When I was a kid, I knew a handful of guys who were rabid baseball fans. They could tell you any stat for any player on their team going back 10 years. They collected baseball cards religiously, stored them in little plastic sleeves and studied them daily.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have seen this same phenomena play out for all sorts of different hobbies. Recently, I listened to a couple of car guys talk for an hour solid about engine specs for different model years of muscle cars.
The thing that blew me away was that they could rattle off the displacements, horse power, and any number of other details casually because they knew it through and through. I’ve discovered that guys who will insist that they are “no good with numbers” or “can’t memorize things” are usually not able to due to lack of interest or motivation.
One of the biggest determiners for many folks reaching a state of excellence in relation to any field of study or area of interest is passion. I never learned baseball stats, because as much as I wanted to participate in the discussion I just didn’t find baseball all that interesting.
I did have things that caught my attention, and I learned about them with a zeal similar to the guys around me focusing on baseball. As an adult, I have outgrown many of those interests. When I was dating my wife, she became the focus of my study. I learned about her personality, her interests, her family, and everything else. She fascinated me, and I wanted to know everything about her. Then, after we were married, a strange thing happened.
I studied her less and less intently as other pressures and interests came into my life. My excitement to know everything about her faded. If you had asked me, I would have told you I still loved her. One morning, about 10 years ago, I woke up and remembered that she is the most important part of my life and that I was busy pursuing hobbies and interests that were less significant.
I had sworn before God that I would love and cherish her. The thing is that part of loving someone is being interested in them. We can never reach a point where we know another person completely, partly because they change and grow.
This means that I can never give up and say: I know everything. Over the years, I have met plenty of men who have given up being interested in their wives and lost their marriage as a result. I can say definitively that there is no hunting trip, work problem, sports team, or anything else in the world that is more important than your wife. We can forget that, but in reality when we share our lives with someone, they become a part of us. This means that they are in a position to cause us great joy or misery depending on the nature of the relationship.
The idea of studying your wife may seem strange, but in reality it boils down to a few simple tasks: having conversations every day in which you ask about her day and what she thinks and feels, spending time with her one-on-one without the TV on, paying attention to the things that are most meaningful to her and investing time and energy into them, and paying attention to how your words and actions affect her so you can adjust accordingly.
This may seem like a difficult, even impossible task to a lot of guys, but most married men did it before when they were courting their spouse. It’s just a matter of deciding that it is just as important now as it was then and then doing it.
