Happiness

[Gerda]

I gotta disagree with you both! I think a man's love is very different from a woman's, and that's what I like about it!

And I don't agree, DnJ, that you know how to give love 100%. I would say you know how to give love 670,616,629%, which is also the speed of electricmagnetic waves and light.

I love how a man loves! It's very different from how a woman loves, and I love receiving that kind of love and giving my 100% woman love. I love to write characters who can do that and to read about them in great lit. I did receive it enough to know what it is -- it's just those guys either didn't want to keep me or it was fleeting or conditional, like my H. Or I guess with my H it wasn't so much conditional as totally disordered and ultimately was potentially a mask for a lack of love.

Ultimately, whether you are a faith person or not, I think that Paul's admonition on this is the key to it all. What he tells each of us to do indicates what is hardest for each of us to do --

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body...This is a profound mystery...However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

It's kind of the men are from mars and women are from venus idea -- in other words -- he had to tell wives to respect their husbands because that doesn't come as naturally to us as love. We women often think a man has to earn our respect and are mystified as to how our loving love is not understood or having the impact we want it to. Likewise, respect is very natural to a man, but the raw and open heart required for love comes less naturally to men, who may be less driven by feelings or less in touch with them or who were taught to block them. (Except you, DnJ. But not totally. I've always said that detachment might come naturally easier to you than me, and your being a man may be part of it.) Paul has to tell the men to love and the women to respect because he knows it comes hard to each side and that the other side is longing for it. A great book on this is called, Love and Respect but I see the idea in secular books too, including one that perhaps maybe one or two of you just might have heard of before called, Divorce Busting.

I regularly watch my friends who seem to have decent marriages subtly tear their husbands down though they truly love them. And likewise I regularly have watched my guy friends stumble around the fragile hearts of their wives though they truly respect them.

I know that MLC was not my fault, and now, deep on this journey, I realize that my H may have been battling his mental health demons from day one, but I also did a lot of work to change myself the first few years, and I know that I was a very loving and self-sacrificing wife but really not woman who showed her husband that she respected and admired him very often. I don't think that would have changed the path of MLC, but it has already changed my interactions with men and maybe one day will allow me to be a better wife to someone. When I'm like 80.

And that is my two cents on this topic. Flame away, posters! : )