Love and Respect (9 page)

That’s what I call bringing things full circle. Unfortunately, women think this approach will work with their husbands just as well as it does with their best girlfriends. When a problem arises and something feels unloving, the wife instinctively moves toward her husband to share her feelings. Her eventual goal is that both of them will apologize and then embrace. This is the way she keeps her marriage up-to-date—a high value for her. Her heart longs to resolve things and to reconcile. Her husband matters to her more than any other adult on earth. In truth, her confrontation is a compliment. She thinks,
Oh, that he could see my heart! Why does he close himself off from me?

What a wife usually fails to see is that a big difference exists between her best girlfriend and her husband. A wife will be more judgmental toward her husband than toward her best girlfriend. She feels free to do this because, as his loving helpmate, part of her mission, in her mind, is to “help” change him into a loving man. She knows that if she can just get her criticisms out on the table, he can change. And if he’ll change to be a bit more loving, she knows she will still outlove him.

A WIFE’S SELF-IMAGE MAY DEPEND ON HER HUSBAND’S APPROVAL

The typical wife also fails to realize that her self-image often rests on what she believes her husband thinks of her. This is not the case with a girlfriend. Her girlfriend’s opinion of her is important, but not as vital as her husband’s opinion.

Also, the marriage relationship, unlike her relationship to a girlfriend, is a topic of ongoing discussion between her and other women. Women want to report to each other how wonderful their marriages are. So a wife’s negativity can intensify when her husband stonewalls her efforts to get him to change. He isn’t making her feel good, and she can’t report to her friends the joys of her marriage. If her negativity intensifies, she is in danger of becoming even more belligerent and contemptuous, and then her husband will close her off completely.

Proverbs 21:19 says, “It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman.” The sad irony is that a wife can become “contentious and vexing” because her husband misinterprets her. He doesn’t decipher the code in which she cries, “I need your love.” Instead, he hears, “I don’t respect you.” This sweet, tender, godly woman is misunderstood. When she gets too negative, she does herself—and her marriage—no favors.

Thankfully, some women are becoming aware that negative confrontation doesn’t work. As one wife said:

My strength and verbal skills aren’t helping my marriage. I have come across to my husband as too strong and too controlling and too demanding and too critical. I have been his mommy and his teacher and his holy spirit. It’s my own personal nature to lead and direct and control and fix and do right and make others do the same. He is scared of my tongue.

A WIFE’S SCOLDING CAN START THE CRAZY CYCLE

When a man begins to feel that his wife no longer looks up to him but is looking down at him, the Crazy Cycle kicks in. The Crazy Cycle often starts when women start scolding in their homes. The word
scold
is often associated with mothers bawling out their children; the dictionary definition, however, says that scolding means to reprimand or criticize harshly and usually angrily and even openly. When a wife comes at a husband with repeated reprimands and “scolding,” this is a surefire way not only to annoy him but to treat him with disrespect. Wives, however, tend not to see this. As mothers, correction is part of their maternal nature. Unfortunately, they tend to mother their husbands also, as this mother admits:

A wife “who brings shame” on her husband “is like sickness in his bones”(Proverbs 12:4 NIRV).

As I sat at the conference and listened to you speak about love for a wife, I had no problem hearing and agreeing with everything you were saying. Then on Saturday when you started talking about respect and the lack thereof, I have to be honest, I was taken aback. I was so focused on why he couldn’t understand me that I was totally missing that he was feeling put down. I think this is especially true for me. As a mother of young children, I am forever trying to make them understand right from wrong. I never realized that I had been projecting that onto my husband as well. In all honesty, I don’t think my husband really knew how to explain how my behavior was making him feel.

When a wife scolds her husband, she’s only trying to help correct things, to keep things on an even keel. And there is no doubt at times men need this kind of help. But when a man begins to feel that what his wife is saying reduces him to a child being scolded, there can be trouble. He doesn’t necessarily see his wife’s heart; he only hears her words, which are saying that she’s looking down on him. To paraphrase Proverbs, he would rather live in the wilderness than with this irritating woman. While many wives do not intend to be disrespectful, they appear that way to their husbands, and their husbands take refuge in stonewalling them. (For tips on how not to criticize or stonewall your spouse, see appendix A, p. 305.)

I’ve asked any number of businessmen, “Do you want your associates to love you or respect you?” They all laugh and say, “I could care less if they love me, but respect me? Absolutely!” Right or wrong, men interpret their world through the respect grid, and a wife’s softened tone and facial expressions can do more for her marriage than she can imagine.

Sarah was talking to a wife about controlling her verbal venom toward her husband. The wife was showing disdain for him, which she knew was not wise. But her husband did things that made her so angry. In her view, the problem was strictly with him. He didn’t clean up the kitchen right, he didn’t put the dishes in the dishwasher correctly, and he didn’t pick up after himself the way she expected, so she had turned sour and negative. The wife heard what Sarah was trying to say, but she felt overcome by her anger and hurt.

So Sarah asked this wife a question she asks many women who arrive at our conferences full of contempt for their husbands: “What if your son grew up and married someone like you?” The woman’s mouth fell open. She was stunned. For the first time, she saw it! She would
never
want any woman to treat her son the way she was treating her husband. She realized that when her son became a husband, if his wife treated him with such anger and contempt, his spirit would be crushed and he would shut down in defeat. When she heard it put this way, a completely new view surfaced. She saw herself more clearly than ever before, and she vowed to change.

As a retort to his wife’s contempt, David communicates that he “will be held in honor”(2 Samuel 6:22 NIV).

This lady is a vivid example of many wives who come to our conferences. They have mixed emotions. They love their husbands, yes, but respect them? No. That is why we constantly encourage wives to ask themselves one question: “Is what I’m about to say or do going to come across as respectful or disrespectful?” This prevents a wife from misrepresenting her heart by coming across too negatively.

This whole idea of the male need for respect is new information to many women. In seminar sessions women sit in disbelief when I tell them that Scripture commands wives to give their husbands unconditional respect. I understand their confusion. They are so wired to love, and the culture has so radically enforced this whole idea of love-love-love, that they don’t really know the men they are married to. In fact, they often respond, “This is totally foreign to me.”

To speak his language, remember: “the wife must respect her husband”(Ephesians 5:33 NIV).

And that’s exactly the problem. When a wife does not speak “respect language,” after a while her husband isn’t interested in communicating. Who wants to keep talking to someone ywho doesn’t speak your language? So the husband goes quiet and walks away. Even though wives are told that husbands feel, “My wife doesn’t respect me,” their response is, “What’s that got to do with anything?” The answer, quite obviously, is:
everything
.

It is high time for women to start discovering how their husbands really feel. One wife was shocked when she asked her husband, “Do you want me to tell you that I love you or that I respect you?”

Without hesitation he replied, “Respect.” She couldn’t believe her ears. She had never realized that though he needed her love, what he lacked was assurance of her respect. Learning this is hard on many a wife, and I am sorry that they have to feel everything from amazement to shame. No one is trying to shame wives. On the contrary, our Love and Respect message is designed to help wives see that their big, powerful husbands are really in need of something that wives can give—respect. When a husband receives unconditional respect from his wife, those fond feelings of affection will return, and he will start giving her the kind of love she has always hoped to receive.

“SO THAT’S IT . . . I NEED RESPECT!”

But not all men are conscious of their need for respect. Even significant leaders adept at assessing many different people in many different situations are not always in touch with why they react the way they do in their marriages. I had lunch with a man who ran for the United States Senate and, as I explained the Love and Respect Connection, he said, “Now that you’ve put it that way, that is exactly how I feel. That’s it. I want respect.”

A CEO of a large company attended our conference and, as he reflected on what he had heard, he realized he was reacting to his wife because he felt disrespected. He started voicing this to her, and though it created some tension for a while, it eventually resulted in a deeper understanding between them. In his words, “It helps me and her. When I humbly voice my feelings, we both know what’s going on, instead of me just being moody and withdrawing. Now as she seeks to understand me, her appeal to me to understand her need for love really makes sense. It feels fair.”

I have an acquaintance who has a PhD in educational psychology. As he went over the Crazy Cycle material with me, he said, “That is exactly what I feel when things get heated between my wife and me. For years it was something I was feeling down deep but wasn’t in tune with. I was reacting all right, but neither of us knew why.”

The common thread in what these three men said is that they couldn’t articulate their need for respect, but once it was pointed out, they understood. Early on they quite possibly may have thought to themselves at times,
I don’t deserve this disrespect.
But they soon suppressed those feelings. This is quite typical of today’s male because the culture has told him it isn’t right to express feelings of being disrespected, and if he dared to do so, his wife would not accept it because to her he would sound “arrogant.”

Another thing that may stop a man from voicing his need for respect is hearing from his wife, “You don’t deserve my respect.” With his vocabulary rejected as archaic and his attitude criticized as arrogant, it doesn’t take long for a male to file away his essential need for respect in a compartment labeled, “Do Not Bring Up.” And there it will stay—but if another woman admires him, then look out. As one wife shared after her husband strayed into an affair:

I realized that my husband had cheated with this woman, not because of her looks or her personality, or because she was anything so great, but rather because she was his captiv[e] audience. She thought he hung the moon. Every remark he made to her was witty; everything he did was perfect. In her eyes, he was the most handsome, intelligent, funny man in the world. He needed an ego boost, and she was ready and willing to be that for him.

ARE LOVE AND RESPECT THE SAME THING?

There are many wives who tell me, “Respect and love are the same thing.” I respond, “No, they aren’t, and you know they aren’t. For instance, you respect your boss. You don’t love your boss.” I have been in counseling sessions with couples, and with her mate sitting there listening, the wife will readily say, “I love my husband but don’t feel any respect for him.” But when I turn this around and ask the wives how they would feel if they would hear their husbands say, “I respect you but don’t love you,” they are horrified. They exclaim, “I would be devastated.”

I asked one wife, “How long would it take you to get over that?” She quickly answered, “Forever.”

The typical wife would be up in arms if she heard, “I respect you but don’t love you.” That is taboo! She would view her husband as a very unloving human being. Yet this same wife feels she can readily say to him, “I love you but don’t respect you.” What she doesn’t understand is that her husband is equally devastated by her comment and it also takes him “forever” to “get over it.” The bottom line is that husbands and wives have needs that are truly equal. She needs unconditional love, and he needs unconditional respect.

ALL THIS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS, RIGHT?

Almost every time Sarah and I teach our seminar about the Love and Respect Connection, people tell us, “Why, of course; this is so obvious.” And then either the husband or the wife adds, “But why doesn’t my spouse get it?” Whether it’s a husband or a wife who “doesn’t get it,” the answer is the same:
we often don’t see the obvious
.

A door-to-door salesman rang the bell and waited. A boy who looked about ten years old answered. He was smoking the biggest cigar the salesman had ever seen. After a few seconds of stunned silence on the salesman’s part, he finally asked, “Is your mother home?” The ten-year- old puffed a couple of times, blew smoke in the salesman’s face, and said, “What do
you
think?”

And that’s the point. If the salesman had been thinking at all, he would have known that Mother wasn’t at home. But for some reason we don’t always think, particularly when something is shocking or distracting. When a wife feels unloved, it can be such a shock to her heart that she is oblivious to her disrespectful reactions toward her husband, though any man watching could see it plainly. When a husband feels disrespected, it can provoke him so quickly he doesn’t see his unloving reaction, which would be obvious to any woman. Words of wisdom for all husbands and wives are these:

WE EASILY SEE WHAT IS DONE TO US BEFORE WE SEE WHAT WE ARE DOING TO OUR MATE.