Hi, your marriage sounds a little like mine, OP, so I'd like to tell you what I experience from the woman's side.
As above, so below. Everything is a metaphor for everything else. What is marriage, but the joining of two bodies? As you live your lives together, share experiences, and come to agreements, your brains change shape to resemble one another. The physical aspects of your minds become extensions of one another. This corporeal melding can be understood in the way that sex is, so bear with me as I write more explicitly.
A woman's fundamental desire is to envelop her man. I want to understand the way his mind works, I want to be the glue that comprises his family; I want to drown him in my feminine proclivity for bond-making. What I ask in return is that he not flee from my crushing. A woman might bear down on you, pushing you out of her if she's enjoying sex with you. In your body, reader, you know this isn't a cue to distance yourself. It's actually a welcoming: it's an invitation to press forward with more focus. Your woman asks the same of you emotionally.
The hot-crushing of marital conflict is actually an invitation to draw yourself nearer to your woman (whether she knows it or not), but men tend to avoid conflict for a number of reasons. For one, you're usually socialized to feel your emotions are inappropriate, and so tend to hide them. Two, anger is relatively taboo in our society, and constructive anger management isn't taught to most of us. The combination of these usually ends with men who withdraw, who capitulate and go quiet in the face of marital conflict. While this approach can be quite effective at dissolving conflict, it also dissolves connection and a woman's felt fullness of your presence in her life.
Instead, a man who is present with his emotions and present with his womans' feelings is engaged in the relationship. We want a man who doesn't arbitrarily shy away from conflict, a man who respectfully speaks his mind and is open to really listen to his woman, and not just her words. For instance, if you ask your woman, "Do you like this?" and she doesn't speak but her body quivers, do you wait for her verbal response? Outside of the bedroom, too, we need you to be tuned into us, our rhythms, and our moods the way we try to be tuned into yours.
The work of joining two souls to one is all-encompassing. Just like having a healthy body requires exercise, diet, and mental training, so does a successful marriage engage all avenues of self-improvement. You will not be able to be present for your wife if you don't find a way to be present for yourself first. Likewise, your wife cannot benefit from your presence if she doesn't learn what presence is by cultivating it within herself. Not any aspect of your relationship falls solely on the shoulders of one or the other; it takes two to tango.
Disclaimer: I can't really speak for all women, but this is my best guess based off my experience and the experience of other women I'm close to. I'm only 26, my marriage is only four years old and we've only got one daughter who is <1 year old. Take with a pinch of salt. skrimplet out
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idrk how I got here or what I'm here for but I keep waking up with this biological urge to not die✨
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