Melissa Love & Respect

One of my favorite books to use with couples is called Love and Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggeriches. The concept is basically that men need respect and women deeply desire love. And that can be a little bit not natural for us because as women, we desire love and so we show love, and men desire respect, and so they show respect. But really we need to do what the other person needs the most. And this is a concept that's been researched by psychologists for a very long time, but really it goes all the way back. And it comes from its roots in the Bible. There's a scripture verse that says, women, respect your husbands and husbands love your wives. There is no call for women to love their husbands, and there is no call for husbands to respect their wives. Why? Because we don't need love and respect? No, we all deserve love and respect. But it's unnatural for women to show respect as much as it is for them to show love. And it's unnatural for men to show love as much as it's natural for them to show respect. So we need to told to do that, and we need to learn to do that, because it's also not natural. In the beginning. We don't mean any harm by this. We're in a new relationship. We care about each other, but we do small things that might hurt or offend the other person. Over time, it builds up and it becomes this crazy cycle. So he doesn't feel respected, so he doesn't show as much love, and she doesn't feel as loved, and so she responds disrespectfully. And then it just becomes this crazy cycle that keeps on spinning. A friend recently asked me, when do I know that my significant other and I need to go to therapy? The answer is that therapy is best used as a preventative tool. So before it becomes this huge catastrophic issue that maybe you're talking about breaking up or you're talking about a divorce, you should come to therapy too. But we want to start when the issues are much smaller and we can address them when they're in their beginning stages. Like anything, the longer you leave a problem unaddressed, the bigger the problem will become. So 15 years down the road, those habits that have been forming for so many years are harder to address and change than they were at the beginning. When they're just new forming in a new relationship or a new marriage, that's when we want to address those snarky comments, disrespect any love that's being withheld. So that's when we want to address Those things not 20 years down the line. That's later than we want to begin addressing it. So if you're ready to talk about what you can do to make your relationship filled with more love and more respect and make it the relationship that you've always dreamed of, schedule a call with me on the link below and we'll have a 20 minute complimentary conversation to talk about what you need to do to get that relationship where you want it to be.