He is the victim of YOU marrying a man you “didn’t love”. You set up your divorce on your wedding day. Love’s not a feeling woman, it’s an ACTION that is the result of a (daily, if not hourly) decision and endless effort. In fact, LOVE (putting the needs of others before your own with no expectations of reward) is what God commands of a husband toward his wife, RESPECT is what is commanded of a wife toward her husband.
God doesn’t tell us to breath, eat, and go to the bathroom, because we will do those things naturally. He tells us to do things that our natural selfishness avoids or ignores, and not to do things our natural selfishness wrongly allows us to do. We husbands are commanded to love our (sometimes?) cranky, self centered wives, and commands you wives to respect your (often?) cranky, self centered husbands.
Things work a lot better His way, but it is not easy.
Wives initiate 70+% of divorces, and the husbands get the bill. A little story I tell, I’m sure it’s fiction because most wives would never try this experiment:
A woman visits an attorney with the plan to divorce her husband who is hard to get along with and mostly ignores her. She tells the attorney she wants to really break his heart with this divorce to pay him back for all her heartache.
The attorney then suggests that she shower her husband with affection, bring him breakfast in bed and have his lunch packed with a heart on the bag, and dinner on the table when he gets home from work. Then make passionate love to him like when they first married. After a few months of that treatment she could drop the bomb of divorce on him and he would be devastated. She agreed and went to work.
Well, a few months went by and the attorney gave her a call asking if she was ready to do the deed and wreck her husband’s life, to which she responded; “I will never leave this sweet, sweet man.”
It is unfortunate that so few get that. I didn’t get it for many, many years. Love is a verb. It is an action. 1 Corinthians 13 makes that perfectly clear. The reason the divorce rate is just as high among Christians as secular folks is because we are hearers of the word only. The fact that we, and society, only benefits when we actually DO the Word often goes right over Christians’ halos. ;)
Yeah. I read “The Total Woman” in the ‘60’s, too. And any “bill” he got, was of his own making. A man who is insanely jealous, again, for absolutely no reason, and is jealous of any attention his wife gives his children, is a sick cookie, and not a fit husband. Any other kind of bill he paid, is, as a matter of fact, very little. He got the house, all the furniture except 1 table, my piano, and 2 chairs. I got 1/2 of his pension (at that time - not future amounts), and $200/month child support. My attorney told me I was nuts, that I should either get the house, or, if I didn’t want it, then half the value of it, and at the very minimum, $100/ week, for the two children still at home, if not double. I told him, that I didn’t want to put him in that position, because I wasn’t trying to ruin him, I just couldn’t be married to him any more. I realize that there are a lot of bitter men out there, who have been absolutely gobsmacked, when their wives divorced them. When men are completely taken by surprise when their wives leave them, (and it’s rarely for another man) it just MAY be, because they were so determined to have their own way, that they didn’t notice how miserable their wives were. And even if I had loved him, what kind of woman stands by and watches her children suffer abuse from an overbearing husband, and can still love him? I feel sorry for men or women, whose spouse has left them, but it’s rarely just one person’s fault, and I certainly did not intimate that in my original post. If someone asks me if I believe in divorce, I always tell them, even as a divorced person, no, I don’t. But there are times when it’s better than being miserable. When Jesus said, “Moses gave you a bill of divorcement, it was because of the hardness of your hearts”, he wasn’t just talking about the person seeking the divorce.