Girls, here you are. Struggling with a ho-hum marriage routine and a barely-there love life. It is easy to blame the hubs for all your marriage woes. But ladies, let’s be honest. There are things we do to screw up our marital bliss. Here’s a few.
Expect him to make you happy.
Any good, brave man who stands at the shores of that which is woman, and feels the slightest expectation to fill that ocean, will run! Do you hear me girls? He is going to hoof it in the opposite direction as fast as his Nikes will let him.
You can’t expect him to make you happy because he simply can’t. It isn’t his job. It isn’t why he was created. If he feels like you expect it he is going to bail emotionally or bail in real life.
Be a baby.
Stop your whining. God’s women have grit. God’s women don’t whine and complain. They get up and get things done.
- Jochebed hid Moses under the radar of the Egyptian guard.
- Deborah went into battle for Israel right beside the soldiers.
- Esther, in a game of high stakes espionage, risked her life to save her countrymen.
Expect him to do women’s work.
I am about to say the most non-21st century thing ever. There is men’s work and there is women’s work. The evidence is in the DNA. God made men with a lot more muscle and he made us with a lot more fluff.
My husband isn’t opposed to doing a little laundry and cleaning the kitchen. He has certainly done his fair share of diaper duty. But, it is not his obligation. Just like I prefer for him to go plunge toilets and gut deer, he prefers me to nurse the babies.
Don’t expect your man to do women’s work and don’t get mad at him when he doesn’t.
Mother him.
He has one and there is a reason he didn’t marry her.
He doesn’t need you to tell him to be careful, wear a jacket and not to run with scissors.
Your man needs you to use that grit to fight along side him. He needs you to be his confidant and secret keeper. He needs you to be his lover. He needs you to be his cheerleader. He needs you to be his wife.
Nag him.
I know they need us to help them navigate the finer details of life, like getting urine in the toilet and dirty underwear off the kitchen table, but there is a fine line between suggesting and berating.
Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging wife. Proverbs 21:19
Go the way of the frump.
Remember how you used to dress up before your boyfriend came to pick you up? Remember how you changed outfits three times, primped your hair again and again and made sure you put on more lipstick when he pulled in the driveway.
Then you married him and became this.
Mom trumps wife
I get it. Crying babies need their mommy, but you were wife before mom. You will be wife after mom too.
Use sex to control him.
After this he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. And the lords of the Philistines came up to her and said to her, “Seduce him, and see where his great strength lies, and by what means we may overpower him, that we may bind him to humble him. And we will each give you 1,100 pieces of silver.” Judges 16:4-5
Yes, it has been done for a long, long time. We give it and we deny with ulterior motives. Don’t.
Keep secrets from him.
Garden living was all about being naked and not ashamed. There was nothing held back in Eden. There was no hiding, no covering, no avoiding the truth.
Be naked and not ashamed with how much money you spend to who you talk with on Facebook.
Leave him.
One of my friends posted this the other other day on his page:
In the Marines we had a commitment to each other- We will NEVER leave you! No One gets left behind! The world would be a much different place if we lived by this simple commitment. Semper Fi Marines
What if the Sisterhood of the Fellowship of Wives held each other to this kind of standard?
Don’t leave your husband behind. Don’t leave him alone in his isolating pride. Don’t leave him in his memory numbing drunkenness. Don’t leave him in his ignorance, his anger or his failure. When he is knocked down, go back for him. Fight for him. Drag him to safety. Care him back to health.
