Your husband doesn’t have to earn your respect

themattwalshblog ^ | 22 FEB 2014 | Matt Walsh

[fulltlt]

I can’t tell you where I was or who was there or when it happened. I don’t want to add to this guy’s humiliation, so I am keeping this vague and generic. I can simply tell you that, some time ago, I found myself in the same vicinity as another married couple.

I certainly can’t read their minds, and I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, all I know is that the husband couldn’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldn’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife.

She disagreed with everything he said.

She contradicted nearly every statement.

She nagged him.

She brought up a “funny” story that made him out to be incompetent and foolish. He laughed, but he was embarrassed.

She was gutting him right in front of us. Emasculating him. Neutering him. Damaging him.

It was excruciating.

It was tragic.

It also was, or is becoming, pretty par-for-the-course.

The respect deficiency in our culture has reached crisis levels.

I’ve discussed at length how men should treat women. I’ve written about the lessons I plan to teach my son; lessons about how he should love, honor, respect, serve, and protect the women in his life. Indeed, men need to respect women, and we, as men, are far from perfect in that regard.

Those posts — the ones where I call on us men to improve the way we treat women — tend to be very popular. They’re popular when I write them or when anyone writes them. Proclaim that women, mothers, and wives should be respected, and a chorus will shout ‘amen.’ Every day on Facebook brings us another viral post excoriating men and supporting women. I’ve written a few of them myself.

But I’ve noticed that the corollary – a message about the respect women must give men, a message challenging wives and encouraging husbands – isn’t quite so palatable for many people. Disrespect for men has become standard practice. That scene I witnessed was sad but unremarkable; we’ve all watched that kind of thing play out a thousand times over.

Men are disrespected by their wives – they’re disrespected publicly, they’re disrespected privately, they’re disrespected and then told that they have no right to be upset about it because they aren’t worthy of respect in the first place.

Disrespect for men is a joke to us now. A little while ago I stopped on the way home from work to buy my wife some flowers. As she rang me up, the cashier quipped: “Uh-oh, what’d you do?” I wasn’t particularly amused, but I chuckled. She continued. “I don’t know if this’ll be enough to get you off the couch tonight!”

Ah, yes, the old “husband is punished by his wife and sent to the couch” meme. I’m not sure if this actually happens in real life, or if it’s an invention of 90′s “all men are fat, witless, oafs” sitcoms, but the popularity of the stereotype is telling. Is this how we see husbands now? A man gets “in trouble” with his wife, she scolds him and puts him in time-out on the couch. Now he has to placate his alpha-bride by showering her with flowers and jewelry.

Men are painted like children or dogs. They can be shooed off of their own beds by their wives and sent to cower in the living room until she permits him to return. This is only slightly less offensive than the cliché of the sadistic wife who punitively withholds sex from her husband. “You didn’t clean the garage like I told you. No sex for you, mister! Next time, follow my instructions!”

Did you ever see this Samsung ad from several months ago?

A worthless, grunting, Neanderthal of a husband instantly “evolves” when his wife plugs a contraption into his back. The ad caused a slight dust up when they released it, but nothing — NOTHING — like it would have if the husband and wife had switched roles in this charming piece of viral marketing.

But with men on the receiving end, a few people complained, some angry Youtube comments were posted, Samsung sales were unscathed, and everyone quickly moved on with their lives.

That’s because disrespect for men isn’t exactly a trendy outrage.

These cultural messages aren’t harmful because they hurt my manly feelings; they’re harmful because of what they do to young girls. Society tells our daughters that men are boorish dolts who need to be herded like goats and lectured like school boys. Then they grow up and enter into marriage wholly unprepared and unwilling to accept the Biblical notion that “wives should submit to their husbands” because “the husband is the head of the wife.” [Ephesians 5]

It is a fatal problem, because the one thing that is consistently withheld from men and husbands — respect — is the one thing we need the most.

Yes, need. We need respect, and that need is so deeply ingrained that a marriage cannot possibly survive if the man is deprived of it.

Often, people will say that a husband should only be respected if he “earns” it. This attitude is precisely the problem. A wife ought to respect her husband because he is her husband, just as he ought to love and honor her because she is his wife. Your husband might “deserve” it when you mock him, berate him, belittle him, and nag him, but you don’t marry someone in order to give them what they deserve. In marriage, you give them what you’ve promised them, even when they aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

This doesn’t mean that a man has a license to be lazy, or abusive, or uncaring. He is challenged to live up to the respect his wife affords him. If his wife parcels out her respect on some sort of reward system basis, the husband has nothing for which to strive. As the respect diminishes, so too does his motivation to behave respectably. Respect is wielded like a ransom against him, and he grows more isolated and distant all the while.

They both swirl in circles around the drain. He fails, so she gives him no respect, and then he continues to fail because he feels disrespected, and she continues to give him no respect because he continues to fail. And so on, and so on, and so on, all the way to the divorce attorney.

The same thing happens with love. If love is unconditional, then the light of love always shines in your marriage, even in its darkest times. But if your love is given in direct proportion to your spouse’s ability to “earn” it, then it will inevitably diminish and fade over time.

Love in a marriage is, as people often point out, a choice. But it’s also a duty. So is respect. I love my wife because I choose to love her. I choose to love her because that is the vow I made; it is my charge, my warrant. Luckily, it’s usually pretty easy to love my wife because she’s kind, warmhearted, and beautiful. But if she becomes less kind, and I withdraw my love because of it, then my love was never love to begin with. It was just a pleasant feeling; a natural response to her nicer tendencies.

This is not to say that women should tolerate a man who fails in his duties, but that her intolerance for his failures can only be constructive if it is rooted in respect. Sadly, many women will approach their husbands and say: “You need to stop doing such and such or start doing such and such, because you’re a failure and I don’t respect you.”

She might not explicitly state this, but it is the message she implicitly sends. There is zero chance that this message will help to heal the damage; it only plunges another dagger into the already gaping wound.

A few months ago I wrote a post about pornography. I stand by every word I typed, but I feel like I could add another couple thousand sentences to the end of it. Ever since I published that piece, I have heard from hundreds and hundreds of men and women on both sides of the porn problem.

Men emailed to tell me that they developed a porn habit and it did great damage to their marriage. But they told me that they resorted to porn after years of being disrespected, shunned and belittled by their wives. They weren’t making an excuse — only offering some perspective and context.

And hundreds of women told me that their husbands developed a porn habit and it caused them to lose all respect for them. This inability to respect their husbands nearly, or in some cases completely, wrecked their marriage.

A vicious cycle. The men didn’t want to fight for a marriage if they weren’t respected, and the women didn’t want to respect men who wouldn’t fight for their marriage. He withholds his love, she withholds her respect. They’ve both set fire to the thing that needs to be fixed.

Respect is our language. If it isn’t said with respect, we can’t hear it. This is why nagging is ineffective and self defeating. This is why statements made in sarcastic tones, or with rolling eyes, will never be received well. We have a filter in our brains, and a statement made in disrespect will be filtered out like the poison it is.

Men are notoriously reluctant to share feelings or display vulnerability. Many times, we keep those inner thoughts locked away — our feelings guarded and hidden — because we know we are not respected. A man will never be vulnerable to someone who doesn’t respect him. Never.

A man isn’t satisfied or content if he isn’t respected. If he can’t find respect where he is, he will seek it somewhere else. This can have disastrous implications for a relationship, but it applies in other areas of life as well. A man is much more likely to stay in a low paying job, a physically demanding job, a dangerous job, or a tedious job, than a job where he isn’t respected.

I’m only emphasizing this because I think it might actually be news to some people. Society does not permit men to be vocal about their need for respect, so the need is often ignored.

I could sit here all day adding “yes, but husbands also need to…” disclaimers. I won’t, because I’ve probably written a dozen or more times on that subject. Every once in a while, I think we should talk about what wives need to do. And here it is. This, above all else. Respect your husbands. Even when he doesn’t deserve it.

[NorthMountain]

momma ain’t happy, nobody happy.

Yep ... that's what makes for a pathologically depraved, dysfunctional, destructive, piss-poor excuse for a family.

"Momma" needs to quit inflicting her misery on everybody else.

[VanDeKoik]

“Then it sounds like YOU have a problem”
Wasn’t talking about me.

“A man’s job is to BE respectable. “
everyone’s job is to be that. Just because you lack a dongle, you can be a jerk?

” I have found that “women” LOVE a confident genuinely respectable man. “

Many women dont know their heads from their asses when it comes to what is or isnt “respectable”. That is why they keep ending up with A-holes. Or need I point you out to a couple of guys known as Bill Clinton and Barry Obama? They like to act like they have some special “6th sense” but then they like to hide behind the “innocent dumb women” act when they get the dope that most people around them saw months ago.

“The guy who wrote this article needs to man-up a bit. . like when he gets his panties all twisted over the clerk who was joking about his motive for buying the flowers”

Maybe he doesn’t like his manhood questioned? Or is that not part of being a “real man”? Oh wait it is...or isnt it? We get different definitions depending on the day.

“hell, she was just being friendly. . .lighten up and play along.”

So in other words, acquiesce to the very thing he is talking about in order to show how much of a “man” he is.

So if a female goes and buys her husband a birthday present, should the cashier say “looks like someone isnt putting out, and is trying to make up for it”?

Dont worry. he’s just being friendly.

“Look. .the truth is. . it is a woman’s nature to idolize a truly respectable man. . .a woman is not truly happy until she finds a man she can trust, love and, . . .hell, worship.”

A bit of advice: Less supermarket check-out mags and Lifetime TV. Women need to stop acting like it can all be boiled down to a generic set of codes and cues. No wonder so many of them end up bitter.

[jsanders2001]

> Post 36. . .excellent! (sounds like the voice of experience!)

It’s really based on biblical principles. Keeping yourself attractive helps. At my church, I have many women try to flirt (innocently) with me and I brush it off and she sees this. She knows I am faithful to her and she respects that because I am being honorable and godly. Just one example...: )

[Buckeye McFrog]

What Gloria Steinem, Phil Donohue and Oprah hath wrought...

[Agamemnon]

My wife does respect me. I guess I got one of the good ones.

My wife and I are coming up on 29 years married this year.

We raised 4 very accomplished children, now 20 years old and older: 2 men - both are Eagle Scouts and USMC, now enrolled in college; one is a pathobiology major (UCONN), the other enrolled in UCONN School of Business. 2 women, one (now a UCONN grad) enrolled in the Masters program through Sotheby's in London, and the youngest working on her degree in animal science (UCONN).

I like to think that deep down even where there may be opposition to a position I take, I, as their father, still have all their respect.

I can say here now, as I often do: I am married to the kind of girl every man WISHED he was married to.

FReegards!

[VanDeKoik]

It blows my mind how on the left men get hit with feminist diatribes about how awful we are for not worshiping them 24/7, not realizing how at fault we are before we’ve done anything, and not treating them like goddesses even when they act like trolls. Degrading men in the most vulgar way.

And then some on the right just clean up the language, and slap a Bible verse on the end and pretend like they are different.

[Responsibility2nd]

Great article. Thanks for the re-post.

 

Your husband doesn’t have to earn your respect
The Matt Walsh Blog ^ | February 22, 2014 | Matt Walsh
 

Posted on Wednesday, February 26, 2014 5:16:21 AM by 2ndDivisionVet

I can’t tell you where I was or who was there or when it happened....

[Neidermeyer]

The “Ruttles” version of that song was “All you need is CASH”

[NorthMountain]

Quite.

The Scriptures are clear, if taken in context. Ephesians 5 leaves little room for doubt:

22 Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.

"be subject in everything" as the Church is to Christ. That leaves absolutely NO room for eyerolling, belittling, degrading, domineering, nagging, inflicting of personal misery, or other forms of contemptuous conduct. Modern American popular culture, for the most part, completely inverts this ... encouraging women to trample the men in their lives.

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Love your wife as Christ loves the Church? Really? He gave Himself up to the most appalling death for the Church. What more is their to say? The love of a husband for his wife, of a father for his children, is necessarily self-sacrificial. Again, modern American popular culture inverts this, encouraging men to be self-centered, materialistic, and infantile.

In the modern popular culture model, husband and wife are at odds with each other, tearing each other down in pursuit of a vain, misbegotten and mistaken notion of self interest. In the Biblical model, husband and wife are united in purpose, the one supporting and the other leading as they carry out God's mission for them.

29 For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church; 33 however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

[wintertime]

I bet your wife thinks she is married to a man every woman wishes she had for a husband. :-)

I have been married to my husband for 32 years....a real honey! Early in our marriage I had a herniated disc ( C 5/6) in my neck. It was very incapacitating for months. Every night my husband came home from work, bought groceries, made dinner, did the laundry,cleaned up the mess, and put 3 preschoolers to bed. I realized that marriage between a man and woman isn’t 50-50. It is 100% from both.

Me?...I am married to a knight in shining armor.

[MortMan]

I probably would have blurted out “Well, that much is obvious...”

[Wiser now]

I have learned to be respectful toward my husband even when I am angry with him, and he is being disrespectful toward me. Because the more respect I give him, the more glaringly obvious his disrespectful attitude toward me becomes, and he cannot deny his behavior and his contribution to any discord we have. It isn’t easy but it has been very effective.
I give him respect because he is a human being with feelings and I want him to look at me with the same attitude. We are respectful toward our co-workers, our neighbors, business people whether they have earned it or not. Our spouses are no different.

[reed13k]

In the service we were taught that loyalty is earned respect is given. The idea was that the insignia on your shoulders earned you the respect that was due the rank - grudging as it may have been. However, a true leader earns the loyalty of their folks.

I think what we are seeing in society is a lack of understanding between respect and loyalty. Respect your spouse with every effort, and earn their loyalty by doing the right things.

[JimRed]

A blog post with full content posted. No pimping here!

[JimRed]

And many young women wonder why men in their age group aren’t interested in marriage...

Buying the cow when milk's two bucks a quart, so to speak.

[CatherineofAragon]

"Men are disrespected by their wives – they’re disrespected publicly, they’re disrespected privately, they’re disrespected and then told that they have no right to be upset about it because they aren’t worthy of respect in the first place.

Disrespect for men is a joke to us now. "

This is very true, and it's detestable. I don't know why a woman would get married in the first place if she thought of her husband as a lower species, which often seems to be the case these days.

But let's face it. The husband in the article is a weak, intimidated puppy for tolerating such crap in the first place. He ALLOWED himself to be gutted, emasculated, neutered, etc., and apparently makes a habit of doing so.

Men need to BE men and stop tolerating mistreatment from such women.

[Lorianne]

There are people like this of both sexes.
Nobody respects a person who denigrates their spouse in public. It’s humiliating not just for the spouse but for all who have to hear it ... and they pay it forward.

I knew a man who would do this to his wife at social gatherings thinking he was being funny. His wife just sat there with her head down. There was nothing but disdain from the others for this man but few spoke up. One time a man in the group did speak up and told him he was not being funny and was spoiling the party for everyone and asked him to leave. Of course, this just humiliated the wife further as she had to leave with him. Everyone felt sorry for her.

But this incidenct didn’t stop him. I encountered him several more times doing the same thing whether is wife was there or not. It seemed to be his main way of joking around with people. He never noticed that no one was enjoying it. It just made him look bad and weak.

Because he was in a a related profession as mine I was in a position to suggest him and his firm to my clients on projects. I regularly DID NOT suggest him or his firm for consulting jobs. I did not want to work with him because I did not respect him personally. I wondered if he would go off like that about his wife to MY clients and make me look bad too.

I am sure I am not the only one who did this. I only regret that I did not have the courage to confront him directly.

There is a price to pay for boorishness but I doubt most boors are aware that they are shooting themselves in the foot.

[JimRed]

...the husband couldn’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldn’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife.

She disagreed with everything he said.

She contradicted nearly every statement.

If a man speaks in the forest, and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?

[MrB]

Imagine a society where men had to be worthy of marriage before they could have sex...

[sauropod]

You're right about that.

I always am ;-)