The Love Bank

“What makes marriage work? The feeling of love. … I’ve never counseled a couple in love who wanted a divorce. But I’ve counseled many divorcing couples with excellent communication and problem-solving skills who claim to care for each other.” – Harley, His Needs, Her Needs: Building An Affair-Proof Marriage

Dave and I are taking a marriage class, based partly on the above book. The essential basis of the book is that what matters is feeling that you’re in love with your spouse: wanting a divorce or having an affair often have nothing to do with your religious or moral convictions, but more to do with whether your primary emotional needs are being met. Your spouse has an exclusive right to meet these needs for you. Affairs start when you look outside of your marriage to meet a primary emotional need.

This seems to go against a lot of what I’ve been taught before about marriage—most of our earlier marriage teaching (premarital counseling, Tim Keller’s ten-part sermon series) has emphasized the theological aspects of marriage: that marriage exists not for our happiness, but for our sanctification. That love is not a feeling, but a covenant.

I think this approach is still biblical because ultimately we are learning how to meet our spouse’s emotional needs, and if we mutually do that, we are submitting to each other, but it gets at it another way, in a more practical, feelings-based way. It says that all the theory and moral convictions in the world may not be enough to withstand the power of a basic emotional need not being met, so it is worth investing some time to understand what your spouse’s basic needs are, and relearning how to meet them, and how to enjoy meeting them when it’s not something you might naturally enjoy.

The associated concept is that of the love bank: essentially, that two people affect each other emotionally with almost every encounter. A positive affect is a deposit; a negative one a withdrawal. Put another way, anything you do either creates love or hate within your spouse.

A couple important corollaries that have helped us personally: no relationship can withstand an unlimited amount of withdrawals. I have to see that every time I passively fail to communicate in Dave’s love language, fail to meet a need he has for recreational companionship or affection or whatever his need may be: it is a withdrawal. Every time I actively snap at him, criticize him, argue with him, basically cause him a negative feeling: it is a withdrawal. Moreover, when he goes to play disc golf with someone else, that other person is putting a deposit in his love bank; not only am I losing out, someone else is gaining as a result. We tend to take our closest relationships for granted, but there is no such thing as a bottomless account—too many withdrawals will take their toll sooner or later.

Another thing: it’s a lot harder to accumulate positive deposits after marriage than before, simply because after marriage you are seeing all the bad as well as the good. It’s harder to get a net positive, compared to when you were dating.

Last thing: this love bank account comes precalibrated in a different way for everyone. We may differ in terms of what we see as a withdrawal or a deposit, and in terms of the magnitude of that withdrawal or deposit. It’s worth understanding those differences so we can make more high-impact, effective deposits, and minimize the withdrawals—because what ultimately matters is not what I perceive, but what he perceives, whether I agree with it or not. Understanding those differences means communicating about what our love languages are (verbal affirmation, physical touch, acts of service, gifts, quality time) or what our top emotional needs are (affection, sexual fulfillment, intimate conversation, recreational companionship, honesty and openness, physical attractiveness, financial support, domestic support, family commitment, admiration).