“Then there was the guy who loved his wife so much, he almost told her.” (Anonymous) That line sounds like the beginning of a corny joke but actually it’s a true testimony of what’s happening in a lot of homes today. Why is it that so many couples speak freely of their love for one another before marriage, but then after the wedding and the every-day-ness of living together as husband and wife starts to set in, those 3 little words, “I love you” seems to be said to each other with less and less frequency? I

s it because it’s not as important to our spouse to express our love to them with words as well as with actions now that we’re married? Absolutely not! It’s because we don’t realize the “currency” value those of those words to the health of a good marriage.

Psychologist John Gottman found in his research on marriages that “Couples who stay satisfied with their relationship maintain a ratio of five positive moments for every one negative.” Saying “I love you” to your spouse (with frequency) can end up contributing to some of the most positive moments of the day for your partner in marriage. We know about that in our own relationship. Even after 31 plus years of being married, those words, when spoken, are still as meaningful to us—if not more so—than even before we became husband and wife. But we also know there are a lot of couples who don’t realize their importance or they wouldn’t withhold them from sharing with each other.

With that said, we’d like to share with you some excerpts of a television program that Dr Phil McGraw had on May 26th that addresses this subject with some interesting ways of looking at it. This particular segment of the program featured Matt and Amanda, who have been married for nearly 7 years. Amanda started out by saying, “My husband won’t tell me that he loves me.” If Amanda tells Matt “I love you” first, he’ll simply respond “mmm-hmmm.”

Matt says he loves his wife, but he shouldn’t have to tell her. As he said, “I come home to her every night. She should just know that I love her.” But Amanda says, “It’s not enough for me. I need to hear him tell me he loves me.” She asks Dr. Phil: “How can I get my husband to say those 3 little words?”

Do you love her?” Dr. Phil asks Matt. “I do love her,” he says. “So why won’t you tell her?” Dr Phil wants to know. “Mmm-hmmm’ is so much easier,” Matt answers. “If you know it’s important to her, why are you unwilling to make the effort to give her the currency she wants?” Dr. Phil asks. “I’ve said it before, women fall in love with their ears. Women are emotional; they want to hear these things.” (In a previous program Dr. Phil makes the observation that, “Men fall in love with their eyes; women fall in love with their ears.”)

Dr. Phil makes the comparison that if a 3-year-old wakes you up in the middle of the night to say he’s thirsty, a parent wouldn’t respond, “Well, I’m not, so go back to bed.” “You might want to,” says Dr. Phil, “but you wouldn’t. You’d respond to the fact that the child is thirsty. Just because you’re not doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to meet someone’s need that you love and care about. And that’s what your wife is saying, ‘I need that.’ That’s a currency for her that she needs. If she needs that, and you love her, and you care about her, and you have the ability to give it to her, why would you not give it to her?”

Matt says that he feels pressured to tell Amanda that he loves her. “That puts me in a hole,” he says. “I’m not going to say it if you’re pressuring me.” “That’s a fair point,” says Dr. Phil. “A lot of people, men and women both, when they say I love you, it’s a question.”

He asks Amanda: “When you say ‘I love you,’ are you asking a question?” Amanda recognizes that it’s a question and that she’s seeking reassurance. “That’s what you object to, correct?” Dr. Phil asks Matt. He says yes, and then clarifies, “If my tools are at the house, I’ll come home to her every night.” I can’t believe you really don’t get this,” Dr. Phil tells Matt, asking if he’s simply rebelling because he feels like he’s being demanded to say “I love you.”

Matt says he comes from a good family and was raised well, but they weren’t “touchy feely lovey.” Dr. Phil jumps in: “But you didn’t marry someone from your family. You married someone from another family!”

Matt and Amanda are in a stand-off, Dr. Phil explains, where she gets needy, which causes him to pull back, which makes her even more clingy, and they end up further and further apart. Dr. Phil makes the analogy that this happens in the wild, where a well-fed lion will ignore a passerby, but a starving lion will do anything to eat. “She’s a hungry lion!” he tells Matt. “You need to feed this woman emotionally.”

Even if it’s not natural for Matt to say, “I love you” or be affectionate with his wife, Dr. Phil says, “There comes a point where you say, ‘You know what? I’m going to do this because it’s a gift to her.’”

I’ve had to mature in my marriage,” Dr. Phil says. “I’ve been married 27 years now. When I first got married, my attitude was ‘provide and protect.’ Then I learned, as I matured, that there’s more to it than that. And I changed my definition of how I define success as a man. It came to me one day that I could really be successful as a man the day I knew my wife could stand in a room with 1,000 women and know in her heart there wasn’t a person in that room that got treated better than she was behind closed doors.” Dr Phil adds, “I did it not because it was natural for me, but because it was important to [Robin].”

Dr. Phil asks Matt, “Will you consider that? Will you weigh that? It’s more than where you leave your tools.”

 

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And how about you? Are you telling your spouse those “3 little words” enough times that they know beyond a shadow of doubt that they’re “loved, honored, and cherished”? Are you exhibiting the love of Christ to your spouse both in your words and in your actions?We’d like to recommend a resource that can help propel your marriage to a new level of understanding and expressing love. It’s Dr. Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re really missing out on a great “help” for your marriage. Buy this book now. 

It’s the prayer of our hearts that today will be the day that we take our love for each other even more seriously— taking it “up a notch” to the honor and glory of God that as others observe how we treat each other in our marriage, they’ll be drawn to the love of God as a result!

 

Have a great week! God Bless!
Cindy and Steve Wright

PS. If you’d like to get more information on the Dr. Phil segment we mentioned this week, you can find it at his web site, www.DrPhil.com.

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