In the last two installments I tried to help men better understand women. These columns were also popular with women, many having shared them with, or read them to, their husbands. What have we learned and how will this help us understand what men want? For the most part, men want their wives to be happy. Why? A happy wife is indeed a happy life. So women, are you happy and where does the joy in your life come from? If you are not happy within yo …
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Dear husbands, Last time I wrote that men and women want similar things in a relationship. They want to feel valued, loved, needed and appreciated. How each sex expresses or feels this may differ, and this causes confusion and a communication breakdown, which if not dealt with, can lead to the dissolution of a relationship. I wrote about what makes a woman happy and spoke of her "list" of things that she feels needs attention before …
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After more than thirty years of working with couples in my office, I am convinced that women and men, for the most part, really do want the same things in a relationship. But they often go about pursuing this in completely different ways, and as a result, inadvertently can alienate the very person they love the most. We all know how frightening the divorce statistics are and I really do believe that if couples with difficulties sought counseling …
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Having the recent realization that I am single digits away from the age my Mom was when she died, I see just how young both she and I really were, some twenty years ago. We all know people who seem old in their 40's and others who seem very young in their 80's. While physical health and genetics contribute, they aren't everything and our mental health and outlook play a far greater role than most people realize in determining just how well and ev …
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Having returned from an international conference on grief and bereavement I received strange looks from friends when I said the conference was excellent. For those of us who work daily with issues around loss, it is nice to be able to have an open forum for discussion of such a difficult area with over seven hundred colleagues from around the world. After all, bring up the topic of death with your family and friends and they bolt. No one wants to …
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A lovely woman I had been treating told me one day that she loved to travel to different countries, but confided that she was a real white-knuckle traveler. She said that in flight she’d practically make marks in her husband’s skin from grabbing so tightly, but once at her destination she was fine and able to enjoy herself. On a subsequent office visit she had just returned from Europe and when I asked how her trip was, she replied &l …
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Sabbatical has just ended for my husband- for all of us really. This means that after seven plus years, I have just had the opportunity to spend six full months with my husband. When I say full, I mean every single day, with the exception of one week when he flew back to Canada to make sure that the medical department of which he is the head was managing with his daily email communication alone and without him being on site. If you had aske …
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