flame

CHAPTER SEVEN

Create a Safe Place for Loving

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“I have this horrible recurring dream in which I open my front door and see a lawyer dressed in a bright red suit, shoving divorce papers in my face. When I was eleven, my parents divorced. I was devastated. When Pam and I married, we swore we’d never mention the ‘D’ word. Last week we had a horrible fight —the worst we’d ever had —and she said, ‘Maybe we should get a divorce.’ I felt like she’d slugged me in the stomach. I put my face in my hands and cried, ‘No, God. How did this happen? How did we get here?’”

Maybe you’ve experienced things in your marriage that you never dreamed would happen. You promised, “We’ll always be madly in love; we’ll never fight like my parents did.” But the truth is, you do. All of us, at some point, experience disappointment with our mate. Disappointment cools our view of the one we love. If disappointment is not dealt with early on, it leads to distance. Distance leads to isolation. Isolation can lead to abandonment.

Is abandonment something you fear in your marriage? Tirzah did. In this next scene, she dreams that Solomon has abandoned her. Fitfully, she clutches the sheets, trying to pull herself out of the nightmare and into the light of reality. Her heart cries out, “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave.”

UNDERSTANDING THE SONG

Tirzah: “On my bed night after night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but did not find him.” (3:1)

Tirzah is in bed alone. All night she dreams of her husband.[1] Here we see the first of four times in this poem that Tirzah describes Solomon as the one “whom my soul loves” (verses 1,2,3,4).

Tirzah: “‘I must arise now and go about the city; in the streets and in the squares I must seek him whom my soul loves.’ I sought him but did not find him. The watchmen who make the rounds in the city found me, and I said, ‘Have you seen him whom my soul loves?’” (verses 2-3)

In her dream, Tirzah finds the absence of her lover intolerable. She needs him. Nothing but his presence can satisfy her. She leaves her bed and wanders the streets, seeking her beloved. For the second time, she says, “I’ve searched and searched, and I can’t find him. My heart is broken.” Desperation sets in, and then she runs into the watchmen, who are making rounds of the city.

Tirzah: “Scarcely had I left them when I found him whom my soul loves; I held on to him and would not let him go until I had brought him to my mother’s house, and into the room of her who conceived me.” (verse 4)

After she leaves the watchmen, Tirzah finds Solomon. The New American Standard Bible says that Tirzah held him, but the meaning of the Hebrew word suggests that she clutched her beloved and refused to relax her embrace.[2] While we may think it strange that Tirzah would dream of pulling her beloved into her mother’s bedroom, in Solomon’s time, a mother’s bedroom was a place associated with intimacies.[3] This reference also communicates feelings of safety and security.

Earlier in the Song, Tirzah expressed insecurity about her appearance (1:5-7). Now we glimpse another insecurity —fear that Solomon will abandon her. Behind the words in verse 4 are the unspoken questions Will the one I love leave me? Will he continue to love me?

Tirzah to the Chorus: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or by the hinds of the field, that you will not arouse or awaken my love until she pleases.” (verse 5)

Once again we see the refrain: “Do not arouse or awaken my love until she pleases.” Why the admonition for sexual purity here? Many reasons have been suggested. Perhaps Tirzah is saying, “Love is hard enough. Don’t add more problems to your relationship by arousing sexual love before the right time and thus bringing baggage into your marriage.”

APPLYING THE SONG FOR COUPLES

We don’t know anyone who has ever gotten up in the morning and out of the blue decided, I think I’ll chuck my marriage today. For most people, the decision to leave a marriage is the result of choice after choice to move away from intimacy. Dennis Rainey, in his excellent book Lonely Husbands, Lonely Wives, observes,

Every day each partner in the marriage makes choices that result in oneness or in isolation. Make the right choices and you will know love, warmth, acceptance, and the freedom of true intimacy and genuine oneness as man and wife. Make the wrong choices and you will know the quiet desperation of living together but never really touching one another deeply.[4]

None of us signs up for this! We don’t want to live in mediocrity. We marry because we want passion and intimacy. So how does a marriage go from intimacy to abandonment? Most of the time, it’s a slow slide into complacency. The couple ignores little problems, and then the little problems become big problems. Of course, there are times when abandonment comes as a shock, as when one partner commits adultery or a major incident goes unresolved. But even then, there are usually warning signs. Here are a few:[5]

Don’t ignore these “foxes,” or abandonment could become a possibility! When people hear the word abandonment, they often think of physical abandonment, as when one person leaves the relationship. But abandonment can also be sexual or emotional. In these instances, couples live under the same roof, but because they have abandoned the marriage sexually or emotionally, they live separate, unconnected lives.

What does sexual abandonment look like? One husband talks about his situation:

Eleven years ago, my wife stood before me and said, “I will never have sex with you again.” Eleven years of living in the same house, yet miles apart. Now we have separate rooms, separate friends, and separate lives. The pain is too deep for words.

Sometimes we mistakenly believe that people who follow Christ are protected from such tragedy, but this man and his wife are both respected leaders in their church. Another couple we know is in a similar crisis. He is a pastor and preaches every Sunday. She sings on the worship team. They haven’t had sex in seven years. According to her, “He’s not interested.” According to him, “She is so critical and disrespectful toward me that I have no desire to touch her.” They both admit, “We stay together for the sake of the kids, but there is no relationship. People see us in church and think we are a happy, godly family. If they only knew . . .”

Sexual abandonment is painful. So is emotional abandonment. Emotional abandonment occurs when couples either refuse to communicate on a deep level, or they speak in such an abusive way that one of the partners withdraws. Here are two examples of emotional abandonment:

From a wife: I long for tenderness to flow between us and for there to be an intimate connection in our smiles, words, and touch, but instead we are like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other. Sandpaper is abrasive, bruising both the skin and heart. I desperately want us to move out of the defeat of this jarring separateness into the joy of communion in which body, soul, and spirit melt together in true oneness. What do I do? Where do I start to reconnect with him?

From a husband: I feel that I can’t even relax in my own home, that I am continually walking on eggshells. I never know what will trigger the hateful comments, the outburst of anger, the look of disgust on her face. She doesn’t slap me with her hands, but she does with her words. My home is not a haven but a living hell.

Emotional safety is the one quality upon which all the other qualities we desire in a relationship —intimacy, openness, and passion —depend. “Without emotional safety, a marriage simply will not feel good. When we believe we are threatened, we defend ourselves and once defensiveness enters the picture, the possibility of openness and intimacy is lost.”[6]

If you have experienced emotional or sexual abandonment, how do you go about reconnecting with the one who has hurt you? Is it possible for your marriage to be a safe place again? Yes, it is possible. We’ve witnessed the resurrection of many dead marriages. It happens when couples entrust themselves to the Giver of Life and make a decision to become servant lovers to one another. This requires personal sacrifice and a willingness to regard your mate’s needs as more important than your own, but every couple whose marriage has been healed agrees that their sacrifices were worth the love they now enjoy.

If you as a couple want to make your marriage a safe place, the first thing you need to do is erect a security fence around it.

Delete the “D” Word from Your Vocabulary

When was the last time you thought or spoke the word divorce? This word flashes a warning light to your mate that is equivalent to a level-five security breech. One wife said she feels incapable of working on their marriage because whenever things get really difficult, her husband threatens divorce: “I never feel safe enough to press through to solutions in our marriage because I’m afraid if I press too hard, he’ll leave.”

Listen up, because what we are about to say is of the utmost importance: The quickest way to destroy emotional safety —and all hopes of intimacy —is to threaten divorce.

Do you want to take what God made holy, smash it, spit on it, and grind it into the ground? Then go ahead. Callously throw around the “D” word like it doesn’t matter. Christians have been increasingly lenient about speaking the “D” word. We are of the opinion that every Christian couple ought to delete the “D” word from their dictionaries, from their computers —certainly from their vocabularies. Listen to God’s voice:

You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. . . . So guard yourself in your spirit and do not break faith with the wife of your youth. I hate divorce. (Malachi 2:13-16, NIV, emphasis added)

Notice that God doesn’t say He disapproves of divorce or that it makes Him sad. He says He hates it. Why? Because the marriage covenant is a picture, a reflection, of the covenant God has with each believer. Hebrews 13:5 contains the only triple negative in the New Testament. God emphatically proclaims, “I will never, never, never leave you. I will never, never, never forsake you.” God is faithful to keep His covenant to a thousand generations (see Psalm 105:8; we’ll talk more about covenants in the next chapter). Of course, our God is a God of grace who extends forgiveness to those who divorce. But to break our marriage covenant with our spouse other than for issues related to adultery is to break God’s heart, because our marriage no longer reflects the permanence of His covenant with us.

Another reason God hates divorce is because He sees the ever-expanding rings of pain that circle out when we toss the stone of divorce into the pool of marriage. When we bring divorce into the conversation —even if it’s not something we intend to follow through with —we become an unsafe spouse and increase the likelihood that we will end up one day in divorce court. One wife shared that she and her husband thought the word divorce long before they actually spoke it out loud. At first they said it to shock each other into action, but now they’ve said it so often that it’s lost its shock value. What was once an unthinkable idea now seems like a viable option.

Author Mike Mason says there is only one way out of marriage. “And the way out is not divorce! No, the way out in marriage (no matter how bad things may get) is simply to put everything we have back on the line, our whole hearts and lives, just as we did the moment we took our vows.”[7] (Hmmm. Seems that Mike knows the secret of being a servant lover!)

When we eliminate the “D” word from our vocabularies and recommit to our pledge “I will never leave you,” we create a security fence around our marriages. With this boundary in place, we feel safe and able to address the deep issues of what we can do to reconnect with our spouse.

Meet Each Other’s Deepest Needs

Nothing makes a husband or wife feel safer than having their greatest need met in the marriage. But what is the greatest need for a man? We could speculate and never reach a consensus because one author will say one thing and another will say something different. What is the greatest need for a woman? Read a hundred different surveys and you will get a hundred different answers. That is why we cannot look to the world for the answer to this question. Instead, we look to the Author of Life, the Creator God, who alone knows the secret because He created male and female.

Scripture doesn’t say, “A man’s greatest need is . . .” Nor does it say, “A woman’s greatest need is . . .” But God does make specific commandments to husbands and wives in Scripture, and we believe that these commands are there to ensure that couples meet each other’s deepest needs. He commands, “Husbands, love your wife. Wives, respect your husband.”

Let’s look at these two needs and see how love fulfills the greatest need of a wife, while respect satisfies the greatest need of a husband.

APPLYING THE SONG FOR HUSBANDS

Love Your Wife

When we want our spouses to hear what we are saying, we often repeat ourselves once, twice, maybe even three times. That is what God does when He speaks to husbands in Ephesians 5. Three times He reinforces His command for a husband to love his wife:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. (verse 25)

Husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. (verse 28)

[A husband must] love his own wife even as himself. (verse 33)

Look again carefully at these three verses. Do any of them offer a disclaimer? Do any say, “It’s not necessary for you to love your wife if she is selfish or if she doesn’t love you in return”? No. In fact, search the entire Bible. You will not find even one exception to the command. Regardless of your wife’s actions, God says you are to love her —period.

Okay, but what does love look like? The answer is found in a little-talked-about word closely associated with the command to love: cherish. Ephesians 5:28-29 expands on this:

So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church. (emphasis added)

The Greek word for cherish, thalpo, has important nuances not easily translated into English. It literally means “to keep warm, or to soften by heat.”[8] We see it used in a beautiful and descriptive way in 1 Thessalonians 2:7: “But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.” The word thalpo is used here of the tender care that a nursing mother has for her children. Note the tenderness and warmth associated with the metaphor. In the Old Testament, the image used to communicate this concept is that of a mother bird covering her young with her feathers.[9]

Another meaning of the Hebrew equivalent of thalpo is “to be of service to.”[10] It is used of God’s superintending care, as in, “You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:3). Thus, God is “intimately acquainted” with everything about us. Here’s what the word cherish means to Jody:

When I see all the nuances of the word cherish, I have to ask, What does it mean for me to cherish Linda? I am to communicate warmth to her; I am to treat her tenderly like a nursing mother and never be harsh; I am to be thoroughly acquainted with all her needs, emotions, dreams, and hopes; and I am to provide protection just like a mother bird hovers over her young, covering them with her feathers. This is very convicting, and I know I must become a student of my wife to even begin to live out all that loving and cherishing her means.

To cherish your wife is to actively love her.

Let Your Actions Speak Love

While there are many ways you can meet your wife’s deep need for love, we want to highlight three that every wife we know will welcome:

Here are examples of how husbands loved their wives in each of the three ways. First, Jeremy tells us how he loved his wife by helping her:

Every time Vicki and I made love, one of the kids would have a nightmare or wake up for no apparent reason, get out of bed, and knock on the bedroom door. I told Vicki to ignore the interruptions, but there was no way she could make love with a baby crying. I grunted with disgust and frustration as she got out of bed to care for little ones. One night it hit me: Jeremy, why do you assume this is her problem? Why do you lie here like a king waiting for her to finish the rounds of mothering? The next time one of our kids interrupted us, I told Vicki to stay in bed and that I’d take care of things. I suggested that she cuddle under the covers and daydream about how I was going to pleasure her. Her look of disbelief and then delight showed me that my act of loving service was long overdue.

Connor loved his wife through affection:

DeDe called me from work and told me she had accidentally backed over the trash can and into the concrete fence in our driveway, denting the car. My first thought was, Great. Our insurance premiums are going to go through the roof. I stuffed the thought and muttered a halfhearted, “I’m glad you weren’t hurt.” I felt badly that I’d sounded so insincere, so when I got home that night, I pulled her into my arms and said, “Honey, I’m sorry your day started so badly. Let’s end it right.” Then I offered to do what speaks love to her —a half-hour foot massage.

Derek loved his wife by listening to her:

I had been away for ten days on a business trip. As I walked through the door, I could smell the aroma of her special lasagna. We had already agreed that dessert would be in bed, so I was eager to be done with the meal! But over dinner, Melissa burst into tears and told me her cat, Tuffy, had died. I thought, Good riddance to the little hairball, but she’d had that cat since before we were married, so I listened to her reminisce about this pet that I wasn’t particularly fond of. She went on for what seemed like an hour. Finally, the tears and words stopped. Then she looked at me and said, “Thanks for loving me.”

Let us say a bit more about the need to listen and dialogue with your wife, because this is one of the primary ways you make her feel emotionally safe. Your wife gives and receives love through words, whereas words are just not as high on most men’s priority list. As one husband said, “I just don’t get it. When I come home from work, I want quiet, peace, and to veg out in front of the television. My wife wants none of these. She wants to talk, talk, talk. It took me a long time to figure out that listening to her was loving her.”

Kevin Leman, author and host of a popular radio program, says that he has yet to meet a man who, after a long day at work, thinks to himself, What I really need right now is a long, forty-five minute talk with my wife.[11] But a servant lover understands his wife’s need to communicate with him and that regular verbal communication is necessary for her to feel loved and emotionally safe.

Get Personal

Your wife is unique. Although certain attitudes universally communicate love to a woman, some things are unique to your wife. We encourage you to develop a personal profile in a notebook under the heading “Things That Speak Love to My Wife”:

When a husband loves his wife, he provides an emotionally safe place for her heart and for their lovemaking. All wives need to feel emotionally and physically safe, but this is especially important for the wife who has suffered from sexual abuse. If your wife has been wounded in this way, she likely feels unsafe and violated. These feelings are deeply woven into her psyche. It is critical that you create emotional safety for her, in and out of bed. She needs you to be a safe shelter, a place for healing. You may find it helpful for both of you to read “Letter to the One Who Has Been Sexually Abused” on page 145.

Your wife desperately needs you to love her through your words and actions. We know that sometimes this can be difficult, but what we are about to ask her to do for you will be difficult for her as well. No one ever said being a servant lover is easy, only that loving sacrificially can help a marriage flourish.

APPLYING THE SONG FOR WIVES

Respect Your Husband

Your husband craves your respect. If you don’t believe us, do what one woman did. On an evening when her husband was relaxed and had nothing in particular going on, she said three simple sentences before leaving the room: “I was thinking of you today. I was thinking of the things I respect about you. I want you to know that I respect you.” As she turned to leave the room, her husband yelled, “Wait! Come back! What things?” He was so loud that their children came running into the room. After the kids left, the wife again started to leave, and in a loud whisper he said, “Wait. Wait. Come back! What things?” He was riveted on her. After she had told him several things that she respected about him, he said, “Wow, can I take you and the family out to dinner?”[12]

Does it surprise you that your husband’s deepest need is for respect, not love? Of course a husband wants love and a wife wants respect. But when God created the first man and woman, He wired subtle differences in their maleness and femaleness as to their basic needs. God wove into the fabric of a man’s being a basic need for respect. Authors of the book Rocking the Roles say,

My wife longs to hear me say, “I love you.” I say it often because I know it means so much to her. But the phrase that has comparable value to me from her is not “I love you” but “I’m proud of you.” Respect and admiration are special ingredients to a husband’s happiness.[13]

Every husband yearns for the respect of his wife. He desperately needs to know she thinks he is important, that in her eyes he has value. The apostle Paul and the apostle Peter understood this truth. That’s why both of them ended their teaching on marriage with this instruction for wives: Respect your husband. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:33,

Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband. (emphasis added)

Peter wrote in 1 Peter 3:1-2,

Wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior. (emphasis added)

The Greek word phobos, translated here as “respect,” carries the meaning of “reverential fear.”[14] The best description we have found of this reverential fear is in the Amplified Bible, which offers an expanded definition of respect:

Let the wife see that she respects and reverences her husband [that she notices him, regards him, honors him, prefers him, venerates and esteems him; and that she defers to him, praises him, and loves and admires him exceedingly]. (Ephesians 5:33)

Who knew that respect encompassed so many ideas? Notice, regard, honor, PREFER . . . praise and admire EXCEEDINGLY? Is this really what God says to wives? Yes!

Look carefully at these verses on respect. Not one offers a disclaimer. None says, “You don’t have to respect your husband if he is selfish or if he doesn’t respect you in return.” No. Search the entire Bible. Look cover to cover. You will not find even one exception to this command.

In fact, Peter tells a wife that her respectful spirit will be used to change her husband. What does respect look like in everyday life? Let’s consider some ways you can actively respect your husband: honor and esteem him, support him, and respond sexually to him.

Honor Him

A man’s masculinity is more fragile than a woman’s femininity. The view a man has of himself (whether good or bad) is usually a reflection from two sources: his work and his woman. A wife’s ongoing responsiveness to her husband should be a well from which he can draw respect for himself. His self-respect is, in many ways, her respect reborn in him.[15]

The book of Proverbs speaks of the importance of a wife’s respecting her husband. The wife in Proverbs 31 esteemed her husband in public: “Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land” (Proverbs 31:23, NIV). We believe the idea here is that because this wife publicly honors her husband with her words, others respect him.

How do we honor our husbands? Through the words we speak privately and publicly to him and about him. If the only thing people knew about your husband was what you say about him, would they respect him? If others (your mother, mother-in-law, friends) could listen in on the way you speak to him in private, what would their opinion of him be? Do you honor your husband by the words you speak?

Support Him

A wife’s words and actions communicate to her husband either “I support you” or “I compete with you.” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, in her book The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, relates what competition looks like in the average home. A woman had called her, wanting a way to convince her husband that she was right in her desire to have another cat.

DR. LAURA: What? He doesn’t have the right to his position?

CALLER: Yes, of course he does. It’s just that I don’t see any good reason not to have another cat.

DR. LAURA: A good reason is that he doesn’t want to live with multiple animals. Why isn’t that a good enough reason?

CALLER: Can’t I keep pushing him to specify his reasons? I just want to know why he feels that way.

DR. LAURA: No, you don’t. You are not really interested in understanding his position. You want to know his arguments so you can shoot them down so you can have another cat. You don’t want to understand; you want to manipulate.

CALLER: Yeah, I guess that’s so. But I really want this other cat!

DR. LAURA: Obviously, you want that cat more than you want to show your husband respect.[16]

Do you support your husband, or do you compete with him? Do you support him in his roles as a provider, a father, a Christian, and a man, or are you more concerned with getting your own way?

Here are some examples of how wives we’ve talked with support their husbands.

IN HIS ROLE AS A PROVIDER:

IN HIS ROLE AS A FATHER:

IN HIS ROLE AS A HUSBAND:

IN HIS ROLE AS A LOVER AND FRIEND:

Not only do our husbands need us to honor and support them but they also need us to notice them physically.

Respond Sexually to Him

Your husband wants you to desire him. Why? Because sexual intimacy affirms his masculinity. That’s how God created him. One honest man said, “For me, respect is spelled S-E-X.” It is important to understand that sex not only meets a physical need in your husband but that it also meets an emotional need. This revelation changed the way Kasey viewed sex:

In the past, I dismissed Trevor’s need for sex because I viewed sex as a physical need, and for me, a mom of three preschoolers, there was no time for my physical needs. If I were hungry, I overlooked it. If I had a headache, I ignored it. So I thought if Trevor had an urge for sex but I wasn’t in the mood, it wouldn’t kill him to wait another day. But then I learned that sex was more than a physical need for Trevor —it was a way he connected emotionally to me. That changed things because emotional needs are important to me!

Another wife said,

It may sound stupid, but I want to make sure he gets what he wants. He’s too wonderful and I love him too much to disappoint him. That’s how I respect my husband: communication, understanding, support, great chocolate chip cookies, and great sex!

A servant lover willingly does these things in order to meet her husband’s deep need for respect. She also seeks to build him up in other ways that will be meaningful to him.

Get Personal

Your husband is unique. Although certain attitudes universally communicate respect to a man, certain ways will be unique to your husband. We encourage you to develop a personal profile in a notebook under the heading “Things That Speak Respect to My Husband”:

When wives respect their husbands and husbands love their wives, they create a safe place for loving. Listen to these wise words from author Tommy Nelson:

Show me a woman who feels that her husband deals with her tenderly —with kindness, good manners, generosity, genuine affection, and understanding —and I’ll show you a happily married woman, regardless of external circumstances that may come against their union as a family.

Show me a husband who feels that his wife deals with him with respect —admiration, appreciation, upholding his dignity as a man, thankful for his protection and provision —and I’ll show you a happily married man, regardless of the stress he may feel from the outside world.[17]

SERVANT LOVERS:   Make their marriage a safe place by meeting each other’s deep needs for love and respect.

SELFISH LOVERS:   Make their marriage an unsafe place through unloving actions and disrespectful words.

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THE CHORUS:

“What is this coming up from the wilderness

Like columns of smoke,

Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,

With all scented powders of the merchant?

Behold, it is the traveling couch of Solomon;

Sixty mighty men around it,

Of the mighty men of Israel.

All of them are wielders of the sword,

Expert in war;

Each man has his sword at his side,

Guarding against the terrors of the night.

King Solomon has made for himself a sedan chair

From the timber of Lebanon.

He made its posts of silver,

Its back of gold

And its seat of purple fabric,

With its interior lovingly fitted out

By the daughters of Jerusalem.

Go forth, O daughters of Zion,

And gaze on King Solomon with the crown

With which his mother has crowned him

On the day of his wedding,

And on the day of his gladness of heart.”

SONG OF SOLOMON 3:6-11

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