How to be your wife’s boyfriend

I wrote a blog post called “How to be your husband’s girlfriend” and I thought it would be a good idea to get the other point of view from my hubs. He is my super sexy guest writer and shares how to be your wife’s boyfriend. We’ve been married for 32 years and there’s always work to do to make our marriage better. Maybe your husband will read this, and the two of you can have some good chats about what he can do to be a better boyfriend/husband. 🙂

she wants love

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs wrote a book called Love & Respect and in it he details the results of a survey of both men and women. And as he put it ““Women need love. Men need respect. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.” Further he says women “yearn to be honored, valued and prized as a precious equal”.

Hopefully, your relationship developed by growing in love with the woman that became your best friend and is now your wife. If your relationship has grown stale and you feel like you are just co-existing with your wife, or if you’ve fallen out of love, the key is to bring it back to how it all started. No one wakes up one day and says, I’d like to live in a loveless, boring or frustrating marriage. As Casting Crowns says, “it’s a slow fade”.  Maybe it started when you committed to a career or hobby which continued to take more and more time, but she’ll understand, right? Maybe it started when the kids entered the scene and began to take more and more time and energy and you didn’t leave much for each other.

The key to success in your relationship is to never leave your wife wondering if you still love her. If you do, she will fill in those gaps by telling herself stories that will hopefully not be true, because those stories never seem to give you the benefit of the doubt.

submit???

Furthermore, if you are a Christian, Paul unlocked this marriage secret in Ephesians 5 where in verse 21 he instructs husbands to submit to their wives (WHAT?). That’s right, it actually says “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ”. Well then, what does submission look like? It is simply a willingness to put the other person’s needs ahead your own. Paul goes on in verse 25 and instructs husbands to love their wives. How much do you have to love them? Ready for this? “…just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” Wow, can you imagine a relationship where the husband loved his wife as much as Jesus loves His church? He goes on in verse 28 in case you cannot relate to that level of love, and he says “…husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself”. Now there is a love we can all relate to!

what does love look like?

So how do you love your wife well? I’ll ask you that question, how did you show your girlfriend that you loved her when you were dating and developing your relationship? The simple answer is to go back to doing those things … be her boyfriend.

Remember the Percy Sledge song “When a man loves a woman”? Did you ever have these feelings for your girlfriend?

When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothing else

He’ll trade the world for the good thing he’s found

When a man loves a woman, spend his very last dime trying to hold on to what he needs

He’d give up all his comfort, sleep out in the rain, if she said that’s the way it ought to be

When a man loves woman, he can do her no wrong, he can never want some other girl

Yes, when a man loves a woman, I know exactly how he feels

Baby, baby, baby, you’re my world

If you are unable to remember what made those days so magical, here are a few thought provoking ideas: hide notes for her to find; make her coffee or tea, breakfast, dinner; hold her hand, hug her, cuddle; give her unexpected gifts (they don’t have to be expensive); think about ways to serve her; take her away for a weekend; take her to dinner, theater, movies, museum; give her a head rub, foot rub and/or massage; fill the cars with gas; go for a drive with no destination; open her door; play games together; just change up the daily routine.

If you ask her, which you should do, she will likely add: listen, encourage, kiss her daily when you leave/return, tell her you love her regularly, send love/intimate text messages (let her know you’re thinking about her),  show appreciation for her, don’t take her for granted (it’s easy to do when our lives are so busy), compliment her, communicate with her (instead of how was your day, tell me some good things that happened today), sometimes she needs to just vent…don’t try to fix it…just listen, flirt with her, cook together, do house chores without being asked.

And here is a difference between men and women that men may never understand. These demonstrations of love do not always have to lead to sex (in her mind).

be a good example for your kids

If you have children, make sure they know that you love their mother. They should hear and see you loving their mom. I shouldn’t need to say this, but given the current state of our society, keep it G-rated in front of the kids! Your kids may act like they think it’s icky, but it is the safe, solid family foundation that they all desire. Never put her down, never argue in front of the kids. I didn’t say never disagree…it’s how you handle the disagreement when the kids are listening and watching. Your kids are always learning from you, teach them how they should respond to a disagreement.

Apologize when you need to…and maybe sometimes when you don’t think you need to.  This is one that causes disagreement between Joy and me. Sometimes I will say something, and she will take it in a way that was never intended, so from my vantagepoint I did not do anything to provoke the offense and thus there is nothing to apologize for. However, from her standpoint she was hurt by what I said.  So, what should you do in this situation?

And while all these things are great for the physical and emotional, you must go beyond this if you want to develop or grow your spiritual lives together. Have spiritual conversations, pray together, do ministry together, go on mission trips together. Show her through your actions that your faith is important. When my wife and I do pre-marital mentoring, we ask our couples to tell us each other’s testimonies. This exercise provides insight as to how important their spiritual lives are to one another. Have they ever had this conversation, how deep did they go and how much do they remember? So, the question for you is if your wife was to give an honest account of your spiritual life what do you think she would say?

Joy and I often talked about a mindset where we wake up each morning and say, “what can I do to make her happy today?” We told a close friend about this, and he added “what can I do to make her holy today?” In other words, what can I do to encourage my wife’s relationship with Jesus today? The answers to these two questions will have profound impact on your marital relationship assuming you put the actions behind the answers.

I hope these words will inspire you to invest in your marriage and enjoy a much more fulfilling relationship with your wife while being her boyfriend.