Men and Women: Vol. II (On Expectations)

This note piggy-backs on the previous one, entitled “Men and Women: Vol. I (On Marriage)”. If you haven’t read that one, I would advise doing so before continuing.

According to a recent study, the divorce rate among those within the church is higher (about 60% of those who get married) than that of those outside the church (about 50%). When I learned this, I was appalled, but not exactly surprised. Here’s why.

It is very easy, especially in a high-caliber, spiritually-charged atmosphere such as the one found at Liberty University, to form expectations so high that they become unreachable. In that kind of environment, ideals are easy to form. Here, I speak more to the ladies than I do to the men. Men, I believe, usually have a much more realistic picture of what marriage will be like, and more realistic expectations of their women. I personally know a few young women who think that they will end up with the next best thing since Jesus himself. It is easy to get caught up in the high, and many people end up chasing around a carbon-copy of Christ, and when they find out he’s not what they expected him to be, they are crestfallen. Somewhere along the way, they have forgotten that they are dealing with people. Imperfect, fallible, fallen people.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong with expecting a godly man. You should. Likewise, men, you should pursue godly women. The problem comes when our expectations outweigh reality, and we miss out on someone who is a blessing from God.

Now, I am giving you all fair warning: In the next paragraph, I am going to get up on my soapbox. If you don’t particularly care for soapboxes, or you find yourself at odds with opinionated people, then I suggest you gloss over what I’m about to say. Better yet, stop reading this altogether. You don’t belong here. There. You have been warned.

LADIES. STOP expecting your boyfriends/fiancés/new husbands to be your fathers. They are not. They never will be. And guess what? They were never meant to be. There is nothing wrong with wanting a man who is like your father. What I’m saying is STOP EXPECTING YOUR MAN TO BE ABLE TO GIVE YOU EVERYTHING THAT YOUR DADDY HAS GIVEN YOU. Yes, you have lived in a nice home all your life, your father has been able to give you all sorts of nice and expensive things, he gives you lots of spending money and buys you a brand new car. Do you know why he was able to do these things? Because you were born into an already established family environment, one where, more than likely, your father and your mother have already formed a financial basis before they had you. Your father worked his entire life to be able to give you what you have. You weren’t around to see Mom and Dad living in a crappy apartment, scraping by on next to nothing before they were able to provide a better home for you. My Dad worked in a gas station for several years before he was able to find the job he wanted and the job that would provide for his wife and his family, one that is STILL providing for us this very day. Guess what? Your husband is going to have to work for awhile before he’s able to give you everything you want, and you just might have to make some sacrifices along the way. Your husband/significant other is NOT some sugar-daddy who will float you cash and expect you to sleep with him once in awhile, some emotional robot who you don’t have to support and indulges your materialism (but let’s be honest, that’s exactly what some ladies WANT, isn’t it?). STOP BEING BRATS, and be a good girlfriend/fiancé/wife.

*He quietly and calmly steps down off his soapbox and clears his throat.

Ahem.

It is unfair and unreasonable to expect a college student or an early to mid twenty-something man to have the wisdom, experience, bearing and maturity of a forty or fifty year-old man. Of course we are not all that an older man is. We are still becoming the men we should be and want to be. Are you, ladies, all that you should be? Are you already the complete picture of what you want to be and should be as a godly, mature woman? I would wager that you are not. The only difference is, we don’t expect you to be.

It is equally as unfair for you to expect us to be.

Further, since when is it a prerequisite to marriage for you to be everything you should be as a person? Since when do you have to be the perfect example of a fully-developed godly man in order to get married, or be in a relationship? Isn’t that part of the beauty of falling in love? The mutual respect, the common understanding that you BOTH are still growing, still filling the roles of what you want to be and should be, and pursuing that? Together? The whole point of a man and a woman coming together is so that they can fill in each others’ weaknesses and benefit from each others’ strengths.

Now, I DO believe that there is a certain level, as far as provision and maturity is concerned, that a man should reach before getting married. I’m not making excuses. But realize that your man is still striving to be that man you want him to be. Men – you SHOULD provide for your wife, love her as Christ loves the church – that’s our job, to protect our women – to fight every day to make the world a better place, to use our strength to change things so that they can live in a better world. But women, realize that, at the end of the day, when we drag ourselves home, tired and beaten down from trying to provide a better life for you, that’s when your job kicks in.

I recently had a conversation with an older man, one that I respect very much, and someone who has been married for over twenty years, and who has a solid marriage and a great family. This is not a sissy, overly-sensitive, overly-emotional man. This is a hard man, a man who has worked all his life. I will use his words here.

“Men are emotionally fragile creatures. There is a degree of instability to us that can only be corrected by the presence of a woman. God knows where I would be without my wife.”

Ladies, we need the kind of comfort that only you can give, that feminine touch (I’m not referring to physical intimacy here) that only you can provide. God created you to help us, so that we wouldn’t have to be alone. Because we aren’t meant to be alone. Every man’s soul longs for the lady with which he can have that sense of comfort, that feeling of home. You are the salve to the wounds we endure while fighting to be a good man. You assuage the tension, pain, and emotional injuries we sustain.

As much as we don’t want to admit it, ladies, we need you.

Why do you think so many guys have big trucks, so many silly gadgets? It’s because up until now, our lives have been empty, and we’re trying to pretend that we’re okay without you. We’re trying to act like we don’t need you. But we do.

Unfortunately, if that “emotional instability” falls into the hands of the wrong woman – an ungodly woman, the woman who doesn’t know what to do with it, or doesn’t want to know – then it only aggravates the situation, and the results could be destructive. If a woman derides her man for his struggles instead of encouraging him and comforting him, it only makes things worse, and knocks the man’s feet out from underneath him, and his incentive to strive to be better is gone. This is not to say that a man shouldn’t be emotionally strong. He should. But understand that we ARE human.

Should people within the church get divorced? I think the question should be, should these couples ever have gotten married in the first place?

Unfortunately, that question comes too late for many people.

What’s the point? Men, be strong for your women, but realize that she may need some practice at the whole feminine comfort thing. Ladies, work with your man, not against him. Realize that he is fighting to be the kind of man you want him to be, God wants him to be, and he knows he should be.

Stop expecting.

Start being.

-a.

Men and Women: Vol. I (On Marriage)

I begin writing with somewhat of a heavy heart. Perhaps this is the price I pay for attempting, through writing, to ease the weight that burdens my mind. This post has been a long time in the making.

Over the last year or so, I think Satan has been systematically attacking my hopes for marriage, love, and a relationship with the godly woman that I so hope for. Suffice it to say, I’m a romantic sort of man, which makes this attack all the harder. It seems like I’ve heard things from everywhere and everything about the negativity of marriage. Here are some examples:

“Give them the hips, not the heart.”

“Don’t get married. You’re young, and it’s not worth it.” This from a young woman not four years my senior.

“Marriage will make you miserable.”

You get the idea.

Honestly, I’m scared. I’m scared of being alone, but because of what I see and hear, I’m equally afraid of getting married. I hear people talk about how they’re uncomfortable being in the same house alone with their spouses, after however many years of marriage. I hear people say they need a “buffer” in between themselves and their spouses. I see men become hard, unaffectionate stones, and I see women become cold and bitter shells. And I ask myself, is this what marriage is like? Marriage shouldn’t be like this . . . should it?

In the words of my good friend, “This is why I think it might not be so bad to not get married, because it would probably make me miserable anyway.”

Then I find myself sad and despairing about my future, and my long term interaction with the opposite-sex. The more I hear, the less marriage seems like the beautiful union of two people becoming one, and the more it seems like two miserable, completely separate individuals living under the same roof.

And so, I have been wondering for a long time exactly what has been the root cause of this. Why is marriage, a holy gift from God, in such a fallen state, to the point where more than half of the couples who get married end up getting a divorce? I may have found an answer.

Satan has not only been systematically attacking my view of marriage (something I’m sure he knows is a soft spot of mine), but he has also, for years and decades, through trends and movements within society, been systematically attacking and breaking down the roles of men and women in relationships. Particularly, in marriages.

Through the rising trend of individualism, and the older trend of feminism, women have been told that anything men can do, they can do (better). They can be CEOs of major corporations. They can be major leaders within the church. Men and women in many realms are on a level playing field. These things, in and of themselves, are not problems. The problem comes when women try to fill roles for which they were not designed and were never meant to fill.

I speak of relationships. I speak of marriage.

The Bible defines the roles of men and women in marriage in this way:

“Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior . . . Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh . . . Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

I believe there is a mutual failure of filling these roles, both on the part of men, and on the part of women, that has led to the current state of marriage.

Women have become unleadable. Filled with an air of self-entitlement and empowerment, many women have assumed the role of leader in every area of their lives. Women don’t know how to submit anymore. And you can’t lead someone who refuses to follow.

Further than that, when men attempt to lead, women revert to an old standby: manipulation. I hear snide remarks all the time from married men about how wives run everything in marriages, however subtle it may be. I observe things, and I find this to be true, many times. If women want to, they can make your life miserable. If you don’t lead the way they WANT you to lead, they’ll find a way. They’ll cut you down with words, exploiting your weak points, giving your weaknesses as an example of why you’re not a good leader. This is NOT respect. This is NOT mutual cooperation. The Bible calls that malice, and it’s sin. The one thing men crave over any other is to be respected by their women. It’s in the Bible. What is God’s one commandment to women? Submit. Respect. Women treat men like this, then wonder why there are so many emotionless jerks, so many men who are disillusioned about marriage and love and relationships. They wonder why men treat women likes pieces of meat. And the answer is, many men think that that is the best they can hope for.

This level of disrespect women have for men leaves men feeling downtrodden, and women feeling like there are just not any men good enough to lead them (This ties into another blog I intend to write, forthcoming, about expectations…should be up within a few days, because all of this is related). So women continue to attempt to lead, and wonder why things went wrong when their men turn sour.

Women were never meant to lead.

I do not place all the blame on women. Doubtless there will be many women who say "We wouldn't have to lead if men were doing their jobs." They would be correct. This is another way Satan is trying to skew the roles of men and women. Men are to blame, because in a large part men today are not pursuing God, and when you don’t pursue God, you can’t have a good sense of how to lead someone else in a relationship as delicate as marriage. Men need to stand up and take back their position as the leaders of the women, the heads of the household, and sadly this is a value that is significantly absent among the rising generation of young men. Again, our roles as men and women are under attack, and the skewed perspectives resulting from this attack have marred our capacity for true, meaningful, godly relationships.

On a personal note, I do not claim myself to be the master of leadership. In fact, I have been accused of being a poor leader (one of the things that led to this thought process, and thus, the blog you read now). While I think this accusation was unfounded, I do believe it hit upon something that is behind the scenes in modern American society, particularly within the realm of the church (Also a subject that will be discussed in the blog concerning expectations). While I am not everything I should be as a man (yet), who is? I don’t expect my future wife to be the purest, sterling example of a submissive godly woman. But I do expect her to strive toward that end, and respect me in the process. Just as I expect myself to strive to be a better leader for her, to treat her the way Christ has treated me, with unconditional and unwavering love.

And for all the attacks, I would just like to say that they HAVE NOT BROUGHT ME DOWN. So Satan, you can keep trying, but suck it. My wife is out there somewhere, and I will not give up hope. I will die alone before I settle. I will not give in to whatever depths of despair you are trying to cast me into. I believe marriage still can and will be a beautiful, wonderful, God-honoring (and difficult) thing. I’m willing to give it my best shot.

-a.

*I would be remiss if I failed to mention Sir Bill Monthie, who helped capture my thoughts, and whose words I have used here. Despite what you may think (or he may think) he holds some great wisdom within him. You can, and should, find his blog here: http://www.deckerintheface.blogspot.com/