*
I believe husbands should be motivated “out of reverence for God” (2 Corinthians 7:1), not out of our wives’ reactions. I’m describing here what
usually
happens, not what
should
happen.
Chapter 13: The Biology of
a Busy Man
How to Help Your Man Put Family First
R
othschild” was to the financial world of Victorian England what “Kennedy” or “Bush” is to political power in the United States. Because of their acclaim, the Rothschilds usually married their English children to their German cousins. The fact that Lionel and Charlotte had an arranged marriage did not in any way lessen the couple’s delight or happiness with their upcoming nuptials. Even arranged marriages could be refused, but both Charlotte and Lionel readily agreed to the match. Lionel wrote to his mother, “[I] have to thank you for my fair bride.”
At first, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte had difficulty adjusting to her life as a young wife. Lionel’s business kept him away for most of the day, and Charlotte lapsed into self-pity, thinking of herself as a neglected bride. It’s not difficult to understand why. Lionel had been quite the romantic before the wedding. He wrote to Charlotte that, without her, “his life of interminable if unpredictable business would seem newly tedious.” He confessed in another letter that he had “no amusement nor occupation, but that of preparing for and thinking of the happy times when I can call you Dearest Charlotte mine and mine for ever.”
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But now that it had become entirely appropriate to call her “Dearest Charlotte,” Lionel stayed away most of the day, building his business. As happens so often, the romantic husband soon became a preoccupied pragmatist. He had a business to run and vocational duties to attend to. Charlotte lapsed into self-pity and criticism and may even have begun to regret her decision to marry.
While we can understand her conflicting emotions, later in life, Charlotte faulted herself, not Lionel, for this “wasted” season: “Lionel was never with me between the hours of tea in the morning and six in the evening. Oh! Why did I waste those hours in warm regrets, in tears? Why did I not then, ardently and assiduously, apply [myself] to study? Possibly, that would have dried my tears and made my thoughts play into pleasant and profitable channels. I could have accomplished much in those days.”
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Most modern wives certainly wouldn’t judge their husbands for working nine-hour days — especially since many have jobs themselves that run just as long or even longer. But most can relate to Charlotte’s surprise at how much a couple’s emotional life changes after the wedding. Charlotte suffered from the common syndrome of being romanced and adored leading up to the wedding, and then watching in shock as her husband immediately turned his focus back to his business once the couple declared their vows. Romance, to the man, is all too often like a vacation; once the vacation ends, he’s ready to get on with life. The wife, on the other hand, frequently hopes and assumes that the romance will continue as a way of life.
Love Abides
Charlotte’s father eventually stepped in and urged her to stop feeling sorry for herself and instead find ways to offer immense practical help to Lionel and stop making a scene when he came home. “Tell your husband he should assiduously visit diplomats in order to hear the news. . . . You should try to find out what is happening in London.”
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Charlotte took this advice to heart. Instead of wasting energy on complaining, she put that same energy to work on Lionel’s behalf. “Soon it was Charlotte . . . who was efficiently entertaining diplomats, Cabinet ministers, princes, and peers. Her guests evidenced her pragmatism; Charlotte knew she did not even have to like them.”
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While it was fashionable for public men of prominence to have several mistresses, no hint of indiscretion ever tainted Lionel’s life — perhaps, in part, because of how indispensable Charlotte soon became to him. The two lovers merged into an indissoluble team, a united force to make their mark in this world. They become arguably the most commercially successful couple of their day. Lionel even made political history by becoming the first person of Jewish descent to win a seat in the British House of Commons. By the time he achieved this lofty aim, Lionel was virtually an invalid. He managed only with Charlotte’s invaluable aid and assistance. Charlotte spent many hours listening to speeches in the gallery so that she could discuss the issues with Lionel when he got home. Their biographer, Stanley Weintraub, writes, “Charlotte was seldom afflicted by boredom. Her responsibilities were too many, and her family seemingly always in motion.”
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The biographer sums it up well:
Her husband had left a legend, and a formidable enterprise to confront the generations after him. Beyond her tireless benefactions and her role as Lionel’s chatelaine, Charlotte’s bounty was unique. Not just as the most memorable woman in three Disraeli novels, but in her sparkling letters and her family legacy, Charlotte still lives. With Lionel, she embodied one of Victorian England’s most remarkable and unfading love stories. A marriage arranged by ambitious mothers between cousins who hardly knew each other and came from different countries, it endured and was even enriched by adversity and challenge. As Charlotte had said, wealth was not enough. Love abides.
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Love abides.
What a powerful description of a marriage! If only the young Charlotte could have looked ahead five decades and pulled herself out of her stupor with the thought that becoming a helper would knit a romance that the years would only intensify! That instead of fight-ing her husband’s drive to succeed, she could become an integral part of it and thereby win his affections, while creating a marriage that one of the most prominent novelists of her day would celebrate in several books.
It’s my hope that Charlotte’s experience will encourage young wives in particular. It’s quite normal for a man to romance his fian-cée eagerly, only to turn his attention to his business after the wedding. I understand this must hurt and may even feel like fraud and deception; I also agree with you that husbands shouldn’t be given a free pass: “That’s just the way men are; what are you going to do about it?”
But I also want to help you begin to look at this from a slightly different perspective. One of the reasons most men focus intensely on their occupation is that God wired us this way. Yes, we can take it to sinful extremes, but the drive to succeed is innate in masculinity, by our Creator’s design.
The Male Drive to Achieve
Here’s a common scenario: the kids have grown, the husband has achieved relative success in life, and the wife finally feels ready to buy that vacation home on the beach or take more time off to visit the grandkids. Then, much to her shock, her husband announces his plans to build a brand-new business or to take on a completely new challenge (golf, triathlons, buying and repairing run-down homes).
To many women, such actions may seem like a denial of one’s age; but it’s a biological imperative that drives them. Male brains are bent toward a calling of some sort. According to Michael Gur-ian, “At the biological core of manhood is the drive and will to prove self-worth, not just as a person, but as a male. . . . There is a biological tendency in men to seek self-worth through personal, independent performance; in women, there is a greater tendency to experience worth through relationships and intimacy. This difference, while certainly socialized in all cultures, finds its origins in human biology. . . . In men, the biological foundation is laid for performance imperative.”
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If you were to study the brains of a man and a woman while they gazed into the eyes of a child or grandchild, you would see that the typical female gets more out of such an encounter, physically, than does the male. Relationships simply reward
you
more than they tend to reward your husband.
Gurian states, “The hero is biologically wired into men’s minds. Testosterone, vasopressin, greater spinal fluid in the brain, less se-rotonin, less oxytocin, and the way the male-brain system projects life onto an abstract and spatial universe lead men to see the world in terms of action, heroes, warriors, even lovers who must negotiate landscapes of challenge.”
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What does this mean, practically? For some men, to stop accomplishing is to stop living. “Settling down” feels like a near-death experience. Why do you think coaches and athletes often hang on to sagging careers long after their prime, always promising that next year things will really come together?
Not all men reach this extreme, but if you’re married to one who has, you won’t help matters by taking this personally. He can’t stop the chemical drive in his brain that pushes him to accomplish and succeed any more than you can stop caring about your kids or grandkids.
“But people are so much more important than building another business!” you protest. But do you see how such a statement unfairly simplifies the situation? Of course, we need people who put people first, and in a very true sense God calls
all
of us to adopt such a philosophy. But we also need people who feel driven to take care of the big picture — building better houses, fighting the wars that keep brutal enemies away, spending long hours in a lab to find a cure for a disease, building the businesses that support countless families. Such heroic aims do, at least indirectly, put people first. If not for the women and men who spent long, lonely hours in a laboratory, many more kids would live without a father or mother who has survived cancer because of modern medical treatments.
Through the differing brains of males and females, God has ensured that what needs to be taken care of
will
be taken care of. This world would be much different — and much poorer — if everyone spent just three hours a day at work so that they could enjoy long picnics and lengthy walks on the beach. There’s a place for beach picnics and family barbecues, but there’s also a place for getting things done.
So while it’s a healthy thing to motivate your husband to spend more time with the family, you should never try to strip away the essence of what it means for him to be a man. Gurian observes, “[Males] just keep pushing themselves toward developing and showing potency, toward acquiring and utilizing social and hierarchical power, even as it kills them eight years younger than women and often takes them away from other human values.”
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This male drive can be harnessed to serve evil (think 9/11) or good (think of the American soldiers on D-Day) — but channeling it is different from trying to cancel it. The sooner you understand this, the more realistic will become the demands you make or the desires you have of your husband. An old German proverb, written long before we could scan a human brain, understood this: “If you take the cause out of a man, there is no reason for the man.”
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Celebrate His Drive
All of this is to say that you can help your husband become more involved at home, but you can’t make him stop wanting to achieve. You must find a way to
respect
and
appreciate
his biological drive — you wanted a man, and you got one! Don’t fault him for finding some meaning outside the home. Celebrate this as you also try to motivate him to spend more time with the family. More times than not, you’ll find that Pat’s method, built on “the magic question,” works most effectively: work hard to make your home a place he can’t wait to come back to. In fact, Martin Luther gave this advice five centuries ago: “Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”
As a Christian man, I want to submit my male tendencies to the lordship of Jesus Christ. But nowhere does the Bible say I’m supposed to act like a woman when God made me to be a man. Jesus talks about a willingness to leave homes and families for the sake of serving the kingdom of God: “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37 – 38). From a biological point of view, this is a very “male” statement that must seem abhorrent to many females — until they realize that Jesus himself spoke those words. Of course, the Bible elsewhere says that to ignore family is to deny the faith (see 1 Timothy 5:8). Obviously, we must find the happy medium.
This will call for humility on the part of wives who chide their husbands’ God-given ambition, assuming that a man who is wholly and centrally focused on his family is somehow holier than a man with a mission. That’s a female view of the world, though not necessarily a biblical one. And it will call for humility on the part of men who truly
are
ignoring their family responsibilities. What women need to realize is that, biblically speaking, a man can err on
either
side of that continuum. Do you really want to be married to a man who only wants to stay home and play with the kids, who has no desire or concern to provide a decent life for you and your children, and who has no motivation to bring glory to God by doing great things on behalf of his kingdom? Some of you may, but you’re in the minority:
Studies all over the world indicate that women between puberty and middle age select, for romantic relationships and marriage, the men who are on a quest toward achievement and status. Women want men who aspire to be kings (even if only at a local level), warriors (protectors who make them feel safe), magicians (men who have, even if in a love of gadgets, some magical power that leads to success), lovers (men who make women part of their quest).
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