Rethinking Marriage: A Biblical Response
by: staff - May 1, 2006 - comments: 7
To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:33)
Put aside the cultural threats and you discover that those of us who affirm a biblical (or at least traditional) view of marriage are doing a good job of tearing down this divinely ordained institution all by ourselves. Faith & Family Values talked to Emerson Eggerichs, author of Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs, to seek to identify what is happening to marriages in America.
FFV: In your study of marriages, you’ve identified something you call the crazy cycle.
EE: It’s built on the fact that as a man I crave respect while as a woman my wife craves love. When a husband feels disrespected, he has a natural tendency to react in ways that feel unloving to his wife. When a wife feels unloved, it is especially hard for her to respect her husband.
For instance, suppose it’s mid-January and she gets on the scales. She is upset to discover she’s put on thirteen pounds. So she goes to her husband and says, “I can’t believe it! I’ve put on thirteen pounds from all those Thanksgiving meals and Christmas parties.”
He’s an empathetic guy. So he’s at a Christian bookstore the next day and sees a book on dieting for Christian women. He buys the book, thinking what a considerate and loving husband he is. When he hands it to her, she goes ballistic.
FFV: Men and women are very different.
EE: Genesis teaches that God created us as man and woman. God designed women to look at the world through pink sunglasses, and they color what she sees. She wears pink hearing aids, and they affect what she hears. And she speaks through a pink megaphone. He has blue sunglasses, blue hearing aids, and speaks through a blue megaphone.
So when that husband hands his wife the diet book, she hears through her pink hearing aids this message: “I don’t accept you. I don’t approve of you. I don’t love you unless you look like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”
She is threatened at the core of her being. In her angry response, the message she’s trying to send is: “I don’t feel loved by you right now. Of all the adults in my life, you’re the only one that I’m intimate with. I need reassurance that you love me for who I am.” He perceives her reaction as disrespectful, however, so he doesn’t hear her deeper cry. Needless to say, they’re both confused.
On the other side of the crazy cycle, she goes to that same bookstore several weeks later and gets a book that stresses the key to marital bliss is communication. She buys it, reads it, and decides he needs to read it too. But he’s busy, so she decides to highlight some of the key sections for him to read. She sets the book next to his recliner, but he ignores it. His blue hearing aids are picking up dissonance. His blue sunglasses are fogging over. This is the third marriage book she’s bought in the last twelve months, and the first two books led to huge arguments.
If I say something I’m in trouble; if I don’t say something I’m in trouble. But if I don’t say something I’m in less trouble, so I’m not going to talk about this third book. There’s no point. It’s just going to lead to a huge argument, he says to himself. So he just shuts down.
In a woman’s world that screams “I don’t love you.” But through his blue hearing aids he’s hearing the gift of the marriage book as “I don’t accept you. I don’t approve of you. I don’t respect you unless you change right now. ”
FFV: So this is one reason why couples are divorcing at such epidemic proportions?
EE: That’s the crazy cycle. Without love she reacts without respect; without respect he reacts without love. And the cycle starts to spin. With a 50 percent divorce rate, we have an epidemic.
These are good-willed people. They’re just confused because no one has gone back to this basic biblical text that underscores it’s both love and respect, not just love. The Beatles sang, “All you need is love,” but the Apostle Paul disagreed. Both love and respect are the keys to a successful marriage.
FFV: You’ve looked to Scripture and found a nugget that perhaps a lot of us have been overlooking.
EE: As I say it, there’s something that’s been hidden in plain sight. It’s found in Ephesians 5:33, which is the summary statement to Ephesians 5, the major treatise in the New Testament on marriage. I believe it is the secret to a successful marriage.
FFV: Given the state of marriage inside and outside the church, many of us apparently have missed it.
EE: The Apostle Paul says husbands must love their wives and wives must respect their husbands. The two key ingredients for successful marriages are love and respect. Every wife has a need to feel love for who she is, and when that need is met she’s fulfilled.
Just as she needs to be loved for who she is apart from her performance, he needs to feel respected for who he is apart from his performance. No husband feels love and affection toward a wife he thinks despises him as a human being.
FFVM: We hear about unconditional love in the church. We even know the Greek word for it. But we don’t hear about unconditional respect.
EE: The culture says respect must be earned. There’s a cultural church consensus that love must be unconditional. But the notion that you show unconditional respect to a male does not feel right to women. It’s counterintuitive; it’s countercultural.
Wives and husbands believe, because it’s what the culture tells us, that respect ought to be earned. But 1 Peter 2:17 tells us plainly: “Honor everyone.”
FFV: In the midst of married life, it is common for spouses to overlook this Truth.
EE: If husbands and wives are to understand the love and respect connection, they must realize they communicate in code. Because husbands and wives are wearing different colors of glasses, it takes effort to decode one another’s coded messages. She criticizes out of love, but he only “hears” disrespect. He distances himself to prevent things from escalating, which may be the honorable thing to do, but she “sees” only his failure to be loving.
Usually, when a wife is complaining, criticizing, or crying, she is sending her encoded message: “I want your love!” And when a husband is speaking harshly or sometimes not speaking at all, he usually is sending his encoded message: “I want your respect.”
FFV: When husbands love their wives and wives respect their husbands, they accomplish a greater purpose outside their marriage.
EE: Every time I show love toward a disrespectful person, every time I show respect toward an unloving person, the Lord is honored. It’s not about my wife and me. It’s about Christ and me. Every time we want to be unloving or disrespectful, it’s as though the Lord is saying, “No, no, no. Don’t look at them. It’s me. Show it to me.”
Further Learning
Learn more about: Family, Marriage
7 comments (post your own) feed
1 On Jun 26th, 2006, at 1:40pm, Joe Smith wrote:
1 Peter 2: 17 does not say, “honor everyone”, as you state in this article. It does say, “Show proper respect to everyone:....”.
Honor and respect are two different things. I have respect for the most base human being alive, but I do not honor him.
I would appreciate your reply to my comment.
Thank You,
Joe Smith
2 On Jun 26th, 2006, at 7:10pm, James wrote:
John,
I just want to point out that a couple of versions (KJV and Holman Christian Standard) I looked at do say “honor.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible said “Honor everyone.” Take a look here. I don’t want to argue between translations, but I hope that helps to see why it was used in the article.
Just my two cents.
3 On Aug 27th, 2006, at 4:48am, Rev. Bernard M. Hayes wrote:
Thank you for this information. This is one of the most powerful pieces of information I’ve seen and I’m amazed because I see, in the Word of God, powerful information all the time. I honestly stopped to pray and thank God for allowing me to see this in a time when my wife and I were following the script of the unloving and disrespectful marriage.
One pastor told me that the woman should respond to the man’s lead and the man should respond to the woman’s need. How beautiful these two concepts are when combined.
Again, I greatly appreciate your insight and look forward to additional information.
May God richly bless you.
4 On Oct 4th, 2006, at 3:36am, angela simpkins wrote:
we are in a couples group dealing with love and respect. however none of us seem to have a real good definition of respect. i think we all have a pretty good idea of love (seems more universal in that you know it when you have it and we’ve all experienced it in its miriad forms) but respect appears to be a bit less tangible. too, we have discussed that love is the greater calling. do you agree
5 On Oct 4th, 2006, at 7:07am, Staff wrote:
Hi Angela,
You’ve touched on a struggle that seems to be very common.
There is a small, very practical book that our staff HIGHLY recommends titled For Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn. She faced a similar struggle and discovered extremely tangible solutions. (It’s a good read for husbands as well!)
We interviewed Shaunti about the book on For Faith & Family Radio. Click here to listen to that program and see how some folks responded.
We’ve done well to learn that love is unconditional, but we’ve been taught that respect is earned.
As Dr. Eggerich points out in the above article, this thinking is contrary to scripture. As Eph 5:33 clearly states, the calling is for the husband to love his wife and for the wife to respect her husband. Paul does not instruct us to “respect IF...” He simply calls us to respect (period). It seems we’re built that way: women need love, men need respect. In the context of this passage on marriage, love and respect are equal.
We wish you godspeed as you and your husband learn to love AND respect. :-)
6 On Nov 11th, 2006, at 1:06pm, Diane Adams wrote:
I understand that you say love and respect are equal, but am I scriptually incorrect in thinking it should go both ways? If my husband and I disagree on a subject and we are unable to come to a mutual agreement of how it should be handled, is it scriptually correct that he makes the final decision? Am I supposed to respect that fact, that he does not respect my feelings or feels that in certain situations his views are correct. I really do not know how I am supposed to accept that as the wifes place. I understand that the Husband is the “head of the household” and should be the spiritual leader, but I feel that being the spiritual leader is in all aspects of our family and not just when he uses that to get the last word. I am not even sure if I am making sense, but I need some advice.
God Bless
7 On Jun 1st, 2007, at 8:04am, Tony wrote:
I read Emerson Eggerichs’ book and contacted him via his website to seek individual help with my failed marriage and how to reach my former spouse.
I never heard back from him.
So I question his willingness to really help in such situations.
This has been my recurring experience, I read the books and contact the folks who write them, seeking help. Not once has any of these folks taken on the challenge, nor have the provided a known good local resource.
Some respond, most don’t reply at all.
It really is sad that so-called Christians don’t have the courtesy to respond to real inquiries by hurting fellow believers.