You’ve probably all heard sermons and marriage seminars that talked about the respect and love passage in Ephesians 5:33. The big quandary for many of us is how we can possibly live out those words when our husband is involved in unrespectable sexual behaviors that make us feel anything but loved.
Both men and women are born with specific needs—physical needs, relational needs, spiritual needs and, most relevant to this topic—emotional needs. The core emotional need of men is RESPECT, and for women it is SECURITY. (I would call it “love”, but that word has come to mean so many different things that it’s easy to misinterpret). Neither gender will feel safe and fully able to trust if their own basic emotional need isn’t being met.
“How can I respect him?” is, without a doubt, one of the most common questions we hear from the wives of sex addicts. Meanwhile, their husbands are cluelessly asking, “Why is my pornography use such a big deal to my wife ?. . . It’s not like I’m having an affair or anything . . . it’s just some pictures. “
So why are these pictures and fantasies so painful for us?
As we said, security is a woman’s core emotional need. Security (which feels like love to us) is needed in two specific areas: financial and relational. If we are married, we yearn to hear “you can count on me” from our husbands. Even if we are reasonably self-sufficient and have our own income, we still have a deep-down need to know that we can relax because someone is watching our back and we don’t need to worry about whether we or our children will have a safe home and enough of the things we need to live and thrive.
When our husband forgets a simple thing he has promised to do, like taking out the garbage, it can shake our confidence in the fact that we can actually count on him for bigger, more important things. Even though the actual “offense” is miniscule, it makes us wonder whether we can trust him at all.
The other security component —the relational one—however, is even more important than tangible comforts. We need to feel like we are “special.” We want assurance that we are chosen above all others—that we are seen, heard, pursued, and irreplaceable.
If our husband is staring at women on the street, or looking at pornography, it’s not him we are doubting, as much as it is ourselves. Most wives come to the conclusion that if he needs to look at someone else, SHE must not be good enough. It certainly doesn’t make us feel chosen or irreplaceable. Even if the women our husbands are ogling are only pictures on a page or computer screen, they feel like competition. Those women are the ones that have captured our husband’s attention, instead of us. It feels very personal and very life-shaking. It hurts in the deepest parts of our souls. We no longer feel the security of being the object of his love and protection.
Even though I cognitively knew that sexual addiction was not about lust or wanting another woman over me, I felt those same doubts about myself every time Bruce had a slip in the early years of our marriage. I felt so rejected and vulnerable. My first reaction was always to find a way to protect myself since I wasn’t sure I could count on Bruce at that moment. That protection sometimes looked like anger, other times like emotional or physical distancing—whatever helped me feel safe again. Unfortunately, my responses seldom looked like I was believing in him, which made him feel disrespected and pull away from me as well.
Over time, Bruce and I learned that we, like so many couples, made way too many assumptions about what the other person was needing or thinking. The only way we could get to the truth and stop hurting each other more was to turn toward each other in these difficult times. Reaching out to the one that feels like an enemy goes against all our survival instincts, but it is only as we took that risk and began to talk about what we were feeling and fearing that we were able to start rebuilding the trust we had lost.
“However each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” – Ephesians 5:33
TODAY’S CHAT: How do you generally try to protect yourself when you’re feeling unsafe or unloved? Does this tactic help or hinder your ability to reach out to one another.
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