My wife is tough, but she shouldn't have to be tough on account of me. I shouldn't be the reason that she is calloused, right, in some way.
I should be the safe place for her. And I think so many times as husbands, we wield our words without that occurring to us that we just are so familiar. And we are overly, overly tough and overly combative at times with our wives.
So that was a conviction I had. And so I'm encouraging men to think more clearly about their own. We talk about this toughness in terms of work, but also just toughness in terms of familiarity. It requires some work.
You got to work at it in order to make it thriving and good. And sometimes we do it well, and sometimes we don't do that very well. And today is going to be one of those days we're going to be talking to men and you wives about how men should be communicating. And this is going to be a little rough for me.
I'm glad you're smiling about that. I think most of us know I have some shortcomings when it comes to marital communication. Okay, so right before we are going to air here. I was talking to a colleague and she said, oh, yeah, I just called my husband the other day and my plan was to ask him what he wants for dinner. He answered the phone like, yeah, what do you want?
I'm in a pinch here. He said, I just want to know what you want for dinner. Why don't you get out of your work voice? That's kind of what we're talking about today.
So how do we lead our spouses in a better way when it comes to communication? Right. And Ryan Frederick has a passion for this. He is an author and he and his wife, Selena, have been with us here before on the show. They minister to couples and families. And of the books he's written, we're talking today about one that is right in alignment with what you've been saying, Jim. How a Husband Speaks. The subtitle is Leading and Loving Your Wife Through Godly Communication. And of course, we have copies of the book here at the ministry. Check the show notes or give us a call.
Eight hundred, the letter A in the word family. Ryan, welcome back. Good to have you. Yeah, thank you for having me.
It's so good. Hey, you've taken up a bold charge here to help men strengthen their marriages through their communication. So I guess the right first question is what led you to do this?
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think what led me to do this is my own need to grow in my own, I think, experience in growing. You know, I've been married 20 years plus, got married young. It wasn't until I think in my 30s that I actually feel like I understood communication, at least the way God would have a husband communicate. And I'm thinking, maybe I can help some guys not have to wait quite that long. Yeah, we're all going, you did that in your 30s.
Way to go. I'm still working on it. I'm an underperformer. I think I became aware that I need to work on it. I'll put it that way. You know, it's so funny because that's one of the things that has struck me. I think mentally, I understand it.
Of course, I read the word and I pray and have a relationship with Jesus. But that this area is an area that I certainly struggle with. I can't speak for every guy. But I think generally the guys I know and talk to about this, we all kind of struggle with how we express ourselves in tone and tenderness or lack thereof regarding our wives.
And I think that illustration I mentioned a moment ago is really indicative of the problem, right? When your wife calls you at work and you're going, yeah, what do you want? What do you want?
What do you need? And she's going, hey, I'm not your business colleague. Stop talking to me like that. Yeah. So what is she expressing when she responds like that? So that's what I call the husband paradox, right? So right straight back to the garden, men were created to work, to do things. And we have a certain potency in that regard. If we don't know how to flip that switch when it comes to cultivating and we come back home and we're not actually seeing our bride as the gift that she always was, you have to turn the toughness off, right? So you have to be outwardly very tough for your wife, but inwardly inside the household, very tender with her.
And so it's that paradox of having to be tough for her, but tender with her. Let's go to the general communication idea. So, you know, what impact does communication, good or poor, have on a marriage and whose responsibility is it to kind of be the gardener of that communication?
Yeah. So you asked why I wrote this book and I think another reason is because communication is, I think, the linchpin for marriage, right? If you can communicate well, you can get through almost anything. It's typically why divorce occurs, a lack of communication.
Yeah. And so if you're not communicating, eventually that turns into bitterness, turns into anger. It turns into affairs and things because you're not actually working through things.
You're not going to your spouse in the covenantal context that God's given you. So I think if men, you asked who's in charge of it. And so I wrote the book for men. I think men are, the buck stops with them, right? Women, wives need to be good communicators as well. And they're not off the hook, but the buck stops with the husband. When Eve ate of the fruit and then Adam ate of the fruit, God looked at Adam and said, what has happened, right?
He looked to him. And so we, I think we are the ones that are charged with loving in this way, leading in this way. If the communication culture in the household is souring or we're growing distant, I don't look to the husband and say, how are you going to solve this? How are you going to break the ice? How are you going to start melting the ice? How are you going to start reestablishing those lines of communication?
If you can do that as a husband, you can work on anything once you get the communication lines cleared. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. What should Adam have said?
Got any ideas? Well, we know what he did say, right? It was this woman. He blamed her.
And by the way, it's not just the woman, it's the one you gave me. So he's blaming her and he's blaming God. He's not taking responsibility for himself.
But instead, God is looking to him. And so we should have said... Wait, man's character ever changed? We're still the same, aren't we?
They did it. Let's look at some underlying premises of communication. We know from Genesis that a husband and wife are made to complement each other.
We talk a lot about that here at Focus. So often opposites attract because we're attracted to something we're not. You know, if you're extroverted, introverted, they tend to go together. Not always.
And I know that's the 80-20 rule. But some couples take issue with this idea of complementing each other and being each other. Well, being a helpmate for a woman, let's say that. So roles, biblical roles in the modern age now are very distorted.
Yeah. So the challenge there is, you know, if you embrace that, like what I just said about husbands being kind of the buck stops with you. That goes back to the garden, but I think it also goes to the New Testament. Obviously, Ephesians 5, where Paul says, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. Husbands and wives are both called to love one another. We're both called to honor the Lord in our marriage. But the call to husbands was to love like Christ. And what did Christ do to love?
He died. He loved sacrificially. We don't see that call to wives. Now, as Christians, wives are called to love sacrificially. But in the marriage, like if anybody's going to die for this thing, it's going to be the husband. It's going to be the husband putting himself on the cross, so to speak, and saying, I'm going to love you sacrificially so that the marriage can flourish. Now, the flip side, this is the part that bristles against our culture, is the wives submit to your husbands.
That's the helper side. And this, I think, the main thing that needs to be articulated is it's not about power. It's not about greater worth. Instead, it's about roles and order. And it's about the structure that God gave us so that we might flourish.
It's not about what our society would make it out to be. You know, I read that. It's kind of interesting because, of course, in a corporate structure, you need that.
Here at Focus, we do that. It's your job description. And it outlines what you have authority to do, what you don't have authority to do. It's kind of interesting to bring that into the marital concept. I mean, it's a little rough to say, you know, it's like a job description. But it does function well when there are clear roles.
But there is a bristling. I mean, we don't have a woman at the table to say, wait a minute, guys, you know. So, you know, kind of give us that overview of why the roles are important. And, you know, it's kind of like how we describe the abortion issue. We're constantly saying this is a moral issue taken over in the political arena. It's not a political issue.
This is about the heart and soul of the country. And do we, you know, do we kill the next generation of children? I would say definition in marriage has that same Christian conviction or should. We know what God has said. We can read the word.
He laid out the descriptions for us. But we, you know, men can abuse that and then it gets all off on a wrong track. But when it's functioning in a healthy way, it's beautiful.
Yeah. I mean, you asked why is it important? And then you, I think, answered your own question is because God gave it to us that way. He said, do it this way.
This is the way that I've designed it so that you might flourish. And are we as Christian men and women looking at that saying, let me weigh that against my own sensibilities. Let me weigh that against what culture is showing us. Or are we saying God has spoken. Now, how can I obey? How can I trust him as a husband and choose and choosing to trust him and now lead as a result, a wife choosing to trust God now submit as a result. Not because somebody else has said it, but because God has spoken.
And if that's not what makes it valuable, I don't know what would. As we're talking kind of up here at this level about communication, you've expressed in the book that you see an element of grace or that communication itself is a grace. Unpacked a little bit for us.
Yeah. So God has revealed himself to us. And how has he done that? Well, he spoke creation into existence, right? We have general revelation. We see God in the sense we see his fingerprints on creation, I should say. But then he revealed himself again through words, through scripture, through the incarnate word Christ himself. So words are a grace. Words are how we know other souls.
We wouldn't know what God has decreed unless he told us, unless he made it known to us that we might then listen and hear the ideas and he's given us the grace to understand. So in marriage, it's I think exactly the same way. It's a miracle. It's how you think about the everything that happens in mechanics that goes into us talking right now.
Right? You're thinking thoughts. You're putting them together into words. You're flexing various muscles that make air come out through your vocal cords. I'm saying things are coming across. They're vibrating through the air, going into your eardrums.
You know, your eardrums reverberate. Like all these things are happening and you're processing it instantaneously. And we're sharing meaning. Like I can know you because you're telling me something. You can know me because I'm communicating something.
In marriage, it's the same way. I think the challenge is we either take that for granted or we're not sending signals that are really meaningful and not communicating well what we actually mean. And so we talk about in the book, sifting through the signal and the noise, being high fidelity communicators, knowing as a communicator, I need to get rid of as much noise as I possibly can.
And then as one receiving communication from my wife, I need to try and identify the signals she's sending and sift out the noise. Things like tone. You know, Ryan, one of the things, temperament must play into this too.
You have a spectrum of capacity for communication. I would say a more introverted man struggles communicating. Not to lay a label on it because there's no stereotypical type, but you know, the quiet guy, the quiet man.
It's probably what may have attracted her in the beginning. He's solid as a rock. He's steady.
He's quiet and just goes about taking care of things. But at some point that may raise its head and the men say, well, you, you knew what you married. You knew I wasn't very verbal.
I told you I loved you at the altar and that should have been enough. I mean, that's the old saying, right? So how does a guy reevaluate that and keep trying to improve in that communication, not just rest and give himself that label that, hey, you know, I'm just not that type.
Yeah. And that's one of the main thrusts that I tried to get across in the book here too, is that communication is a skill. Like it's not something that it comes wired and you're kind of just given whatever wiring that you were born with and you need to just deal with that because a lot of guys.
Yeah, I'll talk to him. I was this guy where I'd say, hey, I'm just not a talker. I don't need to I don't need to process things in this way. I don't need to, you know, and some of that's still true. But for the sake of loving my wife, I can learn a skill that will allow us to flourish. I can learn not to just fall into whatever my basest tendencies are in terms of under-communicating or reading into things the wrong way. And so it's a skill that can be learned. And I encourage men to do that and to do it and to master it. Don't look for the excuse like we talked about with Adam.
I mean, that really is. It's all on her. It's her fault. She married me.
She knew who I was. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. And our guest today is Ryan Frederick. And we're talking about some of the content in his book, How a Husband Speaks, Leading and Loving Your Wife Through Godly Communication. And of course, we have copies of that here at the ministry.
Stop by the show notes or give us a call. Eight hundred, the letter A and the word family. Ryan, I met your wife, Selena, when you were both here and we were covering your book Fierce Marriage. Yeah. And yeah, that's a good title for her.
She seems like a tough as nails kind of woman. How would that play into those heated moments of conflict between you or kind of revisiting that content? But, you know, two two powerful people talking something through that that can be either good or bad.
Yeah. This was a conviction that just as a young husband and looking back, you know, any guy would say this right. Look back and say, man, I can't believe the guy that I used to be. And I used to be pretty harsh. And we've never we've never had we don't call each other names.
We don't have kind of a lot of vitriol. But you have your own way as a husband. Right. You can be overly harsh with your wife or you can. And so the conviction I came to is that, yeah, my wife is tough, but she shouldn't have to be tough on account of me. She shouldn't have to be. I shouldn't be the reason that she is calloused.
Right. In some way, I should be the safe place for her. And I think so many times as husbands, we wield our words without that occurring to us that we just we're so familiar and we are overly, overly tough and overly, overly combative at times with our wives. So that was a conviction I had. And and so I'm encouraging men to think more clearly about their own. We talked about this toughness in terms of work, but also just toughness in terms of familiarity. Well, so much of it could be it can be a look. It can be it doesn't have to be words.
It can be an eye the way you look at her or even your own your posture. Yeah. You know, we're imposing your larger. You know, I never use your your stature to remember. I remember Jean saying that to me regarding the kids.
You know, she goes, you're a big guy when you're upset with the kids, get down on a knee and look at them eye to eye because I think you're like intimidating them. Right. And that's not what you want to do. Same thing in marriage, especially, you know, a guy has size and that can be really intimidating. Right.
And you don't even mean to. I totally was taken by that. I was like, seriously? Yeah. She goes, oh, yeah, I could see it.
They are backing up. And I was like, wow, because I, you know, there was no physical abuse or anything, but she just said your presence is big. And as a man being aware of that and willing to serve your family in that way, I think, I mean, look at Christ, right? The lion, the Lion of the Trap of Judah, but also the Lamb of God.
He humbled himself to death on the cross. If he can do that, we can. It's a great point.
We can humble ourselves a little bit and understand. Yeah. Hey, in the book, you talked about climbing Mount Rainier. And what I really wanted to ask you is why?
No, I'm kidding. Because it's there. I have flown over it a few times on my way to Seattle or whatever, but it looks like a great mountain to look at. Yeah. But you decided to climb it. And what did you notice about the peak when you got there? Which way to go.
I'm glad you got there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you've ever flown over a mountain peak or you've climbed it, it occurred to me that nothing lives up there.
Like nothing like it's completely barren, completely dirt and rock. Yeah. And so I think the reason I brought that up in the book, I talk about that experience is that there's a mountain that many men climb. And if they don't, if they try to stay up there, whether they mean to or they do it unwittingly, stuff dies.
Right. I call it Mount Foolish. And I talk about the Dunning Kruger effect, where as you learn a new skill, sometimes your own, your own pride will get ahead of your competency. So a lot of guys, they think they don't need to learn how to communicate better. And they kind of stay on Mount Foolish before they are humbled to the point where I need to learn and I need to not, not pretend I know more than I know.
And so it's urging guys to say, Hey, I don't know everything that can be learned about how to communicate with my wife. I'm going to, I'm going to descend off this peak where everything can die, Mount Foolish. I'm going to come down into Humility Valley that I might learn how to love my wife well.
And then over time, your, your competency grows in a commensurate rate with your, with your ability. Yeah. Ryan, we pray before our broadcasts. And so I know what's going to happen. Some guy is hearing this tonight and he's going to walk into what he thinks is a trap.
It's a communication thing. He gets home. He's going to be humbled.
And so how does he take what you're saying right now and get off of Mount Foolish and back into a space where something is alive and growing? In those moments, I think the wisest thing a husband can do is just to not react. Right.
The difference between a reaction and a response is about three seconds. Read the room. Your wife is saying more than her words.
She's saying her whole day is coming out in that moment. So as a husband, have your eyes open, have your wits about you. Don't react, respond. And how you respond won't respond as Christ would respond, respond in love, respond with, we talked about humility. So, yeah, I mean, we all kind of, I think in communication that the traps abound, especially marriage.
And I didn't mean she's setting the trap. I just mean we, we need humbling. I need humbling a lot. So I'll invariably get a chance to, I'll invariably have a chance to practice this. You know, we said earlier, Ryan, that you hear from men who have hit tough spots in their marriages and they tell you they've tried everything. It usually means they've missed something. What do you say in response to them saying, hey, Ryan, I've done it all, but it's not working. Yeah, well, try more and keep communicating through it.
And then obviously if you can't do it on your own, then get good men besides you and good pastors. It also might mean you're not trying in the right way. Sure. I mean, that would probably be the right rational response to that. Then, you know, doing something over and over again and getting the same result is not what you want.
Yeah. I mean, marriage takes two. So if you've got, there's a lot that can go into it now. If a husband is at a standstill and he is trying to communicate, he has been around him or saying, hey, you're, you know, you're seeing this clearly. That's maybe a different conversation.
But in many cases, it's just, yeah, you haven't quite tried everything. You had a pretty powerful illustration about compounding communication in the book. That 30 day thing.
I was like floored by that. Yeah. Explain what the correlation was.
Yeah. So the question is, if you could have a million dollars today or what is it, a penny that doubles every day for 30 days, what would you, what would you have? And of course the question, the answer to these sorts of questions is always the nonintuitive one. And so if you took a million dollars today, that's great. You'd have a million dollars. But if you waited 30 days, you would, you would have less than a million dollars clear up to like day 20 something. But then after that you would have, you would end it over $10 million. And the point I'm trying to make. Wow. I got to do that math.
I'm going to go home tonight and count this out. So at a penny a day, that's, it seems like you're giving up a lot, but then it compounds over time. And the idea there is it comes from Proverbs six.
I think it says, look to the ant, right? Who is always working, always storing up. There's wisdom in the incremental gains. And so encouraging guys to not just try to fix it all at once, but just do one small wise change every day. Yeah.
Keep doing it now. Well, that's really important because guys can get overwhelmed. You know, our brains are pretty limited. We got to focus on things. That's why men, they say psychologists, you know, men, the best chefs are men. We have this ability that God's given us to really zero in on a task. But at the same time, it means we aren't hearing anybody around us. We are focused and that's both a blessing and a detriment. Yeah.
So you don't have to fix it all at once. That focus, like reject that and say, I just need to do one thing that I wouldn't have normally done. So I'm going to send my wife a loving note. I'm going to, I'm going to wait. I'm not going to react and said, I'm going to respond or I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to read into it like I normally would. I'm going to ask her to clarify. So these are all small little things that the husband can just do one thing every day or so. Yeah.
I mean, you'll have 10 dollars worth more than 10 million dollars. Definitely. You also talk about couples having a shared language. That sounds romantic and poetic. What does it mean? Shared language.
Hey, Gene, I want some lunch with me and eat a meatball sandwich. Yeah. I mean, that can go two ways, right? We talk about familiarity. Well, you can be familiar in a sense that it's causing isolation in your marriage, or you can have familiarity where you can walk into a crowded room and you can look for your wife and you can make eye contact with her and cast her, you know, some sort of smirk or a glance or a wink or something that, you know, is going to speak to her. That's built over time. And so the same thing happens in terms of communication culture in your home.
Right. So either your shared language is going to be fostering a healthy communication culture. That's going to be something that your kids are going to observe.
They're going to want to because it's building life. Or you can have a shared language that is, you know, negative or or, you know, you're walking on eggshells all the time because you're always waiting for the next explosion to happen type of thing. So I'm not sure if you're going there with that. But, yeah, couples can share language in many ways and they can share culture and certainly build it together. The last analogy I wanted to touch base with you on was you talk about in the book being quite a daredevil jumping off high places into bodies of water. And you want to make sure certain things aren't, debris fields aren't there.
Speak to that analogy and then what, how does that fit with marriage and communication? Yeah. So the example I share is I was scaling the side of this cliff over, there's a river in Mount Rainier and the river has a log jam. And so I can, I've fallen into water. I've, you know, I've, that's not a big deal. The water's cold. I can swim.
All that's fine. But a log jam is virtually unsurvivable. And so I was genuinely scared.
I thought, you know, I might die in this place. I think a lot of guys get to that place in their marriage where they're hanging on by a thread and they can see the log jam developing. They can see it. They're headed for it and they don't know how to get out of it. And so in the book, I give a number of tools to help them break that log jam. The only way you can break it free is you just got to pull one log out at a time. And what are those logs in your marriage that are keeping the communication from flowing that are going to kill you if you don't break this thing free?
What are some examples to solve it? So often we can overlook this, but just pray. Pray. Ask God to help you.
Reveal areas in your own heart where you've been hardened and you're blinded to maybe things that are too close to your face. Whatever he shows you, then repent of those things. It's funny how that has nothing to do with talking to your wife, right? You're talking to God. You're clearing the lines of communication between you and God.
Then you can begin to see clearly what these logs actually are and you can go strategically and pull those out. Some other ones would be like confirming and clarifying meanings. So you talked about tone being a big deal or, you know, my wife, she'll say things. And if I don't confirm what she means, like there's been times I'm completely on a different page.
She thinks I can read her mind. Sometimes I can. It's fairly common. Right. And so I confirm that meaning and clarify.
That's a huge log that you can start getting out of your communication log jam so that you can start to actually talk about these things again. But they do take discipline. One is overlooking annoyances and offenses.
I think our flesh, we love to keep score. So, you know, you don't want to say, well, you remember 14 years ago, right? This is what you said to me. So, I mean, that's a discipline, right? So, yeah.
Yeah. But so often those types of things that are truly not really forgiven at that point, if you're still harboring it against them. And so you need to set the stage, I think, as a husband to do that work, to say, listen, this is an issue that we have dealt with, if that's what you're talking about. But we need to actually sit down, have some time, whatever that means, get the kids somewhere, set the stage. That's part of plucking out the logs. And in there, the two that seem contradictory.
I know they're not, but I'd like for you to explain that. One is use your manners. So that's a good – that's always a good idea.
Kind of basic stuff there. But then also be honest in your communication. Guys can be brutally honest. We tend to, okay, yeah, you want my honest opinion? You don't look very good in that dress. But that's not good manners.
So some of these things can collide, right? That's part of being able to send clear signals because, yeah, you can say a true thing. But saying true things doesn't mean you're right. Now, it doesn't mean you don't say the true thing.
But you need to say it in a way that the signal is not lost in the noise, right? Just the brash, okay, you want my honest opinion? You don't look good, right? Okay, well – I have never said that.
Jean looks great in every dress she's ever put on. Just for the record, I would say the same thing about my life. It makes me kind of nervous hearing you say that. I'm like, dude, you need to write another book. There's a big pregnant pause right there.
We were feeling that. But I appreciate your honesty. Or another one would be like, you want my honest opinion? I think your mom talks too much or whatever that thing is, right? And you're hitting all the hot buttons.
But the point is you can communicate that in a way that is going to be heard or you can cloud it with all the noise of your inability to do it lovingly and articulately. Well, Ryan, this has been such good material. And focus is here for you.
That's the thing. We've got to make sure that we alert you to that. We're for your marriage.
We've been at it over 45 years. Give us a call if you're having some struggles. We will do everything we can do to help you. The first thing is a free assessment that couples can go to the website and do. You can do it as an individual or a couple.
And it's free. And it'll give you some areas that you're doing great in and some areas to work in. And then link that to some of the resources here at Focus that can help strengthen those areas where maybe you're not scoring as high. It's just a good way to get a gauge on how you're doing in your marriage. Of course, Ryan's a great book, How a Husband Speaks, Leading and Loving Your Wife Through Godly Communication. This is here for you as well. And like we often do, if you can make a gift of any amount, monthly or one time, we'll send it as our way, saying thank you for being part of the ministry and helping other marriages to thrive in Christ.
Yeah, join the support team. Find resources like that marriage assessment, Ryan's book, and we've got it all in the show notes for you. Ryan, again, thank you for being with us. This is great material.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. And tomorrow, we'll talk about how you can pray for your adult child.
A friend sent me a poem just this week, and she said, I won't quote the poem right, but the gist of it was, when you were little, I touched you and I covered you with a blanket, tucking you in. Now you're grown, you're out of my reach, and I'm covering you with my prayers. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Are you a pastor? Then you know ministry is full of challenges, but those challenges sometimes come from lies that you believe about your role and expectations of you. As a pastor, you and your spouse need to be refreshed and encouraged, and that's why Focus on the Family presents the Focused Pastor Couples Conference. Join us as we hear from Paul David Tripp, Dr. Greg Smalley, Ted Cunningham, and more. Mark your calendar to join us on October 28th through 30th right here at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. Visit thefocusedpastor.com slash refresh for more details.
