Sharon was tired of the on-going conflict with her and her husband. She knew something had changed in her marriage, but wasn’t sure what. She just didn’t feel totally safe and at ease with her husband for some reason.
His typical reaction to her apprehensions consisted of resorting to name calling. His favorite was calling her the ‘ice maiden’. In using that name, he was not helping her feel better about herself. She was unresponsive to his needs and demands, and that was all that mattered to him.
Things came to a head one evening when Sharon questioned her husband about the flirtatious chats with his old college sweetheart.
He suddenly turned around and erupted in anger. He yelled at her for three hours about how “You don’t know what love is”.
These days, I’ve encountered growing numbers of couples who don’t know what love is. If you question them about it, they take offense with a “How dare you!” kind of huffiness. In their mind, they know what love is. Even though their role models were what they saw in their family growing up or movies they watched, they are firmly convinced they know what love is.
They never consider that the foundation they are building their marriage on may be a shaky one. Given that 50% of the marriages in the US end in divorce, there’s a 50-50 chance that their role model has flaws. The odds grow slimmer when you consider the large percentage of families where affairs are a familial pattern of behavior (or as Hank Williams, Jr. puts it, “A Family Tradition”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHjaW9sXl7s
Flirting with your old college sweetheart is not conducive to a loving environment in your home. It is not putting your spouse ahead of all others. Neither are three hour lectures (men’s version of nagging). If anything, lecturing your wife is a sure way of shutting them down more rather than getting them warmed up to you.
If you’ve found yourself in the position of being damaged or shut down by an unloving spouse, there’s hope. I deal with some of these issues in the e-book, “Why Wasn’t I Enough?“. If you’ve been in one of those situations, you need some emotional healing.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
