…is a powerful way that men install Headship.

Readership: All; Christians;
Theme: Feminine Submission
Author’s Note: This post is based on a comment I left under No More Mrs. Hot Mess! (2021-11-29) with some added input from Jack.
Length: 750 words
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Misery of having Weak or Missing Boundaries

A while back, Femmy wrote about her subjective view of others in which she portrayed man bashing as a common female trait.

“I also noticed I’m really good at seeing what’s spiritually wrong in others, but blind to my own.

For example, all the wives in my family sure can pick out everything wrong in their men, but never once did they say they were wrong about anything they did, except for one: that they shouldn’t have married.

Is this true for all women?

And why do they morally pick on their husbands?

Why do they constantly bash them in front of their children?

Why are they always mad?”

img-1783683468-6a50d98c5de614.09038409.jpg

We’ve been over this before many times.  Genesis 3:16 means that all women to one extent or another will chafe against their husband’s authority.  Wives picking out the moral flaws of their husbands to leverage against them is one way this chaffing manifests itself.  Bashing them in front of their children is another way of usurping a husband’s authority.

On a personal note, if Mrs. Apostle ever does this particular one again then we’ll go see divorce lawyers the next day, which brings us to the answer to Femmy’s last question.

Wives are always mad because they are stuck with a husband who they don’t think is strong enough to set firm boundaries and enact consequences for breaking them.  The insane aspect of this is that the typical unhappy wife does not understand what it is that will actually make her happy and so she grasps at shadows she thinks might do the trick, all the while petulantly goading her husband with “happy wife, happy life” in a vain effort to wring that last drop of life blood out of him.  He does his best to keep up until he doesn’t see the point of trying anymore, because what he does rarely keeps her happy.

Even wives that were, at one time, Tingle crazy for their husband commonly fall into this trap.  After years of nagging and nitpicking, eventually her insolent disrespect causes her to fall out of love, and her lack of humility ruins the entire marriage and family, as I described before.  These women never seem to realize that what they’re looking for can only be obtained by trusting in God, not by castigating a man.  However, when a husband installs boundaries, it creates a structure that can take her one step closer towards realizing this.

Installing Boundaries

In practice, husbands need to ditch all of the culture’s ideas about equality and treat his wife like the most responsible teenager in the family.  This is done by setting firm boundaries and expectations and then enforcing them without letting his emotions get the best of him.  She’ll be unhappy for a while, but ultimately she’ll find comfort in the security and safety of the parameters he has set.

img-1783683469-6a50d98da0b749.82035036.jpg

Think of it like a sheep in a pen with the shepherd at the gate.  They may not like being penned in, but the shepherd’s protection lets them live their lives more freely because they are safe from predators.  The “predator” in this case is demonic — moral criticism, unthankfulness, shame, pangs of guilt, etc. Likewise, a husband’s parameters with his wife should protect against emotionally driven poor decision making that leads to painful and costly consequences.

This is, in fact, the model the Bible gives us with Christ and the church.  He gives us parameters to protect us from ourselves, knowing that we’d all act sinfully against our own long term best interests.  For some of these, it is easier to understand the cause and effect, such as the adulteress leading to emotional, financial, and relational turmoil, while others, like the Leviticus 18 instruction to not procreate with close relatives, make take a little longer to realize.  In the case of Leviticus 18, it took a couple generations after Kentucky reached statehood along with modern genetic research to confirm the wisdom contained there.  (It’s a Southern joke.)

Related