Creating the Intimate Connection: The Basics to Emotional Intimacy

It’s like telling someone that he or she has the wrong color of eyes or shouldn’t be as tall or as short as they are.

As Herb Goldberg points out in The New Male: “In the end, the rewards of his success are revealed as masturbatory. There is really no one to share them with when he gets ’there,’ no one close enough who really cares or knows him and whom he genuinely trusts and feels close to.” One man once said to me, “Well, I have everything I worked hard for all

pursuit. In the suburbs of America, there are certain minimal standards he should meet: a good car (preferably two), a comfortable house, all his family members dressed in currently popular styles, and a general living standard at least equal to that of his neighbors.

Again and again, I have watched men try to live up to these goals— sometimes with tragic results. Men succeed in their role as good husbands to varying degrees, but the cost to them as human beings is almost always high, both physically and psychologically. The more the man tries to fulfill his prescribed good-husband role, the less and less he kno

Another set of problems presents itself when the good husband goes to work after a fight with his wife. He finds it hard to keep his mind on his job.

Good husbands can find a variety of excuses for not talking to their wives about their jobs. I often hear husbands say they don’t want their wives to worry. On the surface, this seems like a thoughtful gesture, but when it is further explored, most couples discover that the good husband is really following that part of his marriage fantasy which te

And his ambivalence may be supported by mixed messages from his wife, who may want a dominating husband in some situations, and an equal, or even subservient, partner in others.

When the American Dream is taken to its outer limits, there is often a kind of existential breakdown among men who have followed the good-husband fantasy to the letter and have gotten to the top of

When the good husband does not share his work experiences with his wife, he cheats both his wife and himself. She is unable to get a picture of what he does at his job, and so there is a whole part of him that she never gets to know. He denies himself an opportunity to get his job-related problems “off his chest,” and possibly, to find answers to t