Book Review: His Needs, Her Needs

I regularly read and dissect popular relationships books, sharing the most relevant information and correcting misguided fallacies. In this post, I review His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-Proof Marriage by Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Harley’s Take

Recognizing your partner’s essential needs and meeting them will continually strengthen your relationship and nip in the bud any possibility of your spouse having her needs met elsewhere.

Harley begins with the premise that everyone has a "love bank," an emotional version of a bank account. You receive “credits” in your “account" when your spouse meets one of your emotional needs.

Neglecting a spouse’s needs causes "debits," which can eventually leave him or her feeling empty and dissatisfied. Spouses who don’t have their needs met might look elsewhere, in effect opening an account at a competing bank. 

Couples who want happy, stable marriages must learn how to effectively meet each other’s needs, thereby insuring their spouse never has reason to shop the competition. But men and women tend to have different needs, so understanding those differences will help you learn how to better relate to your spouse.

Harley identifies each partner’s five most common needs, then shows each partner how to satisfy those needs. He provides a guide for becoming irresistible to your spouse and how to love more creatively and sensitively, thereby eliminating the problems that often lead to extramarital affairs.

The Sigma Male Says

Harley has written an excellent book and is definitely onto something. No question, when spouses get their needs met they are happy. I agree with the premise of husbands and wives doing what they can to satisfy each other’s needs. However, Harley misses a vital component in the happiness equation when it comes to sex.

There is a difference between a woman trying to meet her husband’s sexual needs by making herself available to him (“If I meet his needs he will be happy”) and a woman who looks forward to sex because her husband displays Sigma behavior.

A woman who attempts to please her husband because she thinks it’s her duty will be less satisfied than a woman who meets her husband’s needs because of how his daily behavior makes her feel. The first woman fills her husband’s need for sex to make him happy. The latter fills his sexual needs because she is happy (and because she desires him). When this happens both partners experience a much higher level of sexual satisfaction and they both get their sexual needs met.

When a modern man makes regular deposits in his wife’s account because he thinks he can meet her needs by working harder — he shares the work around the house, tends the kids, does chores, fixes dinner, etc. — the resulting deposit is relatively small and does not increase his wife’s happiness by much. Instead, she seems to become more demanding and increasingly domineering. And modern men are shocked to discover that their wife’s “withdrawal window” has extremely limited hours.

Deposits made by fulfilling the Sigma Roles are much larger. And when a man becomes a Sigma Male, his wife’s resulting happiness will allow him to access her account 24/7.

Updated 10/06/2014

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Dr. John Alexander is relationship expert and the author of The Sigma Male: What Women Really Want. To learn more about Sigma Coaching, visit his website, subscribe to his blog, “like” his page on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter.