Happy Valentine’s Day! To celebrate this day of love, I chose to post something our son Clay wrote. He gives tips on how to be a righteous husband. Clay wrote this to a young man to share some insights that made a major impact on his marriage.

While it’s addressed to husbands, it’s not gender exclusive. The principles he shares are helpful for wives–or for anyone looking for insights on how to love and live in harmony with others.

Clay is the father of four, is retired after 22 years in the Navy, and is now a senior operator at a nuclear power plant. He has taught Sunday School for years and actively reaches out to help others. However, what qualifies Clay to share his insights is that he and his wife seek the Lord for how to live, and their friends look to Clay and Stephanie for counsel.

What is Required?

Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her“ and then in verse 33 it’s repeated, “…each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself…”. The verses in between describe what it means for husbands to love their wives based on what Jesus has done for the church, and set a very high standard for men.

There have been entire messages preached on these verses, and this topic, and a quick Google search will bring up much information. This letter is not intended to re-teach the topic or be a better resource than Google. The intention is to lay out some things one man has learned, sometimes through much difficulty, over almost 30 years of marriage.

Clearly a husband is commanded to love his wife, but what does love mean and how does he do it? Again, there is much Christian teaching on the topic, but the simple summary that has meant much to me over the years is “love is an action.” It’s a simple catch phrase, that I’ve known and believed since before I was married, whose truth is reflected in the verses above where it requires husbands to love our wives like Christ loved the church, and “gave himself up for her”! Christ our King, and the Creator of all the universe, gave up all of the rights that were his due so that he could be rejected, tortured, and murdered in a slow and painful way. That is my standard, and that’s the standard all husbands are called to maintain.

Ok, that means to love my wife like Christ loved the church, I’m required to give myself up for my wife. Giving myself up (fortunately) doesn’t usually require torture and death, but it does require action. I believe that the sooner a young man realizes that action is required to demonstrate love, the sooner a marriage will benefit, and the fewer the problems that marriage need face.

Love is an action!

I’ve repeated that phrase to myself many, many times over the years and then followed it up with a decision to take action. That phrase comes to mind most often when I’m hurt, irritated, annoyed, angry, or in some other emotional state that isn’t loving, but it’s not only the unhappy times when action is required. One very eye opening revelation for me, that fortunately came early in our marriage, was that my wife and I expressed love very differently. In fact, we were so different in how we perceived loving actions, that we frequently weren’t even recognizing them in the other person.

A Bible study based on the book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, wildly changed our marriage for the better. We discovered it early in our married lives and it revolutionized our marriage. What had been a good marriage became a great marriage, because we learned that we had very different ways of communicating love. I had to learn to show her love in a way she recognized it, and I had to learn to recognize love from her when she was communicating it. I can’t stress enough how important I think it is for a husband and wife to both know each other’s love language and learn to actively communicate love to each other in recognizable ways. We’ve been practicing it for so long now that we communicate pretty fluently with several different languages of love, but it still takes purpose and action to communicate the love. I realize this paragraph doesn’t tell you much about what to do, but the book explains the love languages and gives examples of how to demonstrate them and I highly encourage any married couple to read it, share what they learn with each other, and then have fun practicing what you learn.

 Change

I’ve heard it said that women marry men thinking they’ll change, and they don’t. Men marry women thinking they won’t change, and they do. It’s been my experience that this statement is stereotypically true, but a husband must break the stereotype and be willing to change. Any time two people come together to form one family, the husband will bring habits that end up getting on her nerves over time. The husband must be willing to change, that change is an action, and that action shows love. My list of examples are based on my life and on my traditional marriage where my wife has been a stay at home mom and I’ve gone to work over the years. She runs the household and I provide for the household. If the way your household works looks different, your list may be different, but there will still be a list.

• Do dirty dishes go beside the sink, in the sink, or in the dishwasher?
• Does dirty laundry go on the floor, in a basket in the closet, or separated into lights, darks, and reds?
• Does the TV remote get left wherever you last used it, or get put in its place on the shelf when the TV goes off?

• Does your tube of toothpaste get squeezed from the bottom, or squeezed in the middle?
• Does the toilet paper go with the loose end towards the wall, or away from the wall?
• Does the toilet seat go down after every use, or get left where you last placed it?

This is a silly list, and not all of its questions have caused problems in my household, but every single one has caused serious irritation and unhappiness in a marriage, because the wife liked things a specific way and the husband absolutely refused to change habits he’d had for years. I’ve known men who said, “that’s the way I’ve been since long before I met her, why would she think I’d be any different just because we married?” Those men are not giving themselves up for their wives. If you find your wife raising her voice and confronting you about a silly issue like this that she’s “told you before!”, then recognize it’s important to her, remember love is an action, and decide that you’re going to change to demonstrate your love for her.

Communication/Arguments/Anger

Ephesians 4:26 “Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.”

Communication in marriage will eventually lead to disagreements. Disagreements in marriage don’t have to lead to arguments, and arguments don’t have to lead to anger, but way too often in my marriage they have. There’s been no defining moment in our marriage where we learned some big breakthrough about communication, but we have learned several important things over the years:

1. If you’re upset about something, don’t hold it in, but also find the right time to talk about it. We’ve learned that if one of us is unhappy about something we can say, “I want to talk to you about something, can you let me know when it’s a good time?”
2. When my wife approaches me with that sentence, it lets me know there’s something related to me that she’s unhappy about, and she’s willing to be respectful towards me and let me prepare myself and my attitude before she talks, instead of surprising me in a way that may end up feeling like an attack and causing me to get defensive. When I feel attacked, I usually go straight to anger and then what could have been a loving discussion results in a fight and the “be angry and don’t sin” commandment is blown before I even know it’s happening.
3. When I know there’s something bothering her, but she’s approaching me about it in a respectful way, it’s easier to remember that I love her and want to show it, so it helps me choose (set my attitude) beforehand that I’m going to listen, understand what she’s saying, ask forgiveness if necessary, and then take action or make changes to show love. The truth is, I don’t ever want something to bother her about me. If there’s anything bothering her about me, I’m willing to do whatever I can to change it. But by her letting me know ahead of time that she wants to talk, it allows me to prepare myself to receive what she’s got to say and we can keep the communication at a loving conversation level without it ever having to escalate to an argument or a fight.
4. Feelings aren’t necessarily truth, but they’re very, very real. They also frequently happen whether you want them to or not. We’ve learned when we’re hurt by the other to recognize it may just be a feeling. Instead of saying, “You didn’t even care if….!” or any other sentence summarizing what the other person did to hurt you, we’ve learned to say, “I feel like you didn’t even care…”. Adding “I feel” to any expression of hurt allows for the possibility that my spouse is not an evil creature who is intentionally wounding me. It allows that maybe my feelings aren’t correct, but acknowledges the hurt is just as real. It’s much less of an attack and much more a cry of pain. When I use it on my wife, it takes the focus a little off what she did and puts it a little more on how I perceived what she did. It avoids putting her on the defensive and allows us to talk about the issue instead of having her feel attacked for something she most likely didn’t even know she did.
5. In 1.B above I said, “ask forgiveness if necessary.” In 2. I said, “feelings aren’t necessarily truth…” I think it’s important to ask forgiveness for what’s needed, but not for what’s not. If I’ve made my wife feel like I didn’t care about her, I’ll ask questions to understand what I did, how did it make her feel that way, how could I have done it better, etc. I’ll also explain the situation from my point of view, sharing what I actually intended, or was thinking, when I said or did the hurtful thing. In the end, sometimes it turns out that I really didn’t do anything wrong, she just perceived it incorrectly, but we have to come to that conclusion together. In such cases she’ll sometimes apologize for being silly, but I don’t think feelings are silly, they are what they are. In any case, I will usually ask forgiveness for making her feel like she felt, because I don’t ever want her to feel bad and my actions led to her bad feeling, but I don’t ask forgiveness for the thing I did if it wasn’t wrong and if there’s no change I need to make.
6. It’s important to understand that asking forgiveness is not the same as saying I’m sorry. We’re commanded to ask forgiveness when we’ve wronged others, there’s no mention of saying, “I’m sorry” in the Bible. I have no problem with saying I’m sorry, or apologizing, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as “please forgive me” and isn’t adequate when forgiveness is required.
7. Fights are virtually unavoidable. In our 30 years of marriage, 22 of those years in the military moving from base to base, church to church, and homeschool group to homeschool group, we’ve known many, many couples. In all that time only one couple we’ve known claimed to have never had a fight. Fights are wrong and are always a violation of the commandment to “Be angry, and yet do not sin.” I think the second part of Ephesians 4:26 is important in a fight… never let the sun go down on your anger. We’ve made it a point to never go to bed before we work out our differences. There have been times when that meant I didn’t get very much sleep before going to work the next day, but we’ve agreed that our marriage and our love for each other is too important to let anger boil overnight and into the next day. We’ve known couples who would go to bed angry, and then sometimes even ignore the fight the next day. In those cases resentment grows and festers like cancer. When this behavior becomes habit, without repentance and change, the marriage is most certainly doomed.
8. There may be times when your spouse is so hurt or angry that they have trouble being ready to talk, and there’s a risk of going to bed angry. In a case where you feel like your partner isn’t “coming around” quickly enough, ask God to show you where you were wrong. Seek His forgiveness for your actions, then when your relationship with Him is restored go to your spouse and say something like, “The Lord has shown me I was wrong when…” and ask forgiveness for your actions. In all cases like this that I’ve experienced, that leads to a softening of the spouses heart, a great and honest conversation, forgiveness, and restoration.
9. It takes two people to fight, so if a fight occurs and forgiveness is needed, there’s no question that both parties need to be forgiven for at least some of their actions. But if you think you’re ready to ask forgiveness but still feel a need to point out what the other person did wrong, you’re not truly ready and you need to ask God to help you understand what you’ve done wrong. I’ve had plenty of fights with my wife and I can assure you I’m an expert in this field… there has never been a fight where I haven’t eventually come to the realization that it doesn’t matter what she did, she never deserved what I did to her in return and that I need to ask forgiveness whether she ever understands my position or not. And there’s never been a time in our lives when there hasn’t been genuine forgiveness asked for and received when one of us humbles themselves enough to say, “I was wrong. Please forgive me.”
10. Reacting with anger is very damaging and hurtful to a relationship. I did it for years, and often in my anger felt justified because I had been “so wronged.” I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this topic, because it’s something either spouse can battle, but I want to share what I’ve learned. God showed me very clearly, not too many years ago, that every single time I have reacted with anger in my relationship with my wife, it’s because I felt like my “rights” had been violated. In other words, in every single case I was making myself more important than her. God contrasted my selfishness with the selflessness of Jesus who “gave himself up” for me. Honestly, this verse in Ephesians that says men are to love their wives like Jesus, who gave himself up wasn’t part of the revelation. It was just a revelation that I’ve sinned over and over and over again, in certain areas, and Jesus accepts and forgives me ever single time. In fact he gave up his life in a inexplicably horrible way just to have a relationship with me knowing I was going to treat him that way. Given that fact, how can I fly off the handle in anger at my wife just because, “I’ve told you at least 5 times in the last 3 months….!” What an arrogant, hypocritical jerk I was to set such a high standard for my wife and treat her like trash, when my Savior gave up his life for me to prevent me from having to face my due. The revelation didn’t cure me overnight, but it got rid of the feeling of justification when I was angry. From that moment on, when I get angry, I know immediately that I’m wrong and it has helped me recognize more quickly that I need to stop. I wouldn’t say I’m completely cured yet, and I might never be, but I can tell you that my angry outbursts happen much less often now and maybe have even become rare.

Personality

Opposites attract! I’ve found this to be true in most of the couples we’ve known. We are most often attracted to people who aren’t like us. We see them with strengths we don’t have and find it highly attractive. In fact in the dating stage we can be dumbfounded that our future spouse is even attracted to us! The problem is that with strengths that are different than ours, their weaknesses are probably where our strengths are and after some time those weaknesses can really grate on our nerves.

I believe a key to having the most fun in marriage that’s possible is to study personalities with your spouse. I recommend a study of Gary Smalley’s Personality Types, the Lion, Otter, Golden Retriever, and Beaver. Study the four temperaments, Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Sanguine. Also study any Christian studies you can find on the differences between men and women. Having an understanding of our personality types, temperaments, and the vastly different ways men and women think, act, work, talk, and perceive the world in general has hugely helped us understand each other. Things that used to be frustrating are now something we can laugh at. Things that used to make us react negatively are things that now we marvel at because God put two of the most opposite people imaginable together and made one great team. I can’t stress enough how much understanding our differences, and why those differences exist, has removed tension in our marriage.

One personality difference that we’ve discovered is very important to understand. In conflict, my wife wants to deal with the problem immediately and restore a good relationship. I want to go away for a while, cool down if needed, and spend time thinking about what happened, why did it upset me so much, and how am I going to explain it to her in a way she’ll understand. It takes me a lot longer to interpret my emotions or feelings and get to the root of what’s going on that made me react poorly to a situation. For many years of our marriage, she would push me to deal with a situation and I would push her away. It led to more and more anger (in a given situation) in both of us and caused conflicts to escalate to nuclear levels on many occasions. Once I understood that she was built to want to deal with things quickly and that she perceived me trying to get away as an attempt to avoid the topic at all, I better understood why she was pushing me. When she realized that when I was trying to delay a conversation it was because I needed the time, she was able to understand that I wasn’t trying to signal her that she wasn’t worth having the conversation with. We made a commitment to each other – She committed to give me some time and I committed to finish my time and have the conversation the same day. She still doesn’t like waiting, but she at least knows I’m not attempting to avoid the issue altogether. Since that time, our conflicts don’t always become arguments, and the arguments rarely become fights.

Respect 

Let’s re-read Ephesians 5:33, but this time I’m going to give you the end of the verse too: “However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

There are several places in the Bible where men are told to love their wives. It’s easy to find sermons on men loving their wives. The world is full of stories of love, examples of love, and ideas for showing love. Never have I heard a message, or seen anything about a wife respecting her husband, until we recently discovered the book, Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs by Emerson Eggerichs. We had significant marriage problems after about 11 years of marriage. There were deep seated hurts and without counseling to help us work through them, I’m not sure our marriage would have survived. If we had read this book together early in our marriage, I don’t think we would have ever wound up where we were.

To say that a wife must respect her husband in modern day America is akin to saying that a wife is somehow less than a man, but the scriptural command remains. That command does not mean that a woman is less than a man, it just recognizes a man needs something different than a woman does, because God designed us to be different, and this book is the only place I’ve ever seen teaching on the subject. I highly recommend it for its excellent teaching on both both parts of that verse, instead of just the first half that I’ve usually heard mentioned.

Not one sided

I was asked to share things I’ve learned about being a husband. So this letter is written somewhat from a husband’s perspective. I think there’s some risk that a person could read this and think that husbands are supposed to be pushovers. It could be interpreted that I’m saying only a husband is supposed to change, the husband is supposed to get in touch with his feelings, the husband isn’t supposed to get angry… The truth is, a marriage is a partnership and both parties are going to have to change. Neither the husband nor the wife are going to be experts and both are going to have to learn and grow together. I’ve tried to very carefully not ascribe any one trait, characteristic, or behavior to a wife or a husband, because in our lives we’ve known many couples who were almost exactly opposite of us. We’ve had more friends than not where the wife reacted to life similarly to me, and the husband was more like my wife. That’s why I consider it so important for a husband and wife to study and understand love languages, personalities, and temperaments. Understanding who you are and who your spouse is can go a long way toward making differences less frustrating and more fun.

One truth that doesn’t change is that God created women to need love and men to need respect. Men are generally not great at showing love and have to learn. Women will sometimes show disrespect, without knowing it and without intending it. Either mistake will take a toll on a marriage. I highly encourage you to actively learn how to demonstrate what you’re commanded to do. It’s not a one time class, it’s a lifetime of “practicing and perfecting your craft.”