This may not be the best way to ease my way back into participation at this web site after a 3-week full absence and a couple months of mostly being absent . . . but . . . I know I can't possibly be the only as-of-yet-non-plural husband here who has heard these same door-slamming statements from his wife. Some of it is nanny-nanny-boo-boo territory (if you think I'm being too harsh, just visualize a woman drowning out the world with her fingers in her ears saying she won't read more, that a particular lifestyle will send her to the looney bin, or stating that he can't make her even if it
is in Scripture), and in my own case I associate hearing those you-can't-make-me-think-this-is-OK statements with my own insufficiently-developed status as a proper leader; I have left undone responsibilities of mine related to the full nurturing of the family I already have. However, that last one about how we're supposedly just trying to use God and The Bible for our own benefit no matter how much it supposedly hurts our loved ones just begs for me to risk being redundant by restating something many of you have already heard, which is my response to the accusation that as a man I'm just unfairly distorting Scripture to satisfy my desire to have approved sexual variety; it has two parts:
- There is always something disingenuous about a female human being throwing out the victim card when it comes to how to properly structure the family in modern-day America, especially as concerns the husband/wife relationship, because both women as a gender and women as individuals have, generally speaking, not shied away in recent decades from regular reworking of the supposedly appropriate structure of the family for the purpose of advancing the interests of women over those of men. Everything they want is portrayed as falling into one of the following categories, all of which are good reasons:
- Because it's good for the children.
- Because they just want to avoid social stigma.
- Because of past oppression of women.
- Because men are insensitive brutes.
- Because women are emotionally superior to men.
- The assertion itself is a trap, designed to inspire a man to prove that he isn't doing it for the sex, and it's quite common for men to get sucked into articulating all the ways in which he has righteous (read: female) rationales for wanting to expand his family with another wife. Some men even go so far as to first convince their (1st) wives that sex has nothing to do with why they want (more) wives, which has the risk of being followed by actually believing that nonsense themselves, which leads to choosing wives those men don't even really want to be married to in order to prove to their (1st) wives that they weren't doing it for the sex. My vote is to refrain from engaging in any discussion about sexual desires until many other issues are untangled and fully processed, but before those get accomplished, it is wholly appropriate to point out something that apparently gets lost on most women: as men, we do not take on wives primarily for the purpose of getting laid. This is true even with our first wives. Certainly, both partners enter into marriage to a significant extent due to the motivation to establish a sexual relationship, but even in randier-than-average relationships sex takes up far less than 10% of the potential time a couple has together.
These are things, though, that are best mostly pondered privately or discussed with people who already agree with you rather than argued about with those who don't. However, it is entirely reasonable for good men to rest easy in the knowledge that most men
marry women because they
love women, because they want to
protect women, because they want to
care for women, and because they want to
properly and lovingly lead women. These are reasons characterized by responsibility, compassion and contribution -- not reasons of selfishness.
