Love and Respect (2 page)
What did this woman and her husband hear at that conference? What revolutionized their marriage? What caused two people ready to divorce on Friday to be walking together the next day like two young lovers? The book you have in your hands is the Love and Respect message this couple heard. Their account is one of thousands of letters, notes, and verbal affirmations I have received that testify what can happen when a husband and wife take a different approach to their marriage relationship.
Do you want some peace? Do you want to feel close to your spouse? Do you want to feel understood? Do you want to experience marriage the way God intended? Then try some Love and Respect!
This book is for anyone: people in marital crisis . . . spouses headed for divorce . . . husbands and wives in a second marriage . . . people wanting to stay happily married . . . spouses married to unbelievers . . . divorcées trying to heal . . . lonely wives . . . browbeaten husbands . . . spouses in affairs . . . victims of affairs . . . engaged couples . . . pastors or counselors looking for material that can save marriages.
I know that I am promising a lot, and I wouldn’t dream of doing this unless I fully believed that what I have to tell you works. Following are more examples of how marriages turn around when wives and husbands discover the message of Love and Respect and start living it out daily:
It has been one year since we attended the Love and Respect conference. It is the single most powerful message on marriage that my husband and I have ever heard. We constantly find ourselves going back to the principles we learned that special weekend. We sit on the couch together and walk through C-O-U-P-L-E and C-H-A-I-R-S and see where we have gotten off track. . . . We have such incredible joy in trying to do things God’s way and then seeing Him bless us.
Just a few days ago I decided to tell my husband that I respect him. It felt so awkward to say the words, but I went for it and the reaction was unbelievable! He asked me why I respected him. I listed off a few things, and I watched his demeanor change right before my very eyes.
I am sad that I have been married twenty-two years and just now understand the Respect message. 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 began to speak his language, then he responded with what I have wanted.
The above letters are typical of those I receive weekly, if not daily, from people who have gained wisdom by understanding the one key verse of Scripture that is the foundation for this book. No husband feels fond feelings of affection and love in his heart when he believes his wife has contempt for who he is as a human being. Ironically, the deepest need of the wife—to feel loved—is undermined by her disrespect.
Please understand, however, that what I have to tell you is not a “magic bullet.” Sometimes the glow a couple feels at one of our conferences fades in a few days or weeks, and they succumb to the same old problems—the Crazy Cycle. I like to advise all couples who learn about the power of Love and Respect to give it a six-week test. In that time, they can see how far they have come and how far they still have to go.
The journey to a godly, satisfying marriage is never over, but during three decades of counseling husbands and wives, I have discovered something that can change, strengthen, or improve any marriage relationship. I call it the Love and Respect Connection, and my wife, Sarah, and I are taking this message across America. We are seeing God work in remarkable ways when men and women submit themselves wholeheartedly to this biblical design for marriage. We see it working in our own marriage, where we are still discovering new blessings as we use the Love and Respect Connection to touch each other.
If you and your spouse will practice the Love and Respect Connection, the potential for improving your marriage is limitless. As one wife wrote:
I wanted to let you know, I GOT IT! God granted me the power of this revelation of respecting my husband. . . . This revelation . . . has changed everything in my marriage—my approach, my response, my relationship to God and my husband. It was the missing piece.
For so many couples, respect is, indeed, the missing piece of the puzzle. Read on, and I’ll show you what I mean.
I
wrote this book out of desperation that was turned into inspiration. As a pastor, I counseled married couples and could not solve their problems. The major problem I heard from wives was, “He doesn’t love me.” Wives are made to love, want to love, and expect love. Many husbands fail to deliver. But as I kept studying Scripture and counseling couples, I finally saw the other half of the equation. Husbands weren’t saying it much, but they were thinking,
She doesn’t respect me.
Husbands are made to be respected, want respect, and expect respect. Many wives fail to deliver. The result is that five out of ten marriages land in divorce court (and that includes evangelical Christians).
As I wrestled with the problem, I finally saw a connection: without love from him, she reacts without respect; without respect from her, he reacts without love. Around and around it goes. I call it the Crazy Cycle—marital craziness that has thousands of couples in its grip. In these first seven chapters I will explain how we all get on the Crazy Cycle—and how we all can get off.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SIMPLE SECRET TO
A BETTER MARRIAGE
H
ow can I get my husband to love me as much as I love him?” This was the basic question I heard from wife after wife who came to me for counseling during the almost twenty years I pastored a growing congregation. My heart broke for wives as they wept and told me their stories. Women are so tender. On many occasions I sat there with tears rolling down my cheeks. At the same time I became irked with husbands. Why couldn’t they see what they were doing to their wives? Was there some way I could help wives motivate these husbands to love them more?
I felt all this deeply because I had been a child in an unhappy home. My parents divorced when I was one. Later they remarried each other, but when I was five, they separated again. They came back together when I was in third grade, and my childhood years were filled with memories of yelling and unsettling tension. I saw and heard things that are permanently etched in my soul, and I would cry myself to sleep at times. I remember feeling a deep sadness. I wet the bed until age eleven and was sent off to military school at age thirteen, where I stayed until I graduated.
As I look back on how my parents lived a life of almost constant conflict, I can see the root issue of their unhappiness. It wasn’t hard to see that my mom was crying out for love and my dad desperately wanted respect.
Mom taught acrobatics, tap dance, and swimming, which gave her a good income and enabled her to live independently of Dad’s resources. Dad was left feeling that Mom could get along fine without him, and she would often send him that message. She made financial decisions without consulting him, which made him feel insignificant, as if he didn’t matter. Because he was offended, he would react to her in unloving ways. He was sure Mom did not respect him. Dad would get angry over certain things, none of which I am able to recall. Mom’s spirit would be crushed, and she would just exit the room. This dynamic between the two of them was my way of life in childhood and into my teenage years.
As a teenager I heard the gospel—that God loved me, He had a plan for my life, and I needed to ask forgiveness for my sins to receive Christ into my heart and experience eternal life. I did just that, and my whole world changed when I became a follower of Jesus.
After graduation from military school, I applied to Wheaton College because I believed God was calling me into the ministry. When I was a freshman at Wheaton, my mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law received Christ as Savior. A change began in our family, but the scars didn’t go away. Mom and Dad are now in heaven, and I thank God for their eternal salvation. There is no bitterness in my heart, but only much hurt and sadness. I sensed during my childhood, and I can clearly see now, that both of my parents were reacting to each other defensively. Their problem was they could offend each other most easily, but they had no tools to make a few minor adjustments that could turn off their “flamethrowers.”
While at Wheaton, I met a sanguine gal who brought light into every room she entered. Sarah was the most positive, loving, and others focused person I had ever met. She had been Miss Congeniality of Boone County, Indiana. She was whole and holy. She loved the Lord and desired to serve Him only. She should have had a ton of baggage from the divorce that had torn her family, but she did not let it defile her spirit. Instead, she had chosen to move on. Not only was she attractive, but I knew I could wake up every day next to a friend.
THE JEAN JACKET “DISAGREEMENT”
I proposed to Sarah when we were both still in college, and she said yes. While still engaged we got a hint of how husbands and wives can get into arguments over practically nothing. That first Christmas Sarah made me a jean jacket. I opened the box, held up the jacket, and thanked her.
“You don’t like it,” she said.
I looked at her with great perplexity and answered, “I do too like it.”
Adamant, she said, “No, you don’t. You aren’t excited.”
Taken aback, I sternly repeated, “I do too like it.”
She shot back. “No, you don’t. If you liked it, you would be excited and thanking me a lot. In my family we say, ‘Oh my, just what I wanted!’ There is enthusiasm. Christmas is a huge time, and we show it.”
That was our introduction to how Sarah and Emerson respond to gifts. Sarah will thank people a dozen times when something touches her deeply. Because I did not profusely thank her, she assumed I was being polite but could hardly wait to drop off the jacket at a Salvation Army collection center. She was sure I did not value what she had done and did not appreciate her. As for me, I felt judged for failing to be and act in a certain way. I felt as if I were unacceptable. The whole jacket scenario took me by complete surprise.
Sarah and I discovered that “those who marry will face many troubles in this life . . .”(1 Corinthians 7:28 NIV)
y
During the jean jacket episode, though neither of us clearly discerned it at the time, Sarah was feeling unloved and I was feeling disrespected. I knew Sarah loved me, but she, on the other hand, had begun wondering if I felt about her as she felt about me. At the same time, when she reacted to my “unenthusiastic” response to receiving the jacket, I felt as if she didn’t really like who I was. While we didn’t express this, nonetheless, these feelings of being unloved and disrespected had already begun to crop up inside.
We were married in 1973 while I was completing my master’s degree in communication from Wheaton Graduate School. From there we went to Iowa to do ministry, and I completed a master’s of divinity from Dubuque Seminary. In Iowa, another pastor and I started a Christian counseling center. During this time, I began a serious study of male and female differences. I could feel empathy for my counseling clients because Sarah and I, too, experienced the tension of being male and female.
YOU CAN BE RIGHT BUT WRONG AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE
For example, Sarah and I are very different regarding social interaction. Sarah is nurturing, very interpersonal, and loves to talk to people about many things. After Sarah is with people, she is energized. I tend to be analytical and process things more or less unemotionally. I get energized by studying alone for several hours. When I am with people socially, I interact cordially but am much less relational than Sarah.
One night as we were driving home from a small group Bible study, Sarah expressed some strong feelings that had been building up in her over several weeks.
“You were boring in our Bible study tonight,” she said, almost angrily. “You intimidate people with your silence. And when you do talk, you sometimes say something insensitive. What you said to the new couple came across poorly.”
I was taken aback but tried to defend myself. “What are you talking about? I was trying to listen to people and understand what they were saying.”
Sarah’s answer went up several more decibels. “You need to make people feel more relaxed and comfortable.” (The decibels rose some more.) “You need to draw them out.” (Now Sarah was almost shouting.) “Don’t be so into yourself !”
I didn’t respond for a few seconds because I was feeling put down, not only by what she said but by her demeanor and her tone. I replied, “Sarah, you can be right but wrong at the top of your voice.”
Sarah recalls that our conversation that night in the car was life-changing for her. She may have been accurate in her assessment of how I was acting around people, but her delivery was overkill. We both dealt with things in our lives due to that conversation. (We still sometimes remind one another, “You know, you can be right but wrong at the top of your voice.”) Overall, I think Sarah has improved more from that conversation than I have. Just this past week she coached me on being more sensitive to someone. (And this is after more than thirty years in the ministry!)