Parenting authors Nicole Mifford and Deborah Milone have branched out with a new book for husbands: How to Talk So Your Wife Will Listen & Listen So Your Wife Will Talk. This new book promises to become the “husband’s bible,” giving those husbands interested in talking to their wives valuable new tools and techniques.
In our many years of work as rocket scientists and authors of parenting books, we came in contact with many, many wives who felt their husbands didn’t really know how to hold effective conversations with them. We also met quite a few husbands who felt that their wives didn’t hear anything they said. And so, we decided to to write this book.
A few of the pieces of advice seemed fairly basic. We would be surprised if there were any husbands who hadn’t already already heard that, for example, they should stop playing electric bass before talking to their wife, or that they shouldn’t try to talk to their wife while she is talking to her sister on the phone. Other pieces of advice, though, were more valuable, including the suggestion that shouting “I don’t care how you feel, don’t you know any logic!” is a bad idea, especially when your wife is upset.
Some readers of the book have found some of the book’s suggestions insulting to wives. For example, on page 296, the authors suggest that “if your wife is feeling tense and on edge, before trying to have a conversation with her, you might consider offering her a glass of wine.” The authors counter this objection by saying that:
No husband should be offended if his wife brings him a beer after a hard day of work, before engaging him in conversation. We don’t see that offering a woman a glass of wine is any more demeaning. And personally, it takes quite a lot of wine to finish a book like this. So we are speaking from experience, putting—you might say—our mouths where our mouth is.
The authors are currently finishing up work on their next book in the series: How to Talk So Your Husband Will Listen & Listen So Your Husband Will Talk, which is due out sometime in 2015.
Image credits: Georg Wilhelm Wanderer, “Die schöne Münchnerin.” Public domain, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADie_sch%C3%B6ne_M%C3%BCnchnerin.jpg.
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