Why Does Your Husband Avoid Talking About Issues In Your Relationship?

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How often have you tried to talk about something of importance to you, only to be stonewalled, shut out, or ignored? How often have your efforts to work on conflict resolution morphed into a fight? How often have you swept your issues under the carpet to avoid conflict, only to add it to your list of grudges that you have been collecting until your carpet begins to look like the Swiss Alps?

Why is it so hard to engage in meaningful conversation with your husband/partner?

Why are guys so difficult to engage in meaningful conversation that have to do with issues you bring up? They have no problem discussing and analyzing the foils and failures of last night’s football, baseball, soccer or basketball games. They can talk for hours on a pass Tom Brady threw to wide receiver, Mike Adams or the amazing tackles of David Bakhtiari and spectacular catches of wide receiver, Davante Adams. They can spend hours discussing the trades in teams, missed opportunities, fouls and flags on a play, not to mention The NFL drafts, power rankings, matchup previews and fantasy football. They can resurrect up the best blow job they ever had, the hottest girl they bedded down with and who won the Kentucky Derby for the past 20 years.

They delight with pride and glory showing off the fish they caught, strung up alongside them in the photo-op, sharing the never-ending saga, strewn with details of how they hooked and towed the line for hours, struggling to bring him in. They can impress you with who had the most home runs since the start of baseball and who had the best batting average of all time. Men can talk for hours on their successes and failures in the stock market, real estate and best and worst business deals they made. They can impress you with their insight and knowledge about politics, history and their professional data–but when it comes to being present, listening, and working through your concerns, they only want the bottom line—no tears, no drama, no hysterics; just the “bottom line”, “not now”,” later” or complete avoidance. This phenomenon is not true of all men—just the ones you may have as mates.

What We Know About Communication Between Men and Women

What we know from time immemorial, is men have always been the warriors and hunters; women, the keepers of the hearth and the chatterers. As the centuries have past, welcoming in suffrage, civil rights, equal rights and the women’s movement, a metamorphosis began to occur. Men still dominate the world of warriors as the largest percentage of the military are still men, along with the judges and justices of the supreme court. The statistics show the gender distribution of United States Department of Defense officer personnel in 2019, by service branch. In 2019, there were 76,130 male officers in the U.S. Army, compared to 16,580 female officers. (Jan 11, 2021).

Today, more than 73% of sitting federal judges are men. Only 27 percent of sitting judges are women. (Oct 3, 2019). Women are still more prominent as keepers of the hearth, but have been exceeding their places in medicine, law, and politics. In 2019, the statistics show that 46,878 medical school students (50.5%) are women and 45,855 (49.4%) are men. In 2018, the data once again reveals that more women were enrolled in law school than men. Specifically, females made up 52.39% of all students in ABA-approved law schools. Men made up 47.51% of all law students in 2018. As of October 2019, the global participation rate of women in national-level parliaments is 24.5%. In 2013, women accounted for 8% of all national leaders and 2% of all presidential posts. Furthermore, 75% of all female Prime Ministers and Presidents have taken office in the past two decades. (Wikipedia) They are still in first position with being the chatterers as communication and expressing feelings are more endemic in the female gender. The push back to Roe v. Wade has been perpetrated by a man and sexual harassment suits are dominated by women. I suppose we can conclude the battle of the sexes is still a subject to be reckoned with.

How to Effect Change In Your Relationship

It’s not easy to change the nature of the beast. We are hard-wired to be our nature. Is it impossible? No, but it takes motivation, commitment and a willingness to be open-minded to perpetual possibilities. Men who still behave as cavemen, are not good candidates for change. In addition to being hard-wired to their nature, their bodies are copious with testosterone making it difficult to challenge their attitude and belief systems. A successful relationship is dependent on attunement and being present to one another; being able to learn the language and landscape of each partner, being mindful and willing to listen and integrate the wishes, hopes, dreams and needs of the other. Men need to understand that communication is the most important ingredient in a healthy, mature relationship; far more important than the scores in football, baseball, soccer or women. Learning how to relate to your partner is essential to create and maintain healthy relationships. Most of us did not have good role models for conflict resolution, so consequently, we repeat what we know, which is not always the best outcomes.

My mother made the worst pot roast. I hated pot roast all my life because I couldn’t eat my mother’s. We were very poor so she bought the cheapest cut of beef from the kosher meat market. Kosher beef is tough to begin with because it is not aged. Add to this, the cheapest cut, and you know it will be tough to chew. She added very few ingredients to flavor the beef; just salt, pepper, onion, carrot, celery and potatoes, donned with a bottle of Thrifty Maid catsup. It was our standard Thursday night dinner.

As I stepped off the bus, a block from my home, a malodorous smell filled my nostrils. “Shit! It’s Thursday! Pot roast!”

Many years later, married and nearly 50 years old, my husband asked if I would make pot roast for dinner. It was one of his favorite dishes and his mother was a gourmet cook. His family owned a gourmet food market specializing in prime beef and using his mother’s recipes that were served either in the frozen section or on the hot counter. When I asked if he would bring it home, he requested that I make it. I had several cookbooks available to me on a kitchen shelf. Did I even think of looking up a recipe? –Not for an instant. I simply followed the footsteps of my mother’s self-made concoction, duplicating the ingredients she added, using the same pot she had used given to her by her mother that was handed down to me. The pot was my grandma’s that came with her from Poland in 1903. It was made of aluminum, 12×12 inches. The meat was larger than the pan, so I had to fold over the ends of the meat, adding the ingredients that filled every inch of the Polish pan.

When my husband came home, he shouted, “What stinks?”

“It’s pot roast! You asked me to make pot roast.”

He opened the oven and shouted, “Joni, the pan is too small. Is that why you folded the meat over?”

“I don’t know. I think that’s how it makes gravy. That’s what my mother said when I asked her the same question.”

With all the cookbooks that adorned my bookshelf, it never occurred to me to check out a recipe that would have been a marked improvement over my mother’s pot roast. I just did what came naturally. Naturally, is not necessarily good. It was what I knew and we seem to only know what we know until we know another way.

This personal story illustrates the unconscious habits of being human. We only know what we know. However, as human beings, we are capable of knowing more than what we knew. We can expand our mind if we are willing to learn how to be better husbands, partners, parents, and cooks. Today I probably make a better pot roast than even my mother-in-law did, although hers, not mine, has gone down in history. It was from the Epicure Market in Miami Beach; an institution to be remembered by all who grew up there.

Ladies and perhaps men who are reading this diatribe, can understand and appreciate the objective of growth and change. Just because my mother made a crappy pot roast, doesn’t mean that I had to follow her recipe. I am free to create my own or at least select a proven one that tastes good and has great reviews online.

Anyone can change if they want to. Our will and desire to be better than we are transcends biology, environment and learned behavior. We can relearn and become successful partners as long as there is a willingness to grow and change. Learning to be present to your partner, to be attuned, listen, take in what you hear with a sense of wonder and curiosity and be able to understand the good intentions in their world, will increase the level of intimacy in your relationship on every level. It’s well worth the effort!

Joan E Childs, LCSW is a renowned psychotherapist, inspirational speaker and author of Do You Hate the One You Love: Strategies For Healing and Saving Your Relationship. In private practice since 1978, she specializes in individual and couple’s therapy, grief therapy, EMDR, NLP, Inner Child Work and codependency. Learn more about her services at www.joanechilds.com.