Love and Respect (31 page)

If your husband is typical, he has a need you don’t have. When you shame him, punish him, or deprive him, he feels dishonored for who he is. If your husband feels you do not respect his struggle, his desire for you, and his maleness, he’ll pull back from you. But he needs you; you knew that before marriage. As you recognize his need and seek to meet it, you will find him reaching out to meet yours. There is probably no more effective way to give the Crazy Cycle four flat tires and get the Energizing Cycle running on all six cylinders.

HE WILL FEEL YOU APPRECIATE HIS DESIRE FOR SEXUAL INTIMACY WHEN . . .

• you respond to him sexually more often and initiate sex periodically.

• you understand he needs sexual release just as you need emotional release.

• you let him acknowledge his sexual temptations without fearing he’ll be unfaithful and without shaming him.

• you don’t try to make him open up to you verbally by depriving him of sex.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE ENERGIZING CYCLE WILL
WORK IF YOU DO

I sent him an e-mail one day, letting him know why I respect him. He told me that night he was very touched. . . . I really just prayed and let God lead me in what to say to him and it worked. Also, for some time we have sent SHMILY (
S
ee
H
ow
M
uch
I L
ove
Y
ou) messages to each other. I changed mine to SHMIRY (
S
ee
H
ow
M
uch
I R
espect
Y
ou) and he loved that. The following week, my husband called me in the middle of the day to tell me the reasons he loves me. We’ve been married almost ten years and he’s never done that!

T
his wife’s letter is one of dozens that I could use to sum up the power that can be at work in a marriage when the Energizing Cycle is in high gear. Understanding that a wife’s deepest need is for love and a husband’s deepest need is for respect is the core in how to make your marriage better. In Energizing Cycle terms, his love motivates her respect; her respect motivates his love. (See page 115.)

HOW DOES A HUSBAND SPELL LOVE TO HIS WIFE?

As we have seen, love to wives is spelled C-O-U-P-L-E. Following is a brief review of these six concepts. If a husband memorizes and uses even one or two of them each day, he will do his part in keeping the Energizing Cycle going. Husbands should ask themselves these questions:

1.
C
loseness—Am I always remembering to move toward her and accept her need to talk and connect with me to be reassured of my love?

2.
O
penness—Do I share my thoughts with her, and am I sure I’m not resisting her efforts to draw me out?

3.
U
nderstanding—Am I careful not to try to “fix” her every time she talks about one of her concerns or problems? Am I remembering that she is an integrated personality and whatever happens affects all of her, especially her emotions?

4.
P
eacemaking—Am I always willing to resolve issues, and am I careful to never say, “Let’s just drop it and move on”?

5.
L
oyalty—Do I constantly look for ways to tell her that I will be loyal to her forever—that she’s the one love of my life, the only woman for me?

6.
E
steem—Do I always let her know that I treasure her and put highest value on her as a person? Do I let her know that what she does and thinks are important to me? Does she know I couldn’t possibly do without her?

HOW DOES A WIFE SPELL RESPECT FOR HER HUSBAND?

A wife spells respect for her husband C-H-A-I-R-S and uses these six concepts to let him know how important and vital he is to her. Wives should ask themselves these questions:

1.
C
onquest—Am I always standing behind him and letting him know I support him in his work and endeavors in his field?

2.
H
ierarchy—Do I let him know I respect and appreciate his desire to protect and provide for me and the family? What have I said recently to communicate this?

3.
A
uthority—Have I gone on record that, because he has the primary responsibility for me (even to die for me), I recognize him as having the primary authority? Do I let him be the leader? How have I helped in that regard recently?

4.
I
nsight—Do I trust his ability to analyze things and offer solutions and not just depend on my “intuition”?

5.
R
elationship—Do I spend shoulder-to-shoulder time with him whenever I can? Do I let him know that I am his friend as well as his lover?

6.
S
exuality—Do I honor his need for sexual release even when I don’t feel like it?

As a husband spells out love to his wife through C-O-U-P-L-E and a wife spells out respect to her husband through C-H-A-I-R-S, they can’t help but meet each other’s needs. The beauty of it is, if you meet a need in your spouse, it will come back to you as your spouse meets one of your needs. The key is in always being willing to cut your spouse some slack, as this woman discovered:

I think I might have just realized something. . . . It is not that my husband is not showing me love or trying to understand me. It is that I am back to that place where, if he doesn’t do it exactly the way I want it, it’s no good. Okay, I am an idiot! He is showing me love, kindness, etc., in many ways and I have chosen to focus on one thing that I don’t like! . . . So can you extend your 2x4 through the computer and hit me upside of the head?! What I need is to rejoice in the ways my husband shows his love for me and express my appreciation for those. Would you please pray for me to really get this, internalize it, act on it and have it be my
first
response instead of having the negative, critical spirit come first?

I love this wife’s honesty, not to mention her insight. She realizes she is a lot like Eve, who had paradise but wanted more (see Genesis 3). In a fallen world, you cannot always have “more.” You can’t grasp the Holy Grail of perfection, which is always beyond your reach. But you can embrace Love and Respect, which will always provide
more than enough
to energize your marriage. Act on the principles embodied in C-O-U-P-L-E and C-H-A-I-R-S, and your relationship as husband and wife is bound to be less negative and more positive. (If you have not read appendix C yet, do so now to learn how to share your needs with each other.)

FROM THE ENERGIZING CYCLE TO THE REWARDED CYCLE

In part 3, I will discuss how you can complete the Love and Respect process, which is designed to bring your marriage from bad to good, and from good to better. I will discuss how you can combine your faith with everything you have learned to bring you the reward of a happy marriage. I call this the Rewarded Cycle:

HIS LOVE BLESSES REGARDLESS OF HER RESPECT;
HER RESPECT BLESSES REGARDLESS OF HIS LOVE.

The Rewarded Cycle will show you the best way to develop the ability to give your spouse what he or she needs most as you bring your faith in Christ directly into your acts of Love and Respect. You will learn how a husband’s unconditional love mirrors Christ’s love for the church and how a wife’s unconditional respect is like the church’s reverence for Christ. I will share how the Rewarded Cycle develops your inner maturity and freedom of spirit, how it can make you good examples to those around you, and how you can win your spouses in a wise way.

PART THREE
THE
REWARDED
CYCLE

T
hroughout this book I have emphasized that if the husband and wife are both people of basic goodwill, they can use Love and Respect principles to make a bad marriage into a good one and a good marriage into a great one. I have stressed the idea that you must trust your spouse; you must be the first to act on these principles, and not withhold what your spouse needs most in order to get your spouse to give you what you need most. We’ve also seen in preceding chapters that not only does God command men to love their wives and women to respect their husbands, but that we must do this
unconditionally
.

But what if your husband doesn’t show you love when you show him respect? What if your wife doesn’t show you respect as you show her love? If you get no results from practicing Love and Respect, why bother? The Rewarded Cycle gives you the answers to these questions. In a real sense, the Rewarded Cycle is the most important part of this book. Read on, and you will see why.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE REAL REASON TO
LOVE AND RESPECT

P
erhaps the major problem that keeps so many couples somewhere between the Crazy Cycle and the Energizing Cycle is the fear that, even though they try to practice the Love and Respect Connection, it won’t work. Here are some sample remarks I receive by e-mail or in person in conferences: “My fear is that I’m going to move forward in good faith but my spouse will mistreat me” . . . “My wife will continue showing disrespect, riding a bigger broom than ever” . . . “My husband will continue to be unloving. He’ll re-enroll in the A-1 Jerks School and be first in his class.”

Of course, there is always the exception—someone who is afraid to try respect because it just might work! A wife wrote:

Your suggestion to apologize and let him know how much I respect him is great. I intend to do that. But my heart is afraid that he may react positively, and I don’t know if I am ready for more than what we have now: a mutual understanding for our roles as parents. It frightens me that I can do something so powerful and not be ready if he took a different kind of interest in me.

Another question I often hear is, “Why show love and respect when it isn’t reciprocated?” One couple attended one of our conferences. She agreed to try respect, but according to her husband:

. . . it faded away like a mist. She returned to her old self. She has not trusted me due to her relationship with her father. She has in the past been a vocal man-beater with her negative thoughts and comments about men, in general. I feel like an orphan in my own home. I feel like a husband with no wife. What I do experience of her presence is her critical, negative, hostile and judgmental attitude. . . . My emotions for my wife are being buried daily by her attitude towards me when she makes me feel less than a man. . . . I need to understand my wife and I need wisdom on how I can respond to her attacks.

DON’T GIVE UP—TRUST GOD TO WORK

Letters like the one above are heartbreaking, but my advice is always the same:
Don’t give up because it doesn’t seem to be working
. Keep showing your spouse unconditional love or unconditional respect. Look for even the slightest improvements. A husband doesn’t bring flowers, but he does fix the leaky faucet. The wife still has a headache more than you like, but she has toned down the negativity. Remember the pink and blue lenses? We don’t readily see what is happening in our favor, nor do we see the impact we might be making on our spouse.

“Do what is right without being frightened by any fear” (1 Peter 3:6).

One graphic example is a letter from a wife who explained that her husband called from his night job to tell her he got an unexpected bonus check. “Praise God!” she said, and that made him angry. Then he started to complain about how hard he had to work. She tried to remind him they really needed the extra money and, “Why not be thankful?” As he continued to pour out his dissatisfaction with his lot in life, she (who was very much the lecturing type) decided not to give him another gentle lecture to stop feeling sorry for himself. Instead, she got respectfully quiet. As her silence continued, he said, “You better stop this quiet stuff. I mean it; it isn’t like you and it’s making me nervous. Something is wrong here. I don’t like it. I never said for you to be quiet. I said to listen to me without always saying something. So stop being quiet!”

When she wrote to say that her respectful quietness “apparently wasn’t working,” I replied that actually it was working big time. At this season of their marriage, her husband’s bad habits had to go, and he was already under conviction. The quietness probably caused him to hear himself, and he didn’t like what he was hearing. So he lashed out. But her quietness
was
working in a powerful way. I urged her to be patient and let the Holy Spirit convict her husband.

Ultimately, we must depend on “the Helper,”the Holy Spirit, to “convict . . . concerning sin” (John 16:7–8).

Months later she wrote back: “We are doing so well in our marriage. Our arguments have changed for the better.” Her husband’s spiritual life had significantly improved, and she gave credit to God but added, “I’d like to think it had a lot to do with my new attitude and silence, and respect in word and deed.” This wife is a perfect example of how it’s so easy to have doubts when things don’t look as if they are going well. It takes time—in many cases, months—before there is a shift. Don’t doubt the light from God’s Word in your dark times.

Here’s another example of a wife who felt nothing was happening but later was amazed. She called her ex-husband and apologized because she hadn’t always respected his position in their home. (She is a Christian, and he is not.) There was silence, and then he responded, “Thank you.” That ended the conversation, but several days later he called back at midnight in tears, wondering why she had made her apology. She explained she had to ask forgiveness for not being what she should have been as a wife. Again, the conversation ended abruptly. Not much seemed to be happening. Another week passed, and again he called at midnight. He had been thinking of everything he had done, and he was sorry. He went on about all of his mistakes—“some of the few kind words he has ever said to me.”