Relationships-Are You Meeting Your Partner's Emotional Needs?

Some people say that marriages are made in heaven, but every marriage has to deal with daily living and come to the reality that life just gets in the way. The romantic part of marriage starts to cool intensity due to other priorities that demand our attention and it really changes when children start to arrive.

Loving glances can be replaced by frowns as your attempts at intimate conversation are interrupted by by the baby's crying. You discover, as almost every married couple, that the feeling called "romantic love" has to be nurtured by a continuous process of meeting each other's emotional needs.

What is an emotional need? It is a deep desire within you that, when satisfied, gives you a feeling of extreme happiness and contentment. If this desire is unmet or unsatisfied, it leaves you with a feeling of unhappiness and frustration. When a husband and wife meet each other's most important emotional needs, they will be so happy and content with each other. They will experience passionate love, and stay in love as long as these emotional needs are met.

But each of us have different emotional needs, and even if both spouses have the same emotional needs, their priorities for each emotional need may be different. For instance, love and romance for most men are sex and recreation; however for most women its affection and intimate conversation. If such a husband and wife pair would spend a recreational evening together, show intense affection, with deep, intimate conversation, it would naturally lead to sexual fulfillment. The result is that the most important emotional needs of both are fully met.

You, and your spouse, fell in love with each other because you both met some of each other's most important emotional needs. The only way to stay in love, long after the honeymoon is over, is to keep meeting these emotional needs.

So, the first step for you, and your spouse, is to identify what are your most important emotional needs, those that will make you the happiest and most content. The easiest way is to sit down, take a sheet of paper, and jot down what you would like your spouse to do or not do which would make you happy. A list of at least five of your most important emotional needs, in order of priority, would be adequate for a start. When you both are finished with your own list, exchange your list with your partner.

Now,you and your spouse will know what you can do for each other that will make you both happy and content with each other. As a married couple, you both need to learn how to meet your partner's emotional needs.