How to blow your wife's mind

To leave her mouth agape at how lucky she really is, scrambling to group-text her girlfriends just to brag on you? For her to anxiously dig out that box of lingerie she threw in the back of the closet three years ago? Well, gentlemen, it’s your lucky day.

I’ve been with my wife for over a decade. And from the painted-on, perpetual smile on her face, I can tell you one thing—I’m crushing this marriage thing. That’s not to say I haven’t had to learn one or two hard lessons along the way. But we’ve crossed those bridges, and now, I’ve got it on auto-pilot. It’s smooth sailing to the land of marital bliss. Happy wife, happy life, am I right?

You less-seasoned guys, I feel for you. I really do. I know, marriage is hard. And it wouldn’t be right for me to keep my secrets to myself.

So here goes. Here are five sure-fire ways to blow your wife’s mind:

1) Make Her Ask You More Than Once
Your wife loves you. She knows you have so many important thoughts rumbling around your brain. What time does the game start? How many more miles can I push out of that oil change? Are those biscuit and gravy potato chips really worth the price? She doesn’t actually expect you to do anything the first time she mentions it. She doesn’t mind asking you to take the trash out five times before you actually get it to the curb. She completely understands that despite the fact she’s been meeting up with girlfriends for margaritas every Tuesday night for a year, you still forget and work late. She’s really OK with the check that’s been sitting in your wallet for three weeks, waiting to be deposited. Your mind space, it’s important. She doesn’t expect to occupy much—heck, or any—of it. You do you. And she’ll be there with a gentle reminder to please, for the love, stop leaving the car on E.

2) Impress Her With Your Importance
If I know anything, it’s that my wife is really impressed with the work I get done at my job. When I get home from a long day at the office and retreat to my favorite chair to continue checking email, I can see her smile from underneath a pile of children. “My husband, so important”, she thinks to herself with a loving sigh, just before a toddler smacks her across the face with Play-Doh.

Here’s an insider secret: you don’t actually have to be checking your email to look important. Even if you’re only changing your fantasy football line-up, refuse to look up from your device when she starts talking about the latest argument with her mother. It will still communicate the same thing. And when she comes to realize that without you the world might slip off its axis, she’ll be blown away by how lucky she truly is. Trust me, warm feelings like that can’t be achieved through something lame like listening well. One important caveat: if she starts crying, be sure to look up—you don’t want those tears smudging your screen.

3) Be Mr. Fix-It
I know what you’re thinking. I can’t be Mr. Fix-It, I don’t actually own any tools! Take a deep breath, I’m not talking about being able to patch a hole in drywall or tighten a leaky faucet. You can pay someone else to do those simple tasks. What you can’t pay for, and what will really knock her socks off, is the way you deftly solve all her problems. Ten years of a bad relationship with her father? Solved in an afternoon. That friend she keeps thinking might be mad at her? Like taking candy from a baby. Is she frustrated with traffic on her commute? She should really take the interstate. When she brings up any conflict or frustration, don’t sit idly by while she meanders through a thirty-minute story. You already know the answer, so speak up. In fact, the quicker you solve her problems, the more impressed she’ll be with your wisdom. Bonus points if you can interrupt her mid-thought. The abruptness of your logic will leave her pining for more. Pretty soon, every problem in her life will be solved, and she’ll have only one person to thank. It’s a great day to be you.

4) Focus On the Most Important Person
In the unlikely event that an easy solution to a complicated problem doesn’t immediately present itself, you have one recourse—talk about yourself. By being able to shift any conversation away from her emotions and back to your wants and needs, she’ll be forced to focus on the most important person in the room. The stress of her own problems will melt away. When she realizes how many of her own problems she doesn’t have to carry because of your ability to derail conversations back to yourself, she’ll be overcome with gratitude. You’re so giving.

This is a skill best understood in context. How about a few real-life examples to show you how it’s done?

Wife: I can’t believe she hasn’t texted me back yet. Do you think she’s ignoring me
You: I know, that’s so frustrating. My boss still hasn’t responded to that email I sent him last week. Do you think I should send another one? Or is that coming off too strong?
Wife: Your mom still hasn’t RSVP’d for the birthday party. Why does she always wait until the last minute?
You: Right? Last week, I had to call her four times before she called me back. That really hurt my feelings. I mean, c’mon, I’m her only boy.

5) Never Change…Anything
The biggest key to your wife’s happiness? Stability. If you’re early in your marriage, you may be tempted to believe that the excitement of surprises, thoughtful acts, and gifts-for-no-reason will keep your wife on her toes. Granted, it might. But that’s not why she married you. She’s looking for security. And nothing says “secure” quite like the endless droning of one day into the next with no deviation. When you do that for weeks, months, even years on end, you’ll find your wife going to bed early and sleeping late. And why shouldn’t she? She’s so secure that rest comes easy. What a blessing! Don’t surprise her with flowers. Don’t get a babysitter and take her out for a nice dinner. Don’t secretly book that beach vacation. All of these things will only stress her out. Instead, get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, quietly binge on Netflix, and then go to bed. I know it’s hard on you, but just keep telling yourself, I’m doing this for my wife.

Hold on.

That’s all I can take. You know what satire is? Using humor, especially exaggeration, to paint a familiar scenario in a different light. You know everything I wrote above is shitty advice, right? No husband with half a brain would do any of those things on purpose. But that advice is based on real scenarios from my own life. After ten years with my wife, I still find myself doing many of the things I ridiculed above. Granted, it’s all unintentional—I don’t really mean to derail conversations back to myself or forget to take the trash out (again) or try to fix (instead of listen) to my wife’s stressors. But I do still catch myself doing it. It’s a rut (or five) that I constantly find myself driving back into.

Before I met my wife, the only person I had to think about was me. In the almost ten years from high school graduation to my wedding day, I got really good at taking care of me. But that night, in mid-December, when a beautiful bride met me at the altar, it was time to end that self-focused life. But old patterns of thinking don’t die without intentionality.

Here’s the truth: you don’t need five steps to blow your wife’s mind. You only need to think about her before you think about yourself. It really is as simple as that.

Make no mistake, simple doesn’t mean easy. Retraining yourself to think about your wife first is going to be difficult. It actually takes something often defined as dying to yourself to do it. But I don’t care if your 18 or 81, if you’ve stopped doing things just because they’re challenging, you’ve stopped being a man and gone back to boyhood. It’s a difficult path, but I completely believe you can do it. Because this fiercely independent boy has learned to become a self-sacrificing man.

And here’s the best news of all: you don’t have to find that sacrificial spirit inside yourself. You don’t have to create it out of thin air. There’s already an example for you to follow. You just have to copy it.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
Ephesians 5:25

In your house, you get to be Jesus. It’s a high calling but a beautiful one because your wife is valuable enough to suffer and die for.

You probably won’t have to die physically for your wife. But you could fill up her car the next time you drive it. One act piles on another and before you know it: Mind. Blown.