At first glance I thought this book was a manual for the newly married. “This is a guide for rookies, and being married for 11 years now, I am no amateur. My marriage is great and there is nothing this book of marital advice can school me on that I don’t already know,” my prideful heart gloated.
Wrong! I couldn’t have been more wrong and humility rooted itself back into the recess of my ego-damaged heart. Even though I’ve been married for over a decade now (yikes!), the harsh reality is that there is always room for improvement.
Nancy Cobb and Connie Grigsby took the one statement that plagues wives from all walks of life and used it as the title of their book, How to Get Your Husband to Listen to You. Clever.
The book reveals that (now brace yourselves) wives don’t know everything. Contrary to what wives may believe, husbands do know a thing or two. It explains that husband does not equal girlfriend. Sometimes a wife unfairly expects her husband to fill the shoes of a girlfriend, but as Cobb and Grigsby explain in so many words, husbands don’t look good in stilettos. They are not designed to fit into those shoes nor are they designed to fit into that role.
Cobb and Grigsby discuss the five languages of love, which are:
- Physical Contact
- Acts of Service
- Words of Affirmation
- Gifts
- Quality Time
The authors challenge you to discover your husband’s language. You may be spending all your time showering him with gifts, when it would mean the world to him if you would sit down and watch a football game with him. Usually wives will speak to their husbands in their own language, meaning that if the wife’s love language is gifts, she assumes her husband's love language is the same and will respond accordingly. However, more often than not, wives and husbands speak different love languages. The wife should know her love language as well as her husband's and visa versa.
This is an eye-opening book and it helps the reader to understand how men communicate. The wife needs to understand her husband and then he’ll be more apt to listen. This is the wrong book if you are seeking how to change your husband. You waste a lot of time and energy trying to change someone, but instead direct that energy on becoming informed about the way men think. If however, you are looking to improve your marriage, this book will prove to be an instrumental resource.
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