Why does the Bible only command men to love their wives, not to respect them? I used to think it was because husbands and wives need both love and respect, but it's harder for men to do the "love" part well and harder for women to do the "respect" part well. I found the RP a year ago, and many posts (like this one) quickly taught me that a husband cannot expect to receive love from his wife. At least not the kind of romantic and appreciative love that we fantasize about. But only recently am I realizing that this flips the other way too: a wife cannot receive a husband's respect. Indeed, repeatedly trying to respect your wife wounds the feminine spirit. Let me make a few proverbs based off my own life journey to prove the point.

  • People worthy of respect are very careful for their words to reflect their reality. If you take your wife's words at face value, you just failed yet another fitness test and withheld your strength.
  • People worthy of respect are grateful when you help solve their problems. If you try to solve your wife's expressed problems, you just failed yet another comfort test and neglected to connect emotionally. It's not about the nail.
  • People worthy of respect wouldn't repeatedly yell out unless it was to demonstrate the supreme urgency of the situation. If you act like the situation is urgent when your wife snaps or yells over something, you have just sabotaged your Oak leadership while also making her feel bad about herself.
  • People worthy of respect have big feelings but subjugate them to what is true and good. If you expect your wife to act lovey and kind when she feels tired, hungry, anxious, angry, bored, or when you simply pick the wrong movie on date night, well, how're those expectations going for you both? Maybe if you mansplain the "Do not worry" parable one more time, the pissy attitude will stop and she'll finally conquer those insecure feelings, keep digging that hole!
  • The principle of reciprocity is logical and good for people worthy of respect. It makes perfect sense that I should take hundreds of hours of my time to teach each student how to develop models and write papers well, in return for them slaving away in the lab to get all the results for me. Any attempt at reciprocity in a marriage is a covert contract that disgusts your wife. Dance monkey, dance. But you're not going to get any chemistry going in that "lab" by doing more chore-play in hopes of getting affection.
  • People worthy of respect desire to be held accountable. Say buddy, how's it going for you when you try explaining to your wife what she's doing wrong? Remember that Ephesians verse about treating your wife as if she's without blemish? Is that because she doesn't have any easily fixable blemishes, or is it because she's too emotionally fragile to hear about them from you?
  • People worthy of respect would choose "realz" over "feelz" any day of the week. When I first read about fitness tests and how to pass them, it contradicted all my feelz for how women are. But the description of how wife's react when you fail fitness tests matched all of my collected data, so I discarded my feelings and intuitions to experiment with passing fitness tests for once. It worked, and overnight I abandoned all of my emotional intuitions and changed my entire worldview on what a wife's words mean. If you explain a logical fallacy to your wife, no matter how clearly, it just makes her feel bad and double down.

Your wife doesn't want to be respected because it would require her to be something she's not. And cannot be. Respect, in and of itself, is a hurtful covert contract that destroys the feminine spirit.

An important disclaimer. Me saying that respecting your wife is bad is not implying that disrespect is good. Your wife cannot handle respect in the masculine sense, but acting in disrespectful ways is even worse. There's a reason we say to avoid butthurt, criticism, and arguments at all costs.