How to Get Your Husband to Talk to You (Paperback)

Chapter One

One of the fundamental differences between men and women is the way they express love. Men are goal-oriented and express love by doing, while women are relationship-oriented and express love by being.

A woman may say "I love you" by touching, stroking, caressing, and talking.

A man, on the other hand, shows love by doing such things as going to work and earning a living.

When a woman thinks about love, she thinks about starlit nights and romantic interludes. When a man thinks about love, he thinks about bringing home enough money to buy spaghetti sauce to put on the table.

A woman wants to be swept off her feet, while a man may think sweeping the front porch does just that.

Women feel. Men do.

We were hung up on these differences for years. "Why can't you show me you love me? I need to feel loved," we'd say.

And our husbands would respond, "What in the world does that mean? What can I do to make you feel loved?"

Notice that our husbands asked what they could do to make us feel loved? They had no idea what we meant because doing is a man's native tongue while feeling is a woman's.

Countless articles and books have been written describing these fundamental differences, yet it wasn't until we actually began to take this difference into consideration that we began to notice the ways in which our husbands express love.

Before learning this, when I (Connie) would say to my husband, "I need you to make me feel loved," my husband would respond, "I don't know how to do that if I haven't done it already. They didn't teach that in school, and if they did I was absent that day."

"It is not a hard thing to do," I would retort. And it's not-to a woman. But to a man it is like trying to read a map with no legend.

At some point my weary husband would say, "Besides making you feel cherished, what else can I do?"

What else? What else was there? Nothing-at least as far as I was concerned. I know now that what he was doing all those years was trying to give me exactly what I wanted. He was just doing it in a man's language. Imagine that!

Acknowledge the fact that you and your husband show love in entirely different ways, and appreciate your differences. Begin to look for the ways he shows love that are unique to him. One of the clues is that they will often be action based rather than feeling based.

For example, I (Connie) have learned that Wes shows love by supporting me in whatever I'm involved with, working hard to provide for me and our children, forgiving quickly, and not pressuring me to do things I don't enjoy. For instance, I don't enjoy cooking, and he doesn't make me feel bad that I don't. He's happy to eat whatever I prepare. It's usually very simple, but he always thanks me for preparing it.

My (Nancy) husband, Ray's, love language is seldom verbal. He's not a big hand-holder, either. However, he excels in demonstrating his love by doing things for me. If he has a day off and I'm working, he often cleans the house and has dinner ready when I get home. He calls me every day at work to see if I need anything from the store. As I first wrote these words, I heard him pull into the driveway after getting his car washed. I was ready to greet him, only to watch him pull out of the driveway in my car to have it washed. Knowing that I have a deadline to meet, he told me if I needed any errands run or household tasks completed, he was ready, willing, and able. I've learned that I don't need words when everything he does lets me know he loves me.

When you begin to accept your husband's efforts, you are granting him the uncommon luxury of being himself. What would happen if women stopped expecting men to be more like them? We think one of the first things that would happen is that husbands would feel freer to talk.

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Bottom Line: Men express love by doing. They are action based rather than feeling based.

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