The Language of Love

Over twenty years ago author and relationship counselor John Gray wrote the classic marriage text, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. In the book, which became hugely popular with many subsequent works, Gray claimed that most common marriage problems between husbands and wives are a result of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes and that each sex is acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other.

For example, men often offer solutions to problems that women bring up in conversation but women are not necessarily interested in solving those problems, they mainly want to just talk about them. And while such generalizations are always problematic, the essential idea was almost certainly right: men and women are different and we do often talk past one another oriented as we are on our own way of thinking.

To make matters worse, husbands and wives intuitively "keep score" but each tends to score things very differently from the other. As a result, it is quite possible for the efforts of one to go unrecognized and unappreciated by the other. And when the imbalance goes too far, the marriage is in trouble.

Among the differences between husbands and wives is how each views sex. For various biological reasons, women tend to have higher requirements for sex than men. Whereas a woman needs to feel loved to feel sexy, men tend to feel loved through sex. She wants romance but he just wants sex.

Often a wife will want nothing more than to cuddle up with her husband, a moment of nonsexual physical closeness. The husband, on the other hand, tends to see this as a signal of sexual interest or to react to it sexually.

One reason that erotic power is so powerful is that through it the wife speaks the husband's language of love. This is also the reason that it seems so strange for wives who are new to it. Essentially, erotic power entails sexualizing the marriage through and through. In this sense, the wife is agreeing to speak the language of the husband.

But wait!

At the same time the sexualization is, for the most part, without actual sex. In other words, while there is a sexual connotation to every interaction, the frequency of complete sex, especially if measured by the male orgasm, is much reduced. In this sense, every sexual encounter becomes desexualized, the equivalent of courtship and cuddling. The husband is learning to speak the language of the wife. Remembering actually, because he knew to do this before marriage but in the routine of sex in marriage this was all forgotten.

Finally!

The wife can be intimate with her husband without his expectation of sex. Instead, the husband is showering his wife with attention, affection, even worship, at almost every moment of their time together. And the wife freely raises the bar, as high as she dares, for actual sex. The wife is, once again, demanding courtship from her husband.

Like most counselors, Gray believes that the solution to marital difficulties is communication and advises the couple how to better understand each other. But the beauty of wife led marriage is that it doesn't rely on verbal communication. The wife doesn't need her husband to understand what she is doing or to obtain his agreement to change the style of their interaction in the marriage. Instead, she takes the lead in the marriage through her own actions, by her own initiative. And her husband simply learns to follow her lead.