Who am I? What do I do? How much do I earn? Until a man has answered these three, he'll stay inside his own struggle — and that's about him, not about you.
I get a lot of questions from women — in consultations and in my DMs — about male psychology. How do I understand the man I love? What drives him? How do I build a healthy relationship with him? How do I speak to a man wisely? How do I support and inspire him in a crisis? And so on.
I think it makes sense to do a series of posts on this.
Before we get to the relationship between a man and a woman, let’s sort out three fundamental questions that face any man — single or married.
The answers to these three questions determine how a man relates to himself:
- Who am I?
- What do I do?
- How much do I earn?
The first question is about identity. A person can hold several identities at once. Mine, for example: I’m a Christian, a husband, an entrepreneur, a speaker, a blogger.
If a man doesn’t understand his own identity, he’ll live in a crisis of meaning and calling. And without those, he won’t close the next two questions either.
The second question is about the actual work. What do I do for a living?
If a man identifies as an entrepreneur but lost his business for whatever reason and is now driving a taxi, he’ll carry an inner conflict too.
The third question matters because every man needs to provide for the people close to him with dignity. When a man doesn’t earn enough to cover his family’s basic needs, respecting himself becomes almost impossible.
So, ladies: when you start and build a relationship with a man, remember that if he hasn’t resolved these three questions, you can be doing absolutely everything right on your side and he will still be stuck in his own depressive processes. That’s his story, not yours.
But there are three specific things in a relationship that depend on the woman. And they affect the quality of the relationship just as much as the “male questions” do. I’ll talk about them next.
Continued in What Matters Most to a Man in Marriage.
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