The ABCs of Men and Marriage

Thanks to Suzanne Venker for her book Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage

Alpha Female is not for everyone. Because not every woman is an Alpha. And the only time it is problematic in a relationship is if the male is also an Alpha. This combination must occur often enough to warrant the author writing a book about it. I believe it describes my marriage.

Step 1 was to complete the Alpha Female quiz to see how Alpha you were. Example questions included: do you feel uncomfortable if you are not in control? Are you perfectionist? Do you sometimes feel superior to your husband? Do you expect your husband to go along with your plans? Do you frequently contradict your husband? So yes, I was an Alpha Female, although not all the time. Then Suzanne introduced the book by saying; you may not enjoy receiving this advice, given you are an Alpha, and you are likely to disagree with the rules, even though the rules were created from generalizable patterns that had been observed and could help a marriage.

I tried to be open, although I was already feeling defensive having been defined as an Alpha problem. But her podcast had made me laugh so hard I decided to plough on. I almost gave up when she talked about the need to wear high heels to feel good about yourself. I am a total running shoe, flat soled penny loafer wearer… I kept persevering but kept feeling uncomfortable. So you might struggle too. I decided it was worth the effort because there are so few books about relationships out there and I really wanted to make a difference in my marriage.

There are 10 main suggestions:

Hope don’t expect

Ask don’t demand

Praise your husband and thank him

Say yes instead of no

Let him save face

Be kind

Don’t nag

If think you shouldn’t say something, don’t

Don’t focus on what your husband isn’t doing

Say yes to sex

The advice for the first one was: try for a week to not say no to your husband as your first response. Sounds easy enough…. I walked in the house after hearing this advice, and the first thing my husband said was, do you want to go for a superbowl party? NO I said. It was Covid time, I did not want to go to a superspreader event. Shit, I had said NO before I had heard any details, or asked what he wanted to do. FAILED…

Another one was to respect your husband’s choices of activities when at home and not to judge them or disrupt them. For example if he was pottering in the garage or sitting watching TV, do not start talking to him. Instead organize a specific time of day that suits him to ask any questions you have. Shoot, he was cutting back a bush, and I started asking him a question. Sorry, for disturbing you, I said…. One evening he was on the sofa when I was tidying the house. I desperately wanted to sit down too. After our struggle with the book FairPlay, another partnership advice book, he had claimed he wanted us to share tasks. The premise of FairPlay is each person fully owns a task, sharing doesn’t lighten the mental load. Ok, I thought, he wants to share tasks, let’s tidy this last room together… Apparently, I approached it all wrong because I must have insinuated that I was the only one cleaning, which he thought was unfair and he was really upset that I had disturbed him. He just wanted a few minutes to relax. It ended up in an extended row. Oh dear, maybe this advice was worth something. I was just failing to follow it again! I took this dispute to my parent coaching group and got some really good advice. Why didn’t I just sit down with him too if I needed it? Why did I prioritize cleaning over relaxing with him, especially given his quality time is love language? We could have quickly tidied it together later, on the way to bed. This was what another mom suggested: she would say to her husband, “when it's convenient for you, could you please spare a few minutes later to help me”. She said it worked well.

Another tip, don’t refuse your husband sex. Oh for god’s sake. This was just asking too much! I do not have a big libido, and entering menopause I find sex uncomfortable and don’t seem to experience my monthly fertility days when I might actually feel a little horny. I really did not see myself being able to adhere to this advice. But I did share the advice with my husband, as I knew he would appreciate it. He declared he loved Suzanne! Not just her advice! I explained my concerns about not feeling great about it, but told him I recognized he had much more frequent desires and I apologized for not meeting them. He appreciated that I recognized this. So another failure but another opportunity to be more aware of where I wasn’t being the perfect wife I sometimes thought I was.

I can see that I am not failing entirely, I believe I am mostly kind and I do praise and thank him. I feel like I often hold a comment back, but this has in the past made me feel so resentful that I am actually trying to speak up more often. I think the point is to speak my feelings, not to speak my criticism. I can also share my experience of focusing on what he is not doing. Instead of being grateful for all the tasks he was doing, I kept focusing on what he wasn’t, because I needed help with those tasks. His reason for not wanting to take on these tasks was my criticism of him.

My friend who is a therapist said, what if you just stop asking him for help. Asking is not getting you what you need and it’s clearly frustrating both of you. What if you just stopped caring about what he does and try to manage your feelings. Ok, I would try. But instead of asking for help I would also set a boundary. I would say I needed a break from the kids every other week, and he would have to take a day to work from home every fortnight. I wasn’t asking him to do any particular task, just asking him to be home and I would not be there to comment. Once I stopped nagging him, he stopped trying to avoid me and things became more peaceable. I realized the help I most needed was a break. I could do the daily tasks no problem, if I got a break every now and then.

To be honest, the best relationship insight we got was when we took the love languages quiz and discovered how to better appreciate each other. He needed hugs and quality time on the sofa, I needed appreciation and help. One of my coaching homework tasks was to write myself a thank you letter. This really helped me to appreciate myself, and I think this would have been a better way for me to start out when asking for help. The feeling I got from this letter writing process was so positive for me, it made me think to write a similar letter to my husband. He was so touched and grateful. He said no one had ever really thanked him, his entire life. I could see that as an entrepreneur you didn’t get many thanks at work. I was so glad that I had recognized all he did. So in the end I did succeed, at least with points 3 and 9!

Even as I listened to the book again to curate the advice into the behavior change database, I kept wondering if it was actually good advice. Many of the suggestions, such as not expressing every emotion and biting my tongue had been things I had been doing for years and they weren’t necessarily helping my marriage as my husband did not know what was on my mind. Perhaps in some areas I am more Beta than Alpha, so I think the advice will depend on how much room you have, to try new things.

A couple of additional points did resonate with actions I had taken: 1) Decide to stay – my parent coach helped me realize that although I might feel trapped in my marriage and in the US, I did have a choice to leave. It was more my inner critic telling me I had made a mistake. This was a trick I did not realize she could play on me. So I adopted a mantra which said: Today I choose to stay. The choice helped me feel less trapped and the today helped me focus on the present which really calmed my fight/flight instinct. 2) let go of resentment – I realized my husband could not read my mind, that he was doing his best, and that I had a duty to express my needs. In particular, my coach taught us to imagine the other person was already doing the thing we wanted, how would we feel. She said we couldn’t get the other person to change, but we could create the feeling ourselves 3) check your needs and if they are met be satisfied – this is one I am still working on, but if you can list that you have a home and food and transportation, the basic needs, then this is a good life. You can still want to have more but coming from a place of already feeling satisfied or in abundance is different, than wanting more from some sense of scarcity or need. I wish I could be more satisfied with our life, we have so much.