What Most Women Don’t Know About How Men Love

What if the man you love has been telling you how deeply he feels for years—but much of what he has been saying never sounded like words?

A man checks the tires before his wife leaves town. He watches the weather when she is traveling. He works when he is exhausted, repairs what is broken, worries about the future, makes plans for a day when he may no longer be there, and instinctively reaches an arm across the passenger seat when the brakes are suddenly applied. Across a crowded room, his eyes search until they find her.

He may never explain what any of it means.

In What Most Women Don’t Know About How Men Love, Bill Riggs explores the often-unspoken interior life of a man who loves deeply but may have spent a lifetime expressing that love through responsibility, provision, protection, service, sacrifice, faithfulness, memory, and presence.

Beginning with one of the most profound transformations many men experience—fatherhood—Riggs examines what happens when a man discovers that another person’s life can matter as much as his own. A child can teach him that another person’s pain can hurt more than his own, that strength sometimes means remaining calm while frightened, and that love makes a man vulnerable precisely because it gives him someone he cannot bear to lose.

That understanding opens a window into the way a man may love a woman.

This is not a book of stereotypes, nor is it an excuse for men who refuse to communicate. It does not suggest that all men think or love alike. Instead, it explores the deeper meaning that can exist beneath behaviors easily mistaken for mere habit, practicality, work, worry, or routine.

Through marriage, fatherhood, aging, loss, work, sexuality, fidelity, music, memory, conflict, forgiveness, and faith, Riggs examines why a man may turn love into work, why acts of service can become emotional sentences, why his wife’s happiness matters to him, why her pain can leave him feeling helpless, why respect and appreciation can reach him so deeply, and why an old song can suddenly return him to the young woman he fell in love with decades earlier.

The book also challenges men. Love cannot remain permanently untranslated. Providing is not a substitute for presence. Protection cannot become control. Good intentions do not erase painful consequences. Silence cannot require a wife to spend a lifetime guessing what her husband feels.

For the Christian man, the responsibility goes deeper. His wife and children are not possessions or evidence of his success. They are people he has been given the privilege of loving. Marriage becomes covenant, family becomes stewardship, and strength becomes accountable to the God before whom even a man’s private character matters.

What Most Women Don’t Know About How Men Love is ultimately a book for women who want to understand the men they love and men who want to understand themselves more clearly. It is an invitation for husbands and wives to recognize the love that may already be present, confront the places where love has been poorly expressed, and learn to translate devotion into both actions and words.

Because the people we love should not have to wait until we are gone to discover what all of it meant.