I’ve often joked that at some point in my career I’m going to host a men’s seminar. In this joke scenario, I walk into the room with some tall boys of beer and crack one before holding forth on my secrets to being a happy man, husband and dad.
While this specific scenario may not play out (for one, I rarely drink and beer is not what I’ll go for), I am tentatively scheduled to co-host a men’s retreat in the Poconos in April 2026. Just thinking about that event (more details will follow as the project develops) got my creative juices flowing.
So in no particular order, here is some “practical advice for husbands”. The title is a little misleading, actually everything I’m about to say you don’t need to be a husband, or a man even, to use. But I will be presenting it in that context, because, well, it’s one of the most important contexts of my life. Let’s roll.
Inoculating yourself against Nagging
A frequent dynamic that I and countless men have found themselves in is the perception that they are being “nagged” by their partner. What this usually means is that they are frequently hearing complaints or critiques of their performance in one or more areas of a relationship.
It’s important to acknowledge at this point a simple truth: no one likes hearing that they are wrong. To explain that further, I don’t think anyone has a positive emotional reaction to being corrected, or complained to. You can find a way to make it work for you (and perhaps dramatically reduce the “nagging”) but you will likely not overcome the emotional disturbance of receiving a personal complaint.
I’ve admitted before that I used to manifest way more passive aggression in my relationship with my wife, so my typical response to being “nagged” was to mockingly respond back. I often default to humor in an attempt to transcend the emotionality of a situation. This is not suggested, as I will explain in the next paragraph.
Where does nagging come from? Your partner is asking for something from you. Is it the most productive way to ask? No. But if you can set aside your own feelings, you have a chance to right your own ship in this situation.
In my case, my wife was carrying a lot of our shared responsibilities in her working memory (often popularly referred to as “mental load” these days). She wanted to offload some of that, but paradoxically the nagging was reinforcing that dynamic. She nagged, I mocked (and usually did something) ,but then it was on her to nag repeatedly to get the help she was asking for.
Eventually, I thought about my own reaction and how I wanted the dynamic to stop. Crucially, I also realized that if you want a relationship dynamic to stop, it’s best to focus on your half as other people are impossible to control.
So I started making mental notes of what she was asking for help for, and organizing myself around doing it WITHOUT being asked. I must admit I got a lot of satisfaction out of moments where she went to ask me to do something and I could reply “already done, I’ve got it”.
In contrast to previous passive aggressive solutions, this was an AGGRESSIVE solution. And because I created a positive emotional feedback loop for myself, it was pretty easy to scale up. I will add that I took a stand against the “nag” as a form of asking for help, but only after changing my own behavior. I recommend whenever you want a dynamic to change in a relationship that you take responsibility for the first step before putting some pressure on your partner to change their end.
Finding yourself Attractive
I feel like this blog is borderline PG/PG13, so I’m going to try not to become R rated in this section. Just as an aside, that’s not for my own purposes. I’m Danish and find Americans generally super weird and uptight in the way they avoid talking about sex.
So let me put it this way- like a lot of men, especially married men that I talk to, I am very attracted to my wife and I also want her to find me attractive.
Those of you who follow me maybe have noticed that I’ve made a pretty dramatic transformation in my appearance over the last few years, in terms of body composition, muscularity etc. I think this is what most men imagine is going to make them more attractive. I don’t want to discount this entirely, but I do think that many men wildly overvalue their raw appearance in terms of attractiveness.
By far, a way more important factor is your self-perception of your own attractiveness. By that I mean- how do you carry yourself? In this space before I’ve talked about body positivity and some of my own struggles with body image. I think in many instances I found myself with a chicken and egg problem: I wanted my wife to find me more attractive, perceived that I was lacking, and that in turn fed negative feelings about my own appearance. Those negative perceptions made me less attractive, and then you have a vicious cycle.
Building up a positive narrative around your own physical appearance is not easy, but as I will argue in a moment, it is absolutely recommended. One of the key insights I’ve learned over the years is that our thinking is never completely polar in terms of positivity or negativity. If we were completely pessimistic, we would never do anything.
Therefore, if you are struggling with your own body image issues, it’s probably not true that you negatively perceive your body 100% of the time. You have moments perhaps, where you think you actually look pretty good, and then many moments where you relentlessly critique yourself.
What worked for me was to reinforce moments where I felt good about myself, and to let the moments where I felt bad about myself be. I didn’t try to resist my own negativity, I kept all my mental energy focused on bolstering my positive self-image. I made a habit (which I’ve been made fun of by pretty much everyone in my life for, perhaps more on that later) of taking a mirror selfie whenever I felt like I was looking good. I took a moment to study the picture.
Before I get to the benefits I’ve experienced from improving my self image, I do want to sidetrack to talk about the mocking phenomenon that I described above. One of the biggest barriers people have to engaging in positivity is that it can seem inherently dorky. There is a vulnerability to admitting to, for example, the vanity of caring about how you look. Many people protect from this vulnerability by mocking it- my advice is to empathize with their pain and carry on.
Now let’s get to the real benefit of finding yourself more attractive- it makes it much easier for people to find you attractive. I’ve discovered this in more aspects than just pure physical appearance- the more I like myself the easier it is for other people to like me. I think the reasoning behind that is fairly simple.
On a subconscious level, overly negative self-perception puts a certain mental burden on whoever you’re interacting with. So, in the case of a spouse, if you are overly negative about how you look- if they love you and care about you, they are going to be preoccupied with this insecurity. They are going to want to heal that hurt, even though it’s yours to heal.
That burden can be a distraction. When the distraction is lifted, it’s easier for them to be carefree and aligned with their natural feelings of attraction. They don’t have to try to carry your pain simultaneously.
Work from the inside out
If there’s a common theme to all this advice, it’s this: work from the inside out. If you have something you’d like to see changed externally, do the work internally, on yourself to provide a different stimulus to the outside world. The only thing you can strongly influence is the way that you show up in the world, and you’d be surprised at how influential it is in your relationships if you find a way to set up new patterns for yourself.