Psychologist Reveals The One 'Window' In Which Wives Can Change Their Husband
Most men will change for a loving and kind partner.
simonapilollatnf, monicore | Canva Many women come into therapy seeking to change their husbands. (Before you get up in arms about how unfair women are, this desire is true in the reverse too. The difference is that men more often want their wives to act like they did years ago, rather than in a whole new way; both types of changes are often equally outside the realm of possibility.)
The desire to change a partner is not wrong in and of itself. People grow and change all the time, and in a happy marriage, both partners are constantly trying to change in positive ways that make the other feel happy and validated.
However, there would be much less bitterness and resentment if women recognized more about when the window to change your husband is, and how to open it.
The best window for changing your husband’s behavior is before you even get married
So many women are scared to assert themselves with their husbands and are auditioning to get a proposal, consciously or not. So, they push their boyfriend’s red flags and just generally annoying or selfish behavior onto the back burner and don’t confront it directly. This is a shame, because when a man is newly in love with you is the ideal time to ask for changes.
Here’s an example of ways that men can change during this time:
- Learn to be more romantic and/or to recognize holidays and birthdays
- Learn what you like in bed
- Start doing half of the chores
- Learn that you like compliments or whatever your love language is
- Stop yelling or leaving the house or whatever dysfunctional behaviors they do during fights, if these upset you deeply
- Bigger things: convert if your religion is important to you, decide they want kids when they’ve been on the fence, commit to moving closer to your family if/when you have kids
I have seen men change permanently for the love of their wives in all these ways and more. They are happy they have done so and consider their changes positive for themselves as well as for their partners.
Men who are newly in love want to please their partners, and learning skills to do so is considered a privilege and an honor at this stage of the game. Later on, when a woman brings up that she has been dissatisfied with the past 10 years of, let’s say, romantic gestures, men are certainly within their rights to feel defensive and embarrassed rather than immediately jumping up proactively and trying to do better.
Another window for change is when you are feeling close and connected
So many women don’t want to rock the boat and be “good girls” (aka conflict-avoidant and people-pleasing, like daughters of covert narcissist parents). Therefore, when their husband is doing 50% of what they want, they think that now isn’t the time to ask for more. Instead, they wait until they feel he’s only doing 10% of what they want and then they explode in anger, having been pushed past a breaking point that their husband was unaware of.
Again, this is not how to cultivate a genuine and enthusiastic desire to change on the part of your husband. It is how to shame and ambush him, which will certainly sabotage any potential desire to change.
Instead, when things are going well, approach your husband to change in ways that you want him to, in order to build on successes and keep momentum going.
For example, one very common issue I see in couples counseling is a husband not knowing how to please his wife in bed. This is mostly due to women feeling too awkward during the dating stage to give overt directions or feedback. They missed the window where he could have learned to improve his technique a lot quicker and easier due to his natural honeymoon-stage enthusiasm and the frequency of practice opportunities in courtship.
When women who barely sleep with their husbands a couple of times a month say that the reason is that he doesn’t make it enjoyable for her, the husband will feel defensive and shamed. However, if she approached him during a time of more frequent intimacy when he felt closer and more connected, he would be much happier to learn and more confident about his ability to learn to perfect his technique.
Moral: even if you miss the window earlier in the relationship where a man will enthusiastically change for you, you can open a new window later on if you act as loving and close as possible.
A caveat: if you are dating a man who is not enthusiastic about changing behaviors for you even though you have approached him in a kind and loving way and you’re in a very close and connected stage, then he is likely very inflexible. This will worsen over time and drop off a cliff when the honeymoon stage (usually around 1.5 years in length) ends.
Think long and hard about a man who comes at all of your requests from a place of oppositionality even when he is at his happiest with you. This is a recipe for lifelong unhappiness.
Couples counseling can be very useful in helping couples see how they both have to change to make one another happier.
Often the man needs to change something from scratch (which again, is not exactly his fault if the woman was always minimizing the issue in their early life together) and the woman needs to recapture some of who she was when her husband fell in love with her. Of course, a 40-year-old woman with kids isn’t going to act like a 20-year-old girl again, but if none of that girl’s loving demeanor is present in the woman, the husband is highly unlikely to change significantly himself.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.