Why Meeting Your Wife’s Needs are Important

Women have different needs than men do.  And some of them might seem trivial to the other.  To my mind my wife seems to be overly sensitive towards bathroom odors, but that’s just the way women are.

One thing to keep in mind is that we are able to give to others out of our own abundance.  I know, that sounds like psycho-babble.  But my point is that it is hard to give to others and meet their needs when we have needs ourselves—when our own emotional bank account is overdrawn.  In several of my previous books for women I often tell them that if they want their needs met, they must make sure they meet their husband’s needs first.  To some degree women seem to have been created to be able to set aside their needs momentarily in order to meet the needs of others.  It is probably part of their nurturing nature that they have been given this gift.  They do it with their children all the time.  However, even God has not given women an inexhaustible capacity of this aptitude.  And the unfortunate part of this is when a woman crashes, everyone around her suffers mightily.

Therefore it behooves us as men that if we want to have our needs met, we make an effort to meet our wives’ needs first.  That requires us to first of all make the effort to understand what her needs are.  Then we must take steps to proactively address them, before she even knows they are an issue.  In the workplace, a smart manager does not wait until something breaks or a problem occurs before they address it.

In the boiler room of the Navy ship I was stationed on we had a program called Planned Preventative Maintenance (the fact that I can even remember that after 30 years is a testament to the value of that program).  This was where on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis we worked on all the pumps, boilers, evaporators, and other machinery of the fire and engine rooms.  We repacked values, replaced parts, cleaned equipment, painted deck plates, and rebuilt motors before they needed it.  I remember as a young sailor thinking, Why in the world are we wasting time fixing something before it was broke?  But after several years I understood the wisdom in applying preventative maintenance to items that our lives depended upon.  Equipment stayed in perfect operating order so that during a crisis or an emergency we were prepared and able to deal with the problem in an efficient manner.  To ignore the operating status of a pressure relief valve on a 1,200 pound boiler until it was put to the test during an emergency would put the lives of everyone on board the ship at risk.  If it failed it could explode and sink the ship, potentially killing all on board.

Our relationships are even more important.  Why take the chance on having the pressure build up in your marriage until it explodes, killing the relationship and your entire family?

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