4 Ways To Get Your Man To Listen

A major complaint about men is that they don’t listen. Of course they pretend they do by nodding their heads to every sentence, but when you ask ‘darling are you listening?’ You get another nod of the head. And when you finally ask ‘darling so what do you think I should do?’ you are jolted by the answer ‘honey, what was it you said?’ The truth being that your man is in another world thinking how he is going to clinch that lucrative contract, or just too tired but too polite to ignore you.

But one man, in defense of men, thinks that only half of the fault lies with them. Talking to men is not like making love.  For instance, men too feel they need to be warmed up, and the mood and the time have to be right.  Men don’t believe they are trying to avoid meaningful conversations or that they can’t stand them, but rather more to do with the fact that they are not just prepared to talk at the times women approach them. 

So to increase your chances of being given the attention, and get a response, the advice to women is to get his listening powers and attention span, by using the following four ways to do just that.

1. Choose the right time

To you, his schedule of ‘must do’ golf sessions with his friends, and ‘serious’ board room strategic planning sessions and ‘never ending’ football time on TV, might seem to be pushing to the background your ‘togetherness’ time. However all these may be a sign of emotional overload, not that he has lost his emotional feelings.

A man needs his down time just like you do. Perhaps even more so. It’s long been known that women are more emotionally fluent than guys - more verbal, with more people, on more topics. Men tend to withdraw, in part because the areas of their brains that process speech and emotion are less fully developed. This is the more reason why you need to schedule your big discussions at clever times:

Not a good time: In the hour he gets home, he needs to clear his head of office nuisances, right after the kids go to bed is the time to relax and have a glass of wine or cup of cocoa. It’s also not a good time particularly when the two of you have settled your head on the pillow and need to rock each other to sleep gently, not  work each other up.

A better time: You can open up during a walk over the weekend or over a mug of hot chocolate or green tea in the middle part of the evening. Another way of being considerate is to introduce the topic in an email or text, so he has a chance to think about it a bit before the discussion starts.

Spare serious talk for the car

If you need to have a long, deep, serious discussion, such as where your relationship is going, or your suspicion that he is having an affair; then it seems normal to want to talk on the couch or at the kitchen dining table.  However, you should be doing this with a lot of deep eye contact and close study. He may withdraw, be defensive, aggressive, or retreat into his shell.  It’s a strategy that won’t work because you’re trying to back him into a corner, which is unlikely to make headway of any exchanges you’re after. So when the topic is serious or deep, introduce the conversation in the car, while sitting side-by-side. This way he will feel less intimidated, and more relaxed. Irrespective of who is driving, he will be in control and confident.  And with time on his hands, he will listen and say more.

If you need his help, ask

When men and women discuss personal issues, they do so with different objectives in mind.  The woman discusses so as to be understood and perhaps elicit some empathy, while the man enters it with a strict ‘Mr Fix it’ approach: You got problems, I got the solutions.  Thus she gets troubled when he attempts to sort her problems rather than empathise with her, and perhaps in the process accuse him of not paying full attention to her troubles.  In turn, he gets troubled for being rebuffed when he offers solutions.

Experts advise men to retreat from an ‘I got the solutions’ for all problems, and maybe instead meet the women half way, and place solution finding as part of the empathy session. If she completely opens up on her problems, and he assists in brainstorming a solution out of the mess, then both will be happy. Working together as a team to resolve problems works wonders. No matter the situation, many men would like to be perceived as the perfect partner.

Discuss after making love

Oh yes, a perfect time to discuss can be, surely, right after making love. It should be one of those times he feels closest to his woman, and also likely to feel a little more at ease talking about serious issues.  Look at it this way, the lights are down, the love hormones are flowing, and you’re a team. Just the same women may feel less inhibited about their bodies in the darkness; men feel the same way with their words.  It’s highly likely the love you have shown physically might just spill over into pleasant thoughts of the verbal type. And the serious the discussion, the more you’ll learn about each other.

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