Welcome, and Happy Hanukkah to everybody. May this be a time of miracles in our lives for all the people of Israel. May Hashem answer all of our prayers for good. May we see yeshuah (salvation) for all the people of Israel. May there be good health, and may this help us get closer to Hashem.
This is our Shalom Bayit (peace in the home) class number 9, I believe. We were continuing from last week's class. We discussed what we called the rules of fighting, and the right way to disagree. The truth is, you're allowed to disagree, and that's very important in marriage. It should not turn into a fight. The rules of fighting are really the rules of disagreement, so that it does not turn into a fight. Yet the way you handle your disagreements can actually bring you closer to each other.
Every relationship has disagreements. That's life. People are individuals. They have their own opinions and their own ways of doing things, and there will always be disagreements. The closer people are to you, the more opportunity there is to disagree. If you just see a person occasionally and say, “Hi, how are you doing? How's the weather?” you're not going to disagree that much. But the people you love most and are closest to are the ones you might disagree with more often.
It's extremely important to know the proper way to disagree so that it's productive, so that it actually brings us closer. It clarifies things about us that we didn't know, and makes us closer and more aware of ways we can treat each other better. That's what we were trying to do. We got up to the very last point, and that's part of it. We talked about deciding whether something is important enough to bring up, ways to say it nicely, and planning your discussion so that things don't come out that shouldn't have come out. You really think about how you're going to say it, stick to the issues, and don't bombard your spouse with a million things at one time. We brought up a lot of different parts of it.
The last part of the process, which I didn't have time to finish in last week's class, is extremely important. It's called problem solving. Very often, a couple will have an argument or disagreement. Each will say their part: what's upsetting them, what hurt them, what bothered them. The other one will defend themselves and give their part of the argument. But then it stops there: “Well, you don't understand,” and “You don't understand,” and “It's really my fault,” and “It's not your fault,” and “It's not my fault,” whatever it is. And then it stops. That's the end. That shouldn't be the end. It should be the beginning.
That beginning includes everything we talked about before: how to present the issues properly. But once you've presented the issues, what are you going to do with them? What is going to happen with them? What's the benefit that's going to come out of this? That's problem solving. Problem solving means going beyond just identifying the problem; now you want to solve it. So you have to be able to say, “What could we do differently so this wouldn't happen again?” We're living together. We're a married couple. Things happen constantly, and we don't want the same things to happen again.
The way to do it is that I said, “What could we do?” Not, “What should we do?” or “What should you do differently?” or “What should we do so this shouldn't happen again?” When you take blame out of it and just want to come up with a better relationship, and that's really your focus, you can achieve tremendously in the relationship. Then you just want to grow. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. The best way is to take part of the blame. When we take part of the blame, it diffuses the situation.
I feel very, very strongly—and I'm trying very hard to keep this in my mind—that it's impossible to be 100% right. I felt this even more strongly in this last Tehillim class I was teaching. The Perek (chapter) is—let me just make sure which one—probably, maybe, Zayin (seven), Perek Zayin of Tehillim. It says, “David's mistake,” “David's error.” And it's a commentary's talk there that the word Shigayon means an error. What was his error? He himself wrote this, remember. David HaMelech wrote, “An error of David.” What is he talking about? He's talking about the time when Shaul HaMelech was chasing him to kill him. Shaul was chasing David to kill him, and David would never hurt Shaul because he was anointed by Hashem. David respected him and loved him, even though Shaul was trying to kill him. Hashem had anointed David to be the next king, and it had nothing to do with David. David never did anything to hurt Shaul. He was totally, totally not to blame.
“Fine, we'll get some air.” And yet David says, looking back, “You know, there was one time when I could have killed Shaul and I didn't.” He's in a cave, and Shaul doesn't know he's there. David cuts a piece from the corner of Shaul's garment to show him, “I could have killed you, but I would never want to hurt you.” Later, David is thinking, “Maybe that wasn't Kavod (honor) to the king. Maybe I shouldn't have cut his garment. Maybe that was a mistake.”
Another time, when Shaul dies, people come to tell David, and they think David is going to rejoice because he had an enemy who was trying to kill him, and once Shaul died, David would become the next king. So they're telling him, “Shaul HaMelech died.” David HaMelech is devastated. He cries, mourns, eulogizes Shaul, and does all those things on the highest level possible. But after all of that is said and done, David HaMelech says to Tehillim, a thanks to Hashem for destroying his enemy. Now he's wondering, “Was that a mistake?” He's wondering whether maybe even that was something he shouldn't have done.
We don't know from Hashem's point of view, and we know Hashem loves David HaMelech. So I think Hashem loves that David is even thinking these might be mistakes, because maybe—we're not told by Hashem that they were mistakes. But I'm learning from David HaMelech. I'm learning from him that you have to look for your part in it, no matter how right you really are, no matter how right you think you are, and no matter how right you might even be. There's always a little bit that I can improve. There's always a way I can say, “I didn't mean it. I didn't want it. I didn't think I did it. But if there's some way that I hurt you, I have to think of a better way and a different way. I have to change myself in some way to make sure this doesn't happen again.”
We always have to take a little responsibility. I won't even say blame, but responsibility that something I did added to this in some way. So when we look at it like that and we're going to tell a husband something, we can say, “Obviously, something we did together didn't work well. How could we change it? What could we do differently next time?” Really come up with things. Brainstorm. Come up with ways to figure out what we could do differently.
You forgot to bring something home. You could say, “You always do that to me. You're not thinking of me.” How could we change it? What could we do differently? Maybe I should write you a note. Maybe I should call you on the cell phone. Maybe I'll text you. We have a lot of ways to communicate nowadays, so you can do things like that.
Here's another situation that comes to mind: “You're always at your mother's house. You're always helping your mother. You're never with me. You're not helping me. You're not willing to do the things I ask you to do. But if your mother calls you, you jump to do it.” So now you want to know what we should do about that. What are some suggestions?
When people come to me about Shalom Bayit, that's what I help them do. I help them say, “Okay, I hear the problem, but now what do we do about it? What are some ways to alleviate that feeling, that resentment?” So Terri's going to give us a couple. Let me just finish eating. The mouth is always working. It's good to eat while you're out of your room. Stops you, but I'm not.
“Probably not,” she said. “One thing would be to say, ‘You always said that—okay, like I told everybody, it's my birthday. I'm Saturday. I would love to go to the movies Saturday night. I would love if you could spend time with all of my friends and so and so.’ Verbalize what you need, what you want, using that I-language. Maybe even say, ‘How do you think it would work if every time I needed to go to my mother's, we did it together, and I'll try to keep it short, and on the way home we'll go out for ice cream?’ You come up with things. You make things up. How would it be if—”
Someone asked, “Can I just say something that happened?”
“Yes.”
“I had asked my husband to make an appointment. He was going down to the school, and I said, ‘Can you make this appointment?’ I showed him a letter. I said, ‘Also, you have to pay this woman so I can get the appointment.’ I showed him visually. I had to show him. I got a phone call two hours later: ‘Your husband came down to make the appointment, but we can't keep it because you didn't pay.’ So I said, ‘What happened? You didn't pay?’ He said, ‘Oh, I forgot.’ I really was thinking of what you said, and I'm listening. I'm like, ‘Okay, honey, I just want to know what I should do. Tell me what I should do next time so that maybe you could hear me better.’ I didn't know—was that something I should have said, or no?”
“It depends on his reaction. What was his reaction?”
“He was like, ‘What?’ It just went over his head. ‘I don't know what you told him.’ He was like, ‘You didn't tell me to pay her.’”
We all forget sometimes. We all make mistakes, and it happens. It happens to me, too. My husband might tell me to do something, and then I come back and say, “Oops, didn't do it.” Those things do happen.
How to work it out so that it doesn't happen is what we're trying to say. It might be that I'm going to tell him, “Call me when you get there,” or I'm going to call him when I think he's there. It might even be helpful if I called the woman and said, “My husband's on his way over. I brought—I sent him to make the appointment, and I sent him to pay.”
“My husband said he didn't even hear her.”
“Right. You're showing it.”
“Right. I'm like, ‘What should I do? Tell me, maybe I'm doing something wrong.’ I want him to say, ‘Oh, you need to tell me more time.’ He doesn't have time. Is that right?”
“Right. Or maybe I write it, maybe I call, maybe I do something else. But at the end of the day, we have to be forgiving. You have to be forgiving because I definitely know that I do it, too. It's not worth fighting over. It's not worth fighting over, and you might have to work around it in some way.”
“Yeah, I had to go down there.”
“You had to go down and pay it, and hopefully that worked. I don't know why the woman didn't ask for the money, either. Sometimes they're not in the same—okay, it's not the same. Okay.”
The truth is, what you're saying is good: “What could I have done differently?” Really, if your husband said, “Maybe if you called me then,” or “Maybe if you wrote it,” that would be a good reminder. With my family, one of my daughters and my husband got into it from her. They leave themselves messages on their answering machines. They'll call themselves when they're not home. Someone tells you, “Don't forget to do this and this and this and this and this and this and this.” All of a sudden I see my daughter pick up her phone and say, “I'm leaving myself a message. You have to do this and that.” When she gets home and listens to her messages, it will remind her. You have to find your own ways to remind yourself. You come home, listen to your messages, and then you're at the place where you need to be.
So find a way to say, “What could we do differently?” Let's go back to the situation where the wife feels her husband spends too much time at his parents' house and does too much for his parents. I hear that a lot. There's a lot of competition between daughters-in-law and their mothers-in-law over how much time the husband spends with his mother, how much help he gives her, and how much he doesn't help his wife. We'll discuss that a little bit. But say, “What can we do differently?” and come up with suggestions. Whatever your problem is, don't leave it as a problem. Try to go to the next step of problem solving and come up with actual suggestions. Come up with a few and pick something that you and your husband can both agree on. That's another step.
When you get to that step in a relationship and in how you argue, it's going to help you because you're going to change. You're going to make a change. It's all about change. When we don't change, we're stuck in the same position, and the same thing keeps happening again. When we make a change, we have a possibility of growing.
Someone asked, “Everybody has been affected by rules, and then the rest of us don't know. But when I come home and feel like I just want to relax, I just want to do it, and I want to help with the kids or whatever, is it my right to ask for it, or is it no?”
“You get to do what you want.”
“Right.”
“Most men need to unwind when they come home from work, and then there's a certain amount of time. So now it's a compromise. Here's the problem: you come home from work and need to unwind; I need help with the children. What's the solution? Let's brainstorm. What do you want to do? One of his solutions is, ‘Leave me alone.’”
“Okay. I need to get them done now. I'm punctual. I need to get them done now. I can't wait 30 minutes to give them a bath or whatever. I need to not act on a person.”
“So you're going to meet in the middle. Sometimes when a person is—and I don't mean you, but you said you're a very punctual person and it has to be now—I'm picking up on a little perfectionism that could be a problem. Life goes on a half an hour later, too. When we tone down the anxiety and the need for things to be the way we want, when we want, how we want, it adds a lot of peace and love in the family.”
That half an hour—you'll have to figure out for yourself what works for you. Try to be more loose with your schedule. He's a little bit more old-fashioned, in terms of, “You have a wife; that's what you do.” Tell him no. You know why it's not okay? Because it's not okay with you. If it were okay with you, then it's great and wonderful if you're happily going about your way. But if it's causing resentment, then it's not okay with you. If you're feeling it's a strain and unfair, then it's not okay.
So what do you do with the relationship? Can we get a mother's helper for the hour when we need help with the bath and the kids? Can we wait the half an hour until I calm down and relax after work, and then we're going to do it? Could we switch the schedule a little, so it's reading-books time instead of bath time, and then we're going to do that afterward? I love to read to them after they're all delicious and smell from the bath and they're in their pajamas. It's cuddly time and everything. You don't want to cuddle with them when they're full of whatever else they have on them. Still, we can work things out. Think of different ways to do things, come up with compromises and suggestions, and try to do things differently. He wants to stay out of it completely; you want his help the minute he walks in. Somewhere there, there's got to be a compromise, and both of you have to be open to change. That's what it is: a little give on both sides, to find something that fits.
Even if it's finding someone to come in and help you, and he gets his way and sits on the couch, he has to pay for the mother's helper. Either way, it's going to be give and take. Come up with a few different suggestions for change. Try to make it—yeah.
Someone said, “I have a mom's helper, and I came in when she was there once. He walked in the door and said, ‘I don't want to hurt you when I'm here.’ I should have said, ‘Well, then help me.’”
“Right. Talk it out in a nice way and try to think of different ways. The suggestion was to sometimes change things: ask him for his help on the weekend, when he's not straight out of work, and see how that works and whether he gets into it.”
I remember asking my husband to help with bathing the kids. I don't even remember—I think it wasn't—no, no, no. Let me—those weren't my children, because God bless him, that was a different era. That was a different era, and he didn't help me bathe the kids. It was grandchildren, definitely grandchildren. They would buy me, they would buy me, and I wanted his help. He said, “No problem,” because at this point, with grandchildren, he's really getting into this father stuff. It just took a generation later. But that wasn't—I got caught. We're going to change the subject.
I know someone who asked for help with the bath. I went in, and he said, “They're done.” Their faces are dirty. The same chocolate that was on their faces is still there. It's like, “Oh, soap? Soap?” He said, “Yeah, water, soap.” You may want his help, and then when he gives you his help, you're going to say, “Go rest on the couch,” because it may not even be the type of help you want. Then it becomes a different issue: wanting him to do it the way you want it done. When we put the kids in the bath, we expect some soap. We expect some washing to happen, not just into the water and then out of the water.
But the point is to look for change. Don't forget that step in our lives. Look for ways to improve things, ways to change things. Don't get stuck in the pattern. Don't get stuck in the same thing: “I want it this way, you want it that way,” and then you're just going to keep banging heads and nobody's going to change. You've got to be able to change. You've got to be able to grow. It might be a growing thing to be able to be looser. If you're the type who wants everything a certain way and you relax that a little, that's a change. Then there are some women who have no schedule whatsoever and are so dizzy and crazy that it drives their husband crazy. They're going to get a little bit more regimented in their lives, and that's going to help, too. It's change. It's growth. It's really trying to be a better person and a more accommodating person.
We're going to leave that thought and go on to the next. I want you to remember: whenever there's a disagreement, and you get past deciding what the problem is and each person takes a turn expressing their feelings, don't forget to go to the problem-solving stage. When you finish, think to yourself, “What did we accomplish?” The truth is, you should actually be accomplishing. Have that follow-through so you can say, “This isn't working out. You're coming home, and you're really not there. Maybe we should get the woman to come help us,” or, “Maybe I should bathe them earlier.” Whatever the situation, you're going to have your schedule and reevaluate it. Really look to change things and put things in a better direction in your marriage.
Now, the next thing I had in mind that I wanted to discuss—sometimes I have everything typed out in my notes, and then something else comes into my head and just wants to happen. I don't know that I'm going to be 100%, but what I was hoping we would be able to discuss might be difficult. Let me say it like this: every person is made up of all the people we know, and all the characteristics that there are, in different measurements. The word middot is measurements. Every person is really a concoction of all the different personality traits and character traits in the world, but in different degrees. Someone has a lot of anger, someone has a little bit of anger, but you have some in there. There's no such thing—when I was reading something about personality surveys, they said one of the questions they ask to test whether people answering the survey are lying—this is their lying gauge—is, “Do you sometimes get angry?” If the person says no, then they're lying. It means they're not being 100% truthful, or that they're really deluding themselves.
The truth is, there's a certain amount of anger in everyone. How people deal with it is different, but everyone has all the character traits. Everyone has everything. We're supposed to be able to use everything for good. It says that we should love Hashem with all our heart, with two bits in it. They said, “What's the extra bit?” One explanation is that we should love Hashem with our Yetzer Hara, and with our Yetzer Hatov, with our evil inclination, and our positive, and our good inclination. We understand serving Hashem and loving Hashem with our good inclination: you love Hashem with your kindness, with your zerizut, with your passion, with your energy, with everything you have, all the good things.
But how are you going to love Hashem with the negative traits? You have to think of ways to love Hashem even with the negative traits, so that they can be used for a positive reason. Anger should be as minimal as possible. But if a person, let's say, Chas V'shalom—you have a situation, you know someone, we shouldn't know anybody, but you know someone who openly and publicly disgraces Hashem's name—you should be angry. It shouldn't not bother you. It should make you angry to see them disgracing Hashem in public. That should anger you. So there is a time when even anger can be used as a way of loving Hashem.
They say that they call the B'nai Yisrael a very stubborn people. They're stiff-necked. They won't move, give in, or budge. Moshe complained that they were stiff-necked people, and Hashem says that's going to be a positive trait. No matter how much the Goyim (non-Jews) try to take them away from Torah, they're going to be so stubborn that they're never going to leave it. They're going to be burnt, they're going to be killed, and they're going to hold on. They're going to be stubborn. So stubbornness can be a good thing. We have a lot of different personality traits within us, each to a different degree. Everything is supposed to be challenged for good.
In Shalom Bayit, we have to try to channel and save the best of who we are for our husbands. They don't always get that. We know ourselves. There's the best of who we are, the better part of us, and then the not-so-great part of us. There's the very, very kind, patient part of us, and then the very impatient part that can't tolerate anything except what we want. But who gets which part? Save the best of you for your husband. I can think about my own life. If I took the time, effort, and care to speak to my husband the way I speak to my students, he'd be a very happy man. You know that type? There are certain roles we play in life. There are certain chesed (kindness) roles: someone asks you for a chesed, and you're so happy to do it. You want to do it and do it well. Save that aspect of yourself for your husband, not only in public or for the outside, but for the inside.
We have both feelings in us: a feeling of wanting to give and a feeling of wanting to receive. There's a feeling of wanting to—and something that, recently, I don't know what's happening over there, but a woman especially has feelings in her. She's created with feelings of modesty, and she has feelings within her of being provocative. It's a contradiction, and she might have problems in her head: “How could I think like that? Who am I really?” She's trying to suppress certain things about herself. But both are right, as long as it's the right time. Who are we saving it for? Who are we showing it to? Where is it channeled? There's a right place and a wrong place. Nothing is right and wrong. Everything can be used for good.
When we talk about eating, is eating good or not good? The Torah tells us there are times when eating is a big mitzvah (commandment), and there are times when we have to fast. Eating in itself isn't good or bad; there is a time for eating and a time not to eat. As Shlomo HaMelech says, there's a time for this and a time for that. There's a time to cry and a time to laugh, and there's a time for everything. Save the best of who we are for our husbands. Channel all those feelings you have to use at the right time with your husband.
A woman really does have within her a tremendous innate desire to be modest. She really wants to. They've done studies on little boys and little girls, and little girls are automatically modest. They automatically like to cover themselves. They automatically feel more self-conscious about exposing themselves, without ever being taught. They try it on children who are very, very young, without ever having taught them. A woman has an innate modesty that she feels, and yet she has that other side of her and doesn't know what to do with it. What you do with it is use it for your husband at the right time. Then you definitely save the best of you for him, and the rest of the world gets none of that.
The rest of the world sees the librarian. I remember, from my olden days, the librarian with the glasses and her hair tied back in a bun, with the sweater, the Mr. Rogers sweater over her thing or whatever. Then all of a sudden you see that other side of her. A woman is like that. We have one side and another side, and both sides are supposed to be used at the right time. If we're the librarian with our husbands, that's not shalom bayit. But if we're exposed with everybody else, that's also not shalom bayit. Shalom bayit means that we know where and what, and we save the best for our husbands. That's the time it should be used.
Saving the best for our husbands also means asking, “When am I in my best mood?” When you're waiting for your kids to come home from school, you're still in your best mood and can't wait to see them. But after two or three hours, when you try to get them into bed and your husband comes home, sometimes you're not in your best mood. It's not because it's just hard; it's the timing. The timing is hard, and I'm not going to make it so simple for you, because if company walked in at that time, you'd pull it together. Every single day, if you haven't eaten, you're cooking dinner, feeding your kids, and putting them to bed; you wouldn't be so perfect.
I know there are so many things. The reason I would say this—and I'm trying to be fair—is that almost every night I teach at night. I'm very, very tired, and I still have to put on my teaching personality. It's not even fake. It happens because it puts us in a different mode. It's cognitive. It's very much our thinking. We allow ourselves to drop all our guard with our husbands. We have reason to, and we want to be comfortable with them. We want to feel that we don't have to be on guard. But it is because it's hard and because of the timing, and it's also because we're not trying hard enough. When I need to do it, I do it. It's very hard. My husband comes home early, while I'm feeding my kids dinner. At the end of the day I have no makeup on, I'm in my socks and slippers, my hair is in a ponytail, and I'm on the virgin pool in a sleeve. It's not like I'm instantly in bed, and then he comes home. When I first got married, my husband used to work late in a retail store and come home about 10.30 every night. That had its good points. I put the kids to sleep, cleaned up the house, made dinner, and took a nap. Then he came home. My children were little, and it was not perfect for my husband because he never saw the kids up. Then all of a sudden he switched jobs and came home while I was still making dinner and doing bath time. I had to readjust because it was hard. The house was a mess, the kids needed to go to bed, and he came home giving them piggyback rides. Don't do that—riling them up. But I had to readjust and change my head and think, “How can we make this work?”
I think we all suffer from perfection. I think perfection is an illness. We've seen lots of sitcoms on TV where everything is gorgeous. In our times it was the Brady Bunch, and we all think everything has to be perfect. Me, too. No, no, no, no, no, no—but you want everything quiet and nice. My husband, thank God, my children are married. My daughter comes home late, and my husband likes everything nice. Now I have some teaching jobs at night; this year I have a few. “You just do your mail, do your thing; everything will be ready.” We like the order for ourselves because it calms us. I'm not helping the situation; I'm just saying that's all.
I think that, for myself, this is my stage in life. When I'm talking, I'm talking about what I'm up to, what I'm doing. My stage in life is really wanting to grow for myself and make myself better. The way I can make myself better is to treat my husband better and put more effort into treating him better. I don't think I treat him well enough. I'm telling you, this one he could be in there for, but I don't think I treat him well enough. I know I have more patience with other people. I know I'm sweeter with other people. I know I deal differently with other people, and that's not fair. Maybe there are reasons, but the main reason is that psychologically I don't think it's as important. I think psychologically I'm not trying to impress him, and I'm trying to impress everybody else.
We still want to be accepted by the people around us, and our husbands are stuck. They're in it; they can't get out of it. If he sees the real me, if I'm not so sweet and pleasant, he's still coming back. Hopefully. I'm not that bad; he's still coming back. But I can honestly think about myself and say, “I could be better. I should be better. I even think he deserves that I should be better.”
Someone asked, “So, in a crazy, chaotic time of day like that, just smile, though? Don't do anything different?”
“I'm sorry. I'm not saying I run when he comes home, but I'm not at my best, and it's a very hard hour. The kids are exhausted. They're crazy all the time. I cannot go upstairs and put on no makeup, you know.”
“No, that's for when they go to sleep. I don't say you have to, and I don't think a man needs that while all that is going on. If you still have the energy to do that once they go to sleep, then I'll say you're a chef, because that's what you'd have to push yourself to do. Not while you're bathing them. You're not going to put lipstick on to bathe the kids. The pleasant atmosphere, the smile, the kindness in the way you talk to him—that's what I'm talking about. It's very easy to complain, snap, nag, and feel that this hour is hard for me and it's your fault. You're not going to say it's your fault out loud, because you may not be able to figure out why it's his fault, but in your brain you're going to think, ‘This is a very hard time for me, and it's your fault.’ You know why? Because he can go sit on the couch, and that burns you up. You would love to sit on the couch, but you can't. So there's resentment, and it comes through.”
Maybe in your life it doesn't. I don't mind you being in a ponytail with no makeup and your socks and slippers. But the point is, if you're pleasant, smiling, and happy, then he's fine. That's not what I mean by being at your best. I'm not talking about physical beauty at that moment. I'm talking about the way you treat him. If you can still be at your best in the way you treat him at that moment, save your physical beauty for when the kids are sleeping. But at that point, you're still at your physical beauty. But when I say I'm not at my physical best in that situation, I mean that I'm snapping at him, with a little resentment and a feeling like, “So what do you do, anyway?” That's not true and not fair, because they do work and have a lot to do. But we're still going to have that feeling.
Saving our best for our husbands isn't necessarily only that. That's a different aspect. Another aspect is kindness: how patient and kind am I to my husband? I know there's a best in me, and I know there's another side. I know who gets what, and he doesn't get enough of the best of me. That's what I want to try to do.
When we talk about why sometimes we don't want to be as kind to our husbands as to everyone else, one answer I gave you is that we look for acceptance from everybody else. We feel that our husbands are already stuck with us, so we don't have to prove ourselves anymore. But another thing is reciprocity, and that's a problem in a relationship. When other people appreciate our kindness more, you stop doing it when you don't feel appreciated. That happens on both sides of the coin in a marriage, and it's something we have to fight against.
What I'm saying is, if I do a favor for my neighbor or my friends, they're ecstatic about it and gush about how great I am. That gives me a lot of chesed; it gives me a lot of strength and makes me want to do those kinds of favors over and over again. When you do the same favor for your husband and he takes it for granted, you don't get the same pleasure from doing it, and it makes you want not to do it again. These are dynamics that can work in a relationship and actually lower the amount of kindness and acts of chesed that we do for each other.
To change that, we can't change him; we have to change ourselves, because that's life. We only have control over ourselves. That means showing more appreciation, even for the things you think he should have been doing anyway, should be doing more of, didn't do right, or didn't do at the right time. Still show appreciation, because if we wait to show appreciation until he does it perfectly, it's not going to happen. Then it's really going to ruin the relationship. We have to show more appreciation and excitement over the things they do, even when we think it's not worth anything.
Another thing is enthusiasm. When you talk to your friends, you might be very enthusiastic and happy. Sometimes a husband hears a difference. He hears how his wife talks to her friends, then she hangs up the phone and talks to him, and it could be a split-second changeover: “Yeah, hi, how are you doing? I'm so excited. Yeah, okay, we'll get together.” Then, “So what do you want?” It happens in a flash. He sees it, and it goes into his brain: “She loves them. She doesn't love me. She's happy to talk to them. She's not happy to talk to me.” We do that, and sometimes we throw it in their face without realizing.
I'm not saying you're not supposed to be happy with your friends. You're allowed to be happy with your friends. Girls love to talk to girls and be in their friends' company. But first of all, when you're doing it in front of your husband, be aware. I'm not saying don't be happy with your friends, but notice that you have to give him equal excitement. If he's noticing the level of excitement you have with your friends, you should have equal excitement with him. Otherwise, you're telling him he's not important in your life. That's a hurt, and all these little things cause spiral effects in our relationships that go down. When we make those little changes, the spiral goes up. They're tiny little changes.
When you talk more enthusiastically, care more about your husband's day and what's important to him, talk to him about things he wants to talk about, give more of your time and feelings to your husband, and try to be more of that best person you are—more affectionate and compassionate. We have to be more conscious of all those things with our own husbands. I find I need to remind myself. I find I need to get myself ready. The old Shalom Bayit tapes would say, “Before your husband comes home, put on the lipstick.” Maybe we'll do that. But at this point in my life, more than putting on the lipstick, I want to give myself a little Musar (ethical instruction) lecture. I want to give myself a little Shalom Bayit class in my head: “Okay, he's coming home. Be at your best. Be more enthusiastic, be more kind, be more patient. He's deserving of it. He deserves it. Your relationship will grow from it. Try to do your best.” That's what I want to put on inside, not so much necessarily outside.
My husband does appreciate the way I look, and he wants me to look good for him. That's another aspect of giving our best to our husband. He likes that, and he wants that. It makes a difference to him, the way I look and the way I present myself. Very often, when we're talking about what I should wear, he's very cute. We'll be going to do errands, and he's like—but he likes me to look good. He wants me—you know, it's like, “Okay, I get the point.” We'll tone it. But the truth is, it does make a difference to him.
There's the inside and the outside. I should try to work on both, to give the best of me to my husband. That's what I'm saying. That's where I'm at in my life. I don't want to use all my energy and all my kindness everywhere else and be all spent out by the time I'm dealing with my husband. He doesn't get the best of me. I want him to get the best of me, and I think that's going to make a very, very big difference in our relationship. It takes a lot of work, thinking, and self-control. We want to be loose, but I really think it's more than that. I think there's a lot of psychology behind it. We have to give up feeling that our husbands aren't making us happy enough, aren't taking away all our problems, and are responsible for any uncomfortable feelings we have in our lives.
I feel that's a lot of it. A lot of it is that, as we discussed once before, when a woman goes through marriage, she gets married wanting to live happily ever after. She thinks her husband is going to take away all her problems and cares, and that she's going to live happily ever after. Every part of the day when we're not living that fantasy life, we blame our husbands and resent them for it.
I think that when they come home after a whole day, we throw that back at them a little, and that's what we're going to be fighting against. Before my husband comes home, I have to erase those thoughts from my mind and try to think on a higher level: “I really love him. I want our relationship to be better. I'm going to give him the best of me,” instead of that tired-out, worn-out, no-more-patience part of me that he gets stuck with too much of the time. That's what I touch on.