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Become Aware of Emotional Needs
by Dr. Willard Harley
Become aware of each other's emotional needs and learn to meet them.
Often the failure of men and women to meet each others emotional needs is simply due to ignorance of each others needs and not selfish unwillingness to be considerate.
Fulfilling those needs does not mean you have to painfully grit your teeth, making the best of something you hate. It means preparing yourself to meet needs you may not appreciate yourself.
By learning to understand your spouse as a totally different person than you, you can begin to become an expert in meeting all that person's emotional needs.
In marriages that fail to meet those needs, I have seen, strikingly and alarmingly, how married people consistently choose the same pattern to satisfy their unmet needs: the extramarital affair. People wander into affairs with astonishing regularity, in spite of whatever strong moral or religious convictions they may hold. Why? Once a spouse lacks fulfillment of any of the five needs, it creates a thirst that must be quenched.
If changes do not take place within the marriage to care for that need, the individual will face the powerful temptation to fill it outside of marriage.
In order to make marriages affair-proof, we cannot hide our heads in the sand. The spouse who believes his or her partner is "different" and, despite unmet needs, would never take part in an affair may receive a devastating shock someday. Intead, we need to understand the warning signs that an affair could happen, how such liaisons begin, and how to strengthen the weak areas of marriage in the face of such a relationship.
Article written by Dr. Gary Chapman. Based on the book, His Needs, Her Needs by Willard Harley. Published by Revell Publishing. | 
