FULFILLING MY SPOUSE'S EMOTIONAL NEED, FOR BEING LOVED - Part 1

Today we are starting a new blog series entitled “Fulfilling My Spouse’s Emotional Need For Being Loved”.  I believe everyone has an emotional need to be loved by someone, especially in a marriage when it comes to married couples feeling loved by their mates.  A husband and a wife want to know that they are loved by their spouse, because it helps them to feel emotionally fulfilled and secure in their love.  Love starts with our emotions, but it isn’t just based on our emotions.  Love is a feeling that we experience when someone expresses it to us.  Love also is an unconditional commitment that, we have with someone like our spouse, who we are in a relationship with.  God made it possible for us to be able to fulfill our spouse’s emotional need for being loved, but it is something that as married couples will take hard work to accomplish in marriage. We can achieve the goal of loving our mate.  

In the book titled “The Five Love Languages” written by Dr. Gary Chapman, he writes about how people express and experience emotional love.  He says emotionally people have the need to receive love and uses the metaphor of a ‘love tank’ to explain peoples’ need to be loved.  When our spouse’s emotional need for being loved is fulfilled, it is like their invisible love tank is full.  Dr. Chapman through his research determined that there are basically five ways that people express, and experience emotional love that he calls “love languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.  When we understand these “love languages” and how they work, then we can effectively love our spouse the way they need to be loved, and not the way we want them to be loved. 

When we dated our husband or wife, we tried to love them the way we felt or thought they wanted to be loved.  We put our best foot forward in trying to win our spouse’s heart, not in a deceiving way.  We went through our dating relationship doing such things as buying them gifts, opening the car door for them, and doing several other things for them.  We always spent time with them, called them on the phone, and went out on dates.  We felt a certain way emotionally in our dating relationship, and we expressed our love to them, even though it might not have been the primary way they felt love.  We were “in love” and caught up in feelings of “infatuation”, with the person we were dating.  Once we get married, if our emotional need for being loved still isn’t fulfilled we will begin to complain and wonder “what happened to all the love?”  I believe nothing happened to the love, we just start noticing our emotional need for love wasn’t being fulfilled.

Even the Bible in Ephesians 5:25 tell us as husbands we are to love our wives, and I believe as men, if we do that our wives will respond with love toward us.  We are to love our spouse emotionally the way they desire to be love, and when we do we will all have our need for loved fulfilled.  When we look at the “The Five Love Languages” it reveals that people feel love five different ways.  As a spouse in order to be able to meet our mate’s need to be loved, we must talk to and study them to find out their desired way to be loved.  As a married couple, my wife and I had to sit down and express our love language with each other, so we could know how to effectively love one another.  The goal was to meet each other’s emotional need for being loved.

Fulfilling our spouse’s emotional need for love, first starts with identifying their primary love language that meets their need for being loved.  Dr. Chapman says everybody has a primary and secondary love language.  When we experience love shown to us through our primary love language, we feel loved and emotionally fulfilled with our spouse.  Remember the goal is to love our mate the way they want to be loved, and not by the way we desire them to be loved.  Next week we will look at “The Five Love Languages” in detail, so we will be able to know our spouse’s primary love language, and effectively meet their emotional need for being loved. 

Would love to hear your thoughts, questions, or feedback.