While Dr. Harley encourages husbands and wives to rank the emotional needs in the way that seems to match their own feelings, he also says that having such a non-intimate emotional need in the top two is a sign of being in the state of Withdrawal. There's an article on that in the Basic Concepts.

Out of curiosity, what are your husband's top five emotional needs, in order?

When Dr. Harley works with a couple, he concentrates on the intimate emotional needs. As a person moves out of withdrawal, they often express that their top needs are the intimate needs after all. The intimate emotional needs are recreational companionship, intimate conversation, affection, and sexual fulfillment.


The meeting of all emotional needs has to be negotiated and done in a way that the "need-meeter" is enthusiastic about. For example, a husband might feel that his emotional need for sexual fulfillment needs to be met in certain ways that his wife feels are uncomfortable or demeaning; in that case, husband and wife have to negotiate until they can find a way to meet his need that his wife can be enthusiastic about.

If a husband or wife demands that a need be met in a way that their spouse is not enthusiastic about, they will soon find that the need is not being met after all.


I believe I have heard Dr. Harley express his opinion that a wife should get to choice whether she wants to be a stay at home mother or work.

You might want to contact Dr. Harley directly for more clarification on this.

Oh, there is also a chapter in Love Busters on financial conflicts that you will probably want to take a look at.

Can you please point me to this? I looked & couldn't find it. Thanks! ~ Zhamila

Thak you everyone for your replies. You're right I'm not very enthusiastic about working in fast food and he seems to be ok if I take the job or not. We havent done the rn questionnaire completely, I just asked him questions. His #1 is domestic support. I dont think he's in withdrawal but Ill check the article to look for signs. We'll do the questionnaire asap. But he definitely did partially get married to have someone contribute financially so it wouldnt be just him.

I looked at the article on withdrawal and I do think he is in withdrawal to some extent. Like I said we stopped arguing about me working a while ago. He also didn't put sf as very high which surprised me. I thought the fn issue wasn't that bad because we stopped arguing but maybe he just gave up. It looks like its a bigger problem than I thought. So if Im getting this right I meet the need by negotuating an agreement that we're both enthusiastic about, but my income is for personal use and I choose whether or not to work when kids come?

When I say I dont know if his need is valid I mean I think part of the need is rwlated to his childhood and are maybe something he should adress pppersonally.

This discussion both fascinate and reassures me.

My H and I are getting divorced as empty nesters and I'm pretty sure that his number one need was financial support, though I could never get him to even look at this site.

When we married, I had just turned 30 and became pregnant on the honeymoon. This was a terrible blow to my H, because I made more money than he did and wanted to quit my job/career. However, I had saved painstakingly for eight years and purchased a condo before I met him. And I had been honest from the beginning about wanting to be a stay at home mom. When our son was born, I left my job and we made enough of a profit selling the condo to buy a fixer upper house. I also had enough funds to enable us to buy a rental property. His career took off, and by our fifth anniversary we'd had two more children (one of whom died as an infant) and purchased a third house. I felt that I was contributing financially by helping to manage the two rental properties and by being incredibly thrifty with his (our) other income. Unfortunately, he still wanted me to work full time outside the home. His resentment grew and he had a lengthy affair about twelve years into the marriage. He made many other unilateral decisions because I "didn't work," which of course made me resent him. I should mention that I ran a small home day care until my youngest was in first grade, volunteered in their schools and took part time jobs here and there. I did our taxes (which were complicated) and helped take care of his mother when she had a heart attack. None of this mattered to him as much as my working full time would have.

The reason this thread is reassuring to me is Dr. Harley's position that the man should be the primary breadwinner. I know I was trying to have a marriage like my mother's - and did wonder if that thinking was flawed in today's world.

Pmamabear, the difference in your attitudes about money can become an even bigger wedge in your marriage once you have children, so it's good you are addressing this now. If you don't have family to help with childcare, your husbands fears about not having enough money are well founded. Right now you say you don't mind living without extras, but you will need a lot more income just to cover the basics. If you could wait until your business is more solid, before even trying to conceive, I'd advise that.

Having children made my marriage bearable and inspired my husband to become very successful in his career. However, we were each in our separate worlds and now live apart. It's a pain I wouldn't wish on anyone.

It's great you're asking for advice and will be even better if your husband is open to what the folks here have to say.

Good luck!

Pm are you familiar with the idea of the Love Bank? When you meet the top 4 intimate ENs consistently in ways that are meaningful to both of you, he will be in love with you, happy with you. But he still may be miserable with life, and you can't fix that. When I was married, I didn't work in a fast-food restaurant, but I remember leaving my then 2 year old for 2 hours crying with a $5 an hour babysitter so I could work $10 an hour at a tutoring place, because I couldn't stand the thought of my then-H being unhappy and thought I could fix it by working harder. Is that what you are trying to do?

Please take a look at this article, What to Do with a Depressed Spouse. POJA is the way out. It's empowering, to reconnect together to the idea that you create your own life, and aren't being made to suffer or whatever.

patient, I posted to you on your first thread. I hope you read it.

patient, your husband did not have affairs because you stopped working. People don't fall in love or out of love over financial support. Your husband fell out of love because the INTIMATE emotional needs weren't being met. THAT is why he had an affair. When that happened, his top need became a non intimate EN became money because there was nothing else that meant more to him.

People do get divorced when they are in love. Keep that in mind. Your husband might have pointed to your lack of working as a cause for his affair, but that is the typical manufacturing of grievances that every wayward will do. Even by your own admission, your husband was successful in his career.

And his career involved travelling, which caused physical and emotional distance between you. It is easy for intimacy to die when the spouses live separate lives. It is likely that the lifestyle caused the lack of intimacy; the career was the problem.

Dr. Harley is much smarter than I when it comes to this stuff. However, this issue has me completely curious as to why this EN is treated differently and has a gender bias.

Why is the FS support not an EN a woman should meet when it is the man that has it as an EN?

If the couple decides not to have children, does this mean that the man should still be the sole worker in the marriage and the woman to stay home and do what she wants during the day?

I know that when children are involved, the parent that is at home has a ton of stuff to take care of. But I know that before my wife and I had children and it was just the two of us, domestic chores were negligible in terms of maintenance.
If the husband is responsible for FS and the woman gets to choose not to work, does this mean that the man gets to choose not to do DS if he chooses?

I do want to say my wife isn�t working right now (although she works just as hard as I do as a stay-at-home mom right now). And I have no problem with this. I�ve actually kinda enjoyed it. But I�m just curious as to why this need is different than the rest in that if it is a need for a man, the wife is not responsible in meeting it.

Hi everyone, I have an update. We did our official EN Questionnaires last night and he changed a few things since our discussion: His needs: 1. Honesty and openness, 2. financial support, 3. affection, 4. domestic support, and 5. family commitment. I have a feeling these are going to change but its a starting point. I think in a couple weeks we'll both look at the them again and see if we want to revise anything.

So he said he's completely satisfied with the financial support I'm giving him, he just wants us to do more sales. He says his need for it is 4/6, he wants me to make $1,000-1,500 a month, but only if he's not making enough, it would make him somewhat unhappy if I didn't do that, that I make enough and he likes the way I do it, and his explanation of what I could do better was to help him with the budget and do more sales.

I also brought up the subject of "if he's not making enough for me to get a job to help him feel more secure" and asked him if he could get a different job, or a second job if he wasn't making enough, instead of me getting a part time job. He didn't really say anyting, I think this had never occurred to both of us! I was looking for a second job to make him happy and it never occurred to me that he could look for a second job too.

My top needs: 1. Honesty and openness, 2. Affection, 3. Conversation, 4. SF, 5. Financial support.

Anyway, I guess I'm going to put it on a shelf for now since he's satisfied, but I'm glad we talked about it because I learned a lot. This need is something I definitely am going to monitor. I should also say his views on things like marriage, kids, and money have been evolving slowly.

How does he feel about upgrading education for either or both of you? The problem I see, as a mom of 2, is that you seem to be looking at mostly minimum wage jobs for yourself in terms of qualifications. How is it that you both expect to afford childcare if your income is barely more than (or even less than) the cost of childcare?

It seems like your husband is eager to enjoy the DINK lifestyle (double income, no kids) but a future family is going to take some long-term financial and educational planning beyond simple numbers of income.

One thing that springs to mind, is that you upgrade your education to include childcare qualifications yourself and perhaps you can "kill 2 birds with 1 stone", by taking in other children while staying home with yours.

Spend the next 12 weeks having 15 hours UA time meeting the four intimate emotional needs: Affection, Sexual Fullfilment, Conversation, and Recreational Companionship. Then see how you order your emotional needs.

pmamabear, that is great! One thing that really stands out is his top 2 needs are not the intimate emotional needs. That means he is probably in withdrawal from you and is not in love. People don't fall in love over financial support or O/H because they are not intimate emotional needs. Harley even mentions in this article on financial conflicts that this husbands desire for his wife to earn more money reflects an emotional distance between them.

THAT is where I would focus if I were you. I would focus on correcting the emotional distance and restoring the romantic love in your marriage. That is achieved by following the policy of undivided attention and implementing the policy of joint agreement. It takes 15 hours per week of undivided attention for a couple to MAINTAIN romantic love. If you aren't doing that, you WILL fall out of love in about 5 years.


KT, I have not listened very carefully to the subject of financial support over the years, so I am trying to get myself up to speed. One thing I do know is that he treats men and women differently because they are different. One set of rules for 2 completely different spouses would never work. I have heard him express completely different rules about FS on the radio and just need to find those clips and listen again because I could have missed certain nuances.

exactamundo!

I have to admit I was surprised to see his needs as well - it certainly did not reflect a typical order for men. I have never heard of a man who did not have SF in the top 5, good spotting, this man seems to already be in withdrawal.

I'm not sure about the SF thing either. Before I know it would have been higher on the list. But he did go 6 years in between me and his last girlfriend (he is very careful and was looking for the right person). When I asked him about it, he says he's happy, but he has other things that he cares about more, and when he's not in the mood he says it's because he's worried about the business, and us not getting paid.

I think he listed his needs partially based on what he wants addressed now, so I think that because SF isn't much of a problem, he listed it lower (#7) and I think he didn't want it to look bad to list it high. I'm pretty sure his list will change in the future.

I'm also surprised about family commitment being so high on the list. I asked him about it and he said that it was really important to him and he really did want to have kids, but that he was always scared about the money. I have a feeling when we have kids it's going to be really important and he's going to have stronger feelings/beliefs than I thought.

What are the symptoms of a husband being in withdrawal? I've been there before but we always worked on things. When I asked him how happy he was in our relationship he said 8/10, I remember when I felt like I was in withdrawal it was more 4-6 out of 10. I can't tell if he's dropping stuff because he doesn't want conflict, or if he's not interested, or he's actually happy. We have been "happier" the last few weeks and trying to work on UA.

But I will work on the UA time, the emotional needs, and POJA.

Another question, how do you do the UA? Like 2 hours a day and more on the weekends, or one hour a day?

A symptom of a spouse who is in withdrawal is citing NON-INTIMATE emotional needs as their top needs. Your husband obviously did not fall in love with you over financial support and family committment. Those are things that make spouses happy, but they do not create romantic love.

When a spouse is not in love, they tend to focus on minor needs such as FS and FC, because that has a higher value to them than intimacy.


Being happy is not the same as being in love, though. That is what seems to be lacking here.


Harley recommends 4 - 4 hour dates per week. Here is his article: http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi3350_attn.html