It takes a lot of awareness and compassion to recognize what you have in yourself and your relationship with your husband. It's something I realized to a few years back.

I used to work in an almost exclusively male editorial department. They were a great bunch of guys. During the time I worked with them, I was surprised by the number of times they made statements like, “men can’t express emotion,” “men aren’t good at talking about their feelings,” or some such variation.

They sounded like brainwashed inmates at a re-education, detainment camp. First, I thought, “Boy, did somebody do a number on these guys.” Then I thought about it a little more. I realized that we, and by “we,” I mean American women and the field of Psychology, are the ones who did the number on them.

Men express their feelings, but they do so differently than women. As a collective, we've told men this makes them inadequate and they, in turn, feel badly. If women want to be with men who can talk about their feelings like their best girlfriend and listen to a laundry list of the days minutiae, then why don’t they just get together with their girlfriend? I've never understood this.

Men are better at taking action and mechanical things than women. However, they don’t tell us, “Instead of sitting around blathering about your feelings all day, why don’t you get off your butt and do something about it.” I don’t parrot, “I can’t fix a car engine” like I’m a defective abnormal. They're both equally absurd.

Men are different than women, thank God. American men have become a mess as a result of what women and pop Psychology (Psychology has been a female dominated field for the last 20 years and counting- think about it) have done to them. American women have taken a once proud creature like a Bull Mastiff, and turned it into a docile Pekingese who's so nervous it chases its own tail around in circles trying to figure what it's mistress wants. It's a shame and probably the reason why most of my relationships have been with Europeans in recent years.

About two years ago I noticed the same thing about myself. After 25 years together we had developed some communication patterns that didn't involve hearing one another. I realized one day that I didn't communicate with the most important person in my life anywhere near as well as I did my friends. This scared me and I made this same goal upon realizing this. I can say that two years later our relationship has changed so much because of this. It's well worth the effort!