Love and Respect (6 page)

Not every woman has this problem, but I have counseled many who admit they do have their periods of negativity concerning husbands or the children. Sometimes this is known as PMS (Pre-Murder Syndrome). Everyone ducks for cover when Mom is in that kind of mood. No one doubts her basic mother love, but sometimes they’re not so sure she really
likes
them.

Part of the problem, however, is that women are not at all sure
they
are being loved, especially by their husbands. The question continues to come up: “Does he love me as much as I love him?” It sure doesn’t seem like it. When he acts (or reacts) in ways that seem unloving to her, she reacts in ways that feel disrespectful to him. Who started it? Yes!

“YOU’RE STEPPING ON MY AIR HOSE!”

The more I meditated on these two passages of Scripture, the more I realized that if a husband is commanded to
agape
-love his wife, then she truly
needs
love. In fact, she needs love just as she needs air to breathe. Picture, if you would, the wife having an air hose that goes to a love tank. When her husband bounds in and starts prancing around like a ten-point buck looking for someplace to graze, he steps on her air hose. This does not make her a happy camper. In fact, if she can find a baseball bat or some other weapon, she might just whack the big buck and tell him, “Get off my air hose; I can’t breathe.” Simply put, when her deepest need is being stepped on, you can expect her to react negatively.

In counseling, I tell the husband that when he sees the spirit of his wife deflate, he is stepping on her air hose. She is not getting the “air” she needs to breathe. She is crying out, “I feel unloved by you right now. I can’t believe how unloving this feels. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

Not only is the husband commanded to love his wife, but the wife is commanded to respect her husband. You see, the husband needs respect just as he needs air to breathe. He also has an air hose that runs over to a big tank labeled “respect,” and as long as the “air” is coming through, he is just fine.

To keep the deer analogy going, suppose the wife, a lovely doe, starts tromping on his air hose with her sharp little hoofs. As we have seen ina story like the tenth anniversary birthday card, the wife may have had good reason to prance all over her husband’s air hose, but what’s going to happen? As his air hose starts to leak because of all the little cuts her hoofs have made in it, the husband is also going to react because his deepest need (respect) is not being met. And the battle is on.

As I worked out what Ephesians 5:33 is saying, I started doodling with a diagram like the face of a clock. At 12:00 I wrote, “Without love.” At 3:00 I wrote, “She reacts.” (If she needs love like she needs air to breathe, and she’s being suffocated, she
will
react.) Then at 6:00 I wrote, “Without respect,” and at 9:00, “He reacts.” (If he needs unconditional respect like he needs air to breathe, and he’s hearing criticism or being attacked in some way, he
will
react.)

And there you have it—the Crazy Cycle (see page 5). Husbands and wives keep spinning on the Crazy Cycle because they don’t understand that what seems to be the issue isn’t the issue at all. The real issues are always love and respect. Everything else is just filling in the details.

MEN HEAR CRITICISM AS CONTEMPT; WOMEN FEEL SILENCE AS HOSTILITY

Let me emphasize to wives that when men hear negative criticism, it doesn’t take them long to start interpreting that as contempt for who they are as men. Remember, the man is wearing blue hearing aids. When his wife sends out those pink but very pointed messages and his air hose starts to leak, he soon says to himself,
I don’t deserve this kind of talk. Everybody respects me except you. You’re just picking a fight. I wish you would just be quiet.

When a husband can take it no longer, he gets up and walks out without a word, and that is the
coup de grâce.
He might as well have screamed at the top of his lungs, “I don’t love you!” The wife is dazed. First, she has been treated unlovingly. Second, she has tried to move toward her husband by doing the loving thing. And now he has shown her he is the most hostile, unloving human being on the planet by just walking away and leaving her there! That does it! She is not far from thinking she has all kinds of grounds for divorce. (But if she does stop to think, she will realize that she started the whole thing with her criticism.)

Often both spouses have goodwill but are not deciphering each other’s code. She criticizes out of love, but he “hears” only disrespect. He distances himself to prevent things from escalating, which is the honorable thing to do, but she “sees” only his failure to be loving!

Right about now the women reading this are saying, “Well, if husbands just weren’t so immature . . . if my husband could just be man enough to talk things out, then we could get somewhere.” You can think that kind of thing, and I understand why you would. Unfortunately, it’s not going to change men at all. This attitude of men goes a lot deeper than the fact that they might be immature or proud. Men have an honor code. When a wife comes at a husband who has basic goodwill, he doesn’t want to fight verbally or physically. As his wife rails at him or criticizes, he sits there quietly, which makes her angrier than ever. Because her frontal attack isn’t working, she soon sees him as cold and uncaring. Meanwhile, he’s thinking,
I can’t believe this. My wife is treating me with disrespect—in fact, it’s really contempt. All she can say is that I am unloving.

The Crazy Cycle continues to spin. As she gets louder, he gets quieter. Soon she may be screaming at him with venomous words that he’s never heard in all his life. As a rule, women have learned to fight with words. They are masters of the art, and husbands can feel helpless before the onslaught.

I want to underline that this happens all the time with couples who actually have good intentions—and maybe more so because they feel freer to let down their guard and express what upsets them. Most husbands and wives who are on the Crazy Cycle have basic goodwill toward one another, but they just don’t know how to express it. And so the Crazy Cycle eventually spins many of them right into separation and divorce. I’ve had couples fighting with one another in my office, and I have said, “Time out . . . time out! Sir, let me ask you something, does your wife have basic goodwill toward you and others? Would you entrust the children to her?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Ma’am, does he have basic goodwill toward you and others, and would you entrust the children to him?”

“Of course.”

“Then what is going on with you two? How can two goodwilled people treat one another this way?”

The husband and the wife will look at me as if to ask, “Why don’t you tell us? All we know is, we fight and fight and fight, and usually we really don’t know why.”

As I have tried to explain to many couples over the years, a major part of the answer is learning how to decode each other’s messages. Whenever a wife is complaining, criticizing, or crying, she is sending her encoded message: “I want your love!” And whenever a husband is speaking harshly or sometimes not speaking at all, he is sending his encoded message: “I want your respect.”

We’ve begun to see how this decoding can start to happen, but there are still problems that stand in the way. Men, for the most part, are masters at stonewalling their wives, who confront them because they feel unloved. And many women are so fed up with husbands who don’t seem to want to love them that the last thing they want to grant is respect. These women say the husband has to earn her respect before she will grant it; but, of course, if she continues to disrespectfully hammer at him, especially when he is trying to do the honorable thing, nothing much will happen. We’ll look at how all this plays out and how husbands and wives can deal with these problems in the next chapter.

CHAPTER THREE
WHY SHE WON’T RESPECT;
WHY HE WON’T LOVE

L
earning to decipher your spouse’s code isn’t always done in a day, a month, or even a year. Listen to this husband who came to me for counsel because he sincerely was trying to love his wife. He writes:

Thanks for all your suggestions and support. [But] I remain perplexed at the chasm that exists between my perception and reality. When I began this endeavor, I had hope but low expectations, and I was happy to see how quick and positive the effects of “loving” behavior are. It was not difficult to bite my tongue and not “fight back” when I prepared myself for it. I think that while I felt apologetic, I can easily be humble and pretty much take anything that comes my way.

The difficulty begins when I begin to see things return to normal. When I let my guard down, I begin to talk or share and it turns out that underneath things are very volatile and sensitive. When things started to go bad last week, it happened extremely fast and I was surprised to hear how all the same issues remain at the same raw and grim level. I hate hearing that I am her enemy. It is painful to hear her ask, “Why do you want to crush my spirit?” It is extremely difficult to not explode in despair when I hear her say that she doesn’t believe that I love her, or that I will never change, or that she made a mistake and I am not the man she thought I was.

It sure makes it seem that the road is long and possibly fruitless. Amidst getting angry, and blaming her, and the gambit of contorted emotional upheavals, I hear you saying that it is rarely the content but rather the manner of delivery that causes problems and I cringe at my inability to communicate effectively. Things have gotten so grossly out of shape and I feel shamed that I’ve been blind and let them get so bad. I also feel a little overwhelmed that all this effort and tolerance will only get us to some point of mediocrity, and that at the slightest perturbation everything will come tumbling down again.

Realizing marriage demanded permanence and work, the disciples complained, “If the relationship . . . is like this, it is better not to marry”(Matthew 19:10).

Few men can articulate the male struggle as well as this man does. His wife is crying out for love, but she isn’t helping at all because of her contempt. Why do some women feel so free to make comments like, “You’re not the man I thought you were” to their husbands and expect them to remain unaffected? How do wives expect husbands to respond with love to this kind of barrage? At the same time, how do men get themselves in such a pickle by being so blind in the first place?

UNCONDITIONAL RESPECT—AN OXYMORON?

When I talk to wives, they have no trouble grasping the concept of unconditional love. After all, they are wired that way. But when I men tion showing unconditional respect for husbands, it’s a much harder sell. Few seem to have considered 1 Peter 3:1–2. The apostle Peter reveals that husbands who “are disobedient to the word” (meaning they are undeserving of respect) “may be won . . . by . . . respectful behavior.” A simple application is that a wife is to display a respectful facial expression and tone when he fails to be the man she wants. She can give her husband unconditional respect in tone and expression while confronting his unloving behavior and without endorsing his unloving reactions. He may deserve contempt, but that doesn’t win him any more than harshness and anger wins the heart of a woman.

Interestingly, at first men don’t grasp the idea of unconditional respect either. Wives and husbands believe respect ought to be earned. The wife feels her husband doesn’t deserve respect. The husband wants to earn respect, but he doesn’t feel he deserves the kind of disrespect he’s getting from his wife.

The Bible teaches unconditional respect: “Show proper respect to everyone.. . . Not only to those who are good and considerate . . . but . . . harsh”(1 Peter 2:17–18 NIV).

To suggest that respect for men should be unconditional gets some wives downright upset. Repeatedly, I hear comments like these from wives: “How can I show respect for him when he comes across as so unloving?” . . . “He doesn’t deserve respect; he has hurt me” . . . “I love him, but I get so frustrated and angry I don’t want to respect him” . . . “Love is what matters. If he loved me as I need to be loved, maybe I would have stronger feelings of respect” . . . “Yes, I have things to deal with, but the major problem is with him and he needs to change. The truth is he needs to love and respect me far better than he does.”

Time and again I’ve had women tell me they’ve never heard the two words
unconditional respect
put together in the context of a relationship. For them, it is literally an oxymoron (a term created by putting together two words that appear to be incongruous or contradictory).

A licensed counselor who used my materials and became a thorough believer in the power of the Love and Respect message wrote to say:

Just yesterday, I talked to two new female clients who were wanting to save their marriages that were barely alive. I asked them if they loved their husbands. Without hesitation they said, “Yes.” I then asked if they respected their husbands. I got nothing but hesitation! They sputtered like an old car needing a tune-up. One of them admitted that she was quite the reader, but she had never heard anything like this before. She asked me how she was supposed to respect her husband unconditionally. I told her in the same way that he was supposed to love her unconditionally. It’s only with God’s help. She smiled.

Note that these two wives had no problem with the concept of unconditional love. Women never think of
that
as an oxymoron. To them, the words
unconditional love
aren’t contradictory at all, and when they don’t receive love from their husbands, they let them know it. Women are much more expressive-responsive than men, who tend to compartmentalize their emotions. To put it simply, women are much more apt to show how they feel while men shut down. Men don’t know how to deal with the fact that they aren’t respected, and they can’t put a voice to their feelings. The husbands think,
Well, if that’s the way she feels, there’s nothing I can do. If I have to earn her respect and I’m that bad as a person, then I guess I’ll just forget it.