Handling husbands

PERHAPS the better title for this piece is how to be patient and understanding, how to be all the way loving to one's husband. But that would be too long, right?

Anyway, this is a happy review of a book I just read, precisely about how to deal with husbands, to many wives now a very sensitive matter.

I hope books like this proliferate, and more, that there will be more initiatives to understand better many things in our domestic affairs. Many things depend on these, including basic sanity of individuals, family vitality, and social peace.

"For Better Or For Best," by Gary Smalley and distributed locally by Totus Books in Manila, is an engaging and very practical book detailing many usual problems wives have with their husbands and how to handle them.

Problems like: how to make the husbands more responsive to wives' emotional and romantic moods, spend more time with wives, listen to what wives have to say, appreciate and help wives grow as a person.

It's a sequel to his other book, "If Only He Knew," addressed to husbands, telling tem how to more effectively deal with their wives.

The main forte of this book is that it's based on actual situations, and the suggestions made are done in an easy way. It's no profound, deep-treatise type.

What is more, it conforms to basic and correct Christian moral principles, without sounding like a Catechism. Sorry for that, I like and recommend the study of Catechism, but I understand people when they say they don't like it.

There is also a good attempt to describe things in a systematic way, so problem situations can be easily identified. I think most of our problems arise from the fact that we often fail to see them developing.

I just hope that people take time to read books like this. We cannot take this matter for granted. With so many developments around us, our tendency is to forget fundamental things that are indispensable in our daily affairs.

Take the case of my parents, both now deceased and very lovingly remembered. During their time, there was hardly any book about how to be a good husband or wife. But they were lucky that their problem-solving skills coincided with many of what the book recommends.

They were so different from each other that I sometimes wondered how they ever agreed to be husband and wife. They had problems with each other, but on the whole they managed to stay together with undeniable love for each other.

For this, I give credit to both, but especially to my mother whose formula of patience, silence, praying and smiling produced better and quicker solutions to whatever it was that they were quarreling.

My father was the very rational type. I had no problem with him, or he with me, I think. But with him I had to think always, measure my words, concoct strategies whenever I had to bring up something with him. I had to behave in a certain way with him. I suppose he wanted me to be a man.

With my mother, sweetness personified, I could be completely myself, my naked self, at times capricious and moody. Of course, in time I would realize I had no reason to give my mother any bad time so I also tried to behave.

So, with this chemistry there were times when they could not understand each other. In intellect and sensibility, they were in two different worlds.

Their quarrels were not really loud, much less scandalous. It was my father who got piqued most of the time, while my mother stayed always calm. But I could sense whenever there was trouble between the two of them.

As I said, it was my mother in her quiet mysterious ways that often would get her way, and the problem would be over. That's how I learned that problems are solved not so much by discussing them but by simply praying and being patient.

That's what my mother did most of the time. But again that was their time, their culture. Things are different now. So I feel that books like "For better or for best" can really give a great service to the husbands and wives of today.

It's really common sense laced with a Christian spirit of charity and patience that provides the solutions to many of the problems in marriages today. Sad to say, this is not quite common these days.