Catholic Husband

When I was in college, I loved dating. I went on dates with many women, was in a relationship with a few, and married one of them. It’s a difficult transition to shift your mindset from one of dating to one of a committed relationship. A marriage, being the lifelong commitment that it is, requires your full, undivided heart.

Dating is fun, as it should be. Getting to meet a multitude of people, learning what traits you desire in your spouse, and making rookie mistakes are all good and healthy things. There’s nothing wrong with a young man or young woman dating many people. Not only is each date a quasi-interview for a potential future spouse, it’s a safe and fun environment to get to know people on a deeper level. Your children should be encouraged to engage in an active dating life that’s both age and relationally appropriate. By encouraging healthy dating at home, you can give them the tools they need to continue healthy dating when they move out.

Once you’ve chosen your spouse, and they’ve chosen you, it’s imperative to have an undivided heart. Your spouse deserves and needs your full love, as do your children. 99% of spouses expect exclusivity in their marriage and the practical implications are clear when one considers the survivability of a marriage when one spouse cheats. An undivided heart is the best tool for maintaining and growing a vibrant, healthy marriage.

Marriage isn’t about just avoiding evil. It’s also about doing good. It’s not enough to shut out distractions. Rather, in addition to avoiding distractions and temptations, a spouse must actively pour themselves and their love into the relationship. It’s precisely the exclusivity and permanence of marriage that gives it its stability. Give your love only to your wife.

The benefits of exclusivity are self-evident. Men don’t want to materially support the rearing of another man’s children. Women don’t want to compete with other women or unrealistic fantasies. On a deeper level, both husband and wife want to be respected. On your wedding day, you promised your love exclusively to one another. Based on those promises, we each simply expect our spouse to follow through.

The problem is that we live in a world of distractions. Pornography, careerism, excesses, fantasy media, and other distractions divert precious energy, time, and resources away from marriage. When one spouse struggles, the whole family suffers. When distractions start to plant unrealistic expectations in the mind of a spouse, the marriage starts to crack. These are not harmless distractions and they’re anything but “normal.” It’s vitally important that we cut through the lies and the posturing and recognize distractions for what they really are. These distractions are the single greatest threat to your marriage and are the gateway drug to infidelity.

Again, life, especially marriage, is not simply about avoiding evil. Instead, we should be actively choosing to live the good. There’s a great strength in an undivided heart. One is not a prisoner of his own passions has a clear mind and an open heart. They are able to navigate around temptation, recognize truth, and love fully. When you’re able to give fully of your self, your marriage will benefit immensely. Like a carefully tended garden, the flowers will blossom and the fruit will be rich.

As Jesus said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In the same way, a heart divided cannot support a marriage. Let go of the things that are holding you back from fully and freely loving your wife.

There are many commonly held beliefs about marriage that I refuse to subscribe to. Over the past two years, they’ve been weaved into many of the posts that have appeared on this blog. I don’t believe that marriage is about someone being in control. I don’t believe marriage is about someone being nothing more than a rubber stamp. I believe that marriage is more than a partnership or a co-venture. Marriage is about a husband and a wife, both pouring themselves completely into relationship and reaping the rewards together.

I’m so tried of people telling me the way to have a happy marriage is for the husband to only say, “Yes ma’am.” You might think people are being hyperbolic, but I don’t. If I were a wife, and my husband was an empty suit like that, I’d be furious. Who wants to be committed for life to a person who’s completely spineless? Just as egregious, I don’t think that your wife is always right and you’re always wrong. I’m so resolute in my belief that I first addressed this topic in my 4th blog post to appear on this site, way back in March of 2013.

Yet, despite my protests, it’s true that being obsessed with who’s right only prolongs conflict. Fights don’t have to last long. In fact, they can end very shortly after they begin. All you have to do is stop being emotional and forget about being right. It’s a hard concept to execute in the heat of the moment, but it’s still very possible.

In the final analysis, who was right in any given conflict is not nearly as important as the relationship itself. Conflict is never resolved by assigning blame. Conflict is resolved when core problems are identified and remedied. Once the core issue is taken care of, everything else resolves itself. Assigning blame is treating a symptom- remedying the underling issue is treating the disease. Beware of pride in fights. When we let our pride take over and continue to posture, we only prolong a conflict and let it do further damage to our marriage.

It’s important to be more concerned with mending the broken fences. No one likes an unpleasant conflict in their relationship. The situation is even worse when the impediment is in your marital relationship and you have to see your spouse every day! When you forget about who’s right, you can start asking yourself what you can do to heal the relationship. If you have any role in the conflict, make immediate adjustments to remove the road block to peace. Then, be sure to ask yourself the perennial question, how can you prevent a repeat fight over this same issue?

When you’re able to set aside your emotions in a conflict with your wife, you’re able to get a better understanding of the situation that you find yourselves in. Remember to be kind. Kindness, humility, and servant leadership aren’t concerned with winning. Instead, they’re concerned with loving. Make the resolution a win-win. By acting with kindness, you ease the pain of conflict with your wife and you also replace negativity in your own mind with gentleness.

If you want to drive your relationship off a cliff, by all means, full speed ahead with the blame game. If you want to strengthen your marriage and reduce suffering just forget about who’s right.

Now that Alison’s internship is starting to wind down and she’s finished with her examinations and their associated preparations, we’re finding more and more time to spend as a family. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still crazy busy and working long hours, usually far from home, but now that she has less on her plate, her home time really is our own.

When we first got married, I read a study by the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. In the study, researchers found that there was a real, tangible benefit in having regularly scheduled date nights. Couples were not only happier, they had higher quality sex lives, a significantly lower rate of divorce, and well above average marital satisfaction. Upon reading that study, I decided to do my best to implement the practice.

Life happens and the opportunity for date night ebbs and flows, but there isn’t a week that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about the importance of a weekly date night and a desire to have one. The other week, Alison and I finally were able to have a date night after many months without any. We played “The Office” board game, had a drink, and enjoyed the time to just be silly and have fun.

Our choice to play a board game is just one of the infinite possibilities for your date night. Although date night should be regularly scheduled, it should be anything but routine.

Having new experiences with your wife is a key component to happiness. The unknown and the excitement of surprises play right into our curious nature. Although you and your wife may be expert mountain climbers, there’s always something exciting about a new trail. Although you may be professional bowlers, there’s something new about going to a different bowling alley. Each week, try to change some aspect of the date night and make it something that you’ll both look forward to.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You must have sex on date night. Our society has gotten way out of control with expectations about sex. Sex and dates have become so intertwined in our minds that we stop trying to separate them. The fact remains that while they can pair nicely and appropriately in a marriage, they shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. You and your wife should be able to be intimate without having sex. Even more important, intimacy, fun, and together time shouldn’t be exclusive to sex. You and your wife should be able to have fun, be intimate, and be together for an enjoyable evening without having to have sex. This is especially true when you’re spacing pregnancy with valid cause. In the times when you abstain, you still need to be connecting. Sex is important, but don’t make it the foundation upon which you build date nights.

We spend way too much time being serious. Let date night be your hall pass to let loose. Put the kids to bed or hire a babysitter and just enjoy being the people you are. Don’t bring emotional baggage, stress, or technology. Give yourself permission to have the night off and not worry about life. Be free to be silly like you were when you were dating.

As we travel through life, into marriage and onto the journey of parenting, we change. We rise to the occasion and live our lives responsibly. Date nights are a weekly opportunity for you and your wife to focus on what is the center of your family’s life, your relationship. Your family’s happiness, wellbeing, and ultimately the success of your children rests largely on the quality of your marriage. We spend most of our days looking out from our marriage and caring for the needs of our family. It’s critical that you regularly take time to look in on your marriage and care for your relationship’s needs.

By doing something different, avoiding the trap of making it all about sex, and giving yourself permission to let loose, you can dramatically improve your weekly date night, and, by extension, your marriage.

Don’t let another week pass you by.

The role of husband is perhaps the most challenging role that any man faces. As a single man, the world was your domain. You chose your coming and your going. You chose what you ate, when you ate. You did all of your own social planning, shopping, and travel. As we stepped into the role of husband, and subsequently the role of father, all of that changed.

Some may decry the lost freedom that a married man experiences. Some men long for days of old when they needed no one’s permission, when they had their entire living quarters to themselves, and all was at their direction. What is perceived as a loss is actually a gain.

Man is fulfilled in the married life, whether that be through a permanent marriage to a woman or to the Church. There’s something about the social constructs of both marriage and Holy Orders that not only spurs a rapid maturation in men, but also remarkable stability. Vocation brings us into the fullness of what it means to be men.

The role of husband is so challenging because it requires all of our energy and effort; others depend on us. Our wives depend on us to provide for their emotional needs. They depend on us for stability and strength of character. They depend on us to help guard them from threats against the family. As fathers, our children are wholly dependent on us from their first moments in the world and continue to be through the long and arduous process of growing up.

While we are the head of our household and the leader of our family, these roles are not honorary ones. A husband doesn’t sit on his throne regulating the lives of his household. Rather, he must engage in the activities that real husbands engage in, namely, leading by example. He initiates family prayers, he proactively plays with his children, he finds ways to ease his wife’s pressures and burdens, and he promotes domestic tranquility by ensuring that his own emotions foster a low-conflict marriage.

What so many of us are tempted to do, especially in times of strife, is to shift the blame onto someone else. Husbands can be quick to blame their wives for whatever ill the family is facing, but that’s a recipe for disaster. We should recognize that injecting blame into any situation only exacerbates the problem. Everyone makes big mistakes and everyone makes little mistakes. So instead of focusing on who did what, focus on what we can do to fix it.

To this point, we haven’t considered the duties and responsibilities of the wife. In fact, reading with a certain bias, one might find these concepts to be completely sexist, painting wives as helpless without a husband. Not so. We’ve focused exclusively on the role of husbands because, frankly, we don’t seem to have a good grasp on what that role really is.

Not only are we facing record levels of absentee fathers, some fathers who live with their families are mentally or emotionally absentee. They come home from work, exchange pleasantries, and then engage in their own pursuits, wanting to be waited on hand and foot. If we don’t have a job description, if we don’t understand what being a husband truly means, how can we expect men to step into the role?

We’re innately coded to protect, defend, and provide for our families. When we have no direction or clear communication about what’s expected of us, that’s when our marriages start to crack.

As husbands, we must be proactive. We have to communicate with our wives about how she sees our role. We must understand what things we do that drive her crazy and how we can better meet her needs. This is an evolving conversation, not a one and done. On a daily or weekly basis we need to be checking in to make sure that we’re not only meeting her expectations, but exceeding them.

We need to be active in our children’s lives. We need to make diligent use of our time so we do the things we want to do while not stealing time away from our family. We need to turn off the TV and just roll around on the floor with our kids. We need to reintroduce family activities that reinforce family identity, values, and mutual growth.

Your marriage is not based on emotions or intensity. Your marriage is based on a mutual consent between you and your wife to love each other so fully and completely that it flows forth into your children and your children’s children. You can only meet that standard if you’re all in.