Love and Respect (11 page)

I wrote my husband two letters about why I respected him. I am amazed at how it has softened him in his response to me. I have prayed for years that my husband would love me, and speak my love language. But when I begin to speak his language, then he responds with what I have wanted.

Another wife who had attended our Love and Respect Conference with her husband wrote:

I am nearly in shock at the changes in my husband in the last several days. To give you some background . . . we had a major fight last January and Round Two came in May. That was when he told me he didn’t know how he felt about me, and didn’t know what our future was together. Talk about a Crazy Cycle! We had jumped on and were running to our death.

The thing that struck me was your comment that a man can feel the loss of respect so deeply but not be able to give voice or vocabulary as to what is wrong. As a man who is not given to voicing his emotions much on a good day, I believe this is how my husband was affected. He was able to tell me I had pushed him too hard, but I didn’t understand what button I had pushed. As a result, a lot of my efforts to reach out over the last six months backfired.

So, on New Year’s Eve I left a card in his lunch box. Nothing mushy, just a “You give me many reasons to smile” message, to which I added “and many things about you I respect,” then I said thanks for Christmas and Happy New Year. The next day he got up from the table and brought a chair for me! This last Sunday he suggested going to a movie in the evening, sat and talked before the movie started, proposed going to a musical in town next week. In general, he has been much more open and communicative. . . .

While it would be simplistic and untrue to say all our problems are magically solved, there is a bridge between us that did not exist a week ago. I have yet to hear the “L” word from his lips, but his actions are such that I know it still exists in his heart, and I intend, with God’s help, to fan that flame as much as possible.

Following are comments from three different women who have also discovered the power of respecting their husbands:

I didn’t know something from God could be so easy. I have believed in God my whole life [but] I was not taught this before. But it does make so much sense. If you respect your husband, he will love you. It may not always be in the ways I love him but he does in his own special way. I thank God every day for letting me learn this.

I was so “in the dark” about a man’s number one need being respect . . . even over love. Now, instead of just telling him that I love him, I have begun telling him what I appreciate and admire about him. He eats it up!

A close friend called to tell me God wanted me to listen to what you were saying about respect. My husband and I have gone to numerous marriage conferences and read many books together but nothing remotely like this has ever been mentioned. I think this is the key to understanding my husband and to a joyful marriage. It is amazing what God does when you obey Him.

All these wives have “gotten it.” They have decoded the messages their husbands were sending. They have learned how vulnerable a man can be to a wife’s anger and contempt. Best of all, they have adjusted their pink sunglasses and pink hearing aids and are aware that when a wife respects her husband she does
not
become a doormat. In fact, he starts rolling out the red carpet for her!

But what about husbands who need to adjust their blue sunglasses and blue hearing aids and do their part to make the Love and Respect Connection? I have talked to many men who would be willing to try, but they feel clueless about how to begin. We’ll look at their problems below.

HUSBANDS, REMEMBER ONLY ONE IDEA—LOVE

In the last few years, I have counseled with not a few men who say they are tired of hearing the relentless mantra, “You men just don’t get it. You’re stupid.” They admit they don’t grasp certain things, but being labeled “neanderthal” and “caveman” is demeaning and discouraging. If the cave existed, these men would favor going there to hide! They would agree with the biblical proverbs that say it is better for a disrespected man to live in a corner of the roof or in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman (see Proverbs 21:9, 19). As one husband plaintively but aptly put it: “I have spent the last twenty years literally consumed with trying to figure out what is going on in our marriage.”

I sympathize with these husbands because there were plenty of times in the last thirty years when I felt the same way! But I want to remind all husbands that their wives are basically goodwilled women. They are only acting critical, contentious, and disrespectful because they are crying out for love. The honorable husband who is man enough to try to turn things yaround must learn how to respond when he’s feeling disrespected and offended. He must learn what to do in the face of his wife’s negative reactions and accusations that he is unloving.

No matter how hard it gets, “husbands, love your wives” (Colossians 3:19).

The good news is that the husband need only focus on two questions. First, he must ask, “Is my wife coming across to me disrespectfully because she is feeling unloved?” Good things are in store when he learns to decode his wife’s deepest cry: “Please love me!” To do this decoding, a husband must ask himself what his wife has against him—
why
she feels rejected and even abandoned. The husband may or may not completely decode the wife’s message, but the point is he will be trying to understand her, not attack her back. Second, a husband must ask, “Will what I say or do next come across as loving or unloving to my wife?”

In Genesis 29 and 30 we read of the marriage of Jacob and Rachel. First, they were madly in love. He was willing to work seven years for her, and it only seemed as if it were a “few days.” Then, after being tricked by his uncle Laban into marrying Rachel’s sister, Leah, Jacob was required to work seven
more
years before Rachel could become his wife. But when Leah had children and Rachel didn’t, Rachel became jealous and confronted Jacob, pleading, “Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30:1). Instead of comforting Rachel, Jacob got angry and said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (v. 2) Instead of getting angry, Jacob could have tried to decode Rachel’s demand. Was she really expecting him to be in the place of God? Or was she ventilating her inner pain over her barrenness and the social struggle she was having with her sister to be closest to Jacob’s heart?

As a husband, I am always seeking to decode what my wife is feeling. Suppose Sarah confronts me in a way that leaves me feeling offended, disrespected, or described as unloving. I can react defensively and say, “Women! Who can ever understand them?” Or, because I know the Crazy Cycle is always ready to spin, I can realize Sarah is actually crying out to me. She needs me. She isn’t trying to emasculate me.

In the heart of every wife is this cry: “surely now my husband will love me” (Genesis 29:32).

True, when I feel offended, it just goes against my natural grain for me to say, “Oh, I get it. Sarah wants me to love her.” But I know that is precisely what is going on because I am sure I’m married to a goodwilled woman. She isn’t deliberately trying to be disrespectful and contemptuous; she is simply letting me know that I have stepped on her air hose—again—and she needs my love more than ever.

One husband learned how to decode his wife the hard way. Here is how he described his “epiphany” experience:

On a Saturday evening, I threw a dish in anger that hit my wife in the face and left a small cut. She called the police and I was handcuffed and taken off to jail. A magistrate thought it best for me to sit out the weekend there and held me over on a LOT of bond. I wouldn’t pay it . . . [and] after about four hours on a steel cot the novelty wore off and I really started to think hard about why I was there. With nothing to read, no place to go, and not able to sleep any more, I basically paced and prayed for two days. One single Scripture stayed in my mind the whole time: “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church . . .”

For two days, God replayed the memories I had of our arguments and in each one I was acutely aware of how I had failed to love my wife. It was like pausing a video and having Someone point to it and say, “See, right here you could have reached out to her and reassured her, but you were too busy trying to prove your point.”

At one point I was seeing her face, all distorted with rage as she screamed at me, but totally without any sound . . . the mute button had been pushed on this memory, and then little by little the sound came up so I could hear it. Only the words were not what my wife had been screaming at me. Instead, they were replaced with other words that I needed to hear: “I want you to LOVE me, why won’t you LOVE me? I’m afraid and insecure and I need you to hold me and LOVE me. . . .”

And that’s when I began to weep. All this time I had been so totally wrapped up in my own needs—to demand respect, to be right at any cost, to win a petty argument—this hurt our priceless relationship. I had been so caught up in the words that I had totally missed her heart, her need.

This was my epiphany, and this is why Scripture commands me to love my wife as Christ loved the church. In my conversations with men since then, I have seen the color drain from their faces as I tell them about my experience, and I see the dawning of their own awareness as they realize how they have blown it, too. We NEED this command, but not many of us know just how badly.

Anyway, God sat me down for two days in jail, took away all the distractions, and forced me to look at myself in a way I had never done before. By the end of it, I had been totally emotionally ruined and rebuilt, and I could hardly wait to get home and share with my wife what God had shown me! My last evening in my cell I was freer than I had ever been. I knew the Lord had spoken to me and I knew I was going to do something about it, first in my own marriage, and then in others if the Lord allowed.

Although the husband and his wife reconciled, the court ordered him to attend domestic violence counseling, which he was happy to do. He waited over a year after his experience to validate the changes in his life and then, with the blessing of his pastor, he began to invite other men to discuss the topic of marriage with him. Now he and his wife meet with couples who come to them with domestic issues like the ones they had. He adds, “I’ll forever be grieved at what I did to my wife, and forever grateful for what He has done for our marriage since.”

There are many reasons I like this man’s story, but perhaps best of all is that the wife was the first one to contact us when she ordered our resources to learn more about unconditionally respecting her husband. In her e-mail request, she said absolutely nothing about the abusive incident. She only wrote that she was:

. . . mightily convicted about my need for learning this vital aspect of my wifely role. My husband has a men’s Bible study where, naturally, the focus is on loving and leading your wife God’s way. There is a dearth of material on the other important aspect of a godly marriage, namely, wives and respect. Lots on submission, but not much on respect. My husband and I have been married, very badly (and without God) . . . and we are committed to making our relationship one that honors and glorifies His presence and grace in our lives.

There was not one hint of how she took a dish in the face and how he had to go to jail. I was curious about the kind of Bible study her husband was conducting, so I e-mailed him and asked him to explain what he was doing and why. That’s when he told me the whole story about hitting his wife, going to jail, and figuring things out as he paced up and down in his cell. What a woman! What a man! He had changed so much that she yearned to do her part and now they work together to help other marriages.

Can a husband understand? In serious conflict, if a husband reassures his wife that he truly loves her in spite of the argument they are having, and he avoids like the plague sending the message, “I don’t love you,” all will be fine. One man wrote to tell us how he finally learned to decode:

Later that night, in my mind, I went over what she said and what you taught. I prayed for wisdom. By this time a good deal of the hurt had worn off (I have been through this many times before), but this time there was something different. There was a peace and reassurance I had not felt before, as if the Holy Spirit was saying, “Stay calm, don’t push it, just relax.” And I did. I did not sleep very well at all that night and spent a lot of time thinking. It was then I was able to decode what she was really saying. She was trying to express the pain she felt in our marriage. . . .

It took all night for me to understand what was behind her words; her words were not respectful or loving, but what she was trying to say was deeper and I began to “decode” that. I started off by telling her what I thought was behind what she said, and that it was her way of expressing the pain she felt. It started an hour-long discussion that ended up with my wife sitting in my lap with her arms around me weeping and weeping. It was an emotional release of sorrow. It was a very sad time of grief, but it was HEALING. It was the first time that she had ever done that. This was the first time she felt that I had understood her.

What did this husband do to get to this “breakthrough” point in his marriage? He stayed calm. He prayed for wisdom. He relaxed—and he adjusted his sunglasses. Instead of just seeing blue, he tried to see some pink, and his wife’s pain became clear. As we saw in chapter 2, a key to decoding one another’s messages is to be aware of her pink sunglasses and hearing aids and his blue ones. But both spouses can adjust their lenses if they want to try. As another husband wrote to tell me:

I believe that the Holy Spirit is revealing (polite way of saying “hit between the eyes with a 2x4”) my inability to “decode.” I see only through my own lens and fail to see through hers. I fail to get behind “her eyes.”

The Crazy Cycle can be slowed—and stopped—if only we would have eyes to see and ears to hear.