Inna Shukshina

I received a letter from a reader.
“Hello Inna! I have read your posts — I liked them! You have a post about how it is fashionable nowadays to live according to some religious movement, but that this does not always bear the fruit you need. I am in a similar situation; I read Helen Andelin’s book Fascinating Womanhood. The author is a Christian and her system is built on Christian doctrine; there are a lot of sound ideas in it. The main idea is complete acceptance of your husband, at face value, with all his shortcomings. I tried to follow her advice for about three months; improvements came on the material side, my husband started earning more”

The woman’s problem is that her husband spends all his free time  playing games.

“Now I simply try to live, love and please, so there are no quarrels and my husband is happy, but I am not. I want more closeness in the family, to spend time together. He does not help me around the house. What can you advise?”

I will say that I was in a similar situation. I started applying the advice from the book Fascinating Womanhood. It felt a little strange: my husband and I had always had a trusting relationship, and here I was applying some sort of techniques to him. There was an effect, but I did not feel very good inside. And that was despite the fact that I tried to do it all sincerely. I could not understand what I wanted in life, whether the whole meaning of my life was to make my husband happy. And then I would automatically become happy myself?

Needlework and hobbies did not make me happy. It seemed to me that I was doing everything right. But looking back now, I did not love myself, did not respect myself as a person, and did not know how to negotiate calmly and stand up for my own opinion. It is a great art — to put your position across in such a way that the other person does not take offence, does not close up, but tries to understand and wants to find a compromise.

There is one technique I give clients in coaching — the three-step way of reaching agreement. With it you can put your position across, find out what the other person does and does not want, and, most importantly, say “But I want to be with you!”. That is essential — to make it clear that, despite your different wishes, being together matters to you.
That is one example of how you can learn to reach agreement with your husband. Simply submitting and enduring is very far from always enough; what matters is holding discussions as equals and coming to a shared view. Of course, everyone likes it when nobody argues with them, when they are agreed with in everything and cared for as much as possible. But will the woman herself feel good about it, will she not have to give up a great deal that matters to her? If she has the strength to endure now, will that still be so in the long run, when serious questions have to be decided and some fundamental difference of views appears? How long will a woman’s strength last, living in that mode and constantly suppressing her real wishes? How many years should she wait for her husband finally to understand something and work something out for himself?

It is important neither to please nor to quarrel. These two states are a pendulum, and you need to get off it. To learn to reach agreement, to cooperate, to look together for solutions that suit everyone, while respecting your husband’s opinion as the president of the company called “the Family” — but holding the post in it not of a junior subordinate but of vice-president!