Your Family Tree

This is one of the hardest things for any man to understand but let’s bring it right down to the basics and then it makes sense.

Our partners see our commitment to family and home as a package deal, containing 3 essential elements:

• Spending quality time with the family
• Doing a proportion of domestic chores
• Ensuring the family’s financial survival.

So, she wants to feel like we are committed to her and the children, and to demonstrate that with our time and energy. She feels valued and considered if we are taking responsibility for a fair proportion of housework. At the same time she needs to feel that the finances are secure for the family yet she wants reassurance that she means more to you than your work. These 3 elements work together to convey our commitment to family and the home.

To our partner, being committed to the family means doing a significant share of the housework and domestic chores at home. Even if she isn’t working outside the home, she usually feels that she is working as hard as her man so she expects help with things like the washing, the dishwasher, the babysitting and the vacuuming. Usually she isn’t asking us to do all these things, but to do something demonstrates that we value her and the family.

Some men choose to focus on their work at the expense of their home-life. In the long term that will generally lead to dramas. Most men are surprised to learn that any extra hours they are putting into work beyond the standard 40 hour work week is going to leave their partner feeling like she isn’t a priority and she isn’t valued. The irony is that most of the time he’s working hard because he wants her to be happy and sees the extra hours as a way to give her what she wants in life. We tend to overestimate the importance of money to our partner and don’t realize that she’d rather have us less stressed and more available to her than working so hard to earn more. Women need more time from their man, not more money.