How to love and respect your wife

1. Set your career, academic, and health goals, and then work hard to achieve them.
2. Develop a network of diverse and supportive friends.
3. Challenge your wife to be a mutual, respectful, and equal partner in every aspect of your relationship.
4. Resist any forms of intimacy you or your wife find uncomfortable.
5. Believe in your wife’s honesty and integrity by refusing to lie or cover for her no matter how seemingly justifiable the lie or a cover-up might be.
6. Applaud her desire and her attempts to be close to her extended family.
7. Talk to her about what you see, think, and feel regarding matters that are important to you, and offer her opportunities to do the same with you.
8. Resist “shutting down” or playing the silent game or the “hurt puppy” when you do not get what you want.
9. Take full responsibility for your children by spending large blocks of time (three-day weekends) with your children. Do not recruit any help from you wife or extended family to do this.
10. Be as interdependent as possible by finding fulfillment both within your marriage and as an individual. Enjoy being husband and dad without losing your capacity to enjoy life outside of each of these wonderful roles.