Everybody’s Confused

“Picture a little girl whose daddy swings her on his shoulder and carries her effortlessly. But the older she gets… and the older he gets… the heavier the burden.”

This week I am featuring excerpts from my new book The Marriage Renovation…

Here’s where a woman gets confused. She came into this marriage to live happily ever after. He’s the knight. And she gave up quite a bit when she came in. Perhaps she had an education behind her, maybe a job she liked or even a promising career. Whatever was going on, she set it aside and turned her attention to this marriage and family. Deep inside, she wants the tradeoff to be worth it.

She is told to respect her husband, but respect and idolatry can look pretty similar, and we as a church body do not clearly distinguish between the two. Add to that the skewed teaching about submission, and she is set up to idolize him.

Simply put, respect is about him, idolatry is about her. In other words, a wife respects her husband for his benefit—trusting God to grow and mature him as he does with all of us. But she idolizes him for her benefit—because she wants the security of a knight in shining armor, not knowing to her core that only God provides true security. Now he must satisfy himself, his wife, their children, his boss—and it’s an impossible load he was never meant to carry.

Women don’t say this outright—they are not conscious of it. But they express their disappointment night and day. “Honey, you didn’t do this right.” “You left your clothes in the gym bag again.” “Oh, that’s not the way you diaper a baby!” Men get the message that they no longer measure up. Worst of all, they think it’s their fault. In truth, a man is simply not the Savior both of them wanted him to be.

So he withdraws or controls—either way, he becomes a distortion—and she withdraws or rebels—either way, she becomes a distortion. Neither of them is who God designed them to be.

The more I sought Rob for meaning (instead of Jesus), the more his shoulders strained; the more he turned on me for expecting so much; the more inadequate we both felt.

Picture a little girl whose daddy swings her on his shoulder and carries her effortlessly. But the older she gets… and the older he gets… the heavier the burden.

When we marry, our husband thinks nothing of carrying the weight of the family, but the more time goes by, the more he struggles under weight he was never meant to carry.

Filed under: Abiding In Christ, Love, Marriage