Stress Test
Here’s one sure-fire way to know if your spouse is stressed out.
Check your own heart rate.
Chances are, if you are walking around on pins and needles, wondering about the course of your relationship, or just a lot hungrier lately, chances are your woman is feeling out of place. Especially if you’ve got a good woman like I do, it becomes almost painfully apparent.
God bless her soul, my wife likes to stay busy. Rounding out the final year of her doctoral internship isn’t challenging enough, so she takes cake-making classes, works with remedial students and finds time to be active in our church.
But sometimes, the stars align and those activities become simultaneously demanding. The internship can become overloaded with meetings, the cake class can require a crash course on making flowers and baskets out of frosting, and the church…well, you know how the church can get.
Initially, I became afraid that my wife in all of her diverse interests was beginning to hit the wall on the excitement of our marriage. Dates that were hallmarks of our weekends became dinner and Internet games. Having recently taken a new job with a longer commute, I find myself coming home to her a road-weary shell of myself.
But ultimately, as a man, you have to show your girl all the patience and understanding that she deserves. She works hard for herself and for you, in more ways than you could ever know. Every time you are able to find something you couldn’t locate for days, she silently put it on your end table for you to notice it. When she calls in the middle of the day to share something exciting, its because she couldn’t bare to hold something in without her favorite person knowing all about it.
So sometimes you have to learn to be the soft place to fall. The one who can take the short answers, the sleeping during movies, and the abbreviated hugs when you get home from work. Sure, it should be all about you and her, but there’s nothing wrong with being a stress buster every now and then.
Women worth their weight in salt are bound to get stressed. If yours doesn’t, you should find a good divorce lawyer because she’s likely grown tired of putting in work for her life. But when the stress comes, don’t take it personally.
Take it off her shoulders if you can.
