Becoming Your Spouse's Better Half (3 page)

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Authors: Rick A Johnson

BOOK: Becoming Your Spouse's Better Half
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Ideally, a Christian marriage begins with both parties committed to loving God and each other. But later, after the “buzz” of love begins to fizzle, communication tails off and spouses can start taking each other for granted, losing empathy, respect, and love for one another. Life is tough, and instead of working as a team, they begin fighting with each other in an attempt to get their individual needs met. They scream at and accuse their mates and then expect their mates to want to satisfy their needs. Each spouse soon loses the desire to meet the other’s needs, and each loses sight of the fact that love is an action, not an emotion. That is why the very action of meeting the other’s needs (acting loving) can lead to feeling the emotion of love. Without that action, it is natural to slide into a state of need and self-indulgent gratification.
Harville Hendrix explains this mentality:
Their partners are going to do it all—satisfy unmet childhood needs, complement lost self-parts, nurture them in a consistent and loving way, and be eternally available to them. These are the same expectations that fueled the excitement of romantic love, but now there is less of a desire to reciprocate. After all, people don’t get married to take care of their partners’ needs—they get married to further their own psychological and emotional growth. Once a relationship seems secure, a psychological switch is triggered deep in the old brain that activates all the latent infantile wishes.
6
 
Eventually, husbands and wives allow their neediness—their lack of understanding, empathy, and respect for each other—to pull them away, instead of using their differences to glue them together. If lack of understanding and loss of respect happens over a span of years, the intimacy that could have been created through a couple’s differences becomes a chasm that is often too wide to bring them together again as one flesh.
A chain reaction or vicious circle is the inevitable result: Lack of understanding and respect lead to hurt, confusion, anger, and frustration, which lead to contempt, hate, or resignation. Those feelings then lead to physical escape (oftentimes sinful behavior) and/or emotional divorce, with the appearance of marriage but not the intimacy, and finally end in legal divorce, with all of the ramifications that this has to future generations.
Anyone who has been through a divorce will tell you what a painful, gut-wrenching experience it is. And we are only just now recognizing the devastating effects to children whose families have been ripped apart. Perhaps now is the time to start trying to understand how to turn all marriages, good or struggling, into a satisfying lifelong commitment. Previous generations did it. Why do we struggle so much?
How to Use This Book
 
This book has chapters for men and chapters for women. It was meant to be read together by a husband and wife. The “Men’s Modes” section is to enlighten women about their husbands, and the “Women’s Moods” section is to help men understand their wives’ needs.
My wife and I love reading books together. Every evening we try to sit down and pray together before reading a portion of a book. Generally I read out loud to her while she knits or does some other repetitive task. Other times she reads aloud while I am fixing something that doesn’t require much concentration. This activity has allowed us to grow together, and it helps us spend quality time together each day. It also creates great intimacy between us and prompts us to have quality discussions about important topics that we might never have talked about. However, this takes a significant amount of effort and commitment on the part of both spouses. It is very easy to take a day off and then never get back into it again. But I have noticed that when we as a couple are consistently praying and reading together, our relationship and marriage are at peak performance.
This book has two sections—one for women and one for men—each with seven chapters. The chapters on women’s moods should help men understand their wives better. Likewise, as women read the chapters on men’s modes, I hope they’ll understand their husbands better.
Since women are generally more relationally minded, I wanted the men to feel understood and inspired at the start. Guys, if you’re anything like me, I was afraid if you were forced to read through seven chapters of women’s needs first, you might get bored, frustrated, or just plain overwhelmed and want to quit, so I began with men’s modes.
Reading the chapters together will allow both of you to stop and ask questions as they come up. It’s a good chance to determine whether you think I’m full of baloney or whether I’m making some good points that can transform your relationship. Ideally, both husband and wife will understand how the other gender functions and operates, making for a better relationship and marriage.
Expectations
 
I’ve now lived more years as an adult with my wife than I lived before I got married. We’ve raised two babies to adult-hood together, suffered through a business failure, been rich and been poor (more often poor), and helped each other through devastating personal losses. My relationship with my wife today is changing rapidly just by the nature of our ministry’s growth and the challenges that presents. We also just launched our children into the world. We need to be on the same page and understand what makes each other tick in order to grow together and weather the storms we face caused by these changes. We need to grow together, not apart, to have a successful marriage in times of change and the stresses that brings.
Your marriage relationship is a living, dynamic entity. It needs continuous nurturing, refining, changing, and fine-tuning. Hendrix describes marriage this way:
Marriage is a psychological and spiritual journey that begins with the ecstasy of attraction, meanders through a rocky stretch of self-discovery, and culminates in the creation of an intimate, joyful, lifelong union. Whether or not you realize the full potential of this vision depends not on your ability to attract the perfect mate, but on your willingness to acquire knowledge about hidden parts of yourself.
7
 
Marriages that do not last long enough to go through the rocky stretches of self-discovery never reach that destination of an intimate, joyful, lifelong union that Hendrix talks about. This requires sacrifice on your part. Your mate is not perfect, and the truth is the only person you can change is yourself. Your relationship will change as each of you grows and enters into new seasons of life. After all, the only constant in life is change.
This book will help you and your spouse understand each other better. Simply recognizing that men and women are pretty much diametrically opposite can help you relate to and accept your spouse. Then when you understand how and why someone does something, it allows you to develop empathy for them, which helps you to see things from that person’s perspective. When that happens, love and intimacy soon follow, and they will give you the ability to have a fun, healthy, lifelong marriage.
I encourage you to read this book with the expectation that it will change your marriage and help draw you closer to your spouse. The expectations with which we enter into something generally greatly increase the odds of those goals being fulfilled. Your marriage is too important not to believe with all your heart that it can be a loving, dynamic, lifelong experience.
So get ready, because you are about to experience the awesome process of growing together and becoming lifelong partners in this frightfully wonderful relationship God created called marriage. Hang on, because it can be a bumpy but ultimately incredibly satisfying journey.
Men’s Modes
 
 
Satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity of love must remain a rare achievement.
Erich Fromm,
The Art of Loving
 
 
W
omen have an incredible power to influence their husbands. Much like God has given men great power to impact people’s lives for generations by the things they do or don’t do today, women too have been endowed with a more subtle but equally effective and powerful influence. This influence allows them to encourage and inspire their men to attempt and accomplish things they would never be able to without a woman by their side.
In the movie
The African Queen
, Rosie (Katharine Hep-burn), a middle-aged spinster missionary, uses her considerable feminine charm and guile to convince Charlie (Humphrey Bogart), an unambitious, gin-soaked riverboat captain, to attempt impossible challenges he does not want to try and does not feel adequate to perform. She cajoles, maneuvers, and finally convinces him that he is able to achieve things that few men could do. He feels compelled to try and then actually accomplishes challenges like navigating a wild jungle river; straightening a twisted axle by building a primitive smelter; manufacturing a fin and welding it onto the broken boat propeller; and finally designing and producing torpedoes from scrap materials to turn their boat into a floating bomb, in order to blow up a German patrol boat.
In my book
The Man Whisperer
, I talk about this power that a woman has to encourage her man to greatness or to actually destroy him, sometimes merely with a few words or even just a look. A woman has this great power for a very simple reason. Most men have a hard shell they show to the world that protects their vulnerable ego. This ego is vulnerable because most men secretly feel inadequate. They seldom drop this shield and allow anyone inside their defenses.
The one person in the whole world to whom a man drops this defensive shield, if only occasionally, is his wife. Because she knows the “true” man (not the face he shows the world), this gives a woman great power to encourage or to devastate a man with her words and actions. It’s one of the reasons a wife’s respect is so important to a man. If his wife—who knows him better than anyone else, who has looked at all those secret places in his heart—doesn’t respect him, how can anyone else respect him? How can he respect himself?
The woman who understands that power and then recognizes that a man operates throughout his life differently than a woman—that his life is governed by modes, not moods—has a wonderful gift in the palm of her hand. She can use her God-given abilities to nurture an intimate relationship with her spouse while using her strengths to bolster and compensate for his weaknesses as part of a committed team. When that happens, a healthy, loving, long-term relationship can flourish.
The following modes are ones that most men experience throughout life. They are compartments of a man’s life containing important needs that must be met in order for him to lead a productive life and experience a healthy relationship. Unlike women, men’s needs are pretty simple and straightforward. Figure out a way to meet these needs, and most men will be happy and contented. Not only that, but they will be more able and much more willing to fall all over themselves to meet their woman’s needs.
Men’ Mode # 1
 
Amorous
 
Never Give Up!
 
 
 
Regina was washing her face in the master bathroom when Ramone came up and undressed for bed. He noticed her outfit, one of Diego’s football team T-shirts and worn pajama bottoms, and read the message: no sex tonight. But he was a man, as dim and hopeful as any other. He wasn’t going to let some dowdy old outfit stop him completely. He’d give it a try.
George Pelecanos,
The Night Gardener
 
 
I
like dogs. Dogs are ever optimistic, always hopeful that a meaty bone or a good belly rub is just around the corner. Much like their animal best friends, husbands too are always optimistic, hoping—sometimes against all odds—that a good bout of sex will be just around the corner.
Why do men place so much significance on this physical act that many women look at as either a fun activity (if the time is right) or an unpleasant duty (if the timing isn’t right)? Since sex may be
the
most important need in a man’s life, we begin the book with this topic. Most women do not truly understand this need, so let’s look at what men think and why sex is so important to a man’s life.

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