‘6 Husbands’: How to embrace the changes in a marriage

In "The 6 Husbands Every Wife Should Have," Dr. Steven Craig shares his strategies for help couples change and thrive through every stage of a marriage. Here's an excerpt.

Introduction: My Wife’s Six Husbands

In a way, I’m my wife’s third husband. And if we keep doing everything correctly, I’ll be her fourth husband sometime very soon. After that, as long as I keep working on it, I will have the opportunity to be a couple more husbands in the years to come. In fact, if I try really hard, by the time she’s in her sixties, she will have had at least six husbands—and I will have been each one of them.

This may seem a surprising (if not disturbing) way to begin a book about marriage. But it’s really quite simple when you think about it. As people grow, they invariably change. And as they change, the things they need from life and from their relationships change as well. That means the person most spouses need their partner to be when they’re in their twenties is considerably different from the person they need their spouse to be when in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond.

That’s why my wife will need a new husband soon.

Sixteen years ago, when we got married, my wife needed me to be a certain kind of husband. I was fun, carefree, headstrong, and full of dreams and potential. I made her laugh and helped her feel good about herself and her future. She did the same for me. We loved each other and loved how we felt together. That’s why we got married.

Then life changed.

Time went by and we grew up. And what was important to us in the beginning was replaced by entirely different priorities. In our thirties, my wife no longer wanted me to be fun, carefree, and the life of the party. She now wanted a guy who was settling down to build a life together with her. She was looking for me to focus on establishing a stable career and to begin preparing for a family. In short, she needed me to grow up.

Then, when we had kids, I had to evolve once more. The husband she needed during the baby years was almost completely different from the husband she first married. This husband had tremendous humility and patience, whereas the one she married was cocky and in a hurry. This guy agreeably changed diapers, watched cartoons, and engaged in long conversations about the virtues of breast pumps. The husband she married couldn’t be bothered with those things. The new husband made it a point to be home as much as possible and scaled back on almost all his extracurricular activities. The guy she married spent most of his free time away from home.

As our sons grew, I changed even more. Eventually, I became the kind of husband who enjoyed staying at home on Saturday nights wrestling with the kids and doing horribly messy and pointless kindergarten art projects. I also began to look forward to spending Sunday afternoons (time previously reserved for watching hours of football on television) chasing children through germ-infested habitrails at our local Chuck E. Cheese. During those years, my wife needed me to be more focused on the kids than I was on her because she longed for a guy who loved them just as much as she loved them and who thought of them first—just like she did. Those were years when she needed me to be “daddy” more than she needed me to be “honey.” The husband I was at that stage of our marriage believed that his family came first, no matter what. The one she married put himself first.

It was a lot of work, but I was up to the challenge. Of course, by the time I had this husband mastered, our lives changed again and she needed me to be somebody else. As the years went by and our relationship continued to mature and our children continued to grow, I needed to keep pace. When our children were very young, I needed to be a hovering dad who kept an extremely close eye on the kids. Eventually, as they continued to grow up, I needed to morph into a dad who trusted them to make good decisions and supported them as they ventured further into the world of school, friends, and gradual independence.

As our marriage and our family grew, my relationship with my wife grew as well. Through the years, she became a more confident, assertive woman who had progressively less need for a strong-but-silent man she could lean on. Instead, she wanted a vulnerable and sensitive man who could lean on her at times and value her as an equal.

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As she matured, I did the same.

I also began to realize, much to my chagrin, that many of the characteristics she initially loved about me—things of which I was very proud—were slowly becoming the very things she no longer liked! In other words, as we were growing and changing, the reasons she loved me were changing as well. When we first met, she used to look warmly and lovingly at me whenever I said or did something she thought was funny or smart. In those days I knew I could always win her over with a smile, a joke, or a thoughtful gesture. But after a few years of marriage, I started getting those same looks for different reasons. Whenever I would connect with her parents or grandparents, or when I demonstrated how responsible and trustworthy I could be with her feelings and our marriage, I could feel her beaming at me. Then, when we had children, I would catch her looking lovingly at me when I was playing with the kids or changing diapers. Eventually it became clear to me that that’s what turned her on in those days, not that I was cool, fun, or smart!

That’s why I like to think of myself as a stock on the stock market. When my wife said, “I do,” she wasn’t really marrying me; she was marrying my potential. She bought low and counted on me to mature through the years (and to pay a handsome dividend). She was investing in my future gains, not in who I was at that particular moment. And who would keep a stock around that didn’t improve, mature, and grow through the years?

Of course, I’m not a stock and this isn’t about financial pay- backs. It is about interpersonal paybacks. Marriage is about forming a lifelong relationship that continues to feed your emotional needs as your needs change. The hard part of relationships isn’t all the arguments about dirty socks and unbalanced checkbooks; it’s having the courage and maturity to change yourself as your marriage dictates.

Soon, my wife will need me to be a husband completely different from the one I am today, and I am eagerly looking forward to it. By the time we’re in our sixties, if I’m lucky, I will have been all the different people she needed me to be, when she needed me to be them.

My job as a partner is to constantly reinvent myself, maturely and without resentment or regret. Doing so not only makes my marriage better, it makes my life fuller and it makes me a better person as well as a better husband. If I didn’t face and make these transitions, my wife wouldn’t want me. Not because I wasn’t a good guy, but because I didn’t grow up.

From THE 6 HUSBANDS EVERY WIFE SHOULD HAVE by Dr. Steven Craig. Copyright © 2010 by Steven Craig. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.

© 2012 MSNBC Interactive