Ann

Ann is a counseling client whose marriage to Glenn is the focus of a six-month experiment in loving a spouse who has become emotionally painful to live with. Her story moves from depleted affection and a serious conflict over whether to leave, through a deliberate effort to meet Glenn’s need for love, to a substantial change in his treatment of her and in her feelings toward him. It presents love not as a feeling Ann can summon on command, but as a choice expressed through sustained, specific actions whose effects emerge over time.

Identity and Marital Background

Ann had begun counseling with Dr. Chapman two weeks before he encountered her at Reynolda Gardens. There, on a September Saturday, she approached him while looking down at the cobblestone path and asked whether it was possible to love someone she hated. The question arose from deep hurt, not an abstract inquiry: Ann’s marriage to Glenn had been shaped by his constant criticism and condemnation, which had gradually extinguished her feelings of love and badly damaged her self-esteem.

Ann had been married for ten years, and by the time she sought counseling she felt emotionally depleted. She had previously begged Glenn to attend counseling and pleaded with him to read a marriage book or listen to a tape, but he refused those attempts at growth. As Ann described his position, he believed that he had no problems and that she alone was at fault. The contrast between her willingness to seek help and his insistence that nothing was wrong left her facing the marriage’s troubles largely on her own.

The Crisis and the Question of Leaving

At their next appointment, Ann again described the distress of her marriage and said she did not know whether she could love Glenn again after what he had done to her. Two close friends and other people she had spoken with advised her to leave, warning that Glenn would never change and that staying only prolonged her suffering. Ann could not bring herself to accept their advice, though she acknowledged that she was uncertain what to do.

Dr. Chapman framed her conflict as a division between religious and moral convictions that told her leaving was wrong and emotional pain that made leaving seem necessary for survival. Ann agreed that this captured her dilemma. The question of staying was therefore not presented as simple confidence that the marriage would improve: she was caught between the belief that she should remain and the fear that continued life in the marriage would deepen her pain.

Ann also told Dr. Chapman that Glenn had said he hated her. In explaining his proposed experiment, he described her emotional state through the image of an empty love tank: when the need for love goes unmet, positive feelings may give way to emptiness and pain. Ann recognized herself in that account. She said that she and Glenn had been in love before marrying, but had never learned to speak each other’s love language after the early intensity faded; she believed that her own tank had been empty for years and suspected his was empty as well.

The Six-Month Experiment

Dr. Chapman invited Ann to test whether deliberately learning Glenn’s primary love language and speaking it over time might meet his emotional need and prompt him to respond with love and care. Ann agreed to try. When asked what she most wanted to see change within six months, she described a relationship marked by shared time and interest: she wanted Glenn to do things and travel with her, take an interest in her world, talk and listen when they went out to eat, value her ideas, enjoy their time together, and show that he valued their marriage. She also wanted her own warmth, respect, and pride in him to return, feelings she said she did not then have.

The plan asked Ann to observe Glenn’s primary love language and act on it consistently. She was to look for positive qualities in his life and affirm them verbally, while stopping verbal complaints for the first month. Rather than voicing grievances, she would write them in a personal notebook. Dr. Chapman intended to review that list with her and help turn felt complaints into specific requests, with the longer-term aim of helping the couple discuss frustrations constructively. He also asked her to record the positive words of affirmation she offered Glenn each week and proposed meeting regularly, perhaps every two weeks.

The experiment also involved physical affection and sexual intimacy, an area Ann described as especially difficult. She said she had felt ignored outside those encounters and used within them, and that resentment was one reason the couple had been sexually intimate only once or twice in the preceding six months. Dr. Chapman acknowledged that her reluctance was understandable in the circumstances he described, while asking her to take more initiative during the experiment. He encouraged her to draw on her religious faith and on Jesus’ teaching about loving those who hate or mistreat others. The account makes clear that the plan required Ann to act against her immediate emotional response, not that her hurt had disappeared or that Glenn had already changed.

Change and Outcome

Ann left counseling with the experiment underway and with her original question recast as a practical test: could she choose loving actions toward a spouse she felt she hated? Glenn did not attend counseling, but he listened to some of Dr. Chapman’s tapes and discussed them with Ann. His gradual response became the most important change in the experiment, even though it did not begin with his participation in formal counseling.

The first month, Glenn treated the effort lightly. After the second month, he began giving Ann positive feedback about what she was doing. During the final four months, he responded positively to almost all of her requests. As his responses changed, Ann’s feelings toward him began to change drastically as well. The sequence matters: the narrative records an initially dismissive reaction, followed by recognition and increasingly cooperative behavior, alongside the return of positive feeling on Ann’s side.

Glenn encouraged Ann to continue counseling, which she did for another three months after the six-month experiment ended. He later told friends that Dr. Chapman was a miracle worker; Dr. Chapman instead attributed the outcome to love. The account does not claim that every marriage will produce the same result, and its closing advice explicitly declines to guarantee one. Ann’s story concludes with a substantial relational change, not with evidence that every difficulty in the marriage was resolved.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ann’s experience gives practical form to the book’s distinction between feeling loving and choosing actions intended to express love. Her marriage begins this account with years of criticism, an apparently empty emotional reservoir, and a husband unwilling to seek help; the experiment does not depend on denying those conditions. Instead, it tests whether speaking Glenn’s primary love language can alter the relationship even while Ann’s own feelings remain negative.

The six-month structure turns the idea into an observable process: affirmations are recorded, complaints are withheld from immediate expression and written down, requests are developed from those complaints, and feedback is sought over time. The changing pattern in Glenn’s response supplies the account’s evidence for hope, while the explicitly unguaranteed outcome limits its promise. Ann’s story thus presents love as sustained practice under strain and as a possible source of renewed connection, rather than as proof that painful relationships invariably improve.