How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

Real leans back. “Good,” he says. “Your job walking out of here is to be more giving—physically, with helping around the house, and emotionally. I want you to open your heart, share more, listen better, cherish more. Verbally cherishing your wife with compliments, for example, is a good thing for her, good for Sylvie to see, and a good thing for Sy

Real frowns. “But she’s the after-school mom and the cook and the cleaner-upper,” he says. “That would be fine if she didn’t work, but not if you’re both working. What I see happening with guys is ‘Don’t mess with me—I need sleep and R&R so I can fight the dragons for my family.’ But she’s fighting the dragons now, too.” In the old days, he goe

Then have what psychologists call an “intentional conversation,” in which you are extremely clear about your need for change and your wishes going forward. “Most men are actually willing to negotiate and compromise, but they expect the woman to be direct,” says Coleman, who cheerfully admits to being a reformed “lazy husband” himself. “Men often do

He leans forward. “Tom, what you’re not getting, and this is true for most men I see, is that it is in your interest to move beyond your knee-jerk selfishness and entitlement and to take good care of your wife, so she isn’t such a raving lunatic all the time.” He shakes his head. “The idea that withdrawal is going to work is nuts. You’re a sweet gu

“We’re all figuring it out as we go along, so I think this idea that women have this built-in superpower where they just know how to take care of children is a lie. We need to do away with it.”

Cyndi Lauper’s manager: Would I be interested in

Instead of attacking each other, he had us attack, together, the polarizing cycle in which we had become trapped.

This rather amazing finding surprised even the Pew researchers, who said that in seventeen years of polling, no item on the list has risen in importance nearly as much. In other words, this issue is about more than laundry: it’s a direct depiction of the sense of fairness, or unfairness, that exists within a relationship. It touches on so many sign

This is followed by a leisurely twenty-minute shower, a late breakfast, a long nap, and then a meandering perusal through a variety of periodicals. Meanwhile, I am ferrying our daughter to birthday parties and playdates. On weekend evenings, Tom doesn’t check with me before he meets friends for drinks; he just breezes out the door with the assumpti