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Unitarian author and husband, Neil Chethik arranged with the University of Kentucky Survey Research Center to interview almost 300 men from age 19 to 95 who had been married from 1 to 9 times and who fathered from zero to 8 children.

He did this to find out what men want from their relationships and marriages. A look at any bookstore will show dozens of books about what women want in their relationships and marriage. But what do men want in their marriages?

That’s what he set out to find out about men who married women in his book Voice Male. He found

most men are not phobic about commitment, don’t have sex on their minds all the time, and are willing to talk frankly about their relationships– just not in the same way women do. Men have a unique, masculine style of loving that focuses more on doing than talking, on sharing space rather than feelings.

This morning, we’ll take a look at how men discover and get molded into the American husband: from seeker, to newlywed, and beyond.

Next, we’ll look at key issues important to husbands and the stumbling blocks when negotiating marriage and spouses.

In the olden days– say before 1960, men and women married young. This was the only socially acceptable way to have marital relations– to be married. Most men who married before 1960 did so as a virgin. They waited only long enough to be able to financially support a stay at home mom, and then got married.

Back then, men married women, not looking for a soul mate, but looking for a help mate. Farms and businesses needed two adults at minimum to keep things going.

Marriage was more about the melding of families than it was about finding that one person to fulfill all your possible needs. That’s why in-laws could be so much more of a problem.

Nowadays, the statistics are pretty sharp about when to marry. Marriages where the couple is aged 19-24 tend not to bode as well as when the couple is 25 years or older.

How many men get married? 9 out of 10 get married at least once. Why get married? To have a companion, to have stable marital relations, and often, to prepare for having children.

What do men look for in a wife? 55% of men say they were first drawn toward their future spouse because of her looks.

But men don’t seek super models, they tend to approach women who are comparable to them in physical attractiveness. Chethik says,

Rather than seeking to meet women of unattainable beauty, they tend to seek out the beauty in the women they meet. (Page 14.)

The single biggest factor in a potential wife is positive temperament.

Men said that the dominant mood at their childhood house was set by mom, and recognizing that, most men are interested in women with optimism and warmth, especially expressive women, and sometimes in contrast to their own in-expressiveness.

After physical beauty & optimism, comes self-confidence. I think women are– to some degree attracted to these same qualities– comparable good looks, positive attitude, optimism, warmth, and especially, self-confidence.

Preparing to be married quickly puts men and women in traditional roles. While men get to put a lot in to the proposing, women put a lot in to the wedding planning.

Men tend to want a more local wedding rather than in the bride’s hometown; usually want to spend more on the honeymoon than the wedding, and often want the wedding to be more informal than the bride does.

It’s not usually discussed, but just before the wedding, often there is cold feet. Is this really the right person for me to marry? Is this really the right time for us to marry?

For me– and for other men I know– the wedding day was like preparing for an execution. I was to die a single man and be reborn a married man. You have confidence you’ll make it through the other side, but the dying thing can be hard.

The minister spoke to me as the service was about to begin, telling me not to lock my knees, and did I think I was going to pass out?

One guy was so nervous at his wedding he ended up introducing his brother to his parents. Death and rebirth, and life again.

Men– and women too– ought to be nervous at the altar and in front of the minister. Because they are making a very public promise to sacrifice their personal needs and desires to create something greater than themselves. Death, and rebirth, sacrifice, and life again.

We who marry make a public promise, and spend the rest of our marriage trying to fulfill that promise.

As newlyweds, we are forced to confront the fact that the person we have married does not carry around the exact same set of assumptions about how things work, what is too much or not enough, and so forth.

This can be exciting in the courtship phase– diversity expands our views. But it can be tiring in the newlywed phase– why would any reasonable person think the way my spouse does?

Chethik relates the story of newlyweds Patricia and Ed. They were both in the kitchen. Ed was chopping vegetables, Patricia preparing fish filet next to him. Ed noticed that

Instead of dragging the filets through the flour mixture to bread them, she laid the fish on the pan and sprinkled flour on top of them.

Witnessing this, Ed couldn’t stop himself from pointing to the breaded catfish recipe in the magazine on the counter nearby. ‘It says to dredge,’ he informed his new bride. Ed is an engineer and, as he told me years later, “it’s an article of faith that you follow the directions.”

Patricia was puzzled at first by her husband’s reference to dredging, then realized what he was referring to.

“Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” she responded.

Which was not what Ed wanted to hear. “Yes, it does matter,” he countered.

Startled, Patricia stared at Ed for a moment. “Okay,” she said, “then you do it.” She wiped her hands and marched out of the room. (Page 58.)

Deciding what is and what is not so important, deciding how you will spend your time– these things now have an affect on someone else, and that someone else’s mood will have an effect on you.

For example, it is the “fact of being married, not the amount of time spent with their wives that gives many husbands a sense of security and satisfaction.” Just knowing their bride will come home to be with them gives newly married men a sense of security.

I mention this because, some newlywed women don’t understand why their husband is working longer hours, seems to be ambitious, and doesn’t spend as much time with them.

For the husband, working long hours is showing he cares about his home life– even if he’s not actually at home. Newly married men still feel enormous pressure to take care of their family economically.

Ultimately, the challenge for newly married people is to learn how to argue satisfactorily. Not to try and agree on everything, but to learn how to disagree gracefully.

This is a time of culture clash in a marriage. Girl culture focuses on feeling and talking. Guy culture focuses on action. Healthy marriages mean figuring out how to deal with this.

When I was newly married and my spouse came to me with a personal problem, I would sometimes try to be helpful by offering suggestions for how she could fix her problem. She was offering her feelings, I was offering several action plans.

I was shocked to find out she didn’t actually want advice most of the time. But, if that’s true, then why was she sharing her pain with me?

At that time in my life, if a person offered that they were in pain over something, the best thing I thought I could do was to offer helpful suggestions to either get out of it, or to avoid it in the future, whatever “it” was.

Sometimes my spouse accused me of not really listening to her. But I could recite verbatim what she’d just said. This was not satisfying for either one of us. I didn’t like her being in pain. Why wasn’t she fixing it?

Part of me thought if she didn’t want advice, and wasn’t fixing it on her own, then she didn’t need me around, and I could go somewhere else in the house. I didn’t like her to be in pain, and it didn’t seem like I could help.

Over the years I have learned that my spouse is the expert on herself. I may think I know what she is thinking or feeling, but I’d be better off going to the casino than taking that kind of bet every time.

It doesn’t matter if I have great advice, it doesn’t matter what I think her problem is. My job is to be present with her at the times she indicates she needs me.

It sounds so simple now, but I did not have any of this modeled to me growing up. Research indicates that a husband’s relationship to his father– how he watched his father operate– has far more to do with how good a husband a man will be than almost any other factor.

Men can overcome poor fathers, but they have a longer road to travel, as many spouses will surely attest.

Imagine that a man grows up where his mother does the inside-the-house housework, and the dad does the outside-the-house housework. What do you think that future husband’s expectations are going to be when it comes to housework?

Some of us grew up never having seen a grown man use a vacuum cleaner. Me included.

In Chethik’s book, chapter 8 is entitled “Housework: the Link to Sex.” I think that chapter title gets every husband’s attention.

Here’s the hard research (okay, you in the back row, wake up, put your books down and turn your phones off, you’re going to want to hear this one).

those couples who work out a fair division of household duties have more frequent marital relations, are less likely to seek marriage counseling or consider a divorce, and are more happily married overall. (Page 116.)

In the last 40 years, husbands have moved from doing 4 to doing 13 hours of housework a week. But their wives still spend about twice as much time on housework as their husbands.

Still, I was surprised at this statistic:

the more satisfied a wife is with the division of household duties, the more satisfied a man is with his marital intimate life.

In addition to the rise in satisfaction, the actual frequency of marital relations tends to be higher when a woman feels that the housework is divided fairly.

Among wives who were satisfied with the division of housework, 2/3 had relations with their husbands at least once a week.

When the wife was un-satisfied with the housework situation, the proportion having weekly relations dropped to 50%.

Husbands! Are you getting any ideas here? It’s not so much that the wife is holding the husband’s intimate life hostage, as it is that when the wife feels loved and appreciated– like when the housework seems more equitable– she is more inspired to show love and appreciation herself.

Here’s the flip side: when the housework seems unfair, couples are

more than twice as likely to consider separation or divorce;

more than twice as likely to have affairs, and

more than 10 times as likely to say their marriage was “not stable at all.”

Wow. For you husbands who are having disagreements with your spouse about housework, I think the evidence is in!

One of the smartest things I did as newer husband was get a maid in to clean house twice a month. At the time, I thought it was an extravagance.

My spouse wanted to invite people over. I figured with her visual disability she simply could not see how messy our little place was. With us both being parish ministers at two different churches and having two little ones, trying to keep our place clean or even moderately well kept didn’t seem possible.

But I blanched at the thought that people I knew would come over and see how we actually stepped over stuff to get from one place to another, and let’s not mention the kitchen or bathroom.

I was talking to an older female colleague at a minister’s retreat, and she allowed as to how maid service saved her marriage. She married a restaurant owner with a new restaurant, and if you think you’re busy, don’t go into the restaurant business.

So we tried having a maid come in twice a month, and we’ve never looked back. It instantly increased our satisfaction with the division of household labor, and our satisfaction with each other. It was magic.

This is the spiritual road of being an American husband. Your spiritual life is intimately tied in with your spouses. It means learning to make sacrifices for someone else’s satisfaction and sense of well being. That in turn, enhances your own satisfaction, which makes it all worthwhile.

Sometimes being a good husband is simple. It just means mastering the phrase, “Yes, dear.”

Chethik’s research is fascinating, but we only have a little time left this morning. So, we can’t leave this subject without talking a little more about 3 things: marital relations, how wives can change their husband, and tips for husbands.

When it comes to marital relations. Chethik has this to say: “When men marry, some believe that they’ll have as much [loving] as they want for the rest of their lives.”

All I can say is: the poor deluded fools.

What kills a woman’s interest in her man? Some men say it’s a particular food: wedding cake.

Husbands generally want more quantity and frequency than is usually mutually available. Most men feel the arrival of small children gets in the way of their relationship with their wife. And of course, the wife feels stretched out in all directions.

What to do? Some men re-channel the energy, a small percentage have affairs.

Some men are not adept at pleasing their woman. This is complicated by the fact that wives can be reluctant to talk about what pleases them. The good news is that when women do talk to their husbands, the husbands seemed determined to deliver.

There are also issues of weight gain, previous abuse, and men’s dysfunction, but the bottom line for most husbands is that intimacy with their wife provides the medicine to get over and through all the little tricky bits of marriage.

It’s the oil that keeps the machinery humming. It is the one thing they share with their spouses in a unique & deeply significant way: they are husband and wife.

How to change a husband? The short answer is that nagging doesn’t work, modeling the behavior you wish to see in your husband has the best chance for success.

I understand you can train a husband much the way exotic animals are trained. Here’s the tips in that direction:

1. Give encouragement at even the smallest move in the right direction. After all, a baboon doesn’t learn to do a back flip all at once, right?
2. When you see behavior you don’t like, ignore it. If he complains about losing his keys, say nothing, do nothing, he’ll run out of steam more quickly than if you give any response.
3. Substitution: if he’s hovering around you at the stove top, put chips and salsa at the other end of the kitchen. He can’t be in two places at once.

I’m not saying you should blatantly manipulate your spouse, just learn what works for the both of you. Remember, if you’re not getting the results you want, you either have to learn a new skill or change how you are doing things.

Okay, top tips for husbands.

1. Keep expectations reasonable. Don’t expect to change each other or to stay the same.
2. Marry a friend– what’s the alternative?
3. Make your marriage a priority– you want your spouse to make you a priority, right?
4. Learn to give and take– Give more than you take or you’ll be real sorry. Think of your marriage as a bank account, you better keep on making deposits before you think of withdrawals. And remember that what looks like 50-50 to you probably won’t be seen that way. Think 80-20, and it will probably be much better for you.
5. Stay connected– check in with her, more than you think is necessary!
6. Nurture your partner’s dream– if you don’t, who will?
7. Keep the faith. Go to church, be willing to stretch over the dry times.

Say Amen! Somebody.