It is generally accepted that men and women view love and respect in a marriage differently. Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, author of Love & Respect and founder of Love & Respect Ministries, interviewed 7,000 people with the question: “When you are in a conflict with your spouse or significant other, do you feel unloved or disrespected?" His results showed that 83 percent of the men said they felt disrespected, and 72 percent of the women said they felt unloved. (http://loveandrespect.com)
Obviously, the need for love and respect in a marriage isn’t exclusive to one gender or the other. We each desire to be loved and respected—though it is clear to see that one affects a person more deeply than the other. It is also clear that if one or the other is missing or abused in a marriage that that marital relationship could be in big trouble.
At the heart of this issue, both husbands and wives want to feel that they’re important to the other. A wife wants to know that her opinion matters. She wants to know that something during the day made her husband think of her. When a husband shows this kind of thoughtfulness or sensitivity to his wife, she feels loved. A husband wants to know his wife is “proud” of him and his efforts to provide for the family—not that this excludes him from participating and contributing to things at home, as a lot of husbands seem to assume.
Marital Myth
Contrary to what some people may believe about marriage, it is not a license for husbands to tromp all over their wives’ feelings or self-esteem and do whatever they want simply because they’re the “head of the household and bringing in the bacon”. Husbandry is not about absolute rule and control over everything. It does not mean free rein to do whatever he wants or go wherever he wants. It’s about making decisions that are in the best interests of the family, while taking into consideration the opinion and feeling of the other significant person in running the household. This may mean giving up or compromising on what he ultimately wants, but he should be wise enough to know when he needs to hold his ground and not for selfish reasons. Running the household isn’t exclusive to the one providing the main source of income. Running a household is a partnership and something that is done as a team, cooperatively.
Unfortunately, many marriages are foundering because many husbands fail to satisfy their wives’ emotional needs. They think making money is sufficient. Wives fail to recognize how integral being a provider is to a man’s psyche and often badger their hard-working husbands for not doing more at home—whether justified or not.
Sometimes we wives have a tendency to expect our husbands to live up to expectations that may be unreasonable, and when they don’t we pummel into our husband’s minds how much of a failure they are because they can’t reach our standards. These are those moments where our husbands feel “disrespected” and tune out.
The Respect and Love is in our Actions
So many times in our marriage we say “I love you” or “I respect you”, but do we say the same things with our actions? A husband says, “I respect you”, but then cops a feel on his way through the kitchen even though a wife has said 100 times “I hate that”. Or someone says “I love you” and the next words out of his or her mouth is anything but loving.
Marriage is not about getting your way all the time. It’s about recognizing both personalities involved and finding a way to help those personalities work together. It means compromise on both sides. It means recognizing that one partner isn’t “inferior” to the other. It means each partner has different strengths and different abilities to offer and contribute, and it takes work to find the optimal balance between his and her strengths.
But this can’t happen if husbands and wives pick at each other, and tear one another down, and view their way as the only way. They will only succeed in killing the spirit in the other and spiraling the marriage into a really unhealthy and unhappy place to be.
Let’s Work Together
If you’re angry or frustrated, that’s okay. But try to temper those feelings with positive thoughts, and think about what your words spoken in the heat of anger might do to the other person’s spirit, and what it might do to the spirits of those who might be listening. In the Internet age, people have adopted the habit of typing the initially reactionary email and then deleting it or saving it as a draft and coming back to it later once emotions have calmed a bit. This must be done in personal relationships as well.
Avoid starting a sentence in a discussion or argument with “you”. “You” automatically puts a person on the defensive and then they will lash back and there is no chance of resolving the issue if both parties spend the entire time defending themselves instead of addressing the actual issue.
Part of good communication is listening. A common adage is each person has one mouth and two ears, which means we should be listening twice as much as we talk.
Learn to pick your battles and learn when to walk away. Some things aren’t worth the effort. If there isn’t a clear reason as to why something is wrong or improper, then it’s best to just leave it alone. Not stacking the dishwasher as meticulously as you do is not a sin or a crime, or necessarily improper—so don’t comment. Walking away doesn’t mean giving up. It simply means recognizing when you may offer an emotional, heated response that won’t really lead anywhere, or recognizing when your partner may be just trying to goad you into an argument. Time to take a break, or to take the high road and not allow yourself to be dragged through the mud.
Study your partner. Find out and remember what he or she enjoys, what makes him or her happy, what makes him or her sad, and make an effort to act on those things.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of tips and ideas. Some marital situations will require counseling and help beyond this article. But remember you can do a lot in your marriage simply by working on some of these issues within yourself as a part of that marital unit.
If you would like to discuss a situation like this that’s happening in your marriage, get some advice or just hear from other women who have been in this position before, please join us in the Marital Breakdown and Recovery community group.
Sources: http://loveandrespect.com; www.familydynamics.net