270 Seconds to a Better Marriage

This month's Esquire (May 2011) has a cluster of features on marriage, being a good husband, and so on, many of which are interesting and helpful. Among these is an insert on page 152 offering a baby step approach to improving the marriage relationship from the guy's perspective. It takes less than five minutes and works like this:

In the morning, as soon as you (the guy) wake up, spend ninety seconds giving your wife the "greatest good morning possible": I love you truly, madly, deeply, etc. If she's asleep? No difference; "she'll hear you anyway."

Then, after work or anytime you've been away for at least two hours, give her your full, undivided attention for ninety seconds before you do anything else. "If she's happy, you go happy; if she's low, you go low. Look in her eyes long enough to discern her eye color. This says I value you; I need you."

Last, spend ninety seconds engaging her sometime during the final half hour before bed. In this moment, "do not talk about children, money, or work. Don't talk about the past at all. Look at her, stroke her hair, snuggle up to her, tell her you love her."

Voila.

Now, this, I think, should work. My reasons are two. First, no one is suggesting that we men do this 270 seconds per day and no more; rather, the idea is that it's very easy to go whole days without really paying attention to your wife and that this is bad for marriages. If we do the 270, though, we'll never be in danger of accidentally giving our marriages this kiss of death. Our wives will never feel that "you never talk/listen/pay attention to me." This alone is worth the price of the magazine (or a decade subscription, for that matter).

The second reason I think this approach should work is that the 270 seconds would tell us how much more of this direct attention is necessary on a given occasion. On some days, the "I care" communicated in the 270 might be sufficient to help our wives feel loved, rendering palatable the fact that we have to dash off subsequently and accomplish something. On the other days, the 270 would tell us what else we need to do to love our wives properly, presumably resulting in their appreciation and keeping the relationship rewarding for both parties.

Now, to me, the middle ninety seconds seems the toughest. Focusing on our women right before bed is a no-brainer, right? After all, it's half the reason we're in the bed to begin with. The 90 second "good morning" is not quite as easy, but still very doable, even pavlovian: It becomes the first and most important of the many things we do to start our day and, before long, we're experts.

But right after being apart for a substantial portion of the day? Who knows what state we might be in. For my own part, I usually want to talk about philosophy or whatever else has been rolling around in my head all afternoon. Not the usual woman's favorite topic, even if some of them do enjoy it from time to time. Or our day might have really sucked, making it difficult to refrain from blurting this out before we find out if their day was worse. But this, I submit, is the challenge. It simply must be done. Perhaps we men could make some sort of pact to encourage each other's diligence in this matter.