A little marriage advice for men
My Favorite Things
A man asks his girlfriend when they are dating what some of her favorite things are. She tells him her favorite flowers, her favorite color, the scent of candles she likes or her favorite restaurant. The pursuing man listens intently as she hints and reacts with approval when he later surprises her with one of these gestures and he “gets it right.” He does an excellent job of showing her attention and making her feel like she is the most important thing in his world by giving her gifts or planning dates to include her favorite things, while courting her. Unfortunately, just a few years into the marriage, the wife cannot remember the last time she received flowers, her husband complains when she buys candles because they “stink up the house and are a waste of money,” and the only restaurants they go to are ones with big screen TVs hanging from the walls. He does not notice her new outfit, and they do not even talk to each other as they eat.
Husbands, we wives desperately need to be “wooed” for the rest of our lives! Men can cause a lot of hurt and feelings of unworthiness in their wives by not remembering these valuable things about her. The alternative is you can be a total stud and make her swoon for you all over again when you meet her needs, by remembering some of her “favorites things.” Small gestures can make a huge difference in the closeness of your relationship. These acts of love also offer protection from hidden, internal resentments within your wife that tend to build up over the years and cause bitterness and distance in the marriage. For example, your wife will naturally begin to notice how kind you are to the neighbor lady by shoveling her walkway, or when you give a compliment to the waitress, or when you remember who won Super Bowl III, but you just happen to forget what perfume she wears.
Gifts do not need to be constant or expensive, but paying attention to her when she talks about things/activities she likes—and then surprising her with them every once in awhile—will earn you a bajillion bonus points in her book. Remember—your wife wants you to intimately know her, better than anyone else knows her; this is how she will feel most connected to you. Planning a date at least once a month is extremely important. For you, the husband, planning the date means you decide where you are going (based on what she likes and what you believe would be most pleasing to her) and you arrange the babysitter. Taking her to a romantic or new restaurant and perhaps dancing or a live band or a walk through a park will fulfill her need to be alone with you and will also give the relationship the sense of passion and adventure that every woman desires. There are amazing dating and gift idea websites, so take advantage of them. A note on the bathroom mirror, a gas station rose, or a candy bar—it all counts in our emotional inventory of whether we believe our husband takes time out of his busy day to think of us and make us feel like we are a priority to him.
Let’s Get Physical
Hold on, it’s not what you think, gentlemen . . . Most women like physical affection as a sign of affirmation and feeling loved, but in “girl language” that means hugs, holding hands, foot or shoulder massages, and cuddling on the couch. Dumb-guy move number 329: because your wife accepts physical touch from you, it must be a secret signal she wants to have sex. Sometimes any hint of physical affection seems like a good sign or encouragement by your wife to get your physical needs met, but hold off on that idea for now and we will better address this issue in the sex chapter. Oh yes, there is a chapter on sex. For now, just take my word for it, it is worth your time and restraint to show physical affection to your wife without sexual advances to help meet her needs for physical affection and to help her feel cared for by you so that she actually desires to have sex with you ever again.
I think most women I counsel would agree that a good, strong hug from our spouse is one of the best feelings in the world. It satisfies so many of her needs: she feels his strength, she feels safe, she feels assured that he is there for her and that no matter what, he will protect her, and she can trust that it will all be ok in the end. Husbands—did you know a hug could do all that? Foot and shoulder massages help us to relax and also show us you want to serve us; we often feel, as women, that we are always serving everyone else with little attention paid to our needs.
Handholding is something you can do in church, in the car, and out in public that symbolizes that we belong to you, you want to be close to us, and that you are really “in it” (life) with us. If you really want to blow our socks off, a good, passionate kiss once and awhile will do a marriage good. Daily hello and goodbye kisses will help to keep romance alive and “prime” the passion engine for later. It is important to discuss with your wife how much physical attention she needs. Some women need more physical affection than others, and many women are very particular in how they like to receive their physical affection. Test these areas with your wife and ask her what she needs today to get her physical needs for affection met. Try not to view this as high maintenance, rather simply as how a wife desires her husband to pursue her, communicate with her, and intricately know her on a deep and personal level.
The Wall
Most women are pretty good at expressing their feelings and emotional needs, but it is important to know that there are temperament types in which the woman will rarely express her desires or feelings verbally. She will want her husband to read her mind, which leaves her feeling bitter and resentful, when he does not, leaving her to feel like her spouse doesn’t care about her when he does not deliver the emotional care she desires. A husband might have no idea he is failing his wife if she is not expressing it. If a wife tries to express her needs to her husband and he does not offer understanding or validation or show behaviors that are reassuring to his wife and her emotional state, over time she will give up trying to connect with him.
This is called “putting up a wall.”
Husbands, your wife is emotionally based and she can only endure so much emotional hurt before she starts to protect herself from the pain of rejection or neglect. Your wife was NOT created to be a warrior (like you) and her constant connection with her feelings and emotions leaves her vulnerable and quite easily wounded.
A woman might build an emotional barrier based on her feelings of hopelessness that you will never truly understand her or meet her emotional needs. She might do this because she has been verbally discouraged from asking you to meet her needs, or it might be her perception based on feeling rejection or neglect in meeting her emotional needs. Many women might put up a wall after conflict, especially heated and hurtful conflict in which her husband might have been harsh or even verbally abusive towards her. It might be coming from her childhood or past relationships in which she was ignored, neglected, or rejected by men, and now this wound is being transferred and compounded by events and interactions that are similar in the marriage.
There are many reasons a woman begins to build a wall. As her husband, you should be aware of this, concerned for her, and pursuing her to prevent it from becoming permanent. This “wall” is a dangerous place for a woman to be, because once she starts protecting herself from the pain, it usually means there are hidden resentments towards her husband. Distance will begin to grow between them. This process is usually very slow and unnoticeable at first; layer by layer, one brick at a time, the divider will go up. The biggest factors in women feeling the need to protect themselves are a lack of emotional resolution in conflict and repeated emotional pain within the marital relationship.
Emotional resolution after conflict (no matter how large or small) and ensuring sure the wife feels understood by her husband are the most important components to securing a strong and positive emotional bond in the marriage, which is what allows your wife to feel loved and secure in the relationship. Over time, both men and women can become discouraged if they continue to fail to find resolution to conflict. This will lead the husband to try to ignore or avoid conflict, and the unresolved issues will cause the wife to shut down and stop trying to get her emotional needs met, leaving the couple disconnected and distant.
Sometimes a man will see the lack of his wife’s demand to interact or connect as a reprieve from conflict. He may even enjoy the “break” from her requests or the arguments these demands typically cause. A man might think, “This is great! She isn’t screaming at me or needing anything from me. This is the happiest we have been in years.” Beware, men. This often means your wife is pulling away and giving up on the emotional connection and perhaps even giving up on the marriage.
The wisdom women need to remember is that your husbands are not, I repeat, not naturally honed in on emotionally needs, but wives are. Many women argue this is unfair, but God made women to be more relationship intuitive than men. Although the husband should be the spiritual leader and pursuer in the relationship, when it comes to making sure the relationship is “tidy” (clean of any conflict, anger, bitterness, or grief that might be lurking in the corners), women should take on the role of pursuing resolution to conflict and making sure their husbands understand how they feel. (I know, ladies—just another thing we need to keep clean!) Wives, this is for your own protection. Women do not do well with leftover internalized feelings. In the moment they might say to themselves, “Oh, I’ll just get over it and suck it up,” but later, wives can experience bitterness, unforgiveness, and a lack of affection for their husbands, and it always comes from unresolved feelings. It is always easier to prevent the wall from going up than to try to take it down later. In my experience of fifteen years of marriage counseling, it is the number one reason women will seek a divorce; they can no longer see hope in removing the many layers of protection they have put between themselves and their husband after repeated hurts and many unresolved emotions.
Women can struggle with the idea of the role of being responsible for emotional resolution, and it can make them feel like they have to beg or force their husband to meet their emotional needs. “Do I really need to do that?” they will ask me in counseling. Wives, no matter how often we tell our husbands what we need or how we need to feel loved by them, they will eventually fall into their instinctually nature or behavior patterns and fail us. (Just as we will become overly emotional at times and fail them by being disrespectful.) This should be a reminder to us, as wives, of two things:
We need to rely on God to meet our needs when our husbands do not.
Because we are naturally more emotional and relationship savvy, we need to be responsible for getting our needs met and we cannot give up on trying to communicate these needs to our husband in respectful ways that they can understand, even if it is uncomfortable or difficult to verbalize.
Husbands, if your wife has stopped seeking affection or an emotional connection with you, call your local crisis marriage counseling team immediately! Okay, maybe you do not have to panic right away, but understand you need to pursue your wife emotionally. God designed you to do it, be the leader, and be responsible for her. You did it well at one point, or she would have never married you in the first place
Husbands, try to remember the ways your wife has told you how she feels or what things are upsetting to her, or just ask her again. We love it when our husbands pursue us by asking and trying to understand how we feel! Women can go from contemplating divorce to completely falling in love with her husband again simply by feeling heard, understood, and pursued relentlessly by their spouse. (True story, I have seen it happen within our marriage counseling couples, time and time again.) This can be a difficult task to ask of a husband, especially if it seems like she is not responding or she is full-on rejecting him. But be resilient: “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will read, if we do not give up,” (Galatians 6:9).
That whole emotional wall can come falling down in a glorious crash in an instant, and the emotional bond between husband and wife can be restored! Both men and women need to be encouraged by this, because sometimes as a wife you feel like you could never feel the same way about your husband because of the emotional pain and the layers of hurts and wounds that have built up over many months or years. And for husbands, it starts to feel hopeless and you might feel like your wife will never come back to you, but God’s formula for the connection between husband and wife will never fail! Hope comes to us through wisdom, by understanding the nature of one another and then applying these ideas and skills. Choose to forgive one another, and by the grace of God, it will lead you to a better-than-you-ever-thought-possible kind of marriage!
This blog is an excerpt taken from “The Divine Marriage” book, available at http://www.divinemarriagebook.com, Amazon, Kindle and Audible.