What divorce taught us about marriage

How not to solve conflict

For a marriage to grow as a result of conflict—for healing to occur after conflict—we need to learn to move toward resolution. But some patterns just don’t do the job as well as we’d like.

What doesn’t work for healing resolution? For starters, withdrawing into yourself. I used to do this because it’s what I often saw my father doing. If you withdraw, however, you don’t get your needs met, your spouse’s needs don’t get met, and your relationship suffers. So withdrawing is not the solution. In fact, Dr. Scott Stanley says that the worst thing for a marriage is when the husband clams up and distances himself from the family.

Yielding—giving in—isn’t a satisfactory pattern either. While one person wins and therefore peace prevails for a season, the other person loses, and ultimately, the relationship also loses. If both partners don’t win, the relationship is weakened.

A third pattern? You could be the winner—the opposite of yielding. But again, one of you ends up a loser, so the relationship loses.

How about compromise? Isn’t that healthy? Sometimes you just don’t have time to resolve the issue right then, so you each settle for half a loaf. But remember that compromise is only a temporary solution because it’s still a win-lose situation for both of you and for your relationship. Postponing is okay, but if you don’t get back to the dispute, you lose a doorway to a deeper intimacy that we’ll discuss in a minute.

Smalley, G. (1996). Making love last forever. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

The Crazy Cycle

In the beginning, when I was struggling to find help for other marriages as well as for my own, I was not searching for any “Love and Respect Connection.” But that connection surfaced as I pondered what Ephesians 5:33 is saying. My thought process went something like this: “A husband is to obey the command to love even if his wife does not obey this command to respect, and a wife is to obey the command to respect even if the husband does not obey the command to love.”

So far, so good. Then I reasoned further: “A husband is even called to love a disrespectful wife, and a wife is called to respect an unloving husband. There is no justification for a husband to say, ‘I will love my wife after she respects me’ nor for a wife to say, ‘I will respect my husband after he loves me.’”

At this point I still hadn’t seen the Love and Respect Connection. My theory surfaced as God guided me in recognizing the strong link between love and respect in a marriage. I saw why it is so hard to love and respect. When a husband feels disrespected, it is especially hard to love his wife. When a wife feels unloved, it is especially hard to respect her husband.

At that point came the illumination that made sense to me, and it has made sense to a lot of people ever since. When a husband feels disrespected, he has a natural tendency to react in ways that feel unloving to his wife. (Perhaps the command to love was given to him precisely for this reason!) When a wife feels unloved, she has a natural tendency to react in ways that feel disrespectful to her husband. (Perhaps the command to respect was given to her precisely for this reason!)

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

The Love and Respect Connection is clearly within Scripture, but so is the constant threat that the connection can be strained or even broken. And then came what I call the “aha” moment: this thing triggers itself. Without love, she reacts without respect. Without respect, he reacts without love—ad nauseam. Thus was born the Crazy Cycle! (See page 5 for a visual of it.)

Everywhere I share my theory, husbands and wives immediately understand. They see that if they don’t learn how to control the Crazy Cycle, it will just go round and round and where it stops nobody knows.

Eggerichs, E. (2010). Love & respect. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

THE “SECRET” HIDDEN IN EPHESIANS 5:33

For more than twenty years I had the privilege of studying the Bible thirty hours a week for my pulpit ministry. I also earned a PhD in family studies, plus a master’s in communication. I had a lot of formal training, but when this illumination from Scripture exploded in my heart and mind one day in 1998, it simply blew me away. I literally exclaimed, “Glory to God!” The insight that I finally recognized in Scripture, and which I later confirmed from reading scientific research, explained why Sarah and I would get into our arguments. I finally saw very clearly why Sarah could be crushed by my words and actions, just as my mom had been crushed by my dad. And Sarah could say things that would send me through the roof, just as my mom had said things that would send my dad through the roof.

What was the secret? Actually, it was not a secret at all. This passage of Scripture has been there for some two thousand years for all of us to see. In Ephesians 5:33, Paul writes, “Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (NIV).

Of course, I had read that verse many times. I had even preached on that verse when conducting marriage ceremonies. But somehow I had never seen the connection between love and respect. Paul is clearly saying that wives need love and husbands need respect. As I started sharing my secret in messages and later in seminars and conferences, I would often run into people who would say something like, “This Love and Respect Connection sounds good, Emerson, but isn’t it a little theoretical? We have real problems—money problems, sex problems, how to raise the kids . . .”

As I will show throughout this book, the Love and Respect Connection is the key to any problem in a marriage. This is not just a nice little theory to which I added a few Bible verses. How the need for love and the need for respect play off of one another in a marriage has everything to do with the kind of marriage you will have.

Eggerichs, E. (2010). Love & respect. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.