Call home from work to see if she needs help or you to pick up anything. Come home early and tell her you will watch the kids for an hour so she can have a break, Etc.
You get more with honey than vinegar with women so show EMPATHY and be there. Work on being a supportive husband and make sure you tell her you love her and appreciate her. So many men have problems with words but it is worth it. Ask her to pray with you about it.
Most importantly LOVE her and make sure she knows it. Don't give up.
For a person who didn't have much advice to give, this was very good advice and matches with my experience. My wife is Russian and large families there are extremely rare, not least because life is very hard, apartments are all small, less than 800 sqft. 3 children is like, "wow, big family". 1 or 2 is the norm.
Society is very patriarchal and 97% of Russian women have to do ALL of the cooking, cleaning, child rearing and often work as well because the husband does not make enough money. Women are typically very stoic and hard working there. Men tend to be spoilt and behave like children well into their 20s, not unlike Egyptian or Saudi men. Since women outnumber men, men have more options if they get divorced.
There are only three groups of people who break this rule. Coming from a large family myself I am very observant and interested and I obviously deal with the reaction of Russians finding out we have 6 children and are not planning on stopping.
New Russians and the emerging middle classes who can afford to hire domestic help. Commonly better off Russians will have larger families.
Religious families who live in the deep countryside and have large houses. I.e. where the husband and wife are devoutly Orthodox and both attend Church and are knowledgeable about the Orthodox faith. Lots of Church attending Russians are ignorant of even the basics and treat religion and icons like a lucky horseshoe to be kissed to bring them "luck" in love, health or finances.
The third and final class are women married to husbands who are supportive. A few men there somehow break the chain and chip in with domestic duties, washing up, vacuмning the home, taking the children to school or park, (Russians don't have gardens so parks are a daily feature) ironing, hanging out the washing, carrying a small baby when it is crying rather than leaving that, to the women). When my wife's friends visit and stay with us they always congratulate her on finding me because I basically pull my weight and they have never seen it in Russian society.
Russian men can be very romantic and chivalrous. They will open car doors when a woman gets in or out of a car, never allow a woman to pay for a meal, never forget to buy flowers on a birthday or women's day and will even meet their wife with flowers are the airport when she returns from somewhere. But watch a married man in his 30s change a diaper out there or play with a child and you will laugh. They are like those characters in the movie, 3 men and a baby, the difference being that they are married fathers, not single childless men.
It might be a bit late for Gooch to do much about it, because his wife is 40 and her experiences are probably hard coded, but for a lot of men just starting out on married life, selling that Xbox on eBay and investing 30 mins a day into doing the washing up, cleaning the kitchen floor, sewing badges on their scouting uniforms, cleaning windows, taking out the trash (before you are asked), cleaning the toilet bowls in the house, doing a laundry load will result in two things.
1. Your wife won't feel under pressure and worn out to the same extent. So when she is low the temptation to think she can solve it by not having more children won't be as strong.
2. Her female friends will make comments and compare you to their husbands who don't do as much, so she will understand that with that extra support a larger family is not going to drive her into an early grave.
I know a complete secular couple who got married at the same time as us. The husband was a British man in his mid 30s who did not want any children and had done well in his career, a climber. The wife was a Slovakian auPair who had come from poverty and wanted a man who could provide. He had the personality of a carrot, what most people would term a "real stiff". Jana was I believe his first proper girlfriend.
For the first year or two he steadfastly refused to have children and Jana used to cry on my wife's shoulder and ask her advice as to how to win him around. Eventually she stopped taking the pill and got pregnant, though at the time she insisted that 2 was her absolute maximum and after that she would stop. He was mad about it at first but when the baby came he completely changed and flipped to the other extreme and became some sort of super Dad character. Last time I saw him, in 2002, he was spending Saturday making a beautiful job laying out stone tiles on their kitchen floor. He applied the same focus to being a father and a husband as to his career basically.
Now they have four children. Still both completely secular. They just like kids.
Topic: wife rejects natural family planning (Read 18078 times)