The Love & Respect Experience (Audiobook)

When sorting out how to slow down the Crazy Cycle, it helps to remember that men are commanded to love because they don’t love naturally, and on the other side, women are commanded to respect because they don’t respect naturally.

The Crazy Cycle is, indeed, “the evil of folly and the foolishness of madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:25).

You’re the only person in the world who can meet your spouse’s deepest need for love and respect. After all, you alone are married to your spouse.

God designed the woman to love. He’s not going to command her to agape her husband when He created her to do that in the first place. God is not into redundancy.

Love and Respect is a faith venture, not a formula.

To stay the course in speaking words of Love and Respect, keep your heart in Scripture, trusting in and talking about His promises to help you.

Positive changes flood a relationship immediately when both husband and wife cancel the blame game!

Your spouse deserves the truth from you. Do your best to tell it with love and respect.

As you pray together, you will truly learn to love and respect together.

You may believe that the careless, unloving or disrespectful words you speak are because your spouse is causing you to speak this way, but Jesus says that it is coming out of your heart.

God’s commands are there to help us, not to hinder us or hold us back as male and female.

Here is the secret to marriage that every couple seeks and yet few find: Unconditional respect is as powerful for him as unconditional love is for her. It’s the secret that will help you achieve a brand new level of intimacy.

Unconditional respect, like unconditional love, is all about how one sounds (tone of voice and word choice) and appears (facial expressions and physical actions).

Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean the other person is offensive.

[Women], your self-love cannot be derived from your husband’s love. It can affect it, but it does not determine it.

Being a person who communicates what is true frequently demands tact, and at times it can feel like sidestepping land mines. It takes work to be both truthful and tactful.

When you love or respect unconditionally regardless of the outcome, you are following God and His will for you.

[Husbands] the most powerful weapons you have are your ears. Just listen to your wife, and she is much more likely to feel understood.

Often both spouses have goodwill but are not deciphering each other’s code. She criticizes out of love, but he “hears” only disrespect. He distances himself to prevent feelings from escalating, which is the honorable thing to do, but she “sees” only his failure to be loving!

When the wife flatly says her husband will have to earn her respect before she gives him any, she leaves the husband in a lose-lose situation. Now he is responsible for both love and respect in the relationship. He must unconditionally love his wife and earn her respect.

Don’t label each other as bad because you differ on how you solve your troubles.

Stay the course regardless of the child’s respect and obedience. This is the Family Rewarded Cycle: a parents love unto Christ regardless of the child.

Always see your mate as an ally. Feedback is of little use if you see your spouse as an enemy. Giving and receiving constructive feedback is based on feelings of goodwill in both partners. Both of you need to remember that, even if you don’t always agree and even if you become irritated or angry, you are friends, and neither of you means to hurt the other.

Research and experience prove that men and women see and hear differently. Recognizing these differences and adjusting to them is absolutely necessary for reaching mutual understanding and better communication.

Thank the Lord for the goodwill each of you has toward the other. Ask Him for strength to give each other the benefit of the doubt during moments when someone’s goodwill seems to be lacking. “He who seeks good finds goodwill, but evil comes to him who searches for it.” (Proverbs 11:27)

You must distinguish between “I can’t” and “I won’t.”

Though the end can be worthy (to be loved and respected), when each uses unholy means (unloving and disrespectful words and actions), it will not achieve those ends. We must treat others as we expect them to treat us. To deny this makes us arrogant or fools, or both.

If you want your wife to express appreciation for your attempts to be loving, you must use thankful words when she tries to speak or act respectfully.

We have different vulnerabilities. We can pass judgment on one another all day long or we can say God made us different and that’s ok.

It is crucial for a husband and wife to see that neither one is wrong, but both of them are very different--in body function, outlook and perspective.

Since it is easy to focus on the negative, focus on your mate’s good qualities and express thanks with positive words of Love or Respect.

Marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and your reverence for Jesus Christ.

When you look to God and His Word as your ultimate source of significance and security, you don’t demand that your spouse take that role in your life. And as you draw strength from the Lord individually, He draws you closer together as a couple.

When you come home after you have been apart, the first few moments of reconnecting will set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Parenting is a faith venture. As we parent “unto Christ” we reap God’s reward, “knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord” (Eph. 6:8 NKJV)

So I encourage every husband and wife to commit to the Jesus Way of Talking. Instead of allowing the stress of the situation to control you, you can say to yourself, “Because I love the Lord and I know that He rewards every good word, I am going to be truthful even if my spouse is not. I will also be uplifting, forgiving, thankful and scriptural in my speech because my ultimate goal is to please the Lord. Whatever my spouse’s weaknesses or bad habits might be, I will not let them cause me to sin with my lips.”

We all need to wrestle with the spiritual truth that God is good. If you don’t believe God is good, you won’t trust His word. If you don’t trust His word, you will find excuses to ignore His commands.

If a husband chooses to be a peacemaker--taking the needs and concerns of his wife totally into account during any kind of argument or conflict--his wife will be motivated in turn to respond to his authority during stalemates.

We blame people for the bad things we do, but take credit for the good things we do.

Women give a report to build rapport. Men bond through shoulder-to-shoulder activities without talking.

Your position in Christ is what counts, not your less-than-perfect performance.

Most marriages will succeed when obeying the command to Love and Respect.

Do you seek to understand or only to be understood?

Knowing my spouse will not be able to love or respect me perfectly, I commit to having a forgiving spirit so that I may never speak hatefully or contemptuously.

Could you be facing a crisis in faith more than a crisis in your marriage?

Your marriage is a tool and a test to deepen and demonstrate your love and reverence for Jesus Christ. God is using your spouse to bring you an eternal reward.

Your hunger for God can create an appetite in your children.

Thank God for joining you together and for allowing you to trust Him to help you, whatever the issue. God is there for you and expects you to look to Him to keep you together as a team, so ask Him for His help in the smallest of concerns. “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Matthew 19:6)

Your marriage is a test of your devotion to Christ.

If a husband is commanded to agape- love his wife, then she truly needs love.

It’s true that women have intuition and that men should listen to them. It’s also true that women have blind spots and need the insight of their husbands.

Truth will carry its own weight if delivered respectfully and lovingly.

No matter what your struggle- criticism, constant conflict, sex, money, parenting, harsh words- learning to communicate the Love and Respect way can help you make crucial changes and build the kind of relationship that God blesses.

Negative actions rarely produce positive results.

The parent-child relationship is as easy, and as difficult, as love and respect.

Suppressing negative feelings is not loving, respectful or very wise. Speak up tactfully.

Words of love from a husband are like good medicine that brings life to the marriage.

Your spouse has a need only you can fill.

You can be right but wrong at the top of your voice.

Assuming goodwill can be revolutionary in relationships.

You can experience hurt, but it is your choice to hate.

Your spouse can have a need that you don’t have and that’s okay.

Mistakes can’t be undone, but they can be forgiven.

When others do not respond to our communication, we need to look first at our communication style. Is the other person incapable of hearing what we have to say? Or are we abrupt, brusque, and curt?

Life is too short to fuss and fret over trivial irritations.

Getting married reveals, usually sooner than later, an incontestable fact: your spouse cannot possibly meet all your needs and desires

You cannot use unholy means to achieve a worthy end.

As a husband, if you can grasp that you don’t always have to solve your wife’s problems, you will take a giant step toward showing her empathy and understanding.

Be friendly. Be friendly. Be friendly. Watch what happens.

When we feel crippling discouragement by the sinful choices and outcomes of our kids, we must not let this permanently deter us from parenting God’s way.

As mature men, we need to take leadership and put this out on the table. We must acknowledge our feelings- we need to feel respected. However, as we do this we must acknowledge our wife’s feelings- she needs to feel loved!

It’s hard to realize that we would never act around our business associates the way we act around our spouse.

Our research shows that couples who pray together are more apt to reap all kinds of benefits, including better and more frequent communication, going on “dates” more frequently and having sex more frequently.

Do you understand that God feels compassion for you, no matter what you have done or what your circumstances may be?

“You can be right, but wrong at the top of your voice.”

Do you give yourself grace and your spouse judgment?

Let the Lord change you, but don’t try to change each other.

Pink and Blue perceptions not only affect seeing, they affect hearing as well. Women hear with pink hearing aids and men hear with blue hearing aids. Even more important to understand as you and your spouse seek to gain better communication, you can hear the very same words, but each of you will hear different messages.

He will feel appreciated when you recognize his problem-solving approach as his male brand of empathy.

Troubles over sex and money do not cause a marriage to go under. The lack of love and respect during conflict cause the marriage to go under.

We easily see what is done to us before we see what we are doing to our mate.

Trusting and obeying God’s Word because we love and reverence God never, ever makes us a hypocrite! When the alarm goes off in the morning, we get up, even when we don’t feel like it getting up. Because we do what we don’t feel like doing, does that make us hypocrites? No, it’s a sign we are responsible people. Showing respectful behavior when we don’t “feel respectful” is evidence of maturity.

God rewards your obedience to love and respect, even if your spouse does not respond!

A woman needs love like she needs air to breathe. A man needs respect like he needs air to breathe.

There is a discrepancy between who we want to be and see ourselves to be and how we actually sound in voice and writing. But with self-reflection and honesty, we can turn the corner and improve our communication. We need only evaluate what we are about to communicate.

Money squabbles don’t undermine love and respect; they simply reveal unloving and disrespectful attitudes, which are the real reason why a marriage can start to wobble on the Crazy Cycle.

Self-interest should never come ahead of your spouse’s interests.

At the very bottom of things, in every case and in every conversation, you can do your marriage a huge favor by assuming she is seeking to feel loved or he is seeking to feel respected and give your spouse some grace!

No matter how difficult your spouse may be at the moment, your spouse does not have control over your reaction; you do. You may be experiencing disappointment, frustration, or anger, but you always have a choice.

His love motivates her respect. Her respect motivates his love.

Your spouse may meet many of your needs, but your deepest dependency should be on your Lord.

Through Jesus and Peter, God set forth His standard for living in the unconditional dimension: choose to be loving even when the other person is not; do what is right regardless of the treatment you receive. I believe this standard applies directly to marriage. A husband who speaks lovingly to his disrespectful wife will be rewarded; and a wife who speaks respectfully to her unloving, not-worthy-of-respect husband will be rewarded. Whether you are husband or wife, the reward is what can keep you going in the midst of the craziness: knowing that God commends you, knowing that you have found his favor for your words and actions.

[Husbands] as the church places her burdens on Christ, so a woman needs to place her burdens on her husband. When she shares with you, don’t assume she is asking you to solve the problem. Ask your wife, “Do you want a solution or a listening ear?”

You have two ears and one mouth; use them proportionately.

Wives, you never know: The way you handle this [conflict] might bring your husband not only back to you, but to God. Husbands, you never know: The way you handle this [conflict] might bring your wife not only back to you, but to God. (1 Corinthians 7:16)

Ladies, be careful. “A nagging wife goes on and on like the drip, drip, drip of the rain” (Proverbs 19:13).

When parents genuinely trust and follow the Lord and His ways, their faith spills over onto the children.

When you possess a forgiving spirit, words of Love and Respect will flow authentically from your lips- and realize that the Lord Himself is listening to you at moments like these. He knows you are not powerless, but actually full of power that He has granted you.

To get offended is easy, but to forgive is within your power as you walk in His steps.

You have to become proactive, rather than just trying to stop the reactive.