Review: How to Get your Husband to Listen to You

Note to CSFF tourers: I will have a review up for the webzine Mindflights tomorrow.

How to Get Your Husband to Listen to You: Understanding How Men Communicate

Nancy Cobb and Connie Grigsby seek to teach wives how men communicate in their relatively short book, How to get Your Husband to Listen to You. The book has plenty of advice to make it a worthwhile read, some novel ideas, understand the way God wired him and accept him as he is, and even more novel: don’t nag. Seriously, if you’ve read a lot of self help books on this subject, a good portion of this will seem familiar, but the personal anecdotes, short chapter lengths, and bottom-line presentation makes this among the easier-to-read volumes. I definitely could see the scriptural under pinnings.

However, I often felt the book would have been more aptly titled, “How to get the stereotypical male to listen.” There are some basics that pretty much all men share, and this book summarizes those well. Some of their sprinkled-through descriptions of the Typical Male, however, seemed as demeaning as referencing the Typical Black or Typical Female, or worse, a TV sitcom dad. The book almost seems to assume that all/most men have the same basic personality type (their husbands’ most likely.)

In truth, masculinity, like femininity, comes in varying degrees. The stereotypical male is, evidently, an Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging type. But not all men are that type any more than all women are Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving types. My own husband is an intuitive feeler, for instance. He’s a rare guy for sure, though, so that may not be a consideration for most readers. Plus even he enjoys quiet, hates nagging, is task and action oriented, and basically wants little more than to come home to a loving greeting, dinner, and a little respect. So, while masculinity is at times too narrowly defined, there is still a great deal of truth between the pages of How to Get Your Husband to Listen to You.