Chapter 2

Are You Ready to Love Your Spouse?

From Hope for Troubled Marriages by Dr. Ken Newberger

No one can wave a wand and erase the uncertainty, pain, or anger you may be feeling in your marriage. But this ebook offers a path forward — a way to understand what's gone wrong and begin to change it. The good news is that you already have the one thing that makes change possible: your inherent need to love and be loved.

We often understand the power of love most clearly by noticing what happens when it is missing. To see why marriages thrive or struggle, we first need to understand how the human need for love develops. The story starts much earlier than most people realize.

Beginning at the very start of life, let's look at what happens when an infant or child never experiences the love that serves as the glue connecting us to others. What is life like when this essential connection never fully arrives? After this brief journey, we'll come back to what it means for you and your marriage.

When Love Fails in Infancy

Uncontrollable was a word used to describe the death rate among infants and toddlers in orphanages all across America in the early 1900s. Hear the voices of three medical doctors from that era.

Dr. Hamill, of Philadelphia: “I had the honor [sarcastically speaking] to be connected with an institution in Philadelphia in which the mortality among all infants under 1 year when admitted to the institution and retained there until death, was 100 percent. That is, no infant admitted under 1 year of age lived to be 2 years old.”

The same story came from other cities.

Dr. Southworth, of New York City: “I can give an instance of this difficulty from an institution that no longer exists, in which on account of the very considerable mortality among the infants admitted it was customary to enter the condition of every infant on its admission card as hopeless.”

Dr. Knox, of Baltimore: “I can give testimony from Baltimore of the same kind. A year or two ago I had occasion to investigate [orphaned] babies sent to the different institutions by the city supervisors… None of those that stayed continuously in the institutions lived until the end of the first year.”

What in the world was going on? The medical community diagnosed the problem as “marasmus,” a wasting-away disease of unknown origin. However, according to the dissenting voice of Dr. Henry Dwight Chapin, the fantastic death rate was due to the babies being emotionally forsaken in institutional settings. He argued that the absence of “mothering” was the problem.

Chapin minced no words at a gathering of physicians in Boston in 1914. The doctor stated,

The best conditions for the infant thus require a home and a mother. The further we get away from these vital necessities of beginning life, the greater will be our failure to get adequate results in trying to help the needy infant. … I believe the plan of collecting babies in institutions should be abandoned, as, on the whole, doing more harm than good. … The high mortality is not so much due to lapses in care or details in management as to the system itself, which fails because it is wrong. … rarely, if ever, is sufficient individual care given to infants in institutions.

Bringing his powerful speech to a close, Dr. Chapin exclaimed,

If the present workers in this field will not improve their methods, then some future generation with wider vision, truer courage, and broader human feeling will accomplish this needed reform.

Chapin’s call for reform was heeded. Foster care spread throughout the U.S., and there was a dramatic lowering of the death rate among young orphans.

When Love Fails in Childhood

In the 1930s, Harold Skeels worked with twenty-five young children. All were living in an Iowa state institution. Skeels divided the children into two groups. Skeels placed 13 of the children, the experimental group, into a home for developmentally disabled teenage girls and women. The average age of the children was nineteen months, and their average IQ was 64. Skeels observed one boy, for example, whom he diagnosed as developmentally disabled, demonstrated in part by his incessant rocking back and forth. The other twelve children, the control group, had an average age of seventeen months and an average IQ of 87.

The home for developmentally disabled teenage girls and women was divided into eight wards, with approximately thirty girls in each ward. Each ward received one or two of the tots, and these toddlers instantly became the center of attention. They received a lot of attention and affection. They went on car rides and field trips with their caregivers. Beyond this general care, in almost every case, either an older girl or a hospital attendant became attached to a child, as if that child had been adopted by that individual. An “intense adult-child relationship” developed between the pair.

The experience of the control group was significantly different. They were not separated or distinguished from the larger population. They received the typical care of that era, which meant far fewer caretakers. While the children received good physical and medical care, their social interactions were lacking. Contact with adults or older child assistants focused primarily on daily issues such as eating, bathing, and going to the bathroom. Of these children, Skeels noted, “The outstanding feature is the profound lack of mental stimulation or experiences usually associated with the life of a young child in the ordinary home.”

Over the next year and a half, Skeels watched the development of these two groups. At the end of nineteen months, he found that the experimental group of children had an average IQ of 92, a gain of 28 points. The IQs of the control group, by contrast, dropped to an average of 61, a drop of 26 points. Interestingly, by the end of the nineteen months, eleven of the thirteen experimental children had been adopted. No one adopted any child from the control group.

Over two decades later, Skeels set out to discover what had happened to these children. What he found was stunning. All thirteen children from the experimental group, now adults, were self-supporting. Eleven of the thirteen had graduated from high school. Four had finished at least one year of college. A fifth had a B.A. and was enrolled in graduate school. By contrast, the children in the control group, on average, finished only the fourth grade. One had died in adolescence, and the rest remained institutionalized.

As this episode makes abundantly clear, when secure bonds of attachment are not formed at this critical stage in a child’s life, the damage that is done lasts a lifetime. When young children have their physical needs met but are emotionally neglected – if they do not receive sustained, loving interaction – they will carry that damage for the rest of their lives.

In 1968, Harold Skeels received the Joseph P. Kennedy International Award, recognized by many as the “Nobel Prize” for significant contributions in the field. Just before Skeels accepted his award, he was introduced by a well-spoken young man, dressed in a tuxedo, who had recently earned his master’s degree. During his introductory words, the young man revealed to the audience that not only was he one of the children in the experimental group, but in particular, he was the one who “sat in the corner rocking.”

When Love Fails Among Adults

Dean Ornish, M.D., is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, CA. His research has reached a wide audience through publication in medical journals, as well as popular magazines and books like Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy. In this book, he wrote,

Love and intimacy are among the most important factors in health and illness…. I’m not aware of any other factor in medicine — not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery — that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death.

The sad truth is that when adults live detached lives, they experience greater sickness and have shorter life spans than those who are rich in emotional support.

In 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States, published a report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. He wrote,

Extensive scientific findings from a variety of disciplines… converge on the same conclusion: social connection is a significant predictor of longevity and better physical, cognitive, and mental health, while social isolation and loneliness are significant predictors of premature death and poor health.

“People who need people are” not only “the luckiest people in the world,” as one song put it. They are the only people in the world. When people become disconnected from others, when the back-and-forth flow of love is cut off, there is premature emotional, psychological, and physical suffering, even to the point of death. When love is absent, the fullness of the human experience cannot be realized.

Application to Marriage

Marriage, for the vast majority of people, signifies the closest possible relationship between two individuals. In some cases, marriage feels like heaven on earth. In others, it is like a living hell. For the majority of us, it lies somewhere in between.

For those looking to improve your relationship, where do you start? You start with your existing inclination not to get even, not to get yours, but to love.

We’ve just taken a brief journey into the edges of human existence where the darkness of isolation overwhelms and rays of love are diminished. The outcome is not good. Marriage, by its very nature, is designed to overcome loneliness. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it can. The question is, are you ready to rebuild your relationship? That is, are you ready to love your spouse?

An Exercise: Gestures of Love and Affection

If your answer is yes, here is a good place to start. The exercise itself is simple. You and your spouse each fill out your own copy, marking how much various gestures of love and affection mean to you. Then you trade pages. From there, you quietly begin doing the things your spouse rated as important, without announcing it. Print a copy for each of you, and follow the short directions on the form.

↓  Download the Gestures of Love and Affection exercise (PDF)

Key Takeaways

• Love is not a luxury in a relationship – it is a necessity. From infancy to old age, its absence produces measurable, sometimes fatal, harm.
• The evidence is consistent across the entire lifespan: infants deprived of loving contact wasted away, neglected children fell behind while nurtured ones thrived, and isolated adults suffer more illness and shorter lives.
• You already possess what rebuilding requires – an inborn inclination to love and be loved.

Questions to Consider

1. Where in your own life have you seen the effect, for better or worse, of love being present or absent?
2. Be honest: when you think about improving your marriage, is your first instinct to get even or to love?
3. What tends to get in the way of showing love consistently – busyness, resentment, fatigue, distraction, something else?
4. Are you ready to love your spouse? What is one gesture you could act on today?