I have mentioned
before that just as a woman desires to feel loved, men equally desire to feel
respected. Respect, in all forms, speaks volumes to men and often results in
them feeling worthy of their wife’s affections.
As you can imagine,
talking about this with my husband stirred up some important conversations
between the two of us and I’m really glad that it did!
the time to ask our spouses to boldly and lovingly share them with us.
1. Emotional Manipulation
Do you ever use your moods to
control your husband’s response? For example: Have you ever responded curtly
with, “Nope. It’s fine. I don’t care” – when it actually isn’t fine and you do
care? Guilt trips, using the words “always” and “never”, aggression or passive
aggression, the silent treatment, doling out ultimatums, crying for pity or
exaggerating disappointment are many of the ways that women emotionally
manipulate their spouses.
Friends, I want to encourage you to use your
words. Be honest in the disappointment or sadness that you feel – nobody is
telling you to suppress your emotions – but there is a boundary in knowing what
you are saying to help your marriage versus what you are saying to control your
marriage.
Okay guys, I can be such a mom – in every sense of
the word. But gosh, it’s damaging, and especially to my marriage. We have gotten
to a place where I have recognized that this is a struggle for me and am
actively choosing my words & actions more wisely, but that hasn’t always
been the case. And I believe in many marriages, the wife acts like her husband’s
mother, but because she thinks that it’s what’s ‘best’, she avoids the issue and
drains her husband of all independence and joy.
If you are regularly
telling your husband what’s best for him or making your own convictions his
convictions, it’s likely that you’re playing the role of ‘mom’ rather than the
role of ‘wife’. This tends to make a man feel smaller and smaller in his role as
your protector.
Using aggression as a means of fighting or getting
our way won’t ever allow our husbands to win. If he responds with meekness or
silence, we make him out to be a coward. If he responds with anger, we make him
out to be a bully. If you need space after an argument because aggression tends
to be your go-to, then take time away before you come back together. ‘My dear
brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen,
slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the
righteousness that God desires.” (James 1:19-1:20).
Jesse and I have an ‘open phone’ policy and
over-compensate when it comes to asking hard questions and telling hard truths.
However, there comes a point when ‘openness’ becomes ‘obsession’ and ‘asking’
becomes ‘smothering’. I have always said that if either party in the marriage
truly wants to go out and have an affair, there’s no amount of snooping that
anyone can do to stop it.
But even more importantly, you should fight for
your marriage. If you struggle with trust issues, don’t smother your husband
with prying questions to make him feel as if he’s done something wrong, only
because you assume he has. First – pray for his heart and entrust him to God.
Secondly, step out and speak to a couple or counselor who would be willing to
hold both of you accountable and to help you walk through the trust issues that
you face.
This one speaks for itself. If you spend the
majority of your time criticizing the things that your spouse has done wrong
rather than praising the things that they have done right, it’s likely that they
feel as if they won’t ever be good enough for you. Your words have the power to
destroy or build them up. Challenge yourself each day to voice ten positive
things about your husband for every criticism you give.
This is a big one in a lot of marriages.
Undermining your husband, especially as a father, teaches your children that he
is not competent and shouldn’t be respected. Overruling his decisions in front
of your children not only teaches them to disrespect him, it brings discord and
conflict into your home rather than bringing peace and unity. We are on the same
team and any time we think that we’re doing the ‘right thing’ by devaluing our
husband’s words or opinion, we are slowly giving no other option but for him to
disengage and completely leave the parenting duties to us.
This should be an obvious one, but a
woman who either secretly or openly flirts with other men has the ability to
immediately make her spouse feel ‘less than’, ashamed and embarrassed. When we
married our spouses, they became our only ‘type’; you are your husband’s and he
is yours. Talking about other men or hinting at the attractiveness of other men
is degrading and disrespectful to our husbands and creates insecurity in their
hearts.
Holding grudges and keeping a record of your
husband’s wrongs, rather than talking things out and expressing what’s really on
your mind, will likely lead to bitterness and resentment on both ends. If you
continue to allow bitterness to fester in your heart, you will bring up past
arguments when new situations arise, causing your husband to feel as if there is
never any progress made.
Do you provoke your husband? Do you push his buttons
for the sake of attention or to test his response? Do you nag at him when he
walks in the door for not helping enough around the house, even though he has
worked a 40/60/80 hour week? A taunt is defined as, “a remark made in order to
anger, wound or provoke someone.” We would probably never openly admit that we
‘taunt’ our husbands, but think back to the comments made the past few days –
were they meant for building up or for tearing down?
Contentment is huge. And when we
display discontentment in our lives, our husband immediately feels the need to
‘fix, fix, fix’ until he feels like there’s nothing more that he can do and he
just wants to give up. The more time and energy we waste comparing our marriages
(or husbands) to that of other people, and telling him who he isn’t or who he
needs to be, the more we miss out on the beautiful quirks and gifts in the
person that God gave to us.
[written by Lindsey Maestas, a good
wife and mother]
