A Man I Love Called Me With a Question About His Wife

A man I love called me the other day.

He didn't schedule the call. He didn't say “hey, can I pick your brain about something.” He just called to say hi, the way men sometimes do when they actually need to talk about something hard but can't admit it yet. We small-talked for a while. And then, out of nowhere, he asked me a question.

He said something like this: “Do you create, like, this room in your head — this place where you're not affected by what they have to say to you? Like, if there's a critique of you, and it's not meant to be fixed, it's just meant to be heard — how do you sit in that? How do you not snap back? How do you not try to fix it? How do you not go into the ring?”

He used a word: macho man. He said, “How do you stop the macho man from going into the ring?”

I want you to know something. I'm bad at this. I told him that first. I said, “You're asking a guy who doesn't do this well. I snap back. I lose my patience. I do all the things I'm about to tell you not to do.” And that's true. If you know me, you know I'm not writing this from a mountaintop. I'm writing from the same valley every man I know is walking through.

But I also told him what I've been learning. And the more I sat with our conversation afterward, the more I thought: every man I know needs this conversation, and almost none of them will ever get it.

So I'm writing it down.

The question behind the question

When a man calls another man and asks how to handle his wife's critique without blowing up, what he's actually asking is bigger than technique.

He's asking: How do I stop being such a reactive person?
He's asking: Why does my first instinct cost me the people I love the most?
He's asking: Is there a version of me that can take a hit and not swing back?
He's asking: Am I the only one who feels this way?

The answer to that last one is no. You're not the only one. You're almost all of us. Including me. Including the man who called me.

And the reason most of us don't get better at this is because nobody taught us. We grew up with fathers who either suppressed everything until they exploded, or exploded until they suppressed everything. We learned the two modes. Nobody showed us a third.

Here's my best attempt at the third.

Start with posture, not performance

The first mistake men make — and I've made it a thousand times — is we try to get better at this by making rules. “Next time she says something, I'm just going to listen. I'm not going to respond. I'm going to be calm.”

I can tell you exactly how that goes. You do it once. You feel like a hero. Twenty-four hours later, the kids are screaming for no reason, your wife says something that scrapes a nerve you didn't know was exposed, you're already running late, and something inside you just... goes. And you're standing there five minutes later thinking, what the heck just happened? How did I get here? I was going to be different today.

Rules don't work. Rules fail because they're downstream of something else. They're downstream of your posture.

Posture is the thing you bring into the room before the moment happens. It's the shape of your heart when your feet hit the floor in the morning. And if you try to build a calm, patient, listening man in the moment, you're going to lose every time. That man has to be built before the moment. Quietly. Early. Alone with God.

This is why I start every morning — and I want to be honest, I don't always do this, and I'm not going to pretend I do — with the same two questions. They're the same questions we ask someone we're about to baptize at our church:

1. Do I believe Jesus has done everything needed to save me?
2. Am I willing to go and do whatever He's calling me to do today?

Both of those questions are answered yes when I say them out loud, and both of them feel like lies ten minutes later when I lose it over something small. That gap — the gap between what I said and how I live — is the real conversation I need to have with God every morning.

Then get raw

Here's the part most men don't do, and it's the part that matters most.

I don't pray to God like He's a polite neighbor. I don't lob a question over the fence and wait for a nice answer. I get real. I tell Him what's actually going on. I say something like:

“God, I believe You've saved me. But when it comes to loving my wife the way You've told me to love her — Ephesians 5, as Christ loved the church, which is a terrifying standard — I have no idea how to do that. I don't know how to do it. I get irritated. I get frustrated. I want to snap back. I want to win. There's stuff in my heart from my parents, from my childhood, from things that have happened to me that I'm still dragging around like a sack of rocks. I need You to help me sort through that. I need You to do surgery on my heart. I want to be right — not just for my wife. For You first. And then out of the overflow of being right with You, let me actually love her the way You're calling me to.”

That's a prayer. That's the kind of prayer that actually changes something.

Polite prayer changes nothing. Polite prayer is what you do when you're trying to keep God at arm's length while looking like you're close. Raw prayer is what happens when you're actually desperate enough to stop performing.

Get raw. Tell God the truth. He can handle it.

Shepherd hearts, not behavior

Here's the frame that changed me. I'm going to give it to you straight, because it's the piece the man on the phone kept coming back to.

Your job as a husband and a father is not to manage behavior. Your job is to shepherd hearts.

Those are not the same job. They are barely the same universe.

Managing behavior says: my wife said something mean, how do I get her to stop saying mean things. Managing behavior says: my son is disrespecting me, how do I get him to respect me. Managing behavior says: there's a problem with what's coming out of their mouths, let me fix what's coming out of their mouths.

Shepherding hearts says: what's being said isn't the real thing. It's the surface. It's the ugly brown top layer of an onion. What's going on underneath? What is this person actually scared of? What are they carrying? What happened to them today that I don't know about? What is the Holy Spirit doing in their life right now that I might be in the way of?

Your wife and your kids are the hearts closest to you. That means two things at once: you have the most power to help them, and you have the most power to wound them. Most men underestimate both halves of that sentence.

The minute you start focusing on hearts instead of behavior, everything changes:

• You stop needing to win the argument. The argument isn't the point.
• You start asking better questions. “What do you mean by that? What does that look like? What's underneath that?”
• You start having compassion, because you realize there's always more under the surface than what's visible.
• You start praying specifically for the people you love, in ways you couldn't before, because God is actually showing you what to pray for.
• You start noticing that God is answering those prayers — and that you had nothing to do with it.

That last one is the part that still makes me tear up when I think about it. I've watched God do things in my wife's heart that I prayed for and did absolutely nothing else about. He was already working. I was just invited to watch.

The macho man moment

Here's the hard part. You're going to blow it.

You're going to wake up with all the right posture, pray the raw prayer, get your heart in the right place, and then at 8:47 a.m. somebody is going to say something, and the macho man is going to pop out and walk into the ring before you even knew the bell rang.

This is not a sign you've failed.This is a sign you're a man. It's going to happen. The question isn't how to live perfectly. The question is what you do in the next ten minutes.

Here's what I try to do, and what I told the man on the phone:

1. Don't pretend it didn't happen. He saw it. She saw it. The kids saw it. You saw it. God saw it. Everyone saw it. Trying to move on without naming it just poisons the next interaction.
2. Repent fast. Not to yourself. Out loud. To God first, then to whoever you hurt. “I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. Will you forgive me?” Those are four sentences that most men on Earth have never said to their wives or their kids.
3. Don't grovel, and don't over-explain. You don't need to give a TED talk on why you failed. Just name it, own it, and move forward.
4. Go back to the posture.Don't wait until tomorrow morning. Go sit somewhere alone for two minutes and say the raw prayer again. “God, I just blew it. I'm not trying to live perfectly. I'm trying to stay connected to You. Help me get back there.”

The goal was never perfection. The goal was presence. God's presence in your morning, your presence in their hearts, and the loop that closes between the two.

Why this conversation almost never happens

I've been thinking about why men don't ask each other questions like this.

I think it's because we've built a whole culture where asking for help as a husband and father is treated like an admission of failure. So we don't. We grind it out. We white-knuckle it. We read books alone. We listen to podcasts alone. We go to Bible study and talk about “the text” instead of the thing in our marriage we haven't been able to fix for six years.

And then we get old, and our marriages are fine but distant, and our kids are fine but far, and we can't remember when the softness left.

The man who called me did something rare. He said the thing out loud. He asked another man for the thing he didn't know how to do. And that act alone — just the phone call — is most of the work. The rest is just trusting that God is actually the Person He says He is, and that He actually wants to meet you in your morning, and that the Holy Spirit is a better counselor than anything you'll ever build or buy or download.

If you're the man reading this and you don't have somebody you can call the way he called me, that's the problem to solve first.

Find one man. Call him. Say the thing out loud.

That's why The Guild exists. It's why I'm writing any of this down. Men need each other, and we need the Person of the Holy Spirit, and we need to stop pretending we have it figured out.

I don't have it figured out.

Neither does he.

Neither do you.

Let's stop acting like we do.

— Josh