For Women: It’s Time to Look In the Mirror

Yes, that’s a ball and chain. And no, that’s not my view of marriage!

I have been quite intrigued, if saddened, with this men’s movement  and the idea that marriage to American women, who by and large have been shaped by feminism, is a risky proposition for the average man, even to a Christian woman. I’ve been thinking about it because, until recently, I viewed a man who was delaying marriage as immature and selfish, trying to enjoy all the fun of single life for as long as possible, not realizing that a wife and family are a source of great joy if you approach it with that expectation and a determination to do all you can to have a happy, fulfilling family life. I know, and I’m sure you all do as well, many wonderful Christian women who want to find a good, godly man and settle down, yet year after year, they are coming up empty. And I, like many of you I’m sure, blamed men for being too shallow and/or immature to see what they were missing and take the plunge. 

I don’t feel that way anymore. I’ve seen a few things in the past year that have given me pause, and made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, these guys have point. And all it took was a good, hard, honest look at the type of wife I was during the first decade of my marriage to make me sympathetic to men who have decided that marriage has nothing to offer them in the long run. So to that end, I wanted to write an open and honest letter to encourage single women who want to be wives, and admonish married women who may unknowingly be providing living proof of why marriage is becoming so unattractive to a lot of men.

Some of you may remember my old post, Tales of a Stay At Home Feminist. I openly admitted to being very much like the fictional character in the story that led the post. I was perpetually unsatisfied, and I was perpetually unsatisfied because despite my Christian faith, my expectations of marriage and family had been shaped by the culture, by feminism. My husband, while far from perfect due that little pesky trait called humanity, was and always has been a good husband. Better than most in many cases. Despite that, I could recite, without missing a beat, a laundry list of things that I needed him to be and do that he wasn’t being and doing. Where did my list of things I thought he needed to fulfill come from? Let’s look at the list, and you tell me:

He needed to tell me, at least weekly, that he thought I was beautiful and he couldn’t live without me. I felt like he never complimented me enough. Never mind that I had long ago let myself go , barely bothering to do much more than sweep my hair up into a ponytail and throw on jeans most days of the week. Hardly a look that would inspire sonnets. Furthermore, it wouldn’t hurt if I did something without expecting to be complimented for it all the time.

I needed him to volunteer to do the dishes sometimes. He should be more aware of when I seemed especially tired after dealing with the kids all day. Never mind that he was coming home from his own grueling 10 hour workday. He needed to be willing to help around the house more. It was as though I was oblivious to the fact that he hadn’t been lounging on the beach all day and that he had in fact spent the past 10, sometimes more, hours contributing to the household.

He needed to understand that sometimes I needed “me” time. I needed to have some time away from him and the kids to fulfill some of my own needs. If that meant I needed to spend money getting a manicure, pedicure, lunch with a girlfriend, and a trip to the mall, he should be okay with that no matter what our financial status at the time. Besides, you couldn’t put a price on my sanity!

He needed to regularly romance with grand gestures to make me feel loved. I however, never felt the need to expend the time and energy to do those things that made him feel valued and loved. That’s all I have to say about that for now. I’ll get into it more in the next post.

And I absolutely needed him to understand that I wasn’t going to spend my entire life in the house. At some point I planned to pursue my own dreams, nurture my own gifts and talents, and be all I can be. And when I do that, he needed to be prepared to do more to keep things running smoothly around the house because I won’t have time to juggle it all. It’s the least he could do since I was giving my most creative and productive years to raising “his” family. Never mind that he was doing the exact same thing- sometimes working at jobs he’d rather not, working hours he’d rather not, for the sake of our family.

I could go on and on, but doesn’t it sound like I was taking my cues from the culture, the Oprahization of women, or romantic comedy movies? Certainly I wasn’t getting these ideas from the word of God. I had no thoughts of self sacrifice, of serving out of love rather than grudgeful duty, and certainly no thoughts of submission- to my husband or to the Lord. And yes, during most of those years, I was a “Bible believing”, churchgoing Christian. As a wife, however, my perspective was the antithesis of what the Bible says a wife should be. And because I don’t live on the dark side of the moon, I know I’m not the only one. And I also know that many of the single women out there who think they want to be wives really don’t want to be wives. They just don’t want to be single.

So while we lament the fact that so many men are shying away from commitment, I think the first place to start is in the mirror. Those of us, who are married, in many cases, don’t make marriage look very appealing. And for the single women who want to be married, I pray that in some small way, something I say here will help you to gain a Godly perspective of what a wife is. Because the culture has royally screwed up most women’s thinking and we need to renew our minds with the word of God.

I’ll have to continue this line of thought next time…

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