Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs Read Free Book Online Page B

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