Les Parrott and his wife, Leslie, are very well known educators in the Marriage Enrichment field. This article summarizes a lot of research and gives some profound advice to husbands on how to treat their wives which is absolutely needed but normally does not come naturally for a man.

This is the 2nd of 3 sections.

God bless your family and your marriage.

What Every Husband Should Know About His Wife - Part 2

By Les Parrott

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, said, "Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer the great question: What does a woman want?"

Well, Freud, may not have been able to identify the deepest needs of women, but modern research has. A wife's most basic needs in marriage are: (1) to be cherished, (2) to be known and (3) to be respected.

* She Needs to be Known

For a woman, being understood means having her feelings validated and accepted. That's not as easy as it sounds. I'm a psychologist. I often spend my day doing just that with my clients. I know how to empathize with a person's pain, to feel his feelings and convey understanding. But when it comes to my marriage, something makes me want to solve Leslie's problems instead of understand them.

She will tell me about something and I will passively listen until I have heard enough and then, as if to say I'm ready to move on to other things, I will offer advice. I'll lecture instead of listen. To this day, it often takes every ounce of self-control I can muster to bite my tongue and actively listen.

At least I'm not alone. Consider this fact: Men say three times as many words in public as they do in private, while women say three times as many words in private as they do in public.

Women like to match experiences, to draw one another out, to volley in conversations. But when it comes to talking to their husbands, many women feel like the wife who told me, "Talking to my husband is like playing tennis with no one in the other court."

To meet your wife's important need to be known, you need to actively listen to her, reflecting back to her what she is saying and feeling, and genuinely wanting to understand her. This point cannot be overemphasized: Women need to have their feelings validated and accepted. They need to have you see and experience the world the way they do, instead of explaining to them why they shouldn't see it that way.

Men have a tough time realizing that offering a listening ear is all a woman needs at times -or a comforting hug, a loving statement like "You are hurting, aren't you?" or "You are under a lot of pressure, aren't you?"

Listening to your wife talk without offering quick solutions is the only way to meet her need to be known.

Part 3 tomorrow.