Anonymous Asks (291)

“How should a Christian respond to being in a loveless marriage?”

People have different personalities and experiences, as well as different levels of character development and maturity, so it should not come as a surprise that we enter married life looking for different things. In general, men are looking for respect from their wives, and women are looking for love from their husbands.

I am getting that from a couple of places.

Love and Respect

The most important place is scripture, in which Paul writes, “Let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” This is the consistent teaching of the New Testament. It suggests that, generally speaking, the sexes have different primary needs and different blind spots to the primary needs of their partners. In Colossians, the command for the husband is “love” and for the wife is “submit”. Peter commands the Christian husband to be understanding and to show honor to their wives, and for the Christian wife to “be subject” to her husband. Do you see a pattern there that hints at different primary needs? I do.

The other place I’m getting it is purely anecdotal. I’ve talked to many women who have left their husbands, saved and unsaved, and their consistent refrain is “I just want to be loved.” The perceived lack of love is what made married life undesirable to them, or at least served as a passable excuse for leaving. Likewise, I have asked almost all of my male friends or family members at one time or another, “What is the one thing you crave most from your wife?” Without exception, every one of them said “Respect.”

I absolutely agree. I can manage quite well without being fawned over. In many ways, I’m low maintenance: I do not need endless verbal affirmation, cute gifts, overly-calculated attempts to carve out regular “couple time” or even a pet name. All are perfectly fine, but I can live without any of them. However, to be unappreciated, gossiped about to friends or family, disregarded, manipulated, verbally abused or constantly contended with is intolerable. All are signs of a serious respect deficit.

The Perception of Lovelessness

As I say, people are different. You will find the odd woman who prizes respect over love, and the occasional man who prizes love over respect. Most of us would agree that if we could have it our way, we’d like to have both. But our great Designer knows us better than we know ourselves, and his prescription for a successful marriage patterned after the relationship of Christ and his church is abundantly clear: husbands, love your wives; wives, respect your husbands.

All this is to say that husbands and wives will perceive their marriages as “loveless” for different reasons. If a husband is unaffectionate, harsh, inconsiderate or fails to pay attention to her, his wife will likely conclude he does not love her. Likewise, if he consistently puts his own needs before hers, she will draw the same conclusion, which is probably why Paul tells husbands to love their wives “as themselves”. If your bridge game with the boys, hockey practice, workout or favorite video game is more important to you than finding out what pleases your wife, expect her to perceive her marriage as loveless. At very least it is love-deficient.

On the other hand, if a wife runs her husband down to her friends, is unsupportive, self-occupied, contentious, or shows no practical interest in her husband’s well being and the condition of the home they have together, his perception that he is unloved will not be wildly off base. This is likely even if his wife is a devoted mother, a loving daughter, busy in Christian service and possesses endless other fine qualities. It will also be true even if she calls him “Honey” and says, “I love you” as he’s going out the door to work. Actions speak louder than words.

Talking Past One Another

In my experience, unless one or both parties are having affairs or are sociopathic, few Christian marriages are actually loveless. It is far more likely your partner is expressing love, but doing so in a way you do not recognize. This is often a function of their upbringing.

I read Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages years ago and found it an imperfect but largely accurate predictor of marital happiness, and a persuasive explanation for why even Christians sometimes feel unloved by their partners. Chapman breaks down the “love languages” as follows: acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation and physical touch. He suggests that we all “speak” one or more of these love languages, based on a combination of personality traits probably related to birth order, upbringing, maturity and prior relationship experience. When we experience someone speaking to us in our love language, we feel loved. When they don’t, we don’t.

Chapman’s framework may be completely unscientific. I have no idea. What I do know is that it is consistent with Peter’s command to husbands to “live with your wives in an understanding way”. The Greek word for “understanding” means literally “according to knowledge”, and strongly suggests it is incumbent on the Christian husband to figure out what love means to his wife. He needs to learn to express his affection to her in a way she can most easily comprehend. If giving her a break from changing the baby is what she’s looking for, flowers are not going to cut it. If she wants to hear how much you love her, constant touching may just irritate her. If she grew up in a home where love was expressed in a particular way, loving her the way your own parents loved each other may not communicate the same thing to her.

In short, a Christian woman who perceives her marriage as “loveless” may find there is actually more love going on than she thinks. She and her husband may just be talking past each other. I spent many years in and out of the home of the stereotypical loveless Christian couple. They were not loveless. They were typical Brits: poor communicators who lived lives of quiet desperation. I am convinced both cared deeply, but they just never understood one another. Both were full of goodwill but hopeless at recognizing the other’s emotional needs. Life would not have been better for either if they had parted, but as far as I know, neither one ever figured out who they were living with.

No Love Left

Then again, there are cases in which no love language appears to move one’s partner. I have a friend who tried all five of Chapman’s love languages on his wife over the years and eventually concluded she suffered from anhedonia, or the condition of being unable to feel pleasure. Such situations surely exist. In his case, it turned out to be an insufficient explanation of her behavior. His wife was quite okay with being touched; she just didn’t want him touching her, and she eventually found someone else to do the job. This was not a Christian marriage, so it should not come as a surprise that she took her commitment lightly. When emotional connections fail, as they often do for a time during married life, mature Christian couples can fall back on the commitment they made before God, and trust him to help the appropriate feelings reassert themselves over time. Unbelievers don’t have that kind of support system.

Another friend is struggling with what feels to him like a loveless marriage. Unsurprisingly, the primary issue is that his wife does not respect him. Sometimes, as we have mentioned, that’s the fault of the wife, and the scriptures prescribe the remedy of voluntary respect and submission on her part. Other times, however, a husband who is not behaving in a respect-worthy manner becomes his own worst enemy. Men who are lazy, self-indulgent, poor providers, let you lead them around by the nose, and never pursue any kind of admirable goal in life are notoriously difficult to respect even if you are trying. Men who do not take the lead spiritually can hardly expect to motivate a spiritual response in their partner. That doesn’t excuse a disrespectful Christian wife from her obligations to her husband, but it does suggest a permanent solution may require some changes in the husband’s performance.

A Partner in Rebellion

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell a Christian out of fellowship with the Lord from an unbeliever. A third friend married a girl from a Christian home who had made a profession and was apparently going on for the Lord. For a time, the marriage appeared to thrive. Years later, when she left him, she was not attending church, was out of touch with most of her Christian friends, overly occupied with an unsaved male co-worker and entirely uninterested in either her marriage or her Christian testimony. Perhaps she had gradually drifted away from the Lord unnoticed by her husband. Or perhaps marriage simply allowed her the occasion to stop maintaining a pretense that went back to childhood. There’s no way to know, and she’s not saying.

Where society is concerned, like Elvis, shame and embarrassment have left the building. They will not hold together a loveless marriage to which one party is no longer committed, no matter how committed the other is. In such a case, Paul’s counsel is to let the unbelieving (or apparently unbelieving) partner go in peace.

Just don’t be the one walking.