Emotional communication is the key to happiness between the spouses. Marital life begins with strong, good emotions and warm feelings. In the course of time, these emotions may become apathetic and lose their warmth. This is the most dangerous problem in the marital life and would crack its edifice. The wife should pay great attention to this problem to overcome it and have continual incessant communication and renewing love.
The first step to solve this problem is that each spouse should review his duties towards the other; perhaps the problem was aroused from that point. However, the marital life does not stop at this limit; it is a humane, not mechanical, relationship. The emotional bond between the spouses is a strong rope that is a cornerstone of the marital life.
Emotions are mutual feelings between the spouses; therefore, the husband should be keen on making his wife feel that he loves her. She should also reciprocate these good feelings with him and continuously declare her love, sincerity and faithfulness. True emotions have a magical effect on the spouses’ life. They make the difficult easy, and turn a small house into a paradise in which the spouses and their children rejoice. The clever wife knows many ways to nourish these emotions, the easiest of which is a kind word.
A wise wife makes her husband feel her love for him, regards commending him and gets him accustomed to hearing kind words from the first day of their marriage. These factors nourish the marital life and result in goodness and happiness. Love is a feeling and emotion that is inspired by kind words, mutual respect and exchanging words of love and compassion. The wife’s bashfulness should not prevent her from exchanging with her husband tender words and sublime feelings. The husband should encourage her to do so through saying gentle words and expressing his sincere feelings towards her. They should compete in their love, seeking the happiness of this life and the reward of Allah in the Hereafter.
The wife’s sensitivity may corrupt this warm relationship. Accordingly, she should be forgiving and overlook the slips of her husband. In doing so, she becomes great in the sight of her husband. Moreover, this leads him to be keen on avoiding these slips in the future.
The wife should realize that she lives in a time where temptations are rampant and many women have abandoned modesty and do their best to expose their charms and beauty. The husband’s eye might fall on one of these women and wish that his wife would be more beautiful than her in order to satisfy his desires through lawful means and attain the reward of Allah The Almighty. Hence, the wife should be keen to always appear before her husband in neat, nice clothes, and be well-perfumed in order to satisfy his desires and help him enjoy her well.
It is strange that some women do their utmost in adorning themselves and showing their beauty and charms when they are going out, but they do not do the half or even the quarter of such adornment and beautification while they are inside their homes with their husbands. It is not an Islamic practice for the woman to expose her charms before men outside her home and hide them in front of her husband. The wife should adorn herself for her husband as much as she can. When the Prophet was asked about the best woman, he said: “The one who pleases him [the husband] when he looks at her.” [Abu Daawood and Ibn Maajah]
There are other significant matters that many wives may not heed, thinking that kind words and a good relationship are sufficient to attain happiness. However, the well-ordered, clean, and calm household in which the husband needs to find rest after the hardship of work and the well-prepared table of food are among the matters that the husband is concerned with. Also, falling short in fulfilling these matters results in the disturbance of the marital life.
It is better for the wife to regard her relationship with the family of her husband as part of the relationship with her husband, as her good relationship with his family entails her good relationship with him. She should host them and regard this act as a way of showing her love to her husband. She should also encourage her husband to invite his friends and brothers to eat food that she should prepare willingly and happily. Doing so, she implicitly says to her husband that she likes whom he likes and hates whom he hates.
Moreover, she should be comforting to her husband and support him in the face of misfortunes. The women of the righteous predecessors are the best example in this regard to be followed. Anas, may Allah be pleased with him, said:
One of the sons of Abu Talhah became sick and then died, and Abu Talhah at that time was not at home. When his wife saw that he was dead, she prepared him [i.e., she washed and shrouded the body of the child] and placed him somewhere in the house. When Abu Talhah came, he asked, “How is the boy?” She replied, “The child is in a very quiet state, and I hope that he has rested.” Abu Talhah thought that he had recovered.
She served him dinner, prepared the bed for him, and he had sexual intercourse with her. In the morning, he performed Ghusl [ritual bathing], and when he intended to go out, she told him that his son had died. Abu Talhah offered the [morning] prayer with the Prophet and informed him of what happened to them. The Prophet said: “May Allah bless you concerning your night; [that is, may Allah bless you with good offspring].” Allah granted them a son [from that night], and nine of his offspring memorized the Quran. [Al-Bukhari]
The wife should speak to her husband at suitable times and know his conditions and what he encounters in his daily life. This act endears the wife to her husband and makes him feel his value and importance to her. ‘Aa’ishah, may Allah be pleased with her, said, “When the Messenger of Allah had prayed the two Rak‘ahs [Sunnah] of the dawn prayer, he would talk to me if I was awake; otherwise, he would lie down until the prayer was called.” [Al-Bukhari and Muslim]
Understanding Between the Spouses
Allah The Almighty created people with different natures and dispositions: one of the spouses might like or hate what the other does not. Perhaps, there is a difference in the way of speaking, dressing, food preferences, ways to organize things at home, and time of sleeping; moreover, there may be a difference in the way each of them enjoys the other.
The harmony between the different natural dispositions of the spouses can only be achieved through love that makes the spouses more flexible in dealing with each other. Hence, the spouses reach relative harmony through which neither of them would feel the degrading of his character or dignity. The wife and the husband should tolerate the different natural dispositions of the other, as they have both grown accustomed to these characteristics, and in a short while, each of them would know what pleases the other and do it in order to satisfy their partner.
This is a stage on the way of harmony between them.
The intelligent woman should know what best suits her husband concerning clothes, colors and proper wear for each occasion in order to maintain his prestige. She should pay attention to the food her husband eats, and she should know his favorite food and be keen on serving it. She should be keen on knowing the time of his meals and meet this time. She should serve him the food in the way he likes both in terms of preparation and the way it is served.
The Muslim wife should wait for her husband until he returns from work even if he returns late. She should not sleep before making sure he has returned safely, receiving him well, preparing food for him, talking to him about things that please him, and keeping him company until he goes to bed. She should do her best to wake up early to wake him and her children up for Fajr prayer to start her and their day with goodness. Then, she should prepare breakfast for them, bid her husband farewell when he goes to work in a compassionate way, and advise him to earn lawful gains. Then, she should do her housework and make it convenient for a tranquil and peaceful home.
Such things make a pleasant atmosphere at home for the family and encourage the husband to leave the club, café or other places he might want to visit and instead return to his home. Indeed, such places are full of corruption that would destroy the marital life.
The Working Wife
Sometimes the wife has to go out to work, whatever the reasons may be, but she should organize her life in a way that guarantees the stability of her home and the happiness of her husband so that he does not feel that she has gone far from him and that she neglects him or does not fulfill her duties as a wife. She should not be outside her home during the time he is there. She should do her best to work while he is at work and to be at home at the same time.
Beauty, the Sexual Relationship and Emotional Communication
The sexual relationship is one of mutual participation between the husband and wife. Some wives are shy and leave this issue totally to the husband. This is a misunderstanding of the mutual nature of this relation between the spouses. Many beautiful women may believe that they are able to make the sexual relationship successful. Consequently, they do not perform a positive role during sexual intercourse out of the wrong belief that their beauty alone can fulfill this matter perfectly.
It should be known that the marital life and all of its aspects is an interaction between the spouses. Each of them should be positive in his or her interaction, either in abstract matters such as love and affection, or concrete matters such as the exchange of sexual enjoyment.
The beauty of the woman is a relative matter in the sight of men. A man may like a blonde woman while another man inclines to the brunette or dark woman. Someone may like a short, heavier woman, while another might prefer a tall, slim woman, and so on. A woman’s beauty is not confined to her body; there is immaterial beauty which is characterized in the personality of the woman. The woman may be calm, prudent, staid, loving, satisfied, modest, lenient, cooperative, affectionate, and keen on pleasing her husband.
The wife who has these traits is the one who possesses real beauty even if she is less beautiful than other women. She realizes that it is a wrong belief that only the beautiful woman is able to satisfy her husband’s sexual desires. Rather, all women could do so and make sexual intercourse successful through foreplay, fondling, continuous flirtation and tender words of love. Then, the wife would enjoy her husband and let her husband enjoy her in the lawful way.