Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

Why it's Important to Show Regular Appreciation to Your Spouse

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 3 • Episode 51

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On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches why appreciating our spouse is necessary even for people who don't desire a lot of appreciation themselves.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

Why it’s Important to Show Regular Appreciation to Your Spouse

(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Showing appreciation is not just a polite custom. It is essential to making your spouse feel valuable and invested in your marriage.

Gary Chapman wrote an excellent book called The Five Love Languages. In it he explains that we feel more or less loved according to the actions of others. And, not only that, but some people need more emphasis on particular aspects of loving expression in order to feel loved. 

In my case, someone spending quality time with me is far more meaningful than receiving a gift or words of praise and affirmation.

(1:05)

My wife, on the other hand, can’t get her love bank filled without a good number of words of affirmation. Words of affirmation include things like compliments, praise, and appreciation. My wife and I differ in which type of expression of love is most meaningful to us. Even so, we are still going to need those other forms of emotional expression as well. 

Because of the difference in love languages between me and my wife, I need to have a mindfulness about expressing words of affirmation to my wife. Without that mindfulness, I would not naturally give her loving words as much as she enjoys hearing them. She could feel resentful or like I don’t love her as much as she loves me. 

If my wife only gave me words of affirmation, but was not spending much quality time with me, I would also feel like I was missing something important from her. Other love languages Chapman talks about are gifts, physical touch, and acts of service. They all work in the same way. 

(2:09)

Chapman’s books are helpful for maintaining a healthy marriage. His books are not so helpful for reconciling with a rejecting spouse. You must match the right skills with the current needs of your relationship. Expression of love languages to a spouse who is rejecting will just get you more rejection. 

We can’t rebuild a relationship by suddenly doing a lot of what we should have been doing all along. That typically will result in anger and rejection. 

We have to:

  • Start at the at the level of relationship that matches our spouse’s feelings, and
  • gradually reintroduce behaviors that will deepen our relationship. 

The sure way to be rejected is to behave in a way that your spouse is not yet desiring. It’s about as successful as walking up to a stranger and saying, will you be my girlfriend/boyfriend?

(3:03)

The problem of too little appreciation

While some people need appreciation far more than others, we all need to feel appreciated. Some people mistakenly think it is never important to show appreciation. 

Some people believe that appreciation is just a polite behavior to use outside the home. They believe that our relationship with our spouse should be so casual as to never have to be polite. They believe that words like please, excuse me and thank you are not things married people say to each other. Most of them also don’t believe in saying I’m sorry.

This type of thinking creates an expectancy that any and all behavior is acceptable. They think no self-sensoring is necessary, and that love should be understood without ever having to say it. Such open, honest, natural, free-expression leads to not even needing to consider the other person’s needs or feelings. Loss of consideration results in loss of love, and a feeling of unimportance.

(4:07)

Someone who does not feel appreciated is not going to feel like a priority.

A person who never needs to consider other people’s feelings either lacks empathy or is rapidly losing the ability.

Lack of consideration and kindness in marriage creates a void that will get filled by other things. Often it will get filled by friends, social media followers, or an extramarital affair partner. Affair partners tend to be very good at giving compliments and saying thank you. What does that say about what spouses desire?

Don’t think of your spouse as being in a different category.

(4:48)

People are people whether they are your friends, children, customers, employer, coworkers, or spouse. They all want to be treated well. They will all react badly when mistreated, poorly treated, or neglected. Failure to provide social approval to our spouse is a form of neglect. Earning money, raising children, and taking care of a home do not provide any social approval.

If a behavior would not help you to start a relationship, then it will not help you to keep one. The relationship requirements in marriage are the same as for single people. We need to show respect, while making the other person feel desirable and important.

Ask yourself:

  • Does my spouse feel respected by me?
  • Does my spouse feel desired by me?
  • Does my spouse feel he or she is important to me?

Showing appreciation can help with all three of those questions.

No matter how we behave, we all like to feel good about ourselves. It protects our feelings of self esteem, which are important for facing all challenges in life. The worse our self esteem and the worse we feel about ourselves, the more we will tend to not try or to give up quickly when life is tough. 

(6:06)

Helping our children to have good self esteem is critical for their development into healthy adulthood. As adults their successes socially, financially, and otherwise will maintain their self esteem. Although my love language is not words of affirmation, when I receive them, they validate me. They make me feel effective in my work and relationships. They help me to maintain a positive self identity. 

I regularly receive emails from people thanking me for the difference my podcast has made to their relationship. Although I would continue to podcast without such emails, they help me to feel good about helping others. I try to respond personally to these emails. This little exchange helps both me and the person who wrote me to feel better about ourselves.

If you are a person who gets a good response from appreciating your spouse, it will also help you to feel better about yourself.

(7:02)

On the other hand, if you don’t validate your spouse with agreement, empathy, compliments, and appreciation, you will negatively impact your relationship and your spouse will seek other sources of validation. That will make you feel worse about yourself.

Specifically, without appreciation…

Your spouse may feel unimportant or not good enough for you

When I show appreciation to my wife, she realizes I value what she does. At a subconscious level, she feels personally valued. That contributes to her valuing me and our relationship. She will continue to do those things that I appreciate and which make her feel good about herself. 

If I fail to show appreciation to her, she can still see that I am benefiting from what she does. But, she is more likely to feel that I am taking her for granted. That would mean valuing what she does, but not valuing her. 

(8:00)

Make sure you value your spouse and not just what your spouse does for you.

When our spouses first feel unappreciated they usually make…

Attempts to increase appreciation

Focusing on areas where appreciation is available

People who have a high need for validation, work to get it. They will enjoy most what validates them the most. Ideally, that is their spouse. If not, they may devote more time to work if they get more appreciation there. Or with friends. Or in a chatroom.

What is your spouse’s best source of validation?

Some people will do a lot of work just for one word of praise or one word of thanks. They may also ask questions designed to elicit praise or appreciation, such as how do you like it?, or I did such and such for you.

(8:50)

If your spouse ever asks you how you like something he or she did, I recommend you find a way to praise regardless of how much you like or dislike it. And, if your spouse says that he or she did something for you, that is your cue to express appreciation whether you needed it done or not, regardless of how much money it cost, and regardless of how much of a mess was made.

When a child brings you dandelions he or she picked for you, you don’t scold for bringing you weeds. You make that child feel like those dandelions are a precious gift that you really appreciate. This is exactly the same thing to do with a spouse who serves bad food or drips paint all over the floor while painting the ceiling. The reward you will get from treating your spouse that way will far outweigh any indigestion or new carpet you need to buy.

People who think openness and honesty builds relationships, have clearly never had one. 

(9:53)

Dale Carnegie got it right in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, when he stressed that we must praise people and show our approval if we wish to be liked. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to.

Continued lack of appreciation brings resentment

If your spouse’s attempts to get more appreciation from you fail, your spouse will start to feel resentful. Resentment is the feeling we get when we do something for someone, expecting something in return, and we don’t get it. 

Resentment can be caused when we are not doing our fair share of the work, or it can be because we are not expressing appreciation, or because of both. The person who is really good at showing appreciation may have people going out of their way to do things simply for the nice appreciation it brings, even though that person doesn’t do much in return. 

If you want to get more love, affection, or help from your spouse, work on getting better at expressing appreciation.

(10:54)

Do you remember I talked about love languages at the beginning of this article? Well, those are all ways that we can express appreciation, in addition to verbally saying it.

For example, someone could express their appreciation to me by taking me to lunch, since my love language is quality time together. To do that, they would say that they really appreciate how much I helped with such and such, and tell me they would like to take me to lunch. Of course if all I did was open the door for them, that would be over the top and not matching. 

But, when your spouse has done many things for you, it is not over the top at all. If my wife took me to lunch, we would be using our money, so it would not be a financial reward. But her telling me how much she appreciates how hard I work for us for example, telling me she would like to take me to lunch, and then treating me well at lunch is going to be some appreciation that will last me a long time.

(11:56)

My wife’s love language is words of affirmation, so I can leave little hidden notes for her to find telling her how much I appreciate her, love her, and praising her for specific things. I can tell her how much better she has made my life, how her help specifically makes my life easier, or how blessed I am to have a wife who does such things for me. She needs this kind of thing more than I do, so I need to be mindful to give it to her. 

Other love languages of acts of service, gifts, and physical touch work the same way. Emphasize the other person’s love language, combine it with words of appreciation, and use all of the other love languages sometimes.

Love people the way they want to be loved without doing it too often or beyond their level of feeling for you, and you will help them to like you more and more. Don’t go beyond your spouse’s current level of feelings for you or you will get resistance or rejection, just as you would from other people. 

(12:56)

You need to look for opportunities to show appreciation.

Anything that you would thank anyone for outside of your family is a good reason to thank someone in your family, especially your spouse. This can be as simple as holding the door for you, doing something you requested, doing something helpful whether you asked or not, giving you something no matter how small.

If you haven’t been very appreciative, then do not suddenly start to be that way. 

The best rate of personal change is one the other person likes, but does not consciously notice. 

If you never show appreciation, start by saying thank you for a small thing and don’t say it again for a while. If your spouse starts asking about your appreciation, then you are doing it way too much. It will feel unnatural and gimmicky and your spouse will not like it. That is true for all personal changes. 

(14:02)

Also, make sure you do not tell your spouse you are working on changing. Impress him or her with your changes rather than with your promises to change. Can you imagine being on a first date and telling someone you are working on showing more appreciation? How would that make your date feel when you do show appreciation–like you are checking off a box on your to-do list?

No one wants to be a box on someone’s to-do list.

Too much of a good thing is just as bad as too little of a good thing.

Thirsty people need water, but they don’t need to drink a gallon all at once. Do not try to make up for not showing appreciation in the past by showing too much in the present. Many people make this mistake when trying to reconcile. The result of doing a lot of something someone no longer desires from you is to make them want to get away from you faster. Many people drive their spouses to separation and divorce by trying to make up for such previous deficits with a current excess.

(15:06)

You need to gradually change your behavior and be aware of your spouse’s response to it. If you are increasing your use of appreciation, start small and see what kind of reaction you get. Does your spouse smile? Give a good verbal response? Look sad or angry? Immediately distance or initiate positive talking?

No matter how good of a thing you think you are doing, if it is creating a negative response in your spouse, it is not a good thing. Do not ask your spouse why he or she acted that way and do not try to explain why you were showing appreciation. Such asking and explaining are needy behaviors which will just dig a bigger relationship hole. 

(15:51)

Instead, reduce either the intensity of what you are saying and become more casual, or reduce the frequency you show appreciation, or both. If you have been gradually increasing the amount of appreciation you show, then it should be easy to correct, by just stepping back a bit. Aim for a good reaction every time. This will mean that you use the right intensity, the right frequency, and the right situations. 

Experiment to learn what works with your spouse.

Having a relationship with your particular spouse requires adjustment to the particular needs of your spouse. Adjust to your spouse–don’t make your spouse adjust to you.

Years ago, my wife verbally expressed her appreciation to me a lot. She saw that I was putting up with it more than I was enjoying it and adjusted by saying it less often. People with a love language of words of affirmation often affirm others more than they want to be affirmed and may feel rejected if it is not received well. 

(16:55)

The same goes for the other love languages, of course. Adjusting to each other’s needs is part of marriage just as much as it is part of parenting. The good parent adjusts to the specific needs of each child rather than treating each child the same. One child needs more physical affection, another needs more time together, and another needs more affirmation. Each of those children are also going to have a spouse someday who will have to adjust to that need in order to have a good relationship.

Work on tweaks, not overhauls and makeovers.

As a relationship coach, I help people to build, and often rebuild, their marriages. I don’t have people do that by making drastic changes as that would only increase the amount of stress in their relationships. I do that by helping my clients with step-by-step skills. They learn to help their spouses to feel relaxed, then to have a little small talk, before moving on to common interests and doing things together. 

(17:54)

The skills are very much like what people need to do to build a first time relationship when they are single. If you did them when you were single, you can do them again now that you are married. 

Today, I have shared with you one of the small skills that produces big results. Just like salt, use it regularly, but in just the right amount.

Building your relationship is not a matter of talking about problems so much as it is just helping your spouse to enjoy you again and to find you appealing. The more distant your relationship has become, the smaller steps you need to take to get things going in the right direction again. If you would like to get some help doing that, I welcome you to take a look at my Re-Connections Coaching Package at CoachJackIto.com.

(18:40)

[Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.