Men love your wives...

Well I know that we've all heard that one and we can think of millions of ways our husbands fall short on that one daily.  Possibly that might be the main reason a lot of women feel unfulfilled in their marriage.  But do you know that that is only half the verse and men are only half of the problem.  The other part says, and wives RESPECT your husband.  Do you??? Do you even know what that means.   I say this because I didn't...up until about a year ago.  And like many women, I sat with my best girlfriends and vented/griped about what an unloving husband I had.  I also told him/nagged him almost daily about it...all the while not understanding why that didn't draw us closer together.  Wierd.  I told him every day all the ways he didn't measure up, and instead of drawing closer to me, he pulled farther away.  Then I read a book called LOVE AND RESPECT by Emmerson Eggerichs and my world changed.  The book didn't change my world, God did, but the book was the means that he used to communicate His word to me.  To be honest I only read the book to help a friend who was struggling in her marriage, but I needed only to read the introduction, before I had a revelation that I had never, in 8 years of marriage respected my man and he knew it.  That night for the first time I truly respected him and I went home and told him so.  I also had a list of reasons why, cuz in the book he warns you that they will ask...and he did.  And from there something miraculous started to happen.  I mention all this because what happened to me opened my eyes to what was missing in mine and the majority of my friends marriages...RESPECT.  Before you write this off, I'll tell you one last thing that I didn't know.  A man's #1 need is respect.  They would rather be respected and not loved than loved and not respected.  I didn't believe it when I read it either, but then I asked my husband and he confirmed it.  And so began the healing process.  We had always had a pretty OK marriage, but as God taught me what it meant to respect my husband, our marriage became pretty great.  It takes a shift in thinking(and a touch from God) for a woman who feels unloved, to take responsibility for her part.  So my encouragement on day 2 of 30 days to pray for marriage, is to get your hands on that book and find out how to communicate love in a way that your husband can receive it...RESPECT.  And let God begin to heal your marriage the way he healed mine...even the good marriages will be strengthened by the wisdom in LOVE AND RESPECT.  Sorry I didn't mean for this to be a plug for a book, but I would surely miss something if I simply regurgitated the info...and I truly believe that it is the key to help hurting marriages in our generation.