The Wife's Side Series

Ever have trouble communicating with someone? You say something and they either don’t understand or don’t respond and when they speak to you, you have no idea what they just said. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand how to communicate with your spouse, especially on those days that it would really help the mood around your house? Your wife is upset about something that happened and you don’t see the point in arguing so you just let it go and move on. You are fine with it but she keeps bringing it up and “henpecking” you about it. Maybe the tables are turned and you are trying your best to connect to your husband and he just won’t engage you in conversation or even eye contact. He’s done with it and doesn’t want to talk about it. Honestly enough we have a communication issue here.

Think about when you call a technical support line for a computer problem. You call Microsoft support and they send you to India or Pakistan and you get a middle aged man with a thick and heavy accent. He speaks English but sometimes you couldn’t tell if you even tried. He says, “Hello, welcome to Microsoft Technical support. How may I help you?” “Yeah, I keep getting the blue error screen of death after I try to open certain files on my computer. How do I fix it?” He comes back on the line and says, “Yes, just one moment. First open your registry by going to the run command and typing in regedit. Then go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and open the first folder and delete the top line. Now you need to type in random gibberish.” If you aren’t a technical computer guru you have already been lost by the terms he has used but what in the world were you supposed to type in?

Ephesians 5:33 says, “Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.” Dr. Emerson Eggerichs has written a book on this very verse called, “Love and Respect: The love she most desires and the respect he desperately needs.” In this book he describes the way men and women view things in general as the difference between blue and pink. Men wear blue hearing aids and sunglasses that influence how they hear and see things. Women wear pink hearing aids and sunglasses that influence how they hear and see things. Men need respect from their wives and others and so they wear “respect communication equipment.” This equipment is designed to pick up signals of respect. Women need love from others, especially their spouse, and so they wear “love communication equipment.” This equipment is designed to gather signals of love.

So when a woman communicates in womanese, men try to hear it through their blue hearing aids. When men try to communicate through dorkese, women hear it through their pink hearing aids and the message is lost in obscurity. Since it’s mother’s day and because I believe men to be the leaders in the home as God commanded them to be, today we are going to cover how we as men can become better communicators of love to our wives. Wives don’t click off today, because you have to help in this process. We need to break the crazy cycle of arguing and anger. Today guys, we will learn some tools to help our wives feel loved and that will help eliminate a lot of arguments and problems.

Closeness: Meeting her eye to eye – Genesis 2:24

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

Before woman had been created from the rib of Adam, God had already decided that men needed a suitable helper; why? We definitely do not use the full range of emotions and abilities we have. We would have been very lonely at times as well. Just as God wanted mankind to love Him, so he also understood our need for loving relationships. Look closely at the word used to bring man and woman together, joined or cleaved in some versions. The two people are to become so closely connected and interrelated that they are just like a single person. Just as God wants to be intimately connected with us, he made woman to be intimately connected with man.

The last thing we guys seem to want to do at times is look people in the eyes and talk to them. However, she wants to connect. She wants eye to eye contact because to her eye to eye means heart to heart. Remember, God made her to be intimate and you married that intimate creature. You said that you would fulfill your part of the bargain by loving and cherishing that intimate creature. In her world, sitting and talking face to face with her means that you love her and appreciate her.