I was reading Snowhite's post about how she was trying to meet her H's ENs she thought, but realized that they were HER ENs. It made me remember a "shocking" discovery that WH and I had had the week after d-day when we were filling out the ENs questionnaire.<p>When we were finished with the questionnaire, we found out that our top 5 ENs were basically the same, and in theory were meeting each others ENs because we were meeting the needs we wanted the spouse to fill for us. The problem with us wasn't that we WEREN'T meeting the ENs, it was that we weren't meeting them CORRECTLY. For example, both WH's and my top EN is admiration. He thought he had been meeting mine and I thought I was meeting his. Turns out he wants VERBAL admiration...a lot of "thank you"s, "I love you"s, "You're great"s, "You look nice"s, etc. I needed ACTIONS...touching me when he walked by, kissing out of no where, cleaning up dishes, stirring the spaghetti sauce while I set the table, etc. Can you guess how we were meeting each others EN of admiration? Yep, how WE wanted the other to do it. So I "SHOWED" WH my love and admiration and he "TOLD" me. But I never "heard" WH's admiration because all I never "saw" it and he never "saw" my admiration of him because he never "heard" it. Very confusing I guess, but now that we have figured THAT out (after 10 years of being together I might add), we are FINALLY truly meeting each other's top EN. It's amazing what the power of perception has, huh? And once again how bad the lack of communication can lead to a marriage's demise over a 2 second conversation: "Me: I like to see admiration" and WH: "I like to hear admiration" The admiration was always there, but it was never conveyed properly. The things we learn in retrospect....