His Needs, Her Needs - Book Critique
Article by Philip Leineweber
Willard Harley offers a practical and helpful guide to properly showing committed and caring love
to one’s spouse in his book
His Needs, Her Needs
. It is written in a very understandable format
breaking down ten emotional needs that are common among both men and women.
Summary
His Needs, Her Needs
is structured in such a way that it is easy for the reader to understand and
follow. Harley begins with a brief chapter describing his basic premise of emotional needs and
how when they are not met an affair or unfaithfulness usually results. He then describes one of his
central concepts: the Love Bank. The love bank is simply an internal record everyone keeps for
their spouse monitoring the positive deposits and the negative withdrawals that are made in
relation to how one’s emotional needs are met or left unmet. He here states his belief that
regardless of the level of commitment between a husband and a wife “if any of a spouse’s five
basic emotional needs goes unmet, that spouse becomes vulnerable to the temptation of an
affair.” With these preliminary thoughts, Harley then begins his discussion of each of the primary
ten emotional needs.
Harley alternates between a common female emotional need followed by a common male need.
The needs can be interchangeable but they usually are characteristic of either the male or the
female spouse. The first female emotional need is affection. Verbal and nonverbal affection is
perhaps the primary need that a wife desires to have fulfilled. Harley explains that “when it comes
to sex and affection, you can’t have one without the other” in order to explain that affection is the
very foundation of the wife’s relationship. It is where she derives her security and feelings of
importance. In light of this, he transitions in the next chapter to explain the husband’s main thing
he cannot do without: sexual fulfillment. He describes sex as the “special event of marriage.” He
then describes the various stages of sexual experience, gives advice about solving sexual
