Is It Nagging, Or Are They Just Trying To Help?

The Home Improvement Committee

By John Gray

Women tend to think they are supporting men when they give unsolicited help, since they are pleased when others offer help to them.

Women even expect it. Helping is a way of spending more time together, connecting, and cooperating. All of these activities lower a woman's stress levels, but not a man's.

Women gladly join to help in the kitchen or at cleanup time after a meal. Doing things together is what they do.

When a woman loves a man, her desire to help extends to him. She wants to help him achieve his full potential.

She can become so excited about this partnership and new opportunity that it may seem like she forms a Home Improvement Committee and focuses on improving him.

Just as men tend to have a Mr. Fix-It approach, women tend to have a home improvement gene.

This is not the sort of attention a man wants, but she thinks she is being loving. Her nurturing hormones are at work.

Doing something on your own produces testosterone; doing things together produces oxytocin. "I did it" produces testosterone, while "We did it" produces oxytocin.

Men may interpret the Home Improvement Committee as nagging, while women are just trying to help.