Dear, if your marriage is not working as you desire, there is a tendency that you have neglected the most important emotional needs of your marriage and I will prove it to you in a moment.
Why did I say so?
You see, every marriage has needs, and those needs are so important that if they are neglected, it will affect the marriage negatively. Most couples are so ignorant of these important emotional needs, which is why there are so many cases of disagreements, infidelity, and divorce.
In this article, we are going to look at those important emotional needs and also look at how you will fill them out in a way that will help your marriage stand firm.
The Emotional Bank Account
All those needs are contained in what Steven Covey an American bestselling author called “Emotional Bank account” is where all the love that sustains a relationship is deposited.
: – )
If the “emotional tank” is full the love you shared with your spouse will burn brightly, but no marriage runs well if there is an empty tank.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp_ahyJFR6s[/embedyt]
How full or empty is your emotional bank account?
So how much love and care do you have deposited on your “Emotional bank account”? Believe it or not, the success or failure you’ll experience in your relationship/ marriage depends on the answer you will give.
Simply put, the more you have deposited on this account, the more love will be triggered and the more your marriage will succeed; for that is the most important ingredient for a happy marriage and love burns from the emotional reservoir to keep the marriage flame burning.
Everyone has an emotional account, which just like the ordinary bank account is blank from the beginning, but as we live our lives, we either make a deposit or withdraw from it.
Here’s is how are works
No one can make a deposit on his or her account, it is meant for someone else to deposit on it. Your wife can make a deposit and withdraw from your account and you can do the same on your wife and both of you can deposit on your children too.
However in this emotional bank, the monetary unit is not used, but trust, care, and others. In marriage or relationship, whenever we meet the need of our spouse, we make a deposit in his/her emotional tank, and when you fail to meet the need, you have made a withdrawal.
Make a daily deposit
One of the ways you can continually stay in love is by making sure you make more deposits instead of withdrawals and every single infidelity /affair is obviously a product of an empty emotional bank reservoir.
We have been taught that love comes first in marriage, and we also focus so much on that too, but nobody told us that we must nurture, feed and water our marriage by meeting those little needs of our union.
My need to share this
When I realized the impact having more trust deposited into this account can make in a marriage, I started looking for how to help other couples understand these too.
I visited so many couples, asking a question about what their spouse can do to then that will make him or her fulfilled, or how would they want their spouse to take care of them?
Do whatever you should
Taking care of needs has great meaning when it comes to how far a marriage can go: it simply means doing whatever there is you can to make each other happy, what extra mile you can go because you want your spouse to be happy. As insignificant as that word can be, any marriage that lacks it, is very close to a big fall, if not dead already.
But no one got married to be miserable after some time. Everyone begins within the eyes and with so much hope, and dreams to have a successful marriage. But at a time things started crumbling down.
Amazing isn’t it?
In the earliest stage of your marriage, both of you made so many promises of taking care of each other, and you were sure you want to do just that because the love was so strong, and each of you was so much motivated to see each other happy. But how many of those promises did you keep till now? Little did you know that the very moment you stopped caring for one another, all the love that existed will be lost in a twinkle of an eye.
Why am I talking about “Care” now?
You may be surprised why I am talking so much about this now.
Why should I be telling you about taking good care of your partner now? You see the truth is that you love your spouse so much, but you may have neglected the most important things that matter to him/her.
And as I am writing this article, you are still not sure about what it means to proper care of your spouse.
Is love everything in a relationship?
You believed love is everything; you believed you have been so much committed to making your marriage happy.
Well, all of them are good, but that is not all there is to care for your partner in a better way, I am talking about taking care of your spouse most important emotional need.
The question is,
What are these “Most important Emotional Needs”?
These are those types of need you have that when it is well satisfied, it makes you feel so good and so contempt from deep within you, but when it is not well taken care of, you’ll feel very bad and frustrated.
These needs are so important to you that you can give everything to get them solved; it is those cravings in your heart that when someone fulfills it, you wouldn’t mind falling in love with that person.
By now, you would have seen where I am going. : )
A quick story.
But let me tell you a story that will help drive it into your sub-conscious.
I have told this story before in my article 11 ways you are unknowingly destroying your wife and killing your marriage, but I think it will be good to use it and show you what solving emotional problems can do to someone.
The story is all about a woman who was knockdown by motorbike; though she sustained just minor injuries, someone was around to help take her to the hospital; there and then the woman called the hubby to tell her of the incident and husband showed interest by asking her to go to the hospital for treatment, and never bothered to call again.
But the other man that offered her help called again and again and again just know how she is doing; that’s how it all stated and the woman became a good friend to the man because he did what the husband was supposed to do.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfl-Hx4r4Ds[/embedyt]
The lesson to learn
In that story, there an emotional need for care, but the woman could not them from the husband, but from an outsider.
I am not praising her for her actions; I was only telling you what happens when someone’s most emotional need is met.
However, everyone has basic emotional need it is not just for the women, men too have theirs
Lemma show you another true-life story that will drive in what I am trying to portray
This is a true live narrative from one of the blogs I enjoyed reading.
Hello Dearest Stella,
its an honor to share my chronicle of hope with you and my fellow SDKs.
I met my hubby to be when I was 20 and an undergraduate. We courted for 4yrs and got married 2years ago. Our marriage is blessed with a beautiful daughter.
Before I finally agreed to choose my hubby over all the men who were asking for my hand in marriage, I considered the following attributes which are;
His stand with God.
Read the full story from the source
From what you read, you can figure out what the most important emotional need of those two examples where.
And to be precise with you, you must start looking deep into your marriage/ relationship from now on to understand what the need of your marriage is; if you really want to bulletproof your marriage from infidelity.
Another question is
How do you know what these needs are?
Don’t worry that is why I am here
There are so many different emotional needs: like the need for thanksgiving parties, going to movies, and many others.
But the fact is that everyone is uniquely made and so the needs are different as well, that’s why it is very impossible to understand where to start when you want to help couples that are passing through emotional challenges in their marriage.
As I went about asking couples how they prefer their partners to care for them, I realized that the women’s most important emotional needs were the men’s least need which became a little challenging.
That’s the reason it seems hard for couples to meet each other needs but in other to get things right I had to classify all they listed into one category, and that is what I called the most important emotional needs.
Here is a list the basic emotional need
1) Openness and honesty:
Every partner wants a relationship where there are honesty and openness. Being honest in marriage creates a better and stronger relationship with couples. Honesty brings security in marriage and makes the couple to be bonded emotionally. They know very well that they can trust each other.
Couples that openly share their past, their present plans and activities as well their future are always able to make quality decisions. However, when there is no honesty and openness in a marriage, there is always fights and quarrel.
2) Commitment:
Any marriage that has stayed a long time has a level of commitment present. This is when couples are so willing to do anything there is in other to see that their marriage is moving on well.
In marriage, there will always be times when all things may seem upside down. At that time, your ability to stand firm depends on how committed you are. That is why every partner wants to see that commitment in the other partner. When one partner is more committed than the other, things don’t normally move well.
3) Helping in domestic works
4) Admiration:
How do you admire your spouse? How often have you looked at his or her face and say “dear you are the best thing that has ever happened to me and I bless the day I found you.
Your spouse wants you to admire him or her, and I will encourage now to make a list of all you admire in your spouse. Understand that the hallmark of every relationship is to admire your spouse always.
5) Physical attractiveness:
Physical attractiveness is view differently in every relationship; while some partners view it as a temporal thing that should only exist at the beginning of a relationship; some think it is something that should always be there in other for the marriage to be stronger.
My take on this is if being physically attractive to your spouse will increase the deposit to your “emotional bank account”, then make it a point of duty to make yourself always attractive. Eat well, dress well and neat too.
6) Affection:
Affection is a type of love that exists between people that makes them feel so close, safe and very well cared for. Affection is that emotional bank deposit of love that makes your spouse feel very good about your marriage and you. I call it to love in action.
Marriage thrives well when there is a strong affection, and that’s why every partner must work towards building more affection in their marriage.
7) Sexually active:
One of the things every couple has to themselves and are not expected to share with an outsider is sex. Somehow some couples have lost their sexual life. It is either they are not satisfying each other, having sex at all or that the sex life is boring.
To be sure that you are having the most important emotional need of your marriage met, you must try everything you know to revive sex.
8) Companionship:
Being a good companion is what every partner wants in any relationship. When you were starting out in marriage, you were so interested in winning him/her, you did all you can to impress and charm your partner.
Now that you are married you thought they are not important anymore. The truth is that your partner expects you to be the best friend he/she has; you must be a good companion too. Do take your relationship for granted.
9) Financial support:
Finance plays a very big role in marriage, and most people got married to their spouse because of the financial security to expect to get from their spouse.
When a partner is not getting that financial securities he/she hoped for before getting married, probably due to the partner’s underemployment or unemployment, they become unhappy and frustrated.
At times, these are not seen at the beginning of the marriage but when it has lasted for a while of even after the children. Remember we are talking about meeting your marriage’s most important emotional need and also remember that I said that we usually fall in love with anyone that meets our most important need.
10) Conversation:
The conversation is another emotional need every couple craves for. However, so many couples have neglected this and have their marriage broken.
The conversation is one aspect of marriage that can never be toyed with, it is during this time of communication that partners share their views and opinion with each other. If your marriage lacks conversation today, you are not alone. But just understand that you can restore it by learning the skills.
You will agree with me that those are the more common emotional need, but there may be some variable since every marriage is not created equal.
The truth
When your spouse has one of those needs, and it is not met, he/she may want to swallow and suffer with it or seek somewhere else to get the satisfaction they need. Which do you prefer?
Rounding up:
In other to make sure that the most emotional needs of your marriage are not taking for granted, you have to figure out what more your spouse’s needs are and see a way to take care of them. Remember, all you are seeking is to bulletproof your marriage for infidelity.
Bonus Read
11 ways you are destroying your wife and killing your marriage.