Home › Forums › Family Matters › Shalom Bayis in our community › Reply To: Shalom Bayis in our community
Eclipse, I hope no others ever experience the pain you eloquently convey and and I don’t mean to minimize your personal circumstances.
But there are women who do not understand that a healthy intimate relationship is the main glue that keeps a marriage together. While that doesn’t excuse what men do in response to a lack of that physical intimacy, the woman, in that case, if she reasonably could do better, whether in attitude or in deed, she is playing with fire by not doing what she should be doing.
Men also need to know the emotional needs of women, and be able to reasonably fulfill that, too. One leads to another the other leads to the first.
Rabbi Shafier, of The Shmuz, has an excellent “Nidah” series of audio shiurim. In one of those, he mentions how Yaakov Avinu should have been “head over heels in love” with Leah simply because he married her and had an intimate relationship with her. If I recall, it was only because Yaakov was the Ish Emes that he was and Lavan’s trickery so abhorred him, that this was able to override an otherwise natural (and this is also common medical knowledge) feeling of being emotionally bonded to Leah.
I may not have accurately repeated this portion of his shiur, as I listened to that shiur a number of years ago, but you can get it online and hear for yourself.