When Your “Love and Respect Meters” Appear Broken

I am often asked about “exceptions” to the Love and Respect message. In short, while both husband and wife need love and respect equally, research reveals that during conflict, the felt need of the majority of women is love while the felt need of the majority of men is respect. 

I believe that is why the apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:33 that a husband is to love his wife and a wife is to respect her husband. As a man’s vulnerability is in feeling disrespected and a woman’s vulnerability is in feeling unloved, Scripture speaks often about the importance of loving and cherishing a woman, as well as showing honor and respect to a man.

“But what about exceptions?” many wonder. They say things like, “My husband has told me he responds better to love,” or “I need to know he respects me. That is what I feel I am not getting.” 

While, yes, there are almost always exceptions to any rule, including the Love and Respect principles, I have found that oftentimes many of these “exceptions” prove to not be as they first appeared, when we look at cultural and personal application, and then further clarify whether the husband and wife connect more with the desires of C.O.U.P.L.E. or C.H.A.I.R.S., both found in my book Love & Respect.

The Impact of Upbringing on Love and Respect

To explain what I mean, let me share an email I received from a wife who had concluded that her and her husband’s “love and respect meters” were broken:

My husband was raised by a powerful feminist mother and his father was a loud useless Italian immigrant. My husband acts less masculine in general… He responds best to love. It's like he doesn't understand respect even though he needs it. He needs love and respect, but I am not good at giving love so there is a deficit in that area. His love language is by far acts of service. I overall give him more respect than love. He will say he needs me to respect him, but when I experiment it turns out that acts of love do more to make him feel like his cup is full.

I was raised by a broken, abused, codependent single mom and had no dad, just a string of bad, short-lived stand-ins. I remember trying to be like the loudest, toughest, craziest fastest-driving meanest dude I could think up. It was almost like if I could do that I would solve a couple of things at once… be accepted for who I was as a person, avoid the vulnerability of being female, and maybe get some respect from boys. Being female wasn't safe and didn't come with a future.

To me this makes all the sense in the world why we lean towards the other side of this spectrum. Yes we both need love and respect. Yes God created differences. Yes the differences are valid, good, healthy, and right. But my husband needs me to show love with acts of service and I need him to show respect by less criticism and more approval of me as a person. 

He already is the most self-sacrificial man I know. I KNOW he loves me as a decision he chose by his selfless acts of service (because that is how he expresses it) but I don't FEEL it, because there isn't the respect that I crave. He probably doesn't feel loved or respected… and that is my fault. If it weren't for him we wouldn't be married!

Maybe our love-respect meters are broken from our childhoods being all topsy-turvy? Do you have more information on that??

This wife asserts that she needs respect and her husband needs love. As a reminder, I’ve always preached that both need love and respect equally—that is not up for debate.

But does our background and upbringing have an effect on where we lean and how we interpret love and respect? Absolutely! Consider her description of both their parents: “My husband was raised by a powerful feminist mother and his father was a loud useless Italian immigrant.” Assuming her husband has the same view of his parents that his wife does, he recognizes that the husband and wife combo who had the biggest influence in his life by far—his parents—was made up of a woman who bought in hook, line, and sinker with the feminist movement of the 1970s, whose most extreme adherents sought a complete overturn of what they saw as a patriarchal system where men controlled all levers of power, as well as a dad who was “useless.” 

The basic premise of a man’s deepest felt need being respect is based largely on the assumption that he already knows his wife loves him. As Paul does not command a wife to agape-love (a God-like love) her husband in Ephesians 5:33, but he does instruct the older wives in his letter to Titus to help the younger women to learn how to better phileo-love (a brotherly love) their husbands, we can conclude that women already agape-love naturally. That is just who they are and how they were designed. 

So when a husband is already assured of his wife’s love for him, then his deepest felt need, especially in conflict, is to know that his wife still respects him. But if the agape-love is not there and assured of already, then yes, he will first land on love. He doesn’t believe his wife loves him! Of course he is going to be stuck on that! We all would.

Not only did the “useless” dad probably not feel very loved by his feminist wife, but the daughter-in-law who wrote me admitted about her own marriage, “I am not good at giving love so there is a deficit in that area.” And a husband who is not assured of his wife’s love is naturally going to wonder, “Do you really love me?” Therefore, when she “experiments with acts of love,” as she says, this has such a great effect on him because he isn’t already assured of her love for him! So he breathes in her love deeply and is rejuvenated by it—because he had previously been deprived of it.

About her own upbringing she wrote, “I was raised by a broken, abused, codependent single mom and had no dad, just a string of bad, short-lived stand-ins.” Because of this she profoundly described her resistance to her femininity, because the most prominent role model of femininity in her life—her mom—was abused and walked all over by the poor excuses of men in her life. Who among us would not naturally make the same decisions to try and avoid that same path?

Therefore, she naturally leans toward respect as the key to her self-image and approval. But I know that she craves love as a woman, only she fears that she will not get it if she doesn’t maintain her tough-as-nails image. 

But even her desire to earn respect is connected to her deeper desire to feeling loved. In the acronym C.O.U.P.L.E., the “E” stands for esteem. A woman desires to be esteemed, honored, and respected, and if she doesn’t feel so, then she won’t feel as loved as she should be.

Applying C.O.U.P.L.E. and C.H.A.I.R.S. Principles

This is a prime example of why I would recommend the person believing themselves to be an exception to the Love and Respect message to focus more on the principles of C.O.U.P.L.E. and C.H.A.I.R.S., which I unpack in detail in the book and at the conference.

When you read the descriptions of each, which speaks the most deeply to your heart? Which speaks most deeply to your spouse’s heart? Do you relate more to the desire for love or for respect?

The twelve principles that make up C.O.U.P.L.E. and C.H.A.I.R.S. are based on what Scripture reveals to us about what it means to be male and female. This is not about stereotyping men and women, but about understanding how God has created us with unique needs and desires. 

And yes, sadly, part of living in a broken world includes growing up in homes where mom and dad had their faults (as we all do) and both intentionally and unintentionally instilled in us ideas concerning love, respect, and marriage that do not align with God’s design. Which is why time and time again I point to what the Bible reveals about all of this. 

The Love and Respect principles have never been “my” principles, but God’s. After all, He designed men and women and marriage. He is who we must look to for final say. Not culture. Not our upbringing. Not even me.