The Desire Husbands Don’t Like to Discuss

Men feel loved when they see their wives taking care of themselves

For fear of being misunderstood or hurting their wives’ feelings, men are largely silent about this.  And that’s probably unfortunate, because it turns out this is exceptionally important to them, emotionally. Here’s the bottom line:  When he sees you making an attempt to take care of yourself, he feels loved by you.  To the men in my research, that means that unless you have a physical reason why this isn’t possible (which does happen sometimes), that you generally try to stay healthy and active and able to go do things together, you try to be a healthy weight (whatever is healthy for you), you care how you look around the house at times (not just out in public), and you don’t do self-destructive things.  Nothing crazy – just basic self-care.

Why does this matter so much to men? The research isn’t clear. My educated guess, based on the research so far, is that it has something to do with a) the fact that romance for a guy means going out and doing things together (which requires you to have the energy and ability to do that, to some degree) and, most important, b) how highly visual men are. (The visual nature of men is a whole other topic, but if you’re curious what I mean by that, you can see more in this little book I wrote to help women understand their husbands and sons.)

Although there are always exceptions, the bottom line is that a man’s brain wiring processes the world visually and emotionally in the same way a woman’s brain process the world verbally and emotionally.  Where you as a woman probably want to talk about life, his emotions, sense of desire, and sense of connectedness to his wife are strongly tied to what he sees.   

A man loves his wife, regardless! But if he sees her not making an effort to take care of herself, he instinctively feels that she simply doesn’t care about him.  After all, he subconsciously feels, someone with a visual brain should instinctively understand this.  But because her brain (in most cases) is not wired with that visual-emotional connection, she doesn’t understand it. But he doesn’t realize that. So in his mind, if she doesn’t seem to want to make that effort, he ends with the feeling like she really doesn’t care about him in an area that “she should know” is incredibly important to him.