Eric’s Blog

My wife and I just got done reading His Needs, Her Needs by Willard F. Harley jr. I read my copy and she read hers. It was recommended to us by my boss. He actually told me that when he read it, he realized he was ready to leave his second wife. He didn’t recommend it to us for that reason, he genuinely wanted to help us.

First, let me say, neither my wife nor I, are particularly religious. It is incredibly difficult to find a book about marriage and relationship building that isn’t written by someone with a religious background and this is no exception. The nice part is that the author doesn’t go into too much detail about religion, so it was easy to gloss over.

The Love Bank

If you ever heard anything about making deposits in the Love Bank, then this is where it comes from. The whole idea is to make more love deposits in your account that resides with your partner (the bank) than you do withdrawals or at any other bank. Overall, the concept is fairly easy to understand but more important than the Love bank concept are the emotional needs within the book.

Emotional needs

Ten chapters are broken down into emotional needs. Five are meant for him and five are meant for her. The book starts off with the author’s most important emotional need for her (ladies first), then the most important emotional need for him, then oscillates back and forth between him and her in descending order of importance.

It is key to point out that the order of importance is based on the author’s perspective. He mentions several times throughout the book that not all needs will fit the mold of him or her, some meant for him will obviously be more important to her and vice versa. Also, not all needs will be in the order of importance for every person, some needs meant for him may end up being more important to her and vice versa. Finally, the order of importance may not fit every individual, the order the author put them in may not be the order you list them.

The emotional needs are:

• Affection
• Sexual Fulfillment
• Intimate Conversation
• Recreational Companionship
• Honesty and Openness
• Physical Attractiveness
• Financial Support
• Domestic Support
• Family Commitment
• Admiration

Some needs are fairly easy to understand without reading the chapter. Sexual fulfillment is fairly straight forward without going into too much detail. Guys need sex in order to stay committed to the relationship. Others require a bit more context than just reading them on a list. Admiration, Family Commitment, and Domestic Support just to name a few that baffled me initially but became clearer after reading them.

Some things on the list of emotional needs are surprising. When I gave the list a cursory glance, I didn’t think physical attractiveness would be important to me, but after reading that chapter, I found it was more important to me than I initially realized.

The author does provide examples as he goes along with couples he’s counseled (I’m assuming the names were changed to protect the innocent) and how not having their emotional needs met led to one or both partners seeking fulfillment from outside their marriage. The subtitle of the books is Building a Marriage that Lasts and a reoccurring theme in the book is how to Affair-proof your marriage.

Each chapter concludes with a few questions for both the man and the woman to answer individually and a few questions they should answer as a couple. I answered the questions as I went through the book. After we both finished the book, we sat down together and answered the couple’s questions at the end of each chapter. It kept things fresh and in perspective for us as time went along instead of just data-dumping everything that we learned about ourselves and each other.

15 hours per week

One tenant of the book is to spend a minimum of 15 hours with your partner each week. Are you scoffing yet? I know I did.

If you’re like most people, working 40+ hours a week, trying to find time for yourself, your kids, your hobbies, and everything else you have going on in your life, 15 hours with your partner seems like an excessive amount. The book led me through some interesting math:

• There are 168 hours a week.
• If you’re getting the doctor recommended 8 hours of sleep per night, that equals 56 hours per week, subtracted from the 168 available leaves 112 hours.
• Work takes away 50 hours per week including travel time to and forth leaving 62 hours.
• 15 hours per week with your partner leaves 47 hours in the week for all the other things (e.g. eating, showering, hobbies, children, etc.)

Those 15 hours should be committed to your partner and nothing else. Put down the phones, spend time in an intimate conversation, go on a date, enjoy a hobby together, play a game, have sex, show your affection, whatever is on your partner’s top five list of emotional needs, that what you should be doing. Don’t sit on opposite sides of the room scrolling through social media ad infinitum like we used to. (I actually deleted all my social media and couldn’t be happier, but that’s for a different blog post).

It all comes down to 2.5 hours per day spent with the person you committed the rest of your life to; it’s not that bad. We’ve been mixing it up each day talking, spending time being affectionate to one other, watching a movie or show that we both want to see, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Harley’s Laws of Marriage

Throughout the books, Dr. Harley drops little nuggets of joy for you to enjoy. He calls them his laws of marriage. There are quite a few and many have corollaries and postulates. I’m not going to give away all the goods, but here’s a sample:

“When it comes to sex and affection, you can’t have one without the other.”

“Meet your spouse’s needs as you would want your spouse to meet yours.”

“Caring partners converse in a caring way.”

“The couple that plays together, stays together.”

The best part

The best part of the book was the appendices. After the chapters on the emotional needs, there is an appendix that summarizes all of the needs and then there are questionnaires you can use to grade which emotional needs are mort important to you.

After reading all the chapters and the summary of the emotional needs, it was kind of a no-brainer to determine which needs I valued most and to put them in order of importance. I didn’t use the individual questionnaires for each individual need, I just sort of shot from the hip and wrote down the ones in order of importance for me from one to ten; my wife did the same.

There’s another questionnaire in the back of the book that we used to come up with ideas for our date nights. It is called the recreational enjoyment inventory and has a list of things from acting and aerobic exercise to bible study and skydiving on it. It even has space for you to write down activities that may not be on the inventory. Each individual grades how much they’d enjoy doing the activity from -3=very unpleasant through 0=no feelings one way or the other to 3=very enjoyable.

After you and your partner rank these items, you total up the score for only the positive ratings. Anything with a six is something that you and your partner should select when planning recreational time together. We found that we both share a love for collecting antiques, boating, playing volleyball, and going dancing, but neither of us has any desire to join a bible study or attend church services.

All of the questionnaires and inventories can be found on the Marriage Builders website. They’re free and available to download and reproduce for use in your own marriage.

In summary

I enjoyed this book. It made me think of things in a different way which is what I needed to save my marriage. There were parts of it that were outdated, outmoded or antiques of an era gone by, but for the most part, the major plotlines I’ve outlined here hold true.

I highly encourage others to read this and put it to use. Most people read self-help books and then just data dump; what’s the point? If you read a self-help book and you learn something from it, you need to employ the concepts you found interesting, thought-provoking or engaging. Reading something and then data dumping doesn’t do you any good.

As I read through the book, I highlighted 110 different passages I found interesting, and of those, I made 42 notes either answering questions at the end of a chapter or completely dismissing the author’s view as sophistry or drivel. You have to take the bad with the good, it makes the good so much sweeter. I want to make my marriage better, I want it to work, so I’m taking the bad and the good, figuring which is which, then sorting out what works and what doesn’t. If you’re interested in making your marriage work, I highly encourage you to get a copy of this and read through it.