So many of us wives put a lot of thought and energy into trying to love our spouses well. We read books and blogs. We write books and blogs. We leave bookmarked and highlighted pages casually on our husbands’ bedside tables. We talk to our girlfriends. We talk to our husbands. We do 21-day secret projects and Bible studies. We drag our husbands to marriage retreats and we volunteer to coordinate a new marriage communication DVD series for our church. We pray and pray and pray.
I don’t know about you, but I spy an elephant in the room. There sure seem to be a lot more women writing and talking and worrying about marriage than men. I often wonder if it is just me reading all these beautiful blog posts on how to love my husband better, and all the while wishing in my little heart that my husband would be poring over blogs and doing secret 21-day marriage projects for me.
Why is this? My guess is that it goes back somehow to how God made us differently. However, since I’m not a great theologian (and because different formulations of the words “wife,” “Bible,” and “love” in Google come up with so much good material), I happily stumbled across this nugget of insight on the matter from quite an unexpected source: the handsome, troubled, famous-even-in-his-time Romantic poet, Lord Byron:
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.”
-Lord Byron, Don Juan
I think I can say it for the sisters: Yes, ’tis our whole existence.
When my relationships–especially my marriage–are off, everything about my life seems tinged with gray. I’ll confess that I struggle in those seasons with anxiety, despair, and even disenchantment. When my relationships are on the up, I feel lighter and more able to be happy and present to everything else in my life. So it follows that I spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how to make things better.
In my own experience of marriage and men, and speaking mainly about married couples of course, I most humbly submit that most men don’t work like that. They have the ability or tendency to compartmentalize their lives more effectively than women. As Lord Byron puts it, any relationship problems that men may have are generally just “a thing apart,” rather than an ever-present, all-consuming problem for them. They worry about their relationship problems only when the Relationship Problem compartment is opened by situation or necessity (by their wives usually).
It’s true: our husbands likely all have some serious things they need to be working on for us–more importantly for Christ. As do we. No matter how many things our husbands need to work on though, they constantly make us better people, if we let them. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17). That’s the beauty of faithful, committed-for-life marriage. Our virtues as well as our flaws can point our spouses toward Christ; it’s just that our flaws usually send them on their knees to Him.
Our virtues as wives, however, are particularly important.
“An excellent wife, who can find her? For her worth is far above jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain” (Proverbs 31:10-11).
Our excellence–our virtue–is what makes us trustworthy in our husbands’ eyes and brings them “no lack of gain.” In a dog-eat-dog world, a man’s wife must be the one person he can trust with everything he is, the good and the bad, no matter his performance. They should be able to rest in us, and that brings them the “gain” of well-being and certainly gain in the spiritual life, since all goodness and virtue come from God. So, that’s why we girls talk and write and blog so much about how to be better for our husbands. It’s because we know deep down that cultivating goodness in ourselves is how we reach our husbands’ hearts, which eventually helps them reach out for ours.
The next time I let myself get a little discouraged about my own marriage and my own efforts to strengthen it, I hope that the Holy Spirit will help me to remember this last little jewel from Lord Byron:
“When we think we lead, we are most led.”
-Lord Byron, The Two Foscari
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://catholicwife.macandmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/efranco.png[/author_image] [author_info]Erin is a stay-at-home mom in Baton Rouge, LA. She maintains her blog, Humble Handmaid, where she writes sometimes serious, often humorous accounts of her adventures and spiritual reflections as a Catholic wife and mother. Erin co-hosts a women’s radio show, “Faith and Good Counsel” and is the proud wife of 5 years to Michael, and mother to three beautiful kids. [/author_info] [/author]
