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This book was an fascinating one , I chose His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage by Willard F. Harley because it has such incredible reviews and has been around so long and yet is still very successful.
Also Dr. Willard Harley himself is very impressive, he himself is happily married and has been for over 30 years! Which you would think is a common denominator among relationship therapists and authors but surprisingly it is not. So in the first chapter he
The book is a great read and from reading it you can expect to learn practical ways to improve your marriage now. It does this by first explaining what “her needs” and then “his needs” are. It compares our love for someone like a bank, and all of our or our partners actions leads to deposits or withdrawals from this love bank. The idea is to keep ones account in the positive and making sure to fulfill some basic needs so that our spouses love bank doesn’t get filled by someone outside the marriage.
Some of her needs consist of intimate conversation, physical affection( not necessarily sex), an environment of appreciation(praise, thank yous and cute cards/texts).
It also goes in to his needs, the first one is not so surprisingly sex and the second is the need for recreational activity.Not just recreational activity in general but with their wife! It says many times that your best friend should be your spouse. When men go out for recreational activities i.e. football games, to the gym, hunting and sports they put huge deposits in their love bank. Many times these deposits go in to his friends’ accounts because those are the people who are willing to go with him to those things but there is a major advantage to a wife is she is the one who is connected to these emotionally fulfilling events.
The only thing I did not like about this book is it had several case studies at the beginning of each chapter telling about how some loving couple had stop filling each others love banks and the other person cheated on their spouse. I never knew there were so many ways and reasons to cheat! Have to admit it made me kind of paranoid which Jacob did not appreciate at all.
Mind you I did not think Jacob was cheating but it caused me to take a good look at the habits we are starting now when we are young in marriage and where they could lead if not corrected. Example being I had stopped watching BYU football games with him after we got married. These are a huge deal to Jacob and he loved when I was his cheering buddy. After reading this book I started looking for ways to make the games enjoyable to the both of us to make deposits in both of our love banks.
Needless to say there is a game this Thursday and you can bet where I will be. Go BYU!
It’s also helped Jacob as well fulfill many of my needs that I didn’t even know how to put into words until I read this book.
So the invitation is simple, look at these basic needs of your husband or wife, if you don’t know what it could be, ask them. Chose one of these major needs and find a way how you can better fulfill this for your partner. If you want better details I would encourage to read the book, it has fun activities and discussion questions you can do with your spouse. You’ll learn a lot about each other and how to better fill each others love needs.
Original Article: http://itrustinfamily.com/2014/10/08/his-needs-her-needs-building-and-affair-proof-marriage/