by Shaunti Feldhahn
For both men and women, we often completely forget (or brush off altogether) the fact that we are very different, and thus have very different insecurities. Different doubts, worries, needs, and desires. Which means: things that wouldn’t bother us in any way might legitimately hurt our spouse.
Guys, what does this mean for you? Never, ever underestimate your ability to either make your wife feel secure in your love—or very insecure.
I know this sounds odd to you, but even the most confident woman, in a great relationship, has subconscious doubts that you don’t usually see. Most women (82% according to our For Men Only survey) have a deep hidden question. Am I loveable? Am I beautiful? Especially to him? Is he glad he married me?
Although there are exceptions, most men don’t have those questions. Once you are married, you probably don’t wonder, “Does she love me? Is she glad she married me?” So you don’t realize your wife does have those questions. And you have no idea how easily she can doubt the answers.
So imagine that you are displeased with your wife over something that happened. Maybe she overrode a decision you made about one of the kids. Maybe she did something that made you feel stupid in front of your friends. It isn’t a huge life-altering deal, but it matters to you and you’re legitimately upset. You withdraw. Or maybe it isn’t really about her; maybe you’re mostly worrying over some mistakes at work. Maybe you’re working lots of extra hours, and are just tired and in a bad mood this week.
Regardless of the situation, you can tell she wants to talk. Or she wants to make up. But you’re just not ready. Instead you’re withdrawn, silent, maybe angry, maybe sullen and grumpy for a while.
None of what you’re doing would particularly hurt, if she was doing it to you. At least that much.
For her, it is excruciating.
Why? Because it is triggering her personal insecurity. Without realizing it—and certainly without intending to!—you are answering “Am I loveable? Is he glad he married me?” with a resounding “NO.”
What to do? Two things:
First, you probably assume she knows how much I love her. Don’t! She has the “Is he glad he married me?” question every day, so she needs to know the answer through simple words and gestures every day. (See this column for ideas.)
But second, and more to our point here, realize: what wouldn’t hurt you much (if at all) legitimately hurts your wife. So when you’re upset, she needs reassurance of your love to diminish that hurt, or avoid it entirely. Now, you may or may not be able to immediately change your feelings, or your desire to withdraw. But you can change how you handle it. This reassurance will go a long way: “I’m upset, I need some space to process this, but I love you and we’re okay.” That will tell her that this period of displeasure is not the beginning of things going bad.
Your wife is a smart woman, and she probably knows that logically . . . but because she is different from you, her heart needs to hear it.
Reposted with permission. This article originally appeared here.
What if you are genuinely not glad you married her? What if it’s the worst thing that ever happened to you, because you saved yourself a virgin for her until marriage, and then marriage opened up the fires of passion, but soon into the marriage she denied you affection and intimacy, refusing to talk about it, and here you are 1/4 of a century later and she has wasted your youth, wasted your one and only marriage opportunity, doing what only your worst mortal enemy would deviously do to you, which is ensuring you’d live in a daily hell of being stsrved for affection. And despite all the Christian counselors you’ve been to, she continues to withhold affection, throw respect for you out the window at the drop of a hat (thus denying that your personhood has any value), and yelling at you all the time merely because she feels like it, being impossible to please no matter how many times you do the dishes, and she refuses to be accountable to you when you bring up her unloving behavior, and she hasn’t kept a single one of your marriage vows of being true TO you (sure, she’s not having an affair, but she’s not doing any od the having, holding, loving, cherishing, or anything she promised at the wedding), and despite claiming to be a Christian, none of the Bible changes her heart, and everything that 1 Corinthians 13 says that love is, she consistently displays the opposite towards me and our kid (but not anyone else). What if beign married is absolutely the worst thing that ever happened to you, when prior to marriage it was one of the things you most looked forward to, because you thought, “finally someone in this world will pay attention to me and like me and love me instead of being insouciant towards me, ignoring me because I’m not a dashing hunky prince.” But then after getting married, you realize God has tricked you. Into thinking marriage would be a good thing with the verse that now mocks you, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains the Lord’s favor.” And now every night you have to lie next to someone you always found attractive, but won’t ket you touch her because early in the marriage she adopted the unspoken stance that the marriage bed is only for sleeping in, and woe to the person who loes in bed while awake. And so now every day instead of waking up out of a nightmare you wake up into a nightmare, your first conscious thought every day is “oh, no, it’s real” as you realize you will be yelled at, mistreated, denied affection, and are trapped between the wall of your marriage vows and the hard place of marital unfulfillement, with a spouse who won’t meet your desires, and with no other human being who can lawfully mert your desires, and with God of course not going to meet those physical desired because he gave you your wife with that purpose and responsibility. And though you have loved her as much as you imperfectly can, you now honestly can’t tell the difference between God’s blessing and his curse, between whether he is good or even if you know what good is anymore. And on top of that he is silent, not giving you wisdom on how to proceed or make it day by day through the despair, as you realize your youth is gone and there is no marriage (or marital physical affection) in heaven so your one shot of a life was wasted, and you say every day “I wish I’d never been born”, and you genuinely wish God would permanently end your existence, because your soul is not inherently eternal beczuse it was created, and only can persist eternally if God so sustains it, and you’re pretty sure you won’t like heaven being with a God you don’t like because he brought you this woman, and it was very clear that this was the one he had brought into my lofe to marry, but he decided instead I neeses to be emotio ally pummelled for the rest of my life, and that acarss me because what is he preparing me for? The promise in Revelation where those who overcome will rule with Christ over the nations with a rod of iron makes you think that you’ll be dealing with hard-heads in eternity who need to be ruled over by force (just as thr Roman empire was decribed in prophecy as being iron that crushes everything before it), and you can’t find a place of peace because if this is God’s love towards you, then what does his hate look like? But then you realize that God can treat you however he wants and still be rightous because he made you and therefore owns you and can do whatever he wants with you, and “God is good” does not mean there is an external standard called “good” that we can judge God by, but it simply means that whatever he chooses to do is what defines what “good” is, and that is different than what it means to treat one another in a way that is “good” because God has commanded us to love one another, and because he owns us and them, then he has the right to twll us how to treat others (as we would like to be treated), but that same standard does not appy to him beczuse he is not our equal but is instead our superior and owner, and due to his rights of property ownership he gets to tell us what to do, but he himself does not have to treat us in that same manner, just as you have a right to key your car’s paint but your neighbor does not.
So when your 25th wedding anniversary rolls around, the 2 of you do almost nothing to celebrate it, because in your heart you want to guve her a card that says “what’s there to celebrate?”, but you know it wouldn’t do any good to get her attention, because you’ve written her letters and twlked about it in the past and sbe either ignores my letters or interrupts what I say mid-sentence because she doesn’t want to hear what I say, because in her mind because I have not loved perfectly then I am just a hypocrite to try to hold her accountsble to her actions, and so she conveniently avoids all accountability for anything she does that is hurtful or unkind. So she can yell in my face that I’m a jerk when she thinks I am being heavy-handed in discipline of our kid, screwing her face up with all the hate ahe can muster, while I have to remain the calm one and take this abuse like a man, while inside my heart breaks that I now have to deal with 2 temper tantrums instrad of 1, and this was the woman who was supposed to be FOR me. My journals are full of these entries. There are no good memories. Every good memory is tainted by the accompanying mistreatment, emotional and physical distance, and codependently trying to please an unpleaseable person whonis borderline narcissist.