He did not laugh, however, realizing that the gift was an expression of something new in his wife, that it showed a new concern for him and an attempt to begin to show it. Instead he kissed her tenderly and wore the scarf to his office the next day. When he came home that night he presented her with a lovely platinum watch of a make he had once heard her admire. "She looked down for a moment," he told me, "as though she were confused, and then she looked up at me and put her arms around me and wept a very long time." Those tears, of course, were the sure beginning of a deep thaw. His sensitivity to his wife's need at this point in her life had been a decisive element, and her progress from that point on was greatly accelerated.
In counseling husbands to be sensitively attentive to their wives' needs during this period of change I must warn against one thing. Insincerity or artificiality will not work at all, indeed could actually be harmful. Women are deeply intuitive and can detect any hypocritical attempt to manipulate them. It is not wise to try to express love if you do not feel it. A man who cannot experience real feeling toward his wife should put his main effort into self-inquiry. He may discover that the anger and hurt that have built up in him during the unhappy years that are past are too great to handle alone and he may wish to discuss these intransigent feelings with a counselor or psychiatrist.
I know of one man who, paying lip service to the idea of helping his wife, put in a weekly order at the local florist shop for flowers. When in the next three months she had received "enough," as she put it, "for an elaborate funeral," she begged him to stop sending them.
Another man, having ignored any social life with his wife for years, was told that she should get away from her household duties occasionally. He suddenly insisted, therefore, on dragging her on a round of night clubs and theater parties
