What Most Couples Get Wrong About Love, Respect, and Intimacy

I can't tell you how many times I've seen couples who are fighting, who are going through a very difficult time, who feel like they're not on the same page. And if they would just take this one piece of advice, things can be better. And I'm not like one of those guys that are like, "All you got to do is this." And like, "Okay, your problem's no big deal." Um, I've I've seen real issues. I've seen real dysfunction. And I've seen couples who are not sleeping in the same bedroom anymore, who aren't talking to each other anymore. And the problem they're making is that they think they need more love. They need more respect. They need more trust. Um they need more intimacy, more bedroom activity. And and by the way, these are all true. Show your spouse more love. Show your spouse more respect. engage more physically with your spouse, trust your spouse more, and show your spouse more that you're the kind of person who is trustworthy. These are all good things. The problem I have is trying to chase these things as if those are the solution, as if that's what's actually missing. If you feel like you're missing love, you feel like you're missing respect, you feel like you're lacking trust, you feel like you're lacking marital intimacy or any other quality that is uh important for a marriage, I need you to ask yourself the following question. If love, respect, trust, intimacy, and if there's something else I missed or whatever it may be, if this desired quality showed up, how would you notice? How would you notice it being there? How would you notice that more love is there? How would you notice more respect, trust, indust? What difference would it make for you? Why would it be important to you if you had more love in your relationship? What would that love give you? What would it do for you? What would the respect, trust, or intimacy do for you? How would it make you feel? That's what you need to chase and get more of in this relationship. In other words, the love, the trust, the respect, the intimacy, or whatever it is I may have missed on this list are crucial and are important, but they're pathways. They're pathways to build a connection. If you had more love, you'd probably feel more connected. You'd feel more united. That's really what marriage is. It's two people becoming one. And if you had more respect, you feel like you can connect better with this person. more intimacy. Again, another means to connection. Trust, a very important means to connection. These are all pathways to connection. And I see couples all the time getting distracted by the pathway and forgetting about the result that they're looking for. You know what a common one is? Communication. So many couples come in and say, "We need to work on communication." And it's probably true. Uh they're probably not communicating well. That might be true. But if you had communication, what difference would that make to you? What would you do differently? Right? Ultimately, you'd connect better. So, focus more on connection. And when you can focus on the result that you're looking for, you're going to be able to experience the proper pathway to get there much easily. More marital and sexual activity, more love, more respect, more trust, more communication. These are all symptoms of a healthy connection. Which means what we need to really focus on is the connection. And how do you connect with your spouse? I urge you to read the Bible. Read the Torah because it says Adam knew Eve. The Torah describes their connection as them knowing each other. Get to intimately become aware of your spouse, aware of his or her needs, aware of what's important to him or her. Ask questions. Ask questions that identify what's important to your spouse and take note of them because the more you get to know your spouse, the more you get to connect to your spouse. And from connection when you build connection from there love, trust, intimacy, respect, communication, all of these channels now open up and you can follow through them much more easily. That's my story and I'm sticking to