I'm divorced. My second wife divorced me and to this day I don't know why.
Let me tell the story as briefly as I can.
When we were dating, she once said, "I want a man who knows me so well that I don't have to tell him what I want. He just knows." At the time I just brushed it off. But think about that for a moment. How is he supposed to know what you want if you don't tell him? If you've told him a hundred times and he still doesn't get it, okay, he's not listening to you. But you have to tell him at least once.
So one day about a year after we were married, she said to me, "You don't love me like you did before we were married."
I said, "What do you mean?"
She replied with obvious anger, "If you don't know what the word 'love' means, look it up in a dictionary!"
I replied -- pretty calmly, I think, "I know the dictionary definition of the word. But what did I do before we were married that I'm not doing now?"
She said, "You knew how to love me before we were married!"
We went around a few times and she refused to give me any specifics. Then we had many similar conversations over the next couple of weeks. I begged her to just tell me what she wanted. At one point I said, "If you'd tell me what you want, maybe I'd say, 'Is that all? I can do that.' Heck, maybe I'd say, 'That sounds like fun. I'd loe to do that.'" But she just kept insisting that I knew. Eventually she divorced me.
To this day, I wonder: What did she want? Did she want me to buy her flowers? Tell her I respected her strong and independent character? Visit her mother more often? I have no idea. Did she really believe that I knew what she wanted and was just being obstinate and pretending I didn't? But even if so, what would it have hurt for her to say, "I want you to do X, Y, and Z"? Or I wonder if maybe she didn't know herself what she wanted, that she just had a vague feeling that she was unhappy.
Let me give a little piece of advice to women. If there's something you want from your man, don't expect him to just know. He can't read your mind. Don't give subtle hints. Don't give broad hints. Just tell him what you want.
To take a simple example: Suppose you're out, shopping or driving or whatever, and you want to stop for lunch. My wife will say, "Are you hungry?" I took that question literally at first, and I would say, "No, I'm fine" and go on. I finally figured out that "Are you jungry?" really means "I am hungry". Why can't she just say that? Especially, don't think, "He should know I'm hungry by the look on my face." No, he doesn't. Just tell him.
There's an old joke: A person's face can tell you a lot about what he's thinking. Especially the mouth part of the face.
© 2025 by Jay Johansen
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