So what is the grey area between letting your man lead and expecting him to take care of you?

Sometime there is a fine line to tread between submission and abdicating personal responsibility. While I am sure most men would love to have a woman who defers to his authority, I wonder if they might sometimes resent her when she is not sure when to tackle things on her own.

There is also the issue of true vulnerability and contrived vulnerability: What a woman truly cannot do for herself and what she just refuses to do because she can rely on her man to do it for her.

I myself have abdicated some things in my marriage that I wish now I had not. I wish I had learned about car maintenance. I wish I had learned more about investments. I wish I would have learned to drive a stick shift. Happily I can say that I am learning about car maintenance and investing, but driving a stick shift is not a realistic goal.

At the same time, I have had to turn to my husband for help in areas I never had to in the past. I really do need his help in opening jars and carrying heavy bags because I am old.

There are many other areas in my life where I am now totally dependent on my husband. If he died tomorrow I would be in a world of hurt. I am just now starting to realize how vulnerable I truly am. It is a rather scary thing. I do not worry about my husband leaving me while he is still alive and I really have no reason to worry that he won’t outlive me. It is just the fact that I have let him handle so many things in our marriage and I am not sure if it was truly the right thing to do. Did it place more responsibility on his shoulders than was necessary? Did it make me more helpless than I needed to be?

I throw these questions out there in the hopes that I can get some objective opinions. I would like to know for my own benefit, but also for the benefit of other women. The pat answer is: Put your trust in your man. I have complete trust in my man, but I am still vulnerable because I placed too much trust in him and not enough trust in myself to take on more responsibility.