A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Number 3 in the Marriage Therapist’s Tips list is to let your spouse influence you. Let your spouse influence you. I don’t want to be sexist, but in this case I’m talking more to the men out there. Women, in general, have no problem being influenced by their husbands, but some men have a difficult time accepting influence from their wives.
What does it mean to accept influence? Here’s a classic example: the “toilet seat issue.” The typical woman gets irritated when her husband leaves the toilet seat up. How long would it take for the man to put it down? About half a second, right? A man can score major points with his wife just by putting the seat down.
I’d like to point out that this is a case where you can actually “win by losing.” That’s because when a man accepts influence from his wife, his wife is much more likely to “go easy” and not be harsh the next time that couple is discussing a difficult marital topic. And that makes it much more likely that the marriage will thrive.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Marriage Therapist's Tips.
One Response to “Marriage Therapist’s Tip #3: Let Your Spouse Influence You”
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March 13th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
This is all well and good. But what’s a wife to do when the husband thinks he’s accepting influence, but isn’t really? (”But honey, you got your way in all these situations…” - conveniently leaving out the fact that all those situations were ones in which he either had the same opinion as her to begin with, or didn’t care either way).