Love & Respect by Emerson Eggerichs is about building a marriage on what the other person most desires. Unconditional love and respect are necessary for a long-lasting marriage.

Marriage can leave us stuck in a frustrating cycle of miscommunication, but by understanding your partner’s needs, you can improve your relationship.

There is no denying that men and women are different. Not only does this apply to physical characteristics, but it is present even in our worldviews. Men tend to desire respect above all else in life, but women want to feel loved. When the two come together in marriage, it can be tempting to withhold one to gain the other, but this does nothing but keep us on what the author calls the “crazy cycle.”

If we can learn to respect and love unconditionally, we can move out of this cycle and into the “energizing cycle.” This allows both individuals to motivate one another and ultimately move into the “rewarded cycle.” This is the knowledge that we are rewarded not because we are focused on the marriage but because we are obedient to God.

In this summary, you will learn:

  • why decoding messages in a marriage is the secret to happiness;
  • that obedience to God is above our own needs; and
  • how freedom is found in showing unconditional respect and love.

The secret to marriage is simple, but we must first learn to decode it.

A crazy phenomenon can be found in marriage counseling. It seems that most wives struggle with feeling that their husbands do not love them, but then most husbands struggle with feeling that their wives do not respect them. The common result of this perplexing cycle in which these feelings persist is divorce.

For the author, this cycle started at home when his parents could not get along. They divorced when he was one but remarried again. At age five, after his parents continued the cycle of feeling unloved and disrespected, they divorced again. This changed the way he viewed married life.

In college, when he asked a girl to marry him, there were already some distorted forms of thinking. Their first big fight was over a jacket that she gave him as a gift. His fiancée did not think he was excited enough about the gift, but he felt he had shown the proper level of being grateful. Both thought they were right because of their backgrounds.

The secret to handling all the issues in a marriage is held in a short verse in Ephesians 5:33: “Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” The need for love and the need for respect in a marriage has everything to do with the type of marriage we have and can affect every decision made in that marriage. When a wife feels unloved, she responds in a way that does not feel respectful to her husband. When a husband feels disrespected, he responds in what seems to be an unloving manner. This is the cycle, and it will leave both stuck. The truth is, regardless of how the other person responds, we must keep up our side of things, showing either love or respect.

Couples communicate in code, whether they mean to or not, and the other person must decipher this code. Part of this is the difference between genders. Men and women think and process information differently. A single line, “I have nothing to wear,” has different meanings for men and women. For men, it means there is nothing clean. For women, nothing new. Small miscommunications can escalate into huge fights if we do not learn to decode for one another.

Most often, the argument is not the real issue. Rather, a prior misunderstanding has caused problems. Think of it this way, men and women both view and hear the world through their specific filters. If you are using a filter, you perceive the world in your way but differently from the next person. When you communicate through your filter, you do so in a way that the other person may not understand because their filter is different. In this way, the message gets misconstrued, and arguments begin.

Men most fear losing respect, but women want to be loved.

Learning how to decipher the other person’s code may not happen overnight or even in a year, but if we keep trying, then it will improve. The issue is truly a lack of understanding. Couples miss a simple truth in the Bible. The husband should love his wife, and the wife should respect her husband – and these should happen even when the other person is undeserving. That’s the kicker! We all have roles to fill, whether the other person is acting in a deserving way or not. We must embrace unconditional love but also unconditional respect. 

Part of the reason unconditional respect is a struggle for women is the filters that we mentioned. We may not see disrespect in what men see. A different point of view alters how things are perceived. This is true even in Christian circles, where churches preach unconditional love all the time but rarely touch upon unconditional respect. The point is this: The way to love a husband unconditionally is to respect him in ways that matter to him. Both genders want love and respect, but the most primal drive is different for men and women.

Many men would prefer to live with someone who did not love them yet respected them rather than be loved but disrespected. However, men are to love their wives using agape love, a self-sacrificing love only possible through God. Men are to be the protectors, called to die for their family if need be to keep them safe. While men and women are equals in God’s eyes, there are still distinct roles.

Though men are often seen as rough and able to take criticism, they are frequently hurt by it and take it as a form of contempt. Some may even feel hated when criticized by their wives. The yearning most husbands have is for honor and respect. Along the same lines, conflict often leaves men feeling disrespected. While people think it perfectly normal for a woman to say, “I just want someone to love me,” we regard it as odd to hear a man say, “I just want to be respected.” If a man in society were to say this today, he would likely be labeled arrogant.

Men have an unwritten honor code that they uphold with one another, but in the home, these codes are often broken by wives during conflict, even if not on purpose. Eventually, the man stonewalls his wife because he thinks it is honorable. Still, the wife sees this as unloving and may amp up criticism, which leaves him disrespected all the more. This continues the crazy cycle first described.

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