Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“Women as Barometers of Marriage”

You want to check on the emotional status of someone's marriage? Look at the wife. How is she doing? The theory is that she is the barometer of the relationship: More in touch than the man with the pulse of the overall mental health of both husband and wife.
Fortunately, I didn't have to speculate too long about this as a theory, because I soon found myself in a real-life hoopla gathering of my fellow Floridians. One of the Good Old Boys, full of the success of fifty years of marriage, stood and told his admiring audience the secret of his longevity: "If Mama ain't happy, nobody's happy." White-shirted young bucks wagged their heads knowingly, and took note for their own comparatively meager relationships. I hung back in the shadows, not wanting to commit professional approval too soon.
I had to think about this snappy saying! Was this down-home proverb smarts or risky shallowness? Possibly this guy, who was finishing well, meant he was clever and astute enough to stay tuned into the wife's mood, then, and only then, spring into action and do whatever is necessary to make her happy. Who knows (he puzzles) what irrational inner workings touched off her mood?! A kind of admission that, not only are women themselves emotional mysteries, but that relationship health is a conundrum to us men.

So he just stays put, waiting for instruction, operating in the safety zone. There is a certain drama to this. Following his conventional wisdom, he holds back, like he's off-stage, and awaits the feedback on her condition in order to figure out how to behave. Meanwhile he can get on with life as it was meant to be for a man: work hard, go possum hunting and tend his garden. Assuming his good will in the matter, once alerted, he could try to pump up her happiness. The virtue in this formula is the simplicity of it, not the depth of understanding.

But I'm not ready to give him longevity endorsement just yet. Because it looks like he is denying his interactive role in the ups and downs of the relationship. A player without knowing he is in the game. Blissful that he himself could have ever been the cause of any barometrically registered problem, he probably thinks that his wife gets moody independent of anything he does, or fails to do.
But what if she is moody because she was hoping for more nourishment from his naive heart? By this view, he could be in great position to DO something about the situation long before the barometer rose. If he only knew something was broke, he could possibly fix it (a slight modification of Good Old Boy philosophy).

The truth is, he could be just as depressed as she, or maybe more. Nobody seems to recognize a husband's depressed mood until it floats invisibly on over to the wife. You might think this is a therapist's shell game, but a man's depression looks and smells different. With men, it is more likely to be insidious, active, yet just as damaging to the marriage. Depression in a man does damage in the form of loss of intimacy, alcohol abuse, and anger problems. Now his wife is really suffering. Clinicians have paid less attention to these signs of depression in men, so, like a bad-boy virus that demands recognition, it infects the whole relationship, and shows up in the wife. Her barometer registers "stormy weather", and our guy, still out of the loop, is surprised, not even recognizing his own reflection.

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