How to Live in Love With Your Wife

You may have a better than average marriage, but Matt Jacobson says that should not be the criteria by which you measure how well your marriage is doing. We have to look at the Word of God as the standard for what's normal, but what we tend to do is we look at what we see as what's normal. What's common, even in the church, is not what is normal biblical Christianity. A normal Christian marriage is a beautiful, loving, open, giving, close, fun, enjoyable relationship.

It's rich and it's good. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You'll find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. No matter where your marriage is today, it can be better tomorrow. We'll talk today about things we can do to move our marriages in the right direction. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. We're doing a little love coaching this week. I need some love coaching.

We all need a little love coaching. We all do. I agree, yeah.

Don't you think? I remember, and Marianne and I have talked about this, when we got married, I loved her because she loved me. What I really loved was her loving me.

Absolutely. I understand exactly. I just liked being with her because when she was loving me, I was like, yes, this is what I got married for. Just keep doing this and our marriage will be happy. So it was all about what I'm getting out of love. That's why I think we need a little love coaching because that's not the biblical understanding of love. And we've got some coaches who are with us this week, Matt and Lisa Jacobson. Guys, welcome back to Family Life Today. Thank you.

Good to be with you again. Matt and Lisa have written two books, one for wives called A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, another for husbands called A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife. You wrote separate books, and we've talked about this already a little bit, but are we that different as men and women that when it comes to how we love one another, we have to approach it differently? Does a wife need to think more masculinely about what love is? Does a husband need to think more like a woman to understand how to love his wife? Actually, there is a lot of writing about that out there, but what we find is that people in a marriage are individuals. And you really have to seek out the individual that you're married with to understand them, to have an understanding of what is desirable to them, what is fulfilling to them, what speaks love to them as a person. So we don't really think of it in terms of a gender issue. Oh, I'm a man, therefore I need to be loved this way.

No, I'm Matt Jacobson. And this is how I need to be loved, and this is Lisa Jacobson over here, and I need to seek out and understand her, her heart as a person, as an individual, as a woman. So might there be things, Lisa, that a wife would read in A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, and she would go, I don't think that would work, and she'd be right?

Absolutely. Yeah, they're just ideas, and it also gets you thinking about, wait a minute, what does my husband like, or what does make him feel loved? And most of the time that involves communication and conversation, ideally, but it also can happen through observation. And sometimes we look at it, we do like the, this is my love language, which that's also a good way to think. But across the board, your husband or wife isn't going to be someone that touched, that's the only thing that says love to me.

I doubt it. I bet all of those things will contribute to you feeling loved. So then you kind of got to get down to that personal way of, what does this person need from me, even in this season?

Because I don't know about you guys, but we've changed in seasons. So the beginning of our marriage, Matt was trying to love me, it was the first year of marriage, we lived in this little, the pink apartments, remember this? This is really funny, actually. And I was pregnant, and so I was a little bit, maybe a little irritable, not feeling that great, kind of getting used to the whole sensation of pregnancy. And Matt is intuitive, so he sensed that I wasn't super happy, so he just started scrubbing floors and vacuuming, he even cleaned the toilet. And he was just working, working, working, I'm just sitting on the couch getting madder. You are getting angry that he's scrubbing the floors?

I know, bear with me. Super husband, I'm knocking my brains out for weeks on end, and I'm going, I am going to lay down my life for this woman. Could I see the hands of all of the listeners, if you would get angry if your husband came home and said, I'm going to scrub the floors tonight, would you raise your hands up? Well, it just depends on what my needs are at the time. Well, listen, so I'm exhausted, I am totally exhausted, because truth is, running a house is exhausting. Right.

So it's good to know that as a man. But anyway, so I'm sitting on the couch, and I'm looking at her, and she's in the kitchen, and she's working on the dishes, and she's just rubbing them really hard, and she's getting madder and madder. And I'm going, what is her problem?

Because she's married to super husband, and she's madder. And I said, okay, so what's wrong? Did you say it gently and lovingly like that? I don't remember that part. Maybe not super lovingly, maybe. The love was in my heart.

Right. But anyway, the flames, the ones coming out of her eyes, turned on me, and she smashes down the plate on the counter, and it didn't shatter, but she smashed it down. And she goes, I just want you to love me. And I'm going, okay, you have got to be kidding me. I don't care about all that stuff. And I said, what do you mean, you don't care? No, that's, it doesn't even matter?

No, it doesn't. I'm going, well then, what am I supposed to be doing? And she goes, I just want you to want to be with me. I just, how about you just take me out for a cup of coffee more than once in a blue moon? How about you just desire to be with me?

And I'm going, oh, wow, that's all it takes? I can clean the floors, I can clean toilets, but nobody but you can take me out to coffee and hear what I'm thinking. And especially, I was a new wife, I was in an apartment, we only had one car, so I wasn't really getting out, and I was just desperate. You're lonely. I was lonely.

I didn't want to watch him clean my toilets. Now, later that changed, just to be clear. As the seasons of life changed, that, you know.

That's the thing with women, you never know how to love them. You gotta change every couple hours. Keeps it interesting, keeps it interesting. It is exciting. But what I hear you saying is, we need to become experts at our spouse. Absolutely. And not thinking that once I know it, it's going to be the same forever.

It may change in time and seasons. We also have to be careful about loving our spouse in the ways that say love to us, all right? Because if you're thinking that way, then what you're doing is you're kind of loving yourself, but you're not loving her in a way that says love to her. And that's why it's important to become a real student of your spouse and understand what matters to them. Most of us have heard about Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages. You were doing acts of service, she was looking for quality time.

Marianne and I have talked about the fact that over a marriage, what we thought was each other's love language has changed. And what used to be acts of service now is different. And when you had eight kids under the age of 18 running around the house, acts of service was a priority, right?

Yeah, it definitely got bumped up significantly. Under the age of 12, but who's counting? Eight under 12? I know, mathematically it doesn't seem possible, but I can attest that it didn't happen that way. No twins. And now you're in a different season because some of those kids are out of the house. They are.

You've still got some at home. But now all of a sudden the priorities are different and how you love one another shifts and changes, doesn't it? It does. And the main thing about loving your spouse is just being purposeful every day to love your spouse. It's not something that happens by itself. It's not something that happens just because your day is unfolding. It happens because you're purposeful about it.

And it's not rocket science. It's not about the person who has a PhD and loving his wife and that's the person that knows how to do it. No, this is something for every one of us to do. We were at a wedding and this young couple got married and I walked up to them. We were just getting ready to leave and I just said, you know, I just want to speak a blessing over you. I pray for you that you have a normal Christian marriage. And he looked at me and goes, what, what is this some like curse?

Ancient curse. A normal Christian marriage. And she said, the wife knew me and she said, just hang with him.

I think he's going somewhere with us. See, we have to look at the word of God as the standard for what's normal. But what we tend to do is we look at what we see as what's normal. What's common even in the church is not what is normal biblical Christianity. A normal biblical marriage. I mean, how did the book start?

Two naked people running around in a garden. Right. Okay. I mean, God wrote the book. All right. And then the Song of Solomon.

If you want to give the euphemistic references to fruit, you've got a solid R rating. Go read the Song of Solomon sometime. A normal Christian marriage is a beautiful, loving, open, giving, close, fun, enjoyable relationship.

It's rich and it's good. And it's something that just gives you a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. That's normal biblical marriage. And for every single couple, I don't care where you are in this journey. It doesn't matter if you've been married for five or 50 years. It doesn't matter if you have a terrible marriage today. It doesn't even matter if you have an okay functional marriage or even a good marriage. God has an excellent marriage for absolutely every single couple who will look at the Word of God and say, I'm going to yield my heart to what it says and I'm going to move forward according to the instructions that I find in it. A beautiful, normal Christian marriage is waiting for every one of you.

As I listen to you, I'm inspired. But I'm imagining that wasn't always easy with eight kids that were close together. Did you ever struggle with this? So, everything about life conspires against God's best. Absolutely everything, even the good things. Satan doesn't go out to the barnyard, pick something up off the ground and say, hey, let me tempt you with this.

He wants to take you down with the good things. And kids, that's part of the goodness of God's blessing on your life. But in order to avoid the pitfalls of the struggle, even if you're a family with young kids, is you have to understand something and you've got to yield your heart to it. God did not give you, if I'm talking to the men right now, He didn't give you a wife and children for you to look at them as equally competitive relative to the scale of priority.

Your wife is your number one priority and you're loving your kids by loving your wife well. And so, if you can keep that understanding, that priority in mind and you don't get it confused with all of the other things and then after the family all the other noise in life and recognize it doesn't matter how busy we get, it doesn't matter what life throws at us. And frankly, folks, we've had some things that life has thrown at us. I mean, you don't know our personal journey, but it doesn't matter what is in your life if you keep the priority that God established, love your wife like Christ loved the church, that central relationship and responsibility, you keep that in the forefront and you know, you work through the hard days, but everything falls into place.

And remember, we always have time for our real priorities. I was just thinking back. So, our fifth child had a massive stroke in utero and was born with severe, severe brain damage. And it was devastating and unexpected. Nobody to this day knows why or what and she's still with us today, actually.

She's a beautiful 19-year-old. And when she was born, there was just a big scramble of the hospital and all the experts and we tried to figure out what happened and is this little baby going to make it and what are this poor little family we had? So, that would have been five kids, six and under and what are they going to do? And it was devastating. The neurosurgeon offered to solve the problem for us. Oh, man. Not kidding. And we just said, no, we're going to fight every day for this little girl's life. And the stress of that time was significant.

I was at the hospital for most of the next two years with her in the hospital off and on, the first six weeks solidly in the NICU. And Matt was at home. He had just started a new company.

That was when he started Loyal Publishing. And so, he had these four little kids at home. I was at the hospital. So, yeah, there was a huge strain on your marriage. And the head of the hospital met with us one day. He met with us significantly over the next few weeks just to kind of help us get our heads wrapped around what we were going to be dealing with. And he told us, he said, just so you know, most marriages end up in divorce that have a little baby like this.

The strain is too great. And it was sobering to us. And it helped us to, I think, to even recommit to, okay, whatever we're going to walk through, let's just do it together. And what I was thinking about, I was just remembering that drive, one of those drives to the hospital, because I'd come home on the weekends to visit my other little kids. And we were driving back to the hospital. I stayed at the Ronald McDonald House there near the hospital. Can we just give a shout-out to the Ronald McDonald House?

Sure, absolutely. That is the most amazing blessing to families, because they let you stay there for next to nothing when you have these months-long stays at a hospital. And we did. We stayed at the Ronald McDonald House for months.

Yeah, it was really, really a gift. So I was driving back, and I was, of course, overtired and grieving and all of that and postpartum. And I think I said to you something like, you're not involved, because I felt like I was carrying the weight of this little baby.

And he just about drove off the road. I totally lost it. I haven't lost it in my life. It's not one of the things I do. This is one of the times I did. And I started hitting the dashboard so hard and yelling. I was so mad because of the strain and the stress and the pain. And I had lived at the hospital too.

You're by yourself. You were a lot of the time, but I was living there as well. And back and forth with the kids at home, and thankfully my mom quit her job and was looking after the kids and helping. But the anger of that moment of her, and it wasn't her perspective, it was just in the moment of the stress, saying that I wasn't involved and that I wasn't engaged. And I was furious.

And it was not a godly moment, I will say that. Now I look back and then I think, oh, the strain he must have been under to try to keep this new business we had going and take care of the kids at home and take care of me. But I was so wrapped up in my own world and pain that I wasn't aware of that. And we worked through it.

We had a hard conversation. We were able to sob together, which we hadn't taken enough time probably to have done that, and helped see each other's pain, each in the unique way we were carrying it. So it doesn't mean that you have a perfect marriage and just never have hard moments or hard things. I guess that was the thing I wanted to press upon, that even as life throws you these difficult moments, you can still walk together. You can still do it in love and work through those hard things. When life forces you to tighten your grip, just remember not to let go of each other. So when you're walking through something like that, and I know there's couples listening right now, they're there. How do you love in a hundred ways?

How do you practically, because I know you did it, but it's probably a little different than kiss her passionately, because you're not feeling it, yet it comes back to small little decisions, choices are going to lead you to a different marriage. So talk about how you do it in the darkness. Okay, so right, because there are some dark days, absolutely. So first off, I want to speak to the men.

There's a verse in the Bible that says, act like men, all right? Here's the thing, you're walking through this darkness, this challenge together, and just in the case of our situation, I can tend to minimize hard things. It makes my wife so mad, but I go, hey, yeah, it was tough, but we'll keep going, we'll get through. And so one of the things that we had to deal with is our daughter's heart stopped or she stopped breathing multiple times every night.

And so I'm going, yeah, it's a tough season. Yes, and we're just like our energy is just going down every night. And we have to wake up and get her going again, shake her and breathe in her face, move her head a little bit to get her started again. And so then go back to sleep and the monitor to go off again.

So now do that for 18 months, okay? And again, I kind of early on looked at it as, hey, it's not that bad, we're just going to keep going, we're going to keep going. So one day, because I had this way of being, Lisa goes, yeah, well, how many times do you think the monitor went off last night? And I said, I don't know, 15 maybe.

She goes, yeah, well, here's the printout. And it was 40 times. In one night.

It was so brutal. But what I want to say about this is, guys, you are the one that gets to be the soldier in this circumstance, all right? And you have to look at this as the person that is principally responsible for carrying as much of the weight as you can in those days of challenge and those days of darkness and stop patting yourself on the back to say, hey, I've worked really hard.

It doesn't matter, you're the man. And the Bible says, act like a man, conduct yourself like a man. And we are called to nurture, love, cherish, and to lay down our lives. And it's in those moments of darkness, those moments of life's worst challenges, where you get to walk that out.

And don't you want God to say, you know what you did well, son? Well, don't think of it as, oh, you're having such a hard time. Your job is to protect, look after, and nurture your wife. You're walking through it together, but you get to carry the heaviest load.

Let me go to the phrases that are around that phrase that you mentioned, act like men, in 1 Corinthians 16, because if a husband wants to love his wife, here's how you do it. First, be on the alert, which means you're paying attention. Your eyes are open. You're looking around and you're saying, what's going on here, and what do I need to be alert to, and is there danger, is there need, how can I? So you're alert, be on the alert. Stand firm in the faith is the next thing it says, which means you're anchored in, we're gonna live biblically. We're gonna live according to God's word, and I'm gonna start with that in my life, and then we're gonna do it as a family. Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith. Then it says, act like men. And some translations will say, be courageous, which I think that andrids of my word that they use there in the Greek is a word that means men should be courageous. That's at the heart of masculinity. And then it says, be strong. And that's the next thing that you're saying. Yeah, you're the soldier, so when everybody else is weak, you be strong.

And then what's the last thing it says? The last one is do everything in love. Yeah, let everything you do be done in love. And I think for a husband to say, okay, I need to be alert, and I need to be anchored in God's word, and I need to be courageous, and I need to be strong, but I need to make sure that as I'm doing that, everything is done in the context of love, sacrifice for another person, and that's a call to men for loving your wife.

That's another passage that informs us what that's supposed to look like. I'm super grateful that as Dave and I have walked through some valleys and some dark places in our lives, that Dave hasn't shouldered it alone. He's had other men that have partnered with him, that have prayed for him, that have really held him up at times and held his hands up. And I think that's a big part of it as well. It's a huge part.

We were never intended to just be our strong little islands out there, we're to walk together, and there's great strength, and we were upheld, certainly in our dark days, by the prayers of the saints, and so that's a super critical part of it. Don't just go it alone. And Lisa, what does it look like for you to love Matt? To really, like he's kind of given us this picture.

What's a real woman do? Oh, that's a good question as well. So for Matt, I think some of the categories for him are things like loyalty, respect, honor, and just that I'm behind him. That speaks powerfully to him. So for me to communicate I'm behind you when he's going into something means a lot to him. And also that I'm beside you.

So we're doing this together. He's actually very together-oriented. He's a leader and a pastor, but he doesn't want to do it alone.

He's not actually made to be that way. So I want to do all I can to let him know that, yeah, I'm in this with you, even if I'm not in that particular meeting. He knows I'm home praying for him, or maybe I'll send him a text just letting him know that my heart is with you. Do all of you feel that?

Is that important? Do your wives are beside you? I think to know that she's beside you, but that she believes in you. That she looks at you and says, I believe in the man God's called you to be, and I believe in what you're trying to do. And that doesn't mean that she doesn't step in at times and say that this doesn't seem wise to me.

It's not blind belief. But for, you've described it, cheering on your husband is huge for us as men to know that we've got somebody who's cheering us on. Especially somebody that knows us well, because you can fake other people out. Congregation can come up to me and say, man, I trust you.

I'll follow you anywhere. And I just sort of smile. That's nice. You don't really know, but when my wife says that, it means everything. And at the end of a Sunday when everybody says that sermon was great, whose opinion do you really care about?

The woman sitting in the front row. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So true. And I think there's so much power that a woman has that she probably doesn't realize in communicating to her husband what she believes he could be and should be. And I say that, when I first say that sometimes women go, well, I'm not going to tell him a lie because that's not what he is right now. Like, I know I get that.

But think about your children. If you're a mom, do you have any troubles communicating to your young son, hey, you're going to be a great man someday, or you're a truth teller and I love that about you. Like a woman will say, oh yes, oh yes, I think that's so important and so impactful. Why would it be any different in communicating that way to your husband? So you actually are speaking truth and power into his life, even if he's not quite there yet, but you can see it in him and it actually brings out that in him over time. Yeah, absolutely.

I just am grateful for the way that you guys again practically pressed these truths home in the books you've written. And I would hope our listeners would give each other copies of these books, you know, for a wife to say to her husband, here, here's a book that tells you how you can, and maybe she goes through it before she gives it to him and she just folds back a few of the pages, right? I've heard of that. That's a good idea. Like, this is a good one.

And the husband can do the same thing with his wife and then just. Yeah, I've already done it, Bob. Honey, read that tonight.

Oh, good, I did it too. We've got copies of Matt and Lisa's books, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife, there in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Guys, thank you for being here and for sharing all of this with us. It's been awesome to be with you guys.

Thanks so much. You know, I have to think, couples who have been listening to our conversation this week are thinking, you know, we could use a little practice in terms of how we apply some of what's been talked about because it's been a stressful season for our country and I think for a lot of marriages with everything that's been going on. We're going to make your books available to any of our listeners who would like to get a copy and can help support the Ministry of Family Life with a donation. Go to familylifetoday.com, make whatever donation you're able to make and request your copies of Matt and Lisa Jacobson's books, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife. We'll send them to you as a thank you gift for your support of this ministry and keep in mind your investment is really an investment in the lives and the marriages and the families of not only fellow listeners in your community, but people all around the world who are coming to Family Life Today, listening to this program as a podcast, streaming it on the app, listening to it on the local radio station. They're benefiting from our website, our resources, our events. People who are looking for help and hope are coming to us and you are making the help and hope possible as you support this ministry. So thank you in advance for whatever donation you're able to make. Go to familylifetoday.com to donate or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make a donation. And again, we'll be happy to send you upon your request copies of Matt and Lisa Jacobson's books, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Husband, A Hundred Ways to Love Your Wife.

Again, request it when you make a donation online at familylifetoday.com or call to donate 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word TODAY. By the way, if you are looking for additional resources to help you strengthen your marriage relationship, build a stronger bond of love with one another, check out the resources we have at familylifetoday.com. There's a video series from Dave and Ann Wilson called Vertical Marriage that you can go through with other couples. There's the Love Like You Mean It video series that takes you through 1 Corinthians 13, applying that to marriage. There's the Art of Marriage video series. We've got lots of resources, all designed to help you connect with other couples and build a stronger marriage. Again, find out more when you go to our website, familylifetoday.com. Now, tomorrow, we're going to talk about the difference between how the culture views intimacy and sexuality and what the Bible has to say about that subject. Christopher Yuan is going to join us to talk about holy sexuality tomorrow.

Hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. Got some extra help today from Bruce Goff and, of course, our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.