Obedience to your husband in everything, as unto the Lord as scripture says, seems unreasonable to her. She tends to always ask is everything really everything? Like rob a bank? Kill someone?
There are limits to his authority. God has not authorized man to over rule His law, so theft and murder are not within the man's scope of authority.
Boom!
I keep running into this trope with patriarchal men who think that authority is something that is given to them. It is not.
@MeganC, you and I generally agree on issues related to this, so I think you're actually getting caught up in a logical fallacy. Your general resistance to expecting women to follow men who fail to lead is something with which I empathize, but you're using certain words interchangeably when they actually have different definitions.
In the military a man might be commissioned as an officer and by a consequence of being an officer he has command over other men. That's nice but it still isn't authority. Authority is the outcome of credibility.
A military officer does not need credibility to have authority. Authority is granted to him
Boom!
The definition of 'authority' according to various dictionaries is:
- The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.
- One that is invested with this power, especially a government or body of government officials.
- Power assigned to another; authorization.
Numerous words could be equivalents for what you're asserting, with one being 'respect,' but by incorrectly defining 'authority' as requiring credibility, your logic starts off with a flawed initial premise, so any conclusion will be fruit of the poisoned tree.
As much as I would discourage any man to simply
demand obedience from his wife, Scripture
does expect her to be obedient other than as
@Joleneakamama mentioned above. However, what you're pointing to, Megan, is the concept of 'effective leadership,' which occurs when a man
earns respect, which general requires credibility. This is most in play in voluntary relationships, which modern marriages are. Modern husbands are thus reasonably cautioned to demonstrate credible leadership skills, or increase the risk that they won't be followed, much less obeyed. The military is really an entirely different animal, because once one swears the oath obedience is
not voluntary but compelled. In fact, no military could properly function if everything could be a negotiation instead of an order or a command.
However, neither modern marriage nor military structure addresses what Scripture has to say about it, and I believe it is clear in both Old and New Testaments that women are expected to obey their men. It ain't
fair, and modern laws given women easy outs from obedience, so the secular answer is do whatever you want, Virginia Slim, but if you're seeking compliance with Scripture, the path is clear for how women are instructed: outside of violations of The Law, Virginia, you're required to be submissive, which I find best defined as respectful cooperation; obedience is generally part of that. Again, it ain't fair, but we aren't promised fairness by Scripture, and even though we're all to one significant degree or another hypnotized by feminism (critical gender theory) to consider women's perspective to have the final vote, when a woman complains about her position in the spiritual hierarchy, her beef is with God Himself, because He's the One who created us the way we are. This is quite often accompanied by a failure to notice that God places far more expectations on men than he does on women.
On one hand she says I misinterpret, but on the other hand this issue messes with her faith, she gets mad at God, in anger she speaks against the bible, says how disgusting it is, and wrong He is.
It's inappropriate but also human nature to rebel against authority, even His Authority, but if you're accurately representing your wife -- and I assume, given what you're written about her being able to read all of this, that you are -- she's mainly directly articulating her beefs with
God, not really her beefs with you. When we do that we may as well be asserting that we would be a better God than God is. In any moment in which being angry with the rules God has for us leads us to declare Him wrong or disgusting or just too dang mean we can even be sincere about it, thinking that we've found a fly in God's ointment we believe could be fixed by our newfound wisdom, but what is almost always more likely to be in play is that we're just simply not getting our way, which leads us to wish that God's Way would better help us get
our way.
That the bible seems to be written for men, and that God doesn't care about her.
In point of fact, all of Scripture is of potential value to every human being, but everything is not
about each of us, and your wife is actually correct, although I doubt she'll find any comfort right now from knowing this: the Bible is predominantly written
to and for men. Men are then instructed to teach their women and children about what Scripture contains.
The fallacy, though, is in concluding, just because a book was written for or to men, that that means God doesn't care about her or other women.
I would assert the opposite: it is exactly
because God cares about you that He made the genders different in a complementary way that also includes differential roles related to leadership; created men to have responsibility and capability to care for you; and through His Word provides instructions for how men are to properly care for women.
She hates that men can have more wives. That it is in their authority to do so. It is disgusting to her.
That they take wives for their lustful urges, and nothing else.
She feels that it renders her as simply nothing more than an object, which I assure her it does not, and especially not to me.
It's only natural that a Modern Woman would balk at learning that men can have multiple wives while women aren't permitted to have multiple husbands.
@MemeFan goes a long way toward addressing this, mentioning one crucial justification for the imbalance (and Boom!, by the way):
Because men and women are different.
And different rules are morally justified because there are different consequences for behaviour.
Why would you raise another man's child? So, she isn't allowed to cheat. But you creating baby with another women isn't and having to provide for more children isn't threat directly against her or her children.
And, so, a man having more than one wife is
not cheating -- which is why, in Scripture the only way a situation is labeled adultery is if it involves a married woman having sex with a man to whom she's not married.
However, it goes far beyond this.
Women have been programmed by our culture to believe that sharing a man is a matter of shame, whereas in other cultures it's considered a matter of pride to be part of a good man's plural family.
Our culture is woman-centric, so the expectation is that nothing should hurt women's feelings, which has a lot to do with why women are so prone to inventing pathways for describing life as hurting their feelings, but because of this gynocentrism, and despite all the claims about supposed male privilege, the concerns of women are voiced and supported much more often than are those of men, and the renewed attention to polygyny is one of many indications that men are beginning to expect more from
women. In particular, statements about the unfairness of polygyny and assertions that men are just justifying getting more sex (or even denigrating sex itself) are really a reflection of two significant cultural problems:
- a general failure on the part of women who have and/or perceive themselves to have ready access to husbands to demonstrate an appropriate level of caring for the leftover women who, because of the constant excess numbers of available single women compared to available single men, are relegated by any monogamy-only system to loneliness and also usually poverty for the rest of their lives, as well as insufficient concern for the orphan children of many of those women (because they are either widows or those who have been unrighteously divorced); and
- a relative failure on the part of women to demonstrate gratitude for all that men do for women. I'm not asserting that women don't do anything else, but it is the case that, while men and women are dependent on each other for sex and reproduction, women are predominantly dependent on men for everything else.
That they take wives for their lustful urges, and nothing else.
That one is especially ridiculous to me. Any man who would take on an additional wife simply for sexual services would qualify as a stone cold fool. Having said that, yes, additional sex is definitely a perk, and no disrespect at all intended to you women reading this, but the average woman provides significantly more challenges than the amount of sex she engages in. Paying a prostitute would be more cost effective as well as more relaxing overall.
Lustful urges are why men cheat. Taking on another wife is a huge responsibility. It's what good men do that blesses others and let's the women who have been used but not valued have a stable home and husband.
Men just satisfying lustful urges are like hunters, men that take other men's women are poachers, a husband is like the good shepherd and actually cares for those in his care.
Awesomely put. "A husband is like the good shepherd and actually cares for those in his care." I would add that it's in
his best interests to do so.
I'll also add here that our culture has undergone a radical transformation in regard to intersexual dynamics since Megan, Jolene, Frederick, NBTX11, Gary, and I would assume MemeFan, were coming up. Anyone who pays close attention to current cultural trends can tell you that men no longer have to persuade women to engage in casual sex -- cheating or not cheating. Most young women are quite aggressive now about their sexuality, so male sluts have the luxury of being passive about obtaining casual partners. The same thing applies to married men. Women may be averse to the social disapproval associated with sharing a husband, but they now generally have little compunction about poaching husbands for side action.
But let me bring this back to the gratitude issue. Men occupy 95% of all the most dangerous jobs. They are responsible for creating 99% of all inventions. They handle the vast majority of maintenance and repair, with most women in such endeavors playing auxiliary roles. This doesn't mean that
no women do these things, but they are decidedly the exceptions to the rules. It's estimated, for example, that the number of women in the United States who are capable of not only running power plants but being able to install power lines or repair them would amount to just enough to 'man' 6 medium-sized power plants. That's a drop in the bucket of what would be required if men suddenly disappeared.
Women take this for granted. One rarely hears women complain that only men get to put out most of the fires, risk getting shot as police officers in altercations, perform most of the dangerous military functions or do construction work on skyscrapers -- not to mention perform the vast majority of car repair, tire changes, home repair or emergency services. On top of the fact that the sex one gets from an additional wife isn't going to fully compensate for the additional provisioning and protection a husband typically provides, it has long puzzled me why more men don't just answer the accusation that they just want another wife to get laid more often with the retort, "Given all that I and other men do for you and all other women, is it too much to ask for some more sex?"
God demands that men of authority be better men than other men.
In the modern world a man who wants to take more than one wife must be an extraordinary man and not just your average man
In the past I would have been mightily tempted to agree with these statements.
Assuming that what you mean by 'authority' is 'respect based on credibility,' then, yes, God has some additional demands of men in order to be respected.
However, I fully challenge the notion that only extraordinary men are justified in taking on more than one wife. My primary reason for this is that far more leftover, lonely and poor widows and orphans exist than do extraordinary men. This has long been one of my primary beefs with Biblical Families: that men are more discouraged from practicing polygyny than they are
encouraged, other than the rah-rah lip service about how we're all going to get some more wives. Exodus 21:10 is the primary dictate God has for polygynous men, and it says nothing about them having to be extraordinary or even that they have to be
average. On the other hand, God makes it quite clear throughout Scripture that he expects widows and orphans to be
fully cared for -- and He gives no indication that he just had something as lame in mind as food stamps and section 8 housing.
Are widows and orphans supposed to just remain on hold in lonely poverty while they wait for men to prove themselves extraordinary? Surely not.
And, conversely, do either widows or the women with whom they might share husbands actually
deserve for their husbands to be better than average? Why would they be entitled to that? I see no scriptural justification for that expectation, and I believe I where it's true source is: a combination of selfishness and desire to prevent the plural marriage from happening. Either that or it places men in the position of having to
earn having another wife (or who knows what else) from their
first wife.
Women so frequently blame it on squeamishness about being involved with a husband who's being sexually intimate with another woman, the act of which, as
@MemeFan pointed out, doesn't have the potential to put paternity into question -- but here's what I've rarely, if ever, heard a woman offer her husband when he tells her he wants to bring another woman (and/or that woman's children) into the family: "Hey, honey, that's really generous of you, and I know this will produce blessings for her as well as for those of us already in the family because of her presence, but I just think it's best not to risk any bodily fluids being transferred from her to me or vice versa,
so I'm going to let the two of you have all the sex, and I'll just stick around to do chores and raise the children if you don't mind."
So what if your wife is object. She is your special lovable object. ❤
I get what you're saying @MemeFan but this information will not help her, or be of any use to me.
Lastly,
@raulus, I do hope you will give
@MemeFan's parting quip some time to simmer within you, because he's pointing toward something that almost any marriage can benefit from: removing the antisexual programming feminism (along with its twin-sister, pietistic fundamentalism) has saddled us with. Now, I'm an
old dude, so I can remember what life was like prior to the introduction of postmodern second-wave feminism. Back then, almost every girl I grew up with would have been
mightily offended if boys didn't consider them sex objects. Being considered sexy was openly known to be the
goal of females, because that was what a girl did to attract enough attention to improve her odds of snagging a good husband. I can't tell you how many times I heard girls in my high school complaining about how no boys ever told them they looked good in such-and-such dress, etc.
It's only natural for women to want to be objectified, and it's
unnatural to pretend that it's an insult. It goes without saying that a woman also wants to be valued for her personality and her other talents, but being complimented on one's body or being pursued for sex is
not an insult.
In many cases, it may just be time for some systematic desensitization.
I mean, people are what people are, right? A man ought to love his woman regardless, but can you really blame him for not loving a surly, provoking, nagging woman?
