Best ways for man to love woman flow from how he lives every day

By David McElroy · February 13, 2017

We claim Valentine’s Day is about romantic love, but it’s not. The day is really about fantasy — and that fantasy warps our ideas about what love should look like every other day of the year.

Valentine’s Day suggests that love is about over-the-top demonstrations of devotion and adoration, but I wonder if those grand gestures are mostly empty attempts to make up for the way couples live the rest of their lives.

It’s like a guilty way of saying, “I know I’m a terrible husband [or wife], but if I do these showy things for you and your friends to see, I can go back to living the rest of our lives as though you don’t matter.”

I believe love is best demonstrated by the way two people treat each other every single day of the year, not by the showy things they do once a year and attach shiny red plastic hearts. Love that is lived in an authentic way every single day can changes lives; love that’s just expressed when card companies and florists tell you to is shallow and already dying.

I’ve been thinking today about how a man expresses love for his wife. Other people are in better positions to say how a woman can best express her love for her husband (or how it might look in a same-sex relationship). I have no experience with that point of view.

All I know is how a loving man expresses his devotion to the woman who has chosen him:

— A man shows love by the respect he shows to a woman every single day. He doesn’t ridicule the woman. He doesn’t call her names. He listens to what she has to say. He’s genuinely interested in her thoughts, feelings and dreams. He wants to know what happened in her day — while she was at work or during a trip to the grocery store. He cares about the mundane details of her life. He listens.

— A man shows love for a woman by taking care of things he knows she doesn’t like to do. A woman who used to be in my life hated filling her gas tank. She knew how, but she just hated the task, so I filled her car’s tank every time I possibly could. It wasn’t a big thing, but it showed her a concrete commitment to making her days better in a tiny way.

— A man shows love for his wife by helping with the dirty work of raising children. He gets up in the night to take care of a baby — without complaints and without acting as though he’s being put upon. He changes diapers without whining. He feeds children and knows their schedules. He participates as an equal partner in raising them, not as an observer who swoops in every now and then when the family is in public or when a child wants to express love (or longing) for a dad.

— A man shows his devotion to his wife by being quick to volunteer to help when problems arise. When something is stressful in her life and she needs help, he says, “You have too much to do, so let me handle this.” And then he does handle it — whether it’s something big or something small. She learns that she can count on him. She learns she can trust him to be there when she needs him.

— A man shows his love by keeping his word to his wife. When he promises to do something, it gets done. When he promises not to do something, he doesn’t do it. When he promises to change certain behavior in his life — because the two have agreed it needs to change — he keeps his promise.

— A man shows love by expressing his devotion to his wife in small ways every day. This will look different in every relationship. Some women need for a man to hold her hand at unexpected times. Some women need a man to leave unexpected love notes. Some women need a foot massage. Everybody is different, but a man shows love when he listens to a woman — to what is said and what is not said — and gives her what she needs to feel loved and valued.

— A man expresses love with the gifts he gives his wife. Those can sometimes be big and expensive things, but they can — far more often — be small and thoughtful gifts that show he knows her and knows what she wants and needs.

There are a million other specific things a man does when he loves a woman, but they all flow from genuine devotion and honest respect. Too many times, people who claim to love each other give their best every day to strangers — and give their worst to those people at home who they claim to love.

These are some of the things that men do for women out of genuine love — and if they seem unrealistic to you, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your understanding of love and whether you’re really ready for it.

There’s nothing wrong with having a special day to celebrate romantic love, but everything expressed on that day is empty and meaningless and dishonest if the rest of the year doesn’t lay the loving foundation for the Valentine’s Day gestures.

Love is worth celebrating — but unless love in built brick by brick, day by day, for the rest of the year — there’s nothing to celebrate on Valentine’s Day.

If you love someone, express that love every single day of the year, not just on Feb. 14.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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