Brain Science: How DOES a man’s mind really work?

So, , and we should not expect our relationship with our man to be like our friendships with other women … how does his mind really work, and how can I effectively communicate my love to him?

Let me start with this quote from Sacred Influence:

You’ll be trying to live a science-fiction novel if you ever expect to fully understand your husband. He probably can’t even understand himself! Men seem better able to accept this, while wives often feel as though they have to understand their husbands. Sometimes, you simply have to accept that this is the way a guy is – and love him accordingly.

So there are some things about men that we can begin to understand in a little more detail (phew!).

Many conflicts in marriage crop up not between two individuals but between two sexes. In his book, Gary Thomas stresses the importance of understanding how to approach your husband:

If you accept every other strategy in this book and still approach your husband like you would a close friend or a daughter, expect to fail.

Today’s Tip: Give Him Time

Neurological studies indicate that men may take up to seven hours longer than women to process complex emotional data. Why? Is this because they simply are too lazy to be bothered with sorting through their feelings? That’s certainly what I used to think.

Well, aside from the fact that men have 15 percent less blood flow to their brains, they also have a smaller hippocampus (the part of the limbic system that processes emotional experiences).

Women have more neural pathways to and from the emotive centers of the brain, and the connecting bundle of nerves between the right and left side of the brain (which allows for the processing of thoughts and talk with emotions) is 25 percent smaller in men than in women.

So, when I inadvertently hurt Yeadon’s feelings with a careless comment at breakfast and he snaps at me, I immediately want to talk through our conflict, but he is probably not going to be ready to do that until he gets home from work in the evening! That I can deal with.  

The worst (for me) is when we get into an argument in the evening, and I want to resolve everything before bedtime … but he’s not ready, and he just gets more and more upset the more I try to talk about it, and eventually he just completely checks out and falls asleep while I lie there crying!  

He needs more time to process. Even though I am ready to process, he feels unfairly put on the spot, and he is, because his brain is just in the beginning stages of processing the situation.

Here’s a suggestion: let’s both compromise a little. I need to learn to be patient and not demand that Yeadon work through emotional conflict with me immediately. I should try to give him a heads-up that I would like to talk about it in a few hours…and then I need to shut up about it until later. He, in turn, could be diligent in thinking about it over the course of the day and discussing it with me after a few hours, even though it still might be uncomfortable for him.

Wow … marriage is so complex!  I love what Ann Voskamp wrote:  Love is not passion. It is the pulse of sacrifice.

My next post is on why men stonewall and why women want to verbally work through everything.

Disclaimer:  I am not attempting to give men a free pass to be jerks. My goal is to help women understand what’s going on in our men’s minds so that we can have reasonable expectations, and move forward from there. In a marriage, both the man and the woman are going to have to realize that we work differently and learn to be compassionate toward one another, step out of our comfort zone a bit, and make a conscious effort to bless the other in a way that is felt by the other to be a blessing.

Today's Link:

Ann Voskamp has a phenomenal post titled How to {make} Love