Welcome back, everyone, to the iTorah Marriage Series with Rabbi Ali Cohen. You can reach me at 917-837-0102 or alcohen, A-L-C-O-H-E-N, at L-E-V-T-O-R-A-H.org. If you'd like to call, make a session, ask me a marriage-related or parenting question, by phone, Zoom, in person—whatever works.
Let's get right into it. Today's topic is taking your spouse seriously—taking your spouse's words seriously. I'm going to explain exactly what this means, because nothing is absolute and guaranteed. There's always an exclusion to the rule. I don't want to go off on a tangent, but people get into extremes, like, “The key to a successful marriage is communication.” I mean, the key to whose marriage? Everyone's? Really? The key to success in life is the key; there are no absolute things. Everybody has their own way. And, yeah, there are general situations. But you get the point.
So, taking your spouse seriously: many, many times in a marriage, things come up often—recurring situations—and it becomes a debate. Somebody will say, let's say a wife to her husband, “I don't feel like you're giving me enough attention. You're not giving me enough attention, and it's not fair; you're so busy.” Then he'll get into a debate and get defensive: “Oh, he just went out two weeks ago. See, you're so needy. We just spoke an hour.” Now, it could be she is needy. It could be. But that doesn't help anyone. That doesn't help anything. You're debating an emotion. I like to say this often: it's ridiculous debating emotion. She's not blaming you and saying you're a failure. Again, men or women, like I always say, your wife is not saying you're a failure. She's just saying, “I need your love.” And then you're coming back with points of logic and showing her where you've taken her out and shown her attention. Great. So you proved to her that you showed her attention, but she came with an emotion and she left for the logic. Like, “Oh, you're right. You did take me out last week. I feel better now.” I'm thinking about it now. It's ridiculous.
So, number one: take your spouse seriously. When they say something, don't debate it. When someone says how they feel, don't debate it. Sit there, listen, hear them out, and give it some thought before you say something.
Now, let's take this situation. A wife will tell her husband, “I don't feel loved. I don't feel like we go out anymore. I don't feel like you're thinking about me or you're into me anymore.” So think about it. Okay. Okay. First of all, I hear what you're saying. That's terrible. Now, step number one is: “That's terrible. That must be terrible. You're my wife. I want you to be happy. That must be terrible.”
Now, this does take gevurah, does take strength to do this, because people are soft and fragile. Many people are fragile. So you have a man who wants to make his wife happy. Now he's hearing that she's not happy, he starts to crumble, and then he gets defensive. So you need to be a little bit thick-skinned, a little bit strong to deal with life and not get so defensive when someone says something that might insinuate that you need to step up your game or change or so on. It doesn't mean you're a failure. Your wife, in this situation, didn't say you're a failure. All she said was, “Love me.” Basically, the message was, “Love me.”
The truth is, I know I'm going on a rant here, that's really the debate in almost all these things: “Love me. Can you watch the kids while I nap? Can you help me? Can you love me? Can you be there for me?” You know, whatever the situation might be. So your step number one is: hear them out, validate them. “Yes, I hear. Okay?” Next step is: what can I do? What can I do?
Now, I don't want to talk about what happens if people are being aggressive. Let's say in this situation, the wife would say, “I don't know, you figure it out.” That's a separate topic. She's clearly wrong for saying that. She's clearly being reckless with saying those words. But on your end, if your wife is saying, “I need your attention, I need your love,” the first step is to ask her, “Okay, what can I do? What do you think? Would you like to go out tonight? Is it going next week? Have you had a gift in mind?” The first step is to communicate properly and say, “How can I help? How can I step up my game?”
And most of the time, when someone is heard and they're validated and things are communicated properly, they will explain to you where they're coming from. And then you can say, okay, and make this into a sort of—I don't like this word because people are not going to... It's not taken well—make it into more of a business-like conversation. “Okay, so you feel unloved. Good. And that makes—not good—but why are you feeling unloved?” “Because we don't go out anymore.” “Okay. So I know we went out last week. So do you want to go out twice a week, or do you want to have once a week we go out and the other day a week we go do something else?” Try to be very practical, very practical, and ask, ask. Now, again, in another class I could deal with—I could explain what to deal with.
If your spouse starts getting aggressive: “Nothing, and I don't want anything from you.” That's already a different story that I got. I'll give you a little quick tidbit. You should tell your spouse, whoever it is, like, “Okay, I can help you. If you're going to talk to me like a person, you talk nicely. I can help you. If you want to talk like a mature adult and sit down, I'd be glad to talk. When you attack me and say negative things and you're down my throat, I really can't help you and hear much. And you're clearly under stress, but when you sit down and talk nice, we could talk.”
Yes, anyone listening is going to say, “Yeah, that'll go down well,” but you can't be—it's just unhealthy for someone to bash you and then you give in, like, “Okay, okay, I'll do anything. I'm sorry.” That's not a healthy relationship. That's how kids, young children manage.
And the last point that I want to bring up is similar to the first point about not debating: their perception matters the most. When it comes to somebody's emotion, their perception matters. Which means even if you have a logical debate and you feel like, “No, you are doing what you're supposed to be doing,” for the most part, it doesn't really matter because they're not receiving it like that. So maybe you need to switch gears. You are working extremely hard at this relationship, but maybe there's... You're working hard and you're just using whatever. I don't want to use this, the love languages, but maybe you're buying gifts and that's not what your spouse needs, or maybe you're using the words of affirmation and that's not what your spouse needs. That's just as an idea. It doesn't matter what you think; it matters what they feel.
So, very, very simple: taking your spouse seriously. Stop debating these things. Don't debate an emotion. Hear them out. Let them know you heard them. Ask them what they need. Don't get defensive. Don't be so fragile and brittle. Don't be this frail thing that anytime someone gives you any hint that maybe you need to step up your game, you start falling apart. It's the cause of many, many arguments in the... And Rabbi Miller says many downfalls of marriage. Be wise, be patient, pray to Hashem. He has the answers. He has the answers. He has the ability to give you the knowledge and the koach (strength) to take care, to get your marriage in order or to fix situations that you find hard.