When Your Love Tank Runs Dry

It happens to all of us sooner or later; everything is going along more or less smoothly, when all of a sudden we find that our love tank has gone dry. It could be because your wife is going through PMS, or because she has been sick for the last couple of weeks, or even because of too much stress on the job. Regardless of what the trigger was, you feel like you’ve given all you have to give, and there’s nothing left.

Okay, so what do you do when you get to that point? If you’re like most people, you just throw in the towel and unconsciously make the decision that you’re not giving any more love out until you get some back. Like I said, it’s an unconscious decision; or maybe it’s just that you don’t make the decision to keep on giving out love. Not that you don’t love her any more, just that you’re not going to go out of your way to show it.

As men, we have a tendency to retreat into our cave when we get to that point. We go there to lick our wounds, waiting to heal and hoping somebody will come along to nurse us back to emotional health.

Is that what we should do? Is licking our wounds going to solve our problem? No, it isn’t. We need to seek out a solution to our problem; but we need to be extremely careful of how we seek out that problem. It’s extremely easy at that point in time to accept help from the wrong place, So, we need to be even more careful than normal at those times, to be sure that we don’t accept love from the wrong places.

Of course, that still leaves us with the problem of what to do, so that we can get our love tank filled back up. We could try hinting or demanding that our wife fill it up, but that probably won’t do any good. If we’re empty, there’s a good chance that our wives are too, so they can’t help.

There is one place that we can go to safely, in order to get our love tanks filled; that’s to go right to God. His love isn’t going to cause us problems, such as the love from others will. Not only that, but it’s limitless; He never runs out of love to give us.

Getting into God’s presence, whether through worship or prayer is a great way to get our love tanks filled back up to overflowing. Then, we have in abundance to give to our wives, once again. We don’t have to wait for her to do it, we can go to the Lord on our own, and get what we need directly from Him.

You see, we are commanded to love our wives, in the same way that Christ loved the church. That’s not a suggestion, that’s a commandment. It doesn’t say “love her when you feel loved” nor does it say “love her when you think that she deserves it.” No, it just says to love her as Christ loved the church (Eph 5:25). As husbands, that’s our responsibility, whether she does her part or not.

Let me add one more thing to that. As we all know, men and women define love differently. What I mean by that is that we understand different things as being love. So, you can’t just love her in your way, you have to love her in a way that she understands as love as well. That’s why romance is so important; it’s what she understands as love.