What’s one of the biggest things family men want most from their wives?

Now Before you let your mind go down the path that I’m not intending to take you on, let me give you the answer.

It’s Respect.

There’s been some surveys done and even some guys going out on the streets just asking random people what men prefer most from their wife, love or respect? And the answer usually tends to be respect. And I gotta say even myself, it’s nice to be loved, but I do believe it’s a whole lot nicer to be respected.

Have you ever seen a man get completely emasculated by his wife? It’s not a great thing to witness. I saw a woman once call her husband effin dumbass right in front of their kids with friends around and everything. I’ve seen another woman just a rag on her husband like a mother scolding a child. No man wants that, but there’s a lot of men that will put up with that type of treatment without saying anything just because they don’t wanna lose access to the marital privileges they receive.

I’m a big believer that it’s on you as the man to be the leader. And if you put up with that level of disrespect when you were dating as in you ignored the red flags, how much more do you think you’re gonna get while being married? Or worse, you led with disrespect towards in the way that you speak to her or treat her, how much of that is just being reciprocated?

There’s a reason this happens. And those examples I stated might be a bit extreme, which is why I wanna focus the attention on the man who started out having all sorts of respect, but over time after some years of marriage, there’s been a decline in the level of respect your wife shows you.

I’m gonna be sharing with you 7 mistakes that may be keeping you from getting the respect you desire from your wife. You’re not gonna wanna miss this.

So the respect of a good, solid woman that’s your ride or die is absolutely priceless. I don’t know any man that doesn’t want this from his wife. But what we fail to realize as men sometimes is that respect is earned, not demanded or entitled to simply because we’re called to be the leaders of the home. If you truly want to be respected by your wife, then you’re gonna wanna avoid the following mistakes.

1. You Don’t Keep Your Word

Has your wife ever asked you to take out the trash? Or to handle the dishes after dinner? Or to vacuum the living room because we got guests coming over? And have you ever told her, “yeah babe, I’ll take care of it.” And then about 30 min later she’s over there doing what she had asked you to help her with? Like, she’ll be over there taking out the trash being super load with how she unravels the bag. Or she’ll go start the vacuum and start that thing up right in front of your line of sight between the recliner you’re sitting in and the TV. Tell me that doesn’t happen? Married couples do petty nonsense like this all the time. I know, because my wife and I have lived through this especially after 12+ years of marriage.

You see, we laugh and it’s funny because this is the kind of stuff that happens in a typical marriage, but is it ideal? What if, and here’s a crazy thought, you as her man, just kept your word? Maybe you can’t take out the trash right this very second when she’s asking you to, but what if you tell her, “sure thing babe, just give me 5 min and I’ll take care of it.” And 5 min later she sees you go over and handle what you gotta do? What sort of response would she have if you delivered on your word every time?

Your wife is the one person that knows you just as well, if not better than you know yourself. If you tell her you’re gonna do something, keep your word and follow through. If not you’re becoming a liar. And NO ONE, not even YOU respects a liar.

2. You Don’t Take Care of Yourself

Most men, if you ask them if they’d be willing to put themselves in harms way for their family, they say yes in a heart beat. We’re always willing to die for them no problem. And that’s a great thing, it should be that way. It’s our duty as men to protect our family and take the bullet for them if the situation calls for it. However, the reason why most men are willing to do this is because it’s the easier thing to do.

What do I mean by that? I mean that it’s easier to die for the ones you live than to actually live for them. And what does it mean to live for them? Well, it means to actually take care of ourselves physically. If we continually demonstrate to our wife that we don’t hold our health as a priority, then she will see that as the standard. Most of the time, not all of the time, if you see man who’s overweight, his wife may not be too far behind. Or you’ll see a guy who’s extremely fit and jacked and then you look at his wife and she’s also extremely fit. It’s a standard that you set as a man.

You can’t expect your wife to make an effort to take care of herself and look good for you all the time when you’re over there working hard on the “dad bod” every day.

The “Dad Bod” is not a good thing and it’s an old joke. Prioritizing your health by working out and eating better is the best example you can set for her and your kids. You’re not only doing it for you, but more importantly for your family. If she sees you being lazy and not taking care of yourself, how much respect do you think you deserve from her?

3. You Let Vices Consume You

Vices can come in all forms and sizes. People are quick to go to the big ones like porn, alcohol, drugs, and cheating, but there are definitely some vices that we partake in that seem a bit more subtle. Like Video Games for example, especially in my generation of men. A lot of us grew up on Nintendo and playing Super Mario Bros. as a kid. I mean I know in my household growing up gaming was a staple passtime. And my parents never really regulated it, my brother and my cousins would play for hours every single day, late into the night. And I ended up taking that vice into my marriage and it was a big mistake that almost caused me my marriage.

You see, I would get home from work and immediately after dinner jump on and play video games with my boys in all hours of the night. I would be sitting there yelling at my guys in a Call of Duty match with headphones on, while my wife was on the other couch across from me being ignored by the manchild she married because he’s too busy playing make believe with his friends. Look, I know I’m ragging on this hard and I'm not saying that a video game can't be enjoyed once in a while, but if things are not looking good in other areas of life, is spending all that time on a video game worth it? For me, it wasn't.

And you can ask that question about any vice you partake in. Another vice might be sports. If during football season you watch every game, every highlight and even the 2 hours of commentary after the game. And then when you get together with your friends, you rattle off sports stats on your favorite player or team, who doesn’t even know you exist and could care less if you support them or not. I mean I’m just being real with you. What value does spending all that time on watching sports really bring to your life if your marriage is struggling? If you’re not killing it as a provider and you’re always complaining about your job, how does caving into this vice help your situation? Don’t get mad at me, I’m just asking the question.

It’s always the one vice you refuse to give up that will keep you from getting the results you truly want in life and especially in a marriage. If beer, weed, video games, watching sports, porn, strip clubs, gambling, and cheating sound like better activities than spending time with your wife, then you’ll never fully earn her respect. It takes a stronger man to eliminate vices than to give in to them.

4. You Stop Pursuing Her

You know what really sucks about old school action movies is that they never show you what happens to them after they get the girl at the end of the movie, unless there’s a sequel right. But for those one and done movies where the action hero has to go and beat up all the bad guys to save the girl at the end and then they get married, they would always end the movie right there. So you never get to see how yourction star does during the actual marriage. This was my mentality going into our marriage.

When we were dating I was broke as a joke, but I somehow always had money to take her out and surprise with all of these amazing gifts. Or if I couldn’t buy it, I would make her something. There was always something spontaneous going on and after I married her, well I thought I had beaten the game. Like I landed my dream girl, she’s mine forever because she said I do and now I can put this thing on cruise control for the rest of our lives. I don’t have to try as hard anymore. At least that’s what I thought.

That was my expectation. My wife’s expectation was, “man look how good he treated me while we were dating, if I marry him, I’m gonna get the 2.0 version of this guy.” Our expectations were not aligned at all and I had stopped pursuing my wife. As a result of that, she fell out of love with me and we were both gonna call it quits until my mentor, who I call Pops, knocked some sense into me and things didn’t change until I changed and started pursuing her again.

Most men will put on a show to get her to say “I Do,” but after they tie the knot, they think they’ve beat the game of marriage. Instead of becoming the 2.0 version of the man that was pursuing her for marriage, he puts things on autopilot. He becomes a con artist that fooled her into thinking she was gonna get an even better man. No one respects a con artist.

5. You Stop Growing

Have you ever wondered why as a family man, you can find yourself getting angry and being a bad mood sometimes. Like you become really snappy with your wife and kids and the smallest things piss you off. And after you blow up and go into your tirade, you realize you’re doing it, but you won’t stop because you’ve already gone past the point of no return. If I stop now, I’m gonna look like an even bigger idiot, so let me just keep going. Yeah this was me too. I’ve been here plenty of times and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this was happening until I learned this concept.

Most men that have these types of moments will blame their job and the stuff they have to deal with at work as the reason why they’re pissed. They don’t know how to separate the work and home life and leave all that at the door. But I’m gonna say something to you that might sound crazy, it ain’t your job, it’s you. It’s the fact that you’re not growing. You are not changing and working on improving yourself every day. You’re not challenging yourself to learn and master new skills. You just go to work, do your job on autopilot to guarantee your check every 2 weeks, so you put up with all of the nonsense at work, come home, spend some time with your family, watch tv or play video games, shower, go to sleep, then the next day it’s rinse and repeat. If this is you, I would argue that the reason you’re so pissed off and feel unfulfilled is that you’re not growing.

If you are not a better man today than you were yesterday, it means that you’ve stopped growing. You’ve stopped learning new things and advancing as a man. Which friend do you have more respect for, the one that’s constantly growing or the one that is the same guy he was back in high school? News Flash, your wife sees it the same way as you. You won’t gain her respect by continuing to be the same guy. Watch how much respect you earn if you start leveling up as a man every year. It’ll change the game for you.

6. You Don’t Have A Vision

Have you ever worked at a company with horrible leadership that has no vision or purpose. I have and it sucks! You’re just there for the paycheck and it’s hard to respect those leaders. So if God has called you to be the leader of your home, but you have no vision or purpose for your family, what kind of respect should you expect from your wife? Don’t confuse this with a dream, I’m talking about a vision that you’re actually working towards and there’s evidence to back it up.

My wife is a big dreamer, she wants to go on all of these vacations and visit different countries and I love that about her. But early on in our marriage when she would talk about these dreams, I would shut them down real quick by saying stuff like, “yeah right, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to have enough money for that.” She would say things like, “babe, when we have a house, can we get a big christmas tree and have a bunch of presents for the kids to open.” And I would turn into the Grinch really quick by saying, “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to have enough money for a house.” Think about how much patience she needed to have to tolerate that crap. For you to share your dreams with the person you’ve chosen to do life with and you just get shut down on every dream you share.

Once I snapped out of that and I actually knuckled down and started creating Visions of my own that went in line with her dreams, things changed drastically. We got some of those vacations in, we got the house with the tree and the Christmas presents, like it started coming true meaning it wasn’t a dream anymore, it was a reality. Do you know how much your wife will respect you when she tells you her dream and you simply say, “cool babe, I’m gonna figure out how to make that happen for us,” and then you actually turn around and make it happen? Am I saying it’s easy, no that’s not what I’m saying at all. In fact, it was difficult and it took time for me to stack the skills necessary to make these dreams a reality for us, but man it was freakin worth it. My only regret is that I didn’t wake up sooner so that I wouldn’t have wasted so much time. It all starts with a vision. Have a vision and take action towards making it become a reality.

7. You Don’t Take The Lead

Yes, I saved the most controversial feminist topic for the end because if any of them tuned into this, they probably already moved on. So what does it mean to be a Family Leader? See, what pisses a lot of people off is that they look at Family Leaders as like a tyrannical boss. Growing up in a hispanic household, the machismo stigma was very real and the men ruled with an iron fist simply because they were the man of the house. Enter the abusive screaming and violence that came along with that and you have the depiction of what most feminist believe to be the tyrannical patriarch. This isn’t further from the truth.

Being a Family Leader means you are the greatest servant. You set the standard for the home. You set the tone for the emotion everyone feels in the home. Do your kids and wife cower in fear and walk on egg shells to not piss you off? Or do you bring joy, peace, and security when you enter the room? What sort of feeling are you instilling in your family? Do you inspire them or are you a living example of what not to do? Do you operate by the do as I say, not what I do type of leadership? Are you always asking your wife what she wants to do or where she wants to eat all the time? When it comes to correcting your child do you always make her do it? I hate to break it to you man, but that’s not leadership.

Anything and everything you want from your wife, you should go first. If you want love and respect, lead with love and respect towards her first. If you want her to smile, you smile first. Do you thank her when she cooks you a meal? Do you say God bless you when she sneezes? Simple, I know, but it’s the little things that you do that will cause her to respond. Always Lead with love and respect, and she’ll give that back to you, which is ultimately what every man wants from his wife.

Until next time my fellow Alpha Dad,
G. Vidal