Written as a Facebook comment on February 22nd.

Today’s coffee thoughts shall be about this.

My wife is my best friend and my favorite person in the world. And yet – she has told me several times that I don’t listen to her. This sounds like the setup to a standup comedy routine, doesn’t it? “My wife says that I don’t listen to her… or at least, I THINK she said that. Something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”

But after we had the same conversation about it a few times, it began to dawn on me that she was right. She would recommend something and I would make agreeable noises, and then check it out weeks later when somebody ELSE recommends it. (And then I’d rave about it to her.) She’d ask me to do something, and I’d make agreeable noises, and then I wouldn’t have done it. She’d tell me that something was a problem, and I’d sound sympathetic, and then it would still be a problem.

You can’t say that someone is important to you and then ignore their needs (and then ignore their communiqué that you’re ignoring their needs). So I have been grappling with a very cognitive-dissonant fact – I have a habit of ignoring my wife. I’m trying to fix that.

It’s very easy as a man to think and say that women are important, and then go on to behave in subconsciously sexist ways – interrupting them, ignoring them when they speak, not believing them when they say something is a problem.

I think this behavior is something that leaks into us from broader culture – my mum still forwards jokes about nagging wives to the family whatsapp group all the time. The sexism in Mad Men looks absurd, but all we really do is just make things a little bit less bad. I mean, see the latest Uber fiasco.

I think it’s interesting to ask where the “Naggy Wife” trope comes from. “Wives are naggy” – why? It’s because there are problems that need fixing, and they aren’t going away. Men find it naggy because they don’t agree with their wives’ assessments of what a problem is, and prefer to ignore it. Because problems seem to go away when you ignore them, right? (Hint: they don’t. Somebody’s fixing them. And it’s not you.)

TLDR: take some time to ask the women in your life about their experiences, and listen very carefully without interrupting

Edit: to clarify, I had my wife and closest friends in mind when I said “women in your life”, ie people who already talk to me regularly. As Natalie rightfully pointed out, women don’t exist to educate or enlighten others. It’s not like some Learning Journey shit. Don’t be pushy, you’re not entitled to anything, etc etc.