INDEED: Want Your Husband To Step Up? Try Getting Out of His Way.

Suzanne Venker, author of The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage:

I’d been on my husband for years about his eating habits and considered it my job to educate him about how to be healthy, just as I do with our kids. When I first met my husband, he was going to the gym every morning at 5:30am. He was also 40 pounds lighter. But after years of harping on him with no results, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was my fault my husband wasn’t taking care of himself.

Naturally, I didn’t see it this way at first. Why is it my fault if my husband makes bad choices? He’s lucky to have me guiding him! I’m just being helpful! But what controlling wives call helpful, husbands call something else. A man’s reaction to being told what to do by his wife is to do the exact opposite.

Indeed, it wasn’t until I stopped getting on my husband’s case that he began to take care of himself. Huh — go figure.

My light bulb moment didn’t end there. Once I saw the connection between the two — my dictating and my husband’s lack of motivation — I started thinking about other ways I was behaving that would cause him to react negatively. Like the times I’d tell him how to drive, or I’d correct his language, or I’d complain about whatever he wasn’t doing well and tell him how he could improve.

Read the whole thing.

For what it’s worth, my wife and I allowed our chores list of who-does-what grow organically — over the years we each have taken on what best fits within our skills and schedules. It probably helps that we’re both “see something, do something” types, but the net result is that I can’t recall us ever once fighting about household stuff. And I’ve found that in a smoothly functioning house, the desire to nitpick or complain is substantially reduced.

Best of all, you’re left with more time to enjoy one another’s company — which hopefully is why you’re together in the first place.