Wives, Fill Up Your Husband’s Mental Instagram
Dear Shaunti:
I read your book, For Women Only, and one thing you said scared me. You explained how men can’t not notice a woman with a good figure, but that many men try to look away so they don’t start lusting after every hot chick they see. Since I read that, whenever we’re walking around in public, I’ve been much more aware of what is “out there.” And now I realize there are provocative images everywhere. I can actually tell my husband is trying to fight the urge to look. You say guys have a mental Rolodex of images they’ve seen, so now I’m also worrying what my husband is really thinking about when we’re intimate.
There’s got to be something I can do to help him, and to help me not freak out about this, but I don’t know what. I don’t want to be paranoid. Help me, before I insist on our family moving to an Amish homestead.
-Worried Wife
Dear Worried Wife:
Yes, unfortunately, there’s plenty to look at. I realized the other day that the girls in the mall weren’t wearing jeans shorts. They were wearing denim underwear, artfully designed so their butt would hang out. Oy.
It would be easy to get paranoid, but honestly… it sounds like you have a good man there. I explained in the book how the male brain gets activated by those sights, and how easy it is for a guy to want to drink in those images and store them all up in his mental photo files to think about later. (We used to call it a mental Rolodex, but then we realized that anyone under the age of 30 had no idea what a Rolodex was!) I’m glad you notice that your husband is fighting that urge and trying to look away. Whenever you start to freak out, realize this one thing: in fighting his urge to look, he is trying to honor you.
You ask what you can do, and there is an action you can take that will help make the fight a little less fearsome for your husband. It is something that would be easy to get self-conscious about, but many of the married men I interviewed mentioned how much they appreciated having intimate visual memories of their own wives that they could think about to replace the other images that tried to bombard them every day.
At one of the conferences I spoke at, several women approached me afterwards to tell me a story about this. They had done my For Women Only DVD study, and had become accountability partners to encourage each other to live out what they had learned in the study.
One woman — who seemed like a bit of a shy, reserved type — said that not too long after she finished the study, her husband came home from some long trips for his consulting job and told her that he was really struggling with his thought life because of the revealing ways in which some of the women at his consulting site had been dressing. At first, his wife got mad at him, but then she realized that his honesty was his way of asking for help and trying to honor her.
When she asked her friends what she should do, one of them responded, “Pray for him…and fill up his Rolodex, girl!”
She realized that since she was naturally more reserved, she had probably not been giving her husband a lot of intimate images of her to fill his mind; images he could remember, to help him divert his attention from others when he was feeling tempted. She realized that she didn’t have to go over the top, but that even leaving a muted light on in the bedroom, so he could see her when they were intimate, was a way she could both affirm him for honoring her and help him do so.
So let me suggest that you try the same thing. I know that might be scary at first, but this wife told me that she eventually began to enjoy filling her husband’s Rolodex. I hope you find the same thing happening. Don’t do anything that feels wrong, but just try to overcome your natural self-consciousness enough to give this gift to your visual husband.
Plus, the more you come to enjoy it, the more he will, too!
Helping people thrive in life and relationships is Shaunti Feldhahn’s driving passion, supported by her research projects and writing. After starting out with a Harvard graduate degree and experience on Wall Street, her life took an unexpected shift into relationship research. She now is a popular speaker around the world and the author of best-selling books about men, women, and relationships. (Including For Women Only, For Men Only, and the groundbreaking The Good News About Marriage).
Her newest book, The Kindness Challenge, demonstrates that kindness is the answer to almost every life problem, and is sparking a much-needed movement of kindness across the country. Visit www.shaunti.com for more.
Thank you for actually saying this! I felt betrayed when I listened to pt 2 of your Dobson radio interview when you talked about mental image recall – while failing to actually say “your husband needs those images to be of you.” It seemed it was probably the point of the segment but you didn’t actually come out and say that.
Previous studies used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to visualize the parts of the brain that become active when a person is aroused using sexually themed photos or videos. Many of those studies suggested that there are sex-based differences in the way the male and female brains look when they’re turned on, but the team’s new analysis shows that that’s not the case.
In a meta-analysis of 61 of these brain-imaging studies, which spanned 1,850 men and women of different sexual orientations, the team found no evidence that the differences in brain activation when people viewed sexual content were due to their sex.
“Visual sexual stimuli induce activation in the same cortical and subcortical regions in both men and women, while the limited sex differences that have been found and reported previously refer to subjective rating of the content,” they write.
https://www.inverse.com/article/57689-meta-analysis-sexual-arousal-brain-differences-men-and-women
As a man, I don’t find this post to wives to be edifying. Men, start looking at people as people, no matter what they’re wearing. Stop believing the lie that your brain is hindering you. It’s your thoughts, not your brain.