My wife and I completed the His Needs Her needs questionnaire and my primary concern with my wife's answers was that on the scale of 0-6, she select the need of 6 for all 10 emotional needs listed in the questionnaire.

As a numbers guy, I calculated the following:

She meets 37% of my top 5 needs, 88% of my bottom 5 needs, and 62% of all 10 emotional needs

I meet 87% of her top 5 needs, 77% of her bottom 5 needs, and 82% of all 10 emotional needs

I will also note that her primary emotional need is Affection and mine is honesty and we gave each other a 3 which is the highest score you can give.

From this survey I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job of meeting her top 5 needs and she is doing a pretty bad job meeting mine. I will admit I put a ton of effort into our marriage and just feel like she does not.

So being selfish here, do these numbers mean that in order for her to meet my top 5 emotional needs I have to better meet all 10 of hers?

I'm just lost and feel like whatever I do is not good enough.

Please Help

MG

What is she missing the MOST when it comes to meeting your needs?

Are you married?

How long married?

How many kids?

How many hours per week of undivided attention [out of the house together ALONE] do you spend?

Do you ever spend the nights apart?

Melody - Thank you for the reply

Here are my needs in order or importance and following them are the scores I gave her for meeting those needs on the -3 to 3 scale in the questionnaire. I will not my need for Financial support is not her working but living within our means.

Honesty(3), Admiration(0), Financial Support(-2), Domestic Support(-2), Sexual Fulfillment(-3)

Here are her needs and how she scored me on the same scale

Affection(3), Admiration(2), Domestic Support(2), Recreational Companionship(0), Physical Attractiveness (2)

Answers to your questions

- We've been married for 4-years and been together for 7
- I am 49 and she is 43
- No kids of our own, she has a 11-year old from her first marriage
- Her daughter is with us 50% of the time
- She travels for work during and is gone 6-12 nights per month
- We have 1-2 date nights per month
- She works 70+ hours a week and I work 50 in 2-jobs

Hope this helps

I don't really understand what you are trying to say. This is a very odd way of discussing your marriage.

Is there a problem in your marriage that led you to take the questionnaire?

What is the problem?

Is either of you unhappy, or less than happy? What are you unhappy about in the marriage?

Your top emotional need is a bit unusual. Are you honestly saying that the number one thing that makes you feel romantic love for a woman is honesty?

Not sexual fulfilment? That is the number one need for almost all men.

Please explain how honesty makes you feel love for a woman.

Financial support is another odd one. You say that by this your mean that she should be able to live within your means. Again, are your really saying that a woman who is financially prudent makes you fall in love with her?

Thank you for the Reply SugeCane

For me honesty is the cornerstone of any marriage and without it there is no relationship. I need for my wife to be open and honest with me about her thoughts, feelings, wants, desires, and of course fidelity.

My wife is very happy with our marriage and I am not. She raves about how great a husband I am but I am miserable. As you can see by the questionnaire I'm doing a pretty good job of meeting her needs and she is she is not meeting mine. To be more specific.

- When she missed Valentines day and my birthday for work this year and forgot our 4-year anniversary this year I honestly wondered if she may be having an affair. This is in part why honesty is so high on my list

- She criticizes way more than she admires

- She has racked up so much debt I'm working a second job on the weekends and I make over $130K per year and she makes $85K. I would love to hire a house cleaner to help with the domestic support but we cant afford it. I do 70% of the housework because she is either traveling for work or she is doing her own thing.

- We have sex 1-2 times a month and only when she wants it and remember, according to Willard when it comes to sex and affection, you cant have one without the other and she ranks the the affection I give her as great.

Using Marriage Builders concepts, we can immediately see that your marriage suffers because your wife spends nights away from home; a HUGE number of nights on a regular basis, which is very risky to the marriage and does not allow for you to spend time "bonding" together out of the house on dates, for at least 15 hours per week.

You should easily be able to meet this target, with one child who is with her other parent 50% of the time, but your wife's working pattern does not allow it, and is killing your marriage. Her long working hours, and your two jobs, combined with the travelling, suggest that you barely see one another.

That's how we would see it, but I would still appreciate an explanation from you of what is making either or both of you unhappy. What problem are you trying to fix?

Is this your first marriage?

Why did your wife's first marriage end?

Dr Harley recommends couples in love spend a minimum of 15 hours UA time together per week. Do you spend this amount? I can't imagine that is happening if she works 70 hours a week (and travels) and you are working two jobs. Two dates a month is not enough.

Also, Dr Harley does not recommend nights apart, and specifically advises against traveling jobs.

When I began the online MB course, and ranked openness and honesty as my number 1 need, my coach told me that betrayed spouses ALWAYS put this as their primary need. Non-betrayed spouses never do this, and betrayed spouses move that need lower down the ranking as their happiness in the marriage improves, and the affair recedes. It does not surprise me that you have wondered whether she is having an affair, given your ranking of that need.

I think you should take that suspicion seriously. Your wife has an open opportunity for an affair connected to her work and travelling, as did my husband when he travelled in his job. We all have emotional needs, and if our spouse is not around to provide them, and somebody else is, we are all very likely to allow someone else to meet our needs, sooner or later.

Your wife is probably having an affair, and has been doing so for some time, I'm sorry to say. The reason that she declares herself happy with the marriage and the way you meet her needs is because at the moment, while she is having the affair, she is happy and has not yet become miserable enough in the marriage to want to leave. She isn't complaining because she wants to keep her life as it it - with a loving husband at home and another man whom she meets for secret sex, fun and conversation.

The only reason she can say she is happy with a marriage that sounds as disengaged as yours is because she is lying, and because she is getting her needs met elsewhere.

SugerCane - Again thank you

This is my first marriage and her second. her first ended because her X was a cop and brought the tension and drama home and they grew apart.

As mentioned, she is very very happy in our marriage and I am the one that is not. I am miserable because the sex, the affection, the affirmation is not there. I don't get a lot of domestic support and while it is getting better, she use to criticize me at every turn.

Max, please have a look at this thread. You can skip through some of the arguments that develop mid-way, but the beginning and end posts are invaluable, as they contain clips from Dr Harley, talking about why travelling jobs are poisonous to marriages. Please listen to all the clips.

Dr Harley on travelling jobs

How do you know this for a fact?

I'm wondering whether she had an affair in her first marriage.

Was she divorced when you first met? How did you meet? Why did you marry so late, and why did you marry a woman who already had a child? Why didn't you have any children together?

In our conversations about her first marriage infidelity never came up.

She had been divorced for about 2-years when we met. My parents were married 54-years before my mom passed and I wanted the same for myself. I simply waited till the age of 45 to get married because I never found the right girl until then. We met on-line at match.com. I never really wanted kids and she only wanted one so not having kids of our own was a no brainer.

Like Sugarcane pointed out, there are some huge red flags here. First off the needs you rank the highest are not intimate emotional needs, which tells me you have checked out. Domestic support does not create romantic love because it requires no emotional intimacy. Plus, you could hire a housekeeper.

The lifestyle that you lead will not support a marriage and is a set up for an affair. You can't sustain the love in a marriage unless you are spending every night together and are devoting 15+ hours per week meeting the 4 intimate emotional needs. The fact that she is not interested in sex is the canary in the mine. It is the first indication that a wife has checked out. That is why she is happy elsewhere.

If you would focus on setting up an integrated lifestyle, you could solve all of these problems, including her spending. But you can't do that as long as she travels. That would be the first area I would focus on. The second, of course, would be to spend 15+ hours per week out on DATES meeting the top 4 intimate emotional needs. Once you do that for a while, I predict your EN's will change.

What made this woman "the right one"? You didn't want kids, and she had one. What were the qualities that made her stand out above other women you dated, even with a kid from another marriage?

How soon did your feelings of dissatisfaction begin to surface? Has she worked these hours, and travelled, from the beginning? Has she always spent above your means? Has she always been messy in the house? Do you feel that your marriage was ever happy, with both of you meeting each other's needs?

Incidentally, what does she spend the money on, to put you in such financial trouble with such high incomes? Have you tried any strategies to bring your joint spending under control? Does she recognise that such high spending is a problem? Is she willing to tackle it?

Max, you answered some of my points, but you said nothing about the strong possibility that your wife is having an affair.

If you do not look into this (and do it without rousing her suspicions), you will be burying your head in the sand, and dealing with peripheral problems while letting the crucial problem of the affair continue. Your marriage cannot survive that.

She can't be "very happy" in your marriage if you are apart for up to half the month, and sex, affection and what you call "affirmation" is not there! She can't be happy if you are not happy, if you are lonely and you feel criticised and put upon! She must be able to see that you are not happy, and she must know why, and she can't be happy under those circumstances. And she can't be happy in a distant marriage! What she tells you simply is not logical.

She is getting her happiness elsewhere, and she is lying to you about how good a husband she thinks you are. If she thought you were doing such a good job, she would want to be with you. She would not be happy being apart from you for major amounts of time, and she wouldn't criticise you as much as you say she has done.

SugerCane and MelodyLane

When I sat down to prioritize my emotional needs, I struggled and perhaps this is where I need help.

1) way to think about listing them is what you look for in a spouse.

2) a second way to rank them is what you need from your current spouse.

3) a third way to rank them is by what you are not getting from your current spouse.

I ranked them using method 1. If I were to re-rank them using what I need to feel loved from my Wife the order would be as follows.

Affection
Sexual Fulfillment
Admiration
Domestic Support
Recreational Companionship

About 4-months ago I asked her flat out if she was having an affair and she looked me right in the eye and said she was not.

As for the finances, its the new cars, the hot tub, the landscaping, the home repairs, the medical bills, the overages on the budget. We have sat down and taken a very hard look at our finances and we are on track to get our debts paid off in 18-months and I will quit my second job in 2-3 months. I'm also looking for a higher paying job.

As for her travels, she is in retail and oversees stores so she has to travel to see them. In the 7-years I have known her, she has worked for 4 companies and all have been in retail and required travel.

I have not come across a story on this forum where a spouse asked "flat out" about an affair, and the cheating spouse looked them in the eye and said "yes".

Lying is the norm, Max. What do you think a cheater would say? Do you think they would go to the lengths of hiding an affair, - which means washing intimately, and not getting after-shave, hair or other substances on their clothes, hiding gifts and love notes, keeping text and emails hidden (which means protecting their phone), lying about what they are doing when their spouse calls from home, lying about going out with friends or colleagues, hiding the credit card bill because it shows meals at restaurants and birthday gifts purchased...do you think they would do all that, only to answer "yes" when asked flat out if they are having an affair?

I do hope you are going to take our warnings seriously, and snoop for an affair. There is a strong probability that your wife meets a colleague, who also travels, or meets someone at one of her locations, and they spend time together in hotels. If her denial is all you need as proof that she is NOT having an affair, I feel very sorry for you.