Does caring for the soul of your life mate sound too intense or maybe too, I don’t know… God like?  Do you think this is only God’s job or your pastor’s mission?  It would be like saying, “I’ll care for my children, but when it comes to their education my only job is to get them to the school bus.”  Is loving your wife connected in any way to your wife’s emotional health?  If a man cannot identify his own emotional needs, how can he identify his wife’s?  (That’s a legitimate question.)  What is an emotional need anyway?

As men, we want to go to a tangible numbering scale or to the provide side of work and a pay check, but these do not touch her emotional needs.  We think if we have a good 401K account and a plan for retirement, we’ve done our job.  In his book, Tender Warrior, Stu Weber writes, “As men we so often misplace our vision.  We focus myopically on houses and cars and stock portfolios and bank accounts and piling up stuff.  We revert to the things we can see, when in fact it is the unseen world…where we ought to be majoring in our provision.”   It is the “unseen world” of relational needs.  Ask your wife the question, “What are your top five emotional needs?”  Then ask yourself how you are caring for her soul to help meet those needs.