are essentially a function of his ego. Nothing a woman can do to a man is crueler than making him feel sexually unsure of himself”. “Masculinity is more important to man than feminity to women, (Dr.F.S.Caprio) and sexual performance is more inextricably linked to feeling of masculine self-worth than even motherhood is to a women”. (Dr.Helen).
• Don’t express scorn at his occasional unsuccessful sexual performance. He suffers from deep psychological trauma which paralyses his subsequent performance.
• Don’t fail to reassure him. Every man needs reassurance about his manliness.
• Don’t allow unhappiness to crop up because of his occasional impotence. There is scarcely a man alive who does not find himself impotent on some occasion in his life time. Therefore, it will be very unfortunate if either of the partners reacts with blind fright and does things impulsively to harm one or both of them. You must handle him with affection, sympathy and understanding. Mutual understanding and co-operation are of the utmost importance for a remedy.
• Don’t say unkind things even when you are angry, or lose your temper. These will help him to escape from you in disgust. Then your amends may fail to extract the poison you have injected into his pride. A man, whose wife constantly hurts his self respect, feels unappreciated. This leads him to infer that he is a fool to stay in marriage that offers him nothing but scorn and reproach.
• Don’t hesitate to build up his ego. A wife who wants a happy marriage and one that will last long knows its importance. The more manly she makes him feel, the more she and her children will benefit. The higher the self confidence, the more esteem she will be shown as the woman behind the man. What no wife must ever do is to rob her husband of his self respect. Without it he cannot feel himself a man. With it he feels able and ready to face any challenge and win a good life for the wife and children, who naturally look up to him. The wife, who tears down her hubby and thinks she can rule him by keeping him under her thumb, is grossly mistaken. “Only an appreciative wife commands her husband” as was once said by Lord Tennyson.
• Don’t allow your marriage to become stagnant.
• Don’t fail to “explode” in preserving the freshness in marriage.
• Don’t forget to re-conquer, everyday, married happiness or spare any conscious efforts on your part for the same.

Marriage is essentially an adjustment between a man and a woman who are united in the achievements of common goals to which they give their hopes, thoughts and best efforts. It is the most concentrated union that exists between a man and a woman. It is happy when the expectations of the parties who are engaged in a union, are met on all essential points. Their happiness is to be re-conquered everyday and requires conscious efforts on the part of both husband and wife, an inherent factor in every marriage, affording each partner an opportunity to draw richly on the other’s personality and opinions.