When Your Love Tank Runs Dry – Part 2

Yesterday, I was talking about what to do when your love tank runs dry. I focused on the need to get your tank filled up again by going to God. There was something else I mentioned, which I want to go to in a little more depth than I did yesterday. That is, the risk of allowing others to fill our love tanks.

We have to realize that we are emotionally vulnerable when we are in that state. While we normally think of women being emotionally vulnerable and not men, the reality is that men are more emotionally vulnerable than women, especially when their love tanks run dry. I say that because women are much more used to dealing with their emotions and the effects of those emotions than men are. As men, we tend to ignore our emotions.

The other factor here is that women can connect the emotional and logical parts of their brains together much more readily than men can. So, whether a woman is sad or happy, she at least knows what she feels. On the other hand, men don’t always know what they feel, just that they feel something and they don’t like it.

In that state, a man is very open to receiving comfort from wherever he can get it. Watch out! That’s dangerous! A fair percentage of men who fall into adulterous relationships do so because their love tank is empty and some woman other than their wife offers to fill it.

I’m not saying that she sends you a text message that says, “Hi there. I noticed that your love tank is empty. Let’s meet after work today, so that I can fill it up for you.” No, these things are much more subtle than that. In fact, I’d say that the women usually aren’t thinking about filling up the guy’s love tank. If anything, she sees another hurting soul and shares the pain.

That’s step number one in heading down the road to adultery. We need to nip it in the bud, right there, before it can go any farther. All too often, men take that first step, thinking that it’s nothing more than talking with a co-worker or friend, and not recognizing it for what it truly is.

We must recognize that first flirtatious step for the true danger that it holds for our hearts. That’s our only protection. It is imperative to stop ourselves, even before taking that first step. You see, nobody gets up one morning after 20 years of being faithful to their wife and says to themselves, “I think today is a good day to commit adultery.” No, that adulterous relationship sneaks up on us one tiny step at a time. The adultery happens long before any sexual contact does.

Remember, adultery isn’t just about sex. Jesus said that if a man lusts after another woman, he’s already committed adultery with her in his heart. It doesn’t take sex to make it adultery. Fantasizing about her is adultery. Once again, it takes a number of steps to get the man to the point where he’s fantasizing about another woman, especially if he’s always been faithful to his wife.

The less sex there is in a marriage, the more risk there is of the man falling into adultery. It takes the strength of character to say NO, before taking that first step. Too many men wait until they are already well on the road to emotional adultery, before they realize the risk they are in. By then, it’s much harder to stop themselves, and most are hooked on the relationship enough that they don’t want to.

Keeping ourselves faithful to our wives includes much more than not having any sexual contact with other women. More than anything, it’s a thing of the heart and the mind. That’s where unfaithfulness starts, and that’s where it ends as well. 

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.