Tending To Your Partner's Emotional Needs

Marriages are made in heaven they say, but eventually, every marriage has to come down to earth. The honeymoon "orbits" gradually decrease in passion and intensity, due to other priorities that demand our attention. More so, when the bundle of joy arrives!

Loving glances are gradually replaced by frowns, the stars in your eyes do not shine so brightly anymore, and your attempts at intimate conversation are punctuated by wails from the little intruder. You discover, as almost every married couple before you have discovered, that the feeling called "romantic love" has to be nurtured by a continuous process of meeting each other's emotional needs.

What is an emotional need? It is a deep desire within you that, when satisfied, gives you a feeling of extreme happiness and contentment. If this desire is unsatisfied, it leaves you with a feeling of unhappiness and frustration. This means that when a husband and wife meet each other's most important emotional needs, they will experience passionate love, and stay in love as long as these emotional needs are met.

But, each of us has different emotional needs, and even if both spouses have the same emotional needs, their priorities for each emotional need may be different. For instance, let's say that "love and romance" for one partner means "sex and recreation"; for the other, it's "affection and intimate conversation". Now, if such a pair would spend a recreational evening together, show intense affection, with deep, intimate conversation, it would naturally lead to sexual fulfillment. The result? Passionate love, since the most important emotional needs of both are fully met!

You, and your spouse, fell in love with each other because you both met some of each other's most important emotional needs, and the only way to stay in love, long after the honeymoon is over, is to keep meeting these emotional needs.

So, the first step for you, and your spouse, is to identify what your most important emotional needs are - those that will make you the happiest and most contented. What you would like your spouse to do or not do, that would give you the greatest happiness?

Once you've both identified your most important emotional needs, the rest is making sure that these needs are regularly and adequately met.

(Excerpt from Slice of Life)