Love and Respect (17 page)

YOUR WIFE FEELS CLOSE TO YOU WHEN . . .

• you hold her hand.

• you hug her.

• you are affectionate without sexual intentions.

• you are with her alone so you can focus on each other and laugh together.

• you go for a walk or jog . . . anything that results in togetherness.

• you seek her out . . . set up a date night . . . eat by candlelight.

• you go out of your way to do something for her, like run an errand.

• you make it a priority to spend time with her.

• you are aware of her as a person with a mind and opinions . . . let her know you enjoy discussing things with her and getting her insights.

• you suggest the unexpected . . . get takeout and eat on the beach . . . take a walk to see the full moon . . . park on the bluff and watch the sunset.

• you pillow talk after making love . . . lie close with your arm around her and share feelings and intimate ideas . . . and never turn on
SportsCenter
or
Nightline.

CHAPTER TEN
OPENNESS—SHE WANTS YOU
TO OPEN UP TO HER

W
hile doing marriage counseling, I have noticed a distinctive trend among the couples who come in to see me. As they enter my office and sit down, the husband will position himself so that he can see me. He will occasionally look up or down or to the opposite side, but he seldom looks directly at his wife except with quick glances. The wife will position herself so she can see her husband and me. She will watch us both because she is trying to figure out what is going on inside of her husband—what he is thinking. Remember, as a woman, she is expressive-responsive. She wants to talk about things. She wants to have her problems out in the open for discussion in order to solve them.

Her husband, however, plays it close to the vest. He is the opposite of expressive-responsive—what psychologists consider “compartmentalized.” His wife senses something is going on inside, but he won’t talk about it. “Nothing is wrong,” he says. Yet her intuition tells her he is definitely upset. So the wife is confused, and she says, “I sometimes don’t know which to believe.” But she never quits. She keeps coming at the problem, trying to figure it out. She longs for his love, which is experienced in her world by connecting openly with his heart.

SMASH ONE OF HER LIGHTS AND ALL OF THEM GO OUT

To fully understand the dynamics that are going on when a couple sits in my office for counseling, it’s helpful to define the terms
expressive-responsive
and
compartmentalized
with a simple illustration. We have already seen that men and women are very different—pink and blue see and hear things differently at the level of marital intimacy. Think of this difference as two types of electrical circuits. On one circuit there are three thousand lights, and the circuit is so designed that if one light gets smashed the whole string goes out. On the other circuit there are three thousand lights, and it is designed so that if you smash two thousand of these lights, the other thousand will still work.

A closed husband seems to his wife to be so ill-tempered “that no one can even talk to him”(1 Samuel 25:17 NIRV).

At the level of intimacy, the wife is like the first circuit. If a serious marital conflict exists, this affects her whole being. All of her “lights” go out, and she shuts down totally. This is because she is an integrated personality. Her mind, body, and soul are connected and her entire system reacts to feelings of hurt. Let her husband make one small, unkind remark that feels unloving to her and she is totally upset with him until things are repaired. As one wife told me, “If I’m battling with him in one area, I am at war with him in all areas.”

Sometimes a woman can feel at war with her husband because he leaves her feeling lonely. Following is the kind of letter I receive from many wives:

So many nights he would come home, watch TV till late, come to bed wanting sex, and I would feel used and unloved. Those feelings of loneliness, I guess, came back to me last night and I didn’t like the way I was feeling. . . . I felt like the TV was more important than me. I realize it isn’t true, but that is how I feel. He gets very upset with me when he reads my body language. He will hardly talk to me for days.

Let every husband heed what this woman is saying. When she believes there is a problem, when she feels hurt, lonely, or neglected, she definitely has no interest in responding to you sexually. When her spirit is crushed, her body is unavailable.

The wife’s crushed spirit is not hard to see. Her face tells it all. While women are expressive, men are more poker-faced. The wife may complain that her husband seems to be able to operate as if there is no problem between them when she clearly is still upset and feeling crushed. He goes to work, and when he returns home, he cannot believe she is fully charged to talk about an earlier tension. Usually he has to be reminded of what exactly happened because he has forgotten. For her, the whole day has been interwoven with the spat they had at breakfast. She has replayed and rehearsed the episode a dozen times. But he says, “Oh well . . . let’s just forget it, okay? Let’s move on.”

She cannot imagine how he could make such a remark. Why is he not upset the way she is upset? The answer is easy. Remember the two electrical circuits? Her husband is the one where you can smash two thousand of his lights and the other thousand will still work. That is what is meant by “compartmentalizing” his problems. A man has much more ability to control his reactions. His blood pressure may be going through the roof, but he can keep it under wraps. He may be deeply pained, but he shoves it into a “compartment” in his mind, saying to himself,
What’s the point in trying to talk about this if that’s the way she feels?
¹

WIVES SEE HUSBANDS AS MYSTERIOUS ISLANDS

What I have just covered is a powerful piece of information for all husbands. Understanding that she is integrated, that she is expressive responsive, gives you a huge insight into knowing how to respond when she probes to get you to open up. When a couple sits in my office, the wife is trying to figure him out. She cannot understand why her husband is not as expressive as he was during courtship.

During those first months of dating, both of them had been totally open, sharing inner dreams, yearnings, fears, and failures. They spoke heart to heart, and their openness was something they could literally feel, much like the lovers described in Song of Solomon: “The one I love was at the door, knocking and saying, ‘My darling, my very own, my flawless dove, open the door for me!’ ” (5:2 CEV). The imagery of the opening door symbolizes two people drawing close and sharing their hearts. They are attracted to each other sexually, emotionally, and spiritually.

So what happens to the typical male’s “openness” once he is married? During courtship the man was seeking to discover the woman of his dreams. It was an exhilarating adventure. Once he concluded that she was his dream come true, contentment set in. He no longer felt the need to share and be open. In fact, he preferred simply being together, shoulder to shoulder, and saying little (more on this in chapter 20). He didn’t understand that his openness during courtship was spelling love to her in big letters, and that she was being energized beyond words by his transparent talk. Now that he is married, he doesn’t understand her need for him to be open—to simply talk to her, share with her.

Every wife dreams of narrating to others, “My beloved speaks . . . to me”(Song of Solomon 2:10 ESV), as she reports in detail their romantic conversations and adventures.

To wives, husbands often appear as mysterious islands. Wives keep paddling around their husbands, looking for a place to come ashore, but there is a fog holding them back. There is no place to land. He appears to refuse her access. As one wife wrote to me:

He is completely disengaged. It is really difficult being around him. He NEVER talks. I have no idea what would touch his heart and I really would like to know. It seems as though I am stumbling around in a dark room and the light switch is not where it is supposed to be.

Of course, there are always exceptions. I have counseled couples in which the woman holds in her problems and the man wears his heart on his sleeve, but down through the years these couples have been in the minority. Generally speaking, men and women follow the pattern I lay out above. (See appendix D.)

SARAH PREFERS TO BE UP-TO-DATE ON A DAILY BASIS

Most wives are like Sarah. She prefers to talk about marital problems on a daily basis to keep the relationship “up-to-date.” Sarah feels this prevents any major problems from developing. Throughout our early years of marriage, I really didn’t understand what she meant by keeping things up-to-date to prevent problems. In fact, I often thought that talking about potential problems on a daily basis had to mean we really did have some kind of major marital problem!

I, Emerson, needed to be reminded of the Scriptures: “The heart of her husband trusts in her”(Proverbs 31:11).

Through the years I misinterpreted Sarah’s purpose behind the talks. I often felt they were another rebuke for my failure to be loving, so I’d pull back to prevent feeling disrespected. When I responded to her questions with silence, she would move toward me even more, trying to find out what the difficulty was. And that only made me withdraw all the more. I finally learned what was going on, but until I did, the Crazy Cycle spun more than it needed to.

Now, to keep us on the Energizing Cycle, I work hard at decoding Sarah’s messages when she starts asking questions or pressing me for information. I still have that natural male inclination to think she may be snooping, prying, criticizing, or even trying to control me. I am tempted to feel like the husband who told me, “My wife is always prying. I feel like she has these giant claws, you know the kind they use to open up automobiles to rescue people inside, and she is meddling to get inside me. I need my space. I need my independence.”

I know how this man feels, but I put those kinds of thoughts aside. I know Sarah is not trying to control me; she is a good-willed woman. I know she just wants to connect with me and feel an openness and closeness between us. This is a powerful part of her femininity—why I fell in love with her in the first place.

As a husband you must understand that those feelings of being interrogated and thinking your wife is snooping or asking a lot of unnecessary questions are going to come over you. It will happen, and you must stop yourself before you get upset. Think about
why
your wife is doing this. She wants to keep things up-to-date. She’s moving toward you because she loves you—
you matter to her
!

“She does him good and not evil all the days of her life”(Proverbs 31:12).

Unfortunately, some husbands can’t or won’t try to deal with their verbal wives because they fear feeling inadequate and disrespected. One woman acknowledged, “Through the years I came off as the heavy in the relationship and he always felt when we discussed things it was to fix him and he avoided our so-called discussions.”

One man who along with his wife was struggling to spend more time on the Energizing Cycle wrote to admit that at one time his fear of openness had been a major problem. He said:

I did not reveal myself to her. I stuffed many of my thoughts, emotions and needs that I feared would lead to rejection if I voiced them. . . . This was cutting her off. . . . I believe this was an abdication of my responsibility. I have known for many, many years that honesty and openness is God’s way but had not really come to terms with it until recently.

Over the years I have dealt with many bitter husbands whose anger simmers just below the surface. This kind of husband is not sweetly and gently open with his wife. Instead, he is suspicious of her and feels she has an agenda to irritate and provoke him. His wife intuitively knows, or strongly suspects, he is secretly and constantly mad at her. Paul may well have had this kind of man in mind when he wrote the only negative admonition in the entire New Testament to husbands about how they should treat their wives: “Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them” (Colossians 3:19).

The concept conveyed in the Greek is the idea of a bitter taste in the mouth. To be embittered means that you are upset and irritated, exasperated, indignant, and angry. When we talk about a person being bitter, we usually think he is churning angrily inside over some past disappointment. The embittered husband can be harsh, cynical, or resentful. Instead of being open to his wife, he closes off his deepest heart, giving the impression there is very little he finds tasteful about her.

The bitter husband has no hope for openness with his wife. Perhaps some degree of bitterness is still a problem for you in your marriage, even though you and your wife have vowed to get off the Crazy Cycle and start energizing each other. The answer to bitterness is to listen to the gentle prodding of the Holy Spirit (see John 14:17, 26; Romans 8:9). That can work wonders, as one wife’s letter clearly shows. She and her husband attended one of our Love and Respect Conferences. Afterward, she still felt emotionally raw and vulnerable. The next day he sharply criticized her driving. Sensing she was hurt, he later asked if everything was okay. She told him how she felt—she couldn’t please him when she drove—and he argued, saying that her feelings were wrong, making her feel worse. The letter continues:

But about five minutes later, he came to find me, to tell me he was sorry, and that if what he was doing [to be] helpful was, in fact, harmful, he would stop immediately. Then we hugged and it was over. How wonderful! Just a little thing but great!

This husband decided to concentrate on his inner man. Instead of rationalizing his negative attitudes and criticisms, he reconsidered. He listened to that still, small voice within. As he opened up to his wife, she felt his love! If only husbands could recognize the power of their love and how badly their wives want it. Here are quotes from different wives who long for openness and a little tenderness: