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- She is not happy – I did not notice.
- I got in trouble.
- Is it my fault that she’s not happy? That’s not the point. We think relationships are like puzzles. We look, we see all the pieces there and so we think everything’s fine. But they see in infared. They see in heat, temperatures. You and I see a person, a body. They see if that person is alive or dead. We’re the dummies who believe that Bernie is still alive in Weekend at Bernie’s b/c we saw Bernie. They “sense” something’s wrong.
- We stink at sensing our wive’s feelings and when we do we approach it wrong.
- SO YES, we should know when she’s not doing well and YES she should feel safe to tell us when she’s not doing well.
- We want solutions so we first look at “What caused this problem?” so we can remove the cause.
- Women don’t want us to look at the cause. They don’t want an investigator, they want a grief counselor.
- We think LOGICALLY, they think EMOTIONALLY.
- My wife is afraid of spiders. She KNOWS logically it’s not rational to be afraid of EVERY spider on the planet but she is. She knows that she is emotionally out of whack when it comes to spiders. In my experience women are all completely out of whack when you compare them to us because they work differently.
- The door here at my new office is broken. Something with the hinge at the top getting stuck. Some tensioner issue. There are also sliding doors that open when you approach them. You don’t approach both broken doors the same. One runs of old fashioned parts and one runs off of electricity and lots of complex parts. They both are doors (people) but their systems are either very simple or very complex. We’re the simple ones guys. They’re the complicated ones.
- So what’s our job? It’s not to fix what caused the break, it’s to listen to the story of how it broke and then be present while healing takes place.
- Healing happens with;
- Presence
- Listening
- Physical proximity
- Prayer/encouragement/empathy
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My name is Andy Traub and I help people tell their stories in a way that maximizes their impact. If you'd like to create your own custom channel to reach the world then I can help. Just 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Sweet! I have been looking for the way I can fix my wife! I look forward to listening to this one.
Let me know how that turns out OK?
How does this fit? Not fixing it feels so un-QBQ. My natural response to an unhappy wife is “If we’re not trying to fix it, why are we even talking?”
This would be an interesting topic to explore with a female guest on Linchpin.