If emptiness is what your marriage is full of, chances are you're married to a Crazy-Making Husband. And no wonder you feel empty. His relationship with you is nothing but a monstrous void. A void he creates, sustains and vigorously energizes.
Like a moat around the castle of his psyche, The Crazy-Making Husband needs this void to protect himself from His Wife, a.k.a. his psyche's Dark Invader. Romance, intimacy, sharing -- in fact, all things relational -- are anathema to The Crazy-Making Husband. To him, emotional connection -- even the threat of it -- is a fearful, loathsome prospect.
And what better way to keep aloof, than to shirk involvement with his wife? That's what his Rules are all about. Consider, for a moment, his Rule #8: DON'T EVER LET YOUR WIFE CONVINCE YOU YOU'VE GOT RESPONSIBILITIES.
At first glance, you may think that his responsibilities as a husband reside principally in the day-to-day responsibilities of running the household and rearing the children.
Yet a key responsibility of every husband is to provide for his wife's emotional welfare. In particular, your husband has a profound, inarguable responsibility to meet your relational needs. The needs of your precious self in relation. This includes your need -- and right -- to be loved, cherished, respected, considered, provided for, and protected. That is why you married.
Failing to meet our legitimate emotional needs is perhaps the most brilliant of all The Crazy-Making Husband's crazy-making tactics. Like no other torture, with the profound, penetrating power of intimacy, it clearly tells us that we are unfit, unworthy, inadequate, and ineffective -- in essence, undeserving of fundamental [and critically important] human attentions. With each aborted interchange with our Crazy-Making Husband, we are left with emptiness -- bitter, wrenching emptiness. The emptiness of a void. A torture-chamber void, bloated with the nothingness we receive from our Crazy-Making Husband. In his heart, where warm, bright, husbandly love should live, resides coldness. Where genuine, empathic, selfless caring should be, lies callous self-absorption. Where instinctive protection of our well-being should be in place, instead, there is total indifference. Such anti-love experience, couched in the clothing of marital intimacy, is the lethal 'stuff' from which crazy-making does its dastardly deed.