This Christian Life

Love and Respect

Do you ever wonder why it’s so hard sometimes to communicate with your spouse? Have you ever been arguing with her and sort of get stuck, wondering how to move the argument on? My wife and I went to a mini-conference this weekend called Love and Repsect. I learned more in seven hours about how men and women work and communicate than I think I have in my whole marriage. The thing is, it’s so easy, but I never understood it before.

Here it is: Men want respect more than love and women want love more than respect. The speaker, Emerson E. Eggerichs, Ph.D., talked about the “crazy cycle” that men and women get into when things go awry in a marriage. You read the cycle like this: Without love, she reacts without respect. Without respect, he reacts without love. When in fact, if we behaved just the opposite, we’d be able to jump off the crazy cycle and move through issues and have a much better marriage. So, the “energizing” cycle becomes: His love motivates her respect. Her respect motivates his love.

It simply works. Now I just have to figure out how to love my wife more…