A compelling story about wives, our choices, and their unexpected implications.
By Sarah Baron — Written on Jan 26, 2011
A friend of the Anonymous8 is a single middle age woman who is petite, beautiful, and a go-getter. She has dated a lot. She is interested in a long term relationship, so she is careful who she dates. She has gone out with numerous men, and boy, did she learn something interesting from listening to them.
One night she explained that she made a major discovery about men from her new dating life. Now, we are all curious. We wondered what is it that she found out?
What she has discovered is so simple and basic and it makes so much sense that you will want to slap yourself in the forehead. Sometimes you need to hear it from the outside to see if it applies to you.
First, almost all of the men she has seen are divorcees. She explains that every one of her dates tells her the same story.
“Ladies, let me tell you what. All of these men, they say exactly the same thing to me. And you can see it in each of their eyes. They felt ignored, like their needs weren’t met, like they were last on the list. They tell me this EVERY SINGLE TIME (take your index finger and tap it with vigor on the table while reading that for emphasis), that they were put behind the kids and the friends and were not led to feel as important as other parts of their ex-wives lives. They were lonely. Each man’s story – it’s like a broken record.” And with that last thought, she lets out a sigh.
She goes on. From there, the marriages start to die. These men saw the needs of everyone else came before their needs were met. They were all lonely, and things fell apart.
Of course, this got us all thinking. Have we been doing this to our husbands? Or have our husbands been doing this to us? And it was a slap in the face, a wake up call, and a chance to readjust some of our priorities.
The moral of the story for me is that marriage needs to be at the top of the priority list. I heard it once like this – take care of yourself first (yea! like that’s real easy or achievable when you are in the trenches with kids and jobs and husbands to tend to…), your marriage second, and your kids third. Kids need a happy mom and dad, a supportive family unit, and parents who invest in each other.