In 2013 I had been married 8 years. I had a carpenter husband, but was living in a one-bedroom apartment that he would not extend. He wasn’t very interested in sex, it didn’t matter what I did, or how often I asked him what he liked, he could tell me nothing. He stopped kissing me. And worst of all, he was now refusing to have children with me. He was incapacitated, suffering from a serious neurodegenerative disorder and depressed. All my hopes of marriage were dashed. It seemed impossible to get through to him. Surely the situation was hopeless?
Fast forward 9 years and I have the sex, I get the kisses, he’s healthy and optimistic, we have two beautiful children and this year, I’m getting the HOUSE!!!
How did we manage this? What changed for us? How did I manage to get my list through to him? How did he start caring about me all of a sudden?
The one thing that made the biggest difference was, he stopped trying.
What????
Previously in our relationship, whenever I raised a problem that I had, he would add it to a mental list that he had of a million things that I wanted him to do in the relationship. This list was ever-increasing, ever-changing and no progress he made on it was ever good enough for me.
The answer wasn’t me asking for less (which I tried, but it seemed the less I asked for, the more I accommodated him, the less he was able to do).
One day, we were lucky enough to be invited to try something different.
We were invited to try having him listen to me say EVERYTHING I felt like I needed and wanted, WITHOUT making a list. Simply for the sake of me feeling understood in the relationship.
Now, women LOVE to feel understood. It is the number-one thing we want in the relationship. So it’s no surprise that him learning how to let me feel understood made me feel great!
But women are often still hesitant about this. Sure, it’s great to feel understood, but having children is still really important to me, and it really hurts every time he rejects me, and we can’t live in this dump forever!!!
How can a man just listening to you, and not aiming to fix the problems you raise mean that you get the change you want in your relationship?
In fact, it does.
At little words, we love Biblical models of relationships. So here’s one to try out for size:
“But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.”
Romans 7:6
This relationship model works in the same way as salvation by grace. Throughout history, we, as sinners, were unable to keep God’s commandments, no matter how we tried. In fact, the harder we tried, the more we discovered how hopeless we were. Only one thing changed it; we were released from the law. When Jesus died for us, in a totally unfair, generous-beyond-belief display of love, we stopped trying, and we fell in love.
Suddenly, we were released from the unbearable burden of having to do everything the right way, of doing everything God wanted in order to be acceptable to him. Now, we were loved regardless. And all of a sudden, with our new-found freedom, when we could finally risk doing whatever we wanted, we found that we wanted to keep the law.
When Tim was released from the unbearable burden of having to do everything that I asked for, not by me not asking for it, but by him feeling free to just listen without acting, he suddenly found something that he was good at in the relationship. Helping me feel understood. Which made me feel much better. And without this burden, he found that he could pick up on the things that I really wanted most, and he wanted to do something about them. Because he chose to. Because he loved me, because he was no longer a slave, but these things were his gift to me.
By giving up trying the follow the “letter of the law” by ticking off my endless list, he found a way to understand the “spirit of the law”, the things that were really important to me, and to gift them out of love.
We are forever grateful for the opportunity of being invited to try a different way of relating, and for the guidance of the people who helped us to understand and implement it. So much so, that it is our mission to pass the invitation on. What a gift from God! It was there in the Bible all along, and yet we couldn’t see it.
Would you like to learn a new way of relating, not under the law, but under the spirit? Join The Relationship Workshop and grow wildly in love with your partner.
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-gray-tank-top-and-blue-shorts-doing-push-up-4720309/
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