I'll bet you could write a Dr. Seuss book... on marriage.
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Meat I kissed Joshua Harris good-bye
- Thread starter Slumberfreeze
- Start date
You cannot make someone angry, you cannot make someone sad. Laughter is a physical response and not an emotion. You also cannot make someone happy.
You can exert strong influence on the emotions of another person. You can also tempt someone to feel an emotion. You cannot make them feel certain emotions.
Consider this within the context in which we are speaking, which is regarding if a man can make a woman (especially his wife) happy. It is foolish and condescending to believe a man can make his woman happy. She is not some kind of machine that just needs the right kind of pandering to make her happy. A man who submits to Jesus and faithfully leads/loves his wife has the best chance at exerting an influence of lasting happiness or contentment in his wife. A man whose goal is to force happiness on his wife is not in the same category.
I disagree.
You can provide someone the opportunity to be happy. If they choose to focus on the positive, they will be happy. If they choose to focus on that which they don’t have, they will be unhappy. Normally those people experience short periods of happiness whenever you get them the next thing that they want or do something special for them, but it will never be enough for true happiness.
If someone chooses to put you in charge of providing their happiness, you are their happiness-whore.
If someone chooses to put you in charge of providing their happiness, you are their happiness-whore.
You can provide them the opportunity to be angry as well. If they take the bait, they’ll be angry. If someone decides they are going to be happy and you slap them in the face, do you think they will continue in a happy mood? No. We have a lot to do with someone else’s happiness. Anger. And on and on.
There is a balance. It is true, it takes 2 to make a marriage work; and some women are bound and determined to be unhappy or tear down there marriage. But even in those cases, men are not powerless to act. But many like to put it all on the man and that's wrong too.
Men do have responsibility for their house, but it is also true that a woman can make it impossible for him to fulfill that. However @cnystrom's advice to work on yourself is still appropriate because in most cases there are root problems in the man's status/behavior/approach to marriage that are impeding success.
No man is perfect, ever. That's an unrealistic standard and one commonly used to absolve women of all blame when she tears down her house.
Men do have responsibility for their house, but it is also true that a woman can make it impossible for him to fulfill that. However @cnystrom's advice to work on yourself is still appropriate because in most cases there are root problems in the man's status/behavior/approach to marriage that are impeding success.
No man is perfect, ever. That's an unrealistic standard and one commonly used to absolve women of all blame when she tears down her house.
That is the worst saying ever! Every man should banish it from their language.
It leads husbands to become women pleasers, catering to the whims of her emotions in a vain attempt to make her happy. All it accomplishes is to enslave men while encouraging women to be discontent, bitter, and naggy (dripping faucets).
It is far better to instead lead them, and in particular, lead them to true contentment and joy in Christ (as well as adding to your vocabulary a simple 2 letter word: 'no'). When men do that, their wives will be joyful and content even when life brings circumstances far far worse than the luxury most wives bitterly chafe under.
In the extremes, and slapping someone in the face apropos of nothing is an extreme, that is true.
I have an estranged wife who was treated no differently than the two that are happy.
Lol, I hate that saying as well. However, there is some truth in it. We had a president that told us we would lead from behind. You talk about leading, the only way to truly lead is get out in front and let those under you follow.
Which type of leading are you referring to, letting those under you follow or push them from the rear?
Well, Chris should know me better. He and I have talked, and his wife even has proof that I sent her, that my wife knows that I am a good husband, and I will leave it at that. My wife has repeatedly told me that I am the best, and she has never had another husband to compare me against, so she has an ideal standard that I am held to, but I have worked on my marriage, and I agreed to go to counseling, because I wanted to improve myself even more, knowing that I should not expect to get a second wife, if I am not a great husband, and it really irritates me when someone just assumes that I am not fulfilling my role as a husband and father,especially when they should know better. Thanks for agreeing with the assessment that no man is perfect, and God knows that I strive to be, but He also knows my shortcomings.
Well said! I couldn't agree more!
I don't think anyone here would ever argue that a man who is physically abusive to his wife, has any business marrying a second wife. My point is that the foolish woman doesn't have to slap her husband in the face in order to make him miserable. All she has to do, is threaten to leave, and unless a man understands the truth about divorce and remarriage, that threat leaves a potential for a huge stain on his reputation. Now the man who understands that it is the husband who is forbidden to divorce his wife, and not vice versa, that is not so much of a problem, but then again, there is the matter of where children, custody, and child support get involved, and a good husband never wants to face that dilemma.
To rephrase an old quote, You can make SOME people happy all the time. You can make anybody happy some of the time, but you CANNOT make EVERYBODY happy ALL the time.
It is just that he was using the words "I think" quite a bit.
Has anyone considered that a woman may be ‘tearing down her home’ because she simply doesn’t know or understand what that means?
A woman threatens to leave for several reasons. Sometimes it’s a sign she’s protecting herself from him hurting her first, sometimes it’s because she doesn’t trust him, and then there’s the whole control issue. Dig down to the core issue and DEAL with it.
Also, what kind of foundation has the house been built on? It’s not a bad idea to come back to the ground level, look at holes in the foundation and work your way back up to repairing those pillars.
A woman threatens to leave for several reasons. Sometimes it’s a sign she’s protecting herself from him hurting her first, sometimes it’s because she doesn’t trust him, and then there’s the whole control issue. Dig down to the core issue and DEAL with it.
Also, what kind of foundation has the house been built on? It’s not a bad idea to come back to the ground level, look at holes in the foundation and work your way back up to repairing those pillars.
I think we are all in agreement that a man should strive to be godly. We got off track from the OP, because when it comes to a book like IKDGB, I read that thing and went "OK, sounds good, but what woman is going to just marry me if I approach her and ask her to do so?" Then of course, no man should feel trapped in a relationship with a woman he is considering for marriage, when she is doing hurtful things to him, which is how a man can feel (trapped) after having read that garbage.
I dare say most of the men here at BF, dated at least one other woman before they met and married their current wife, but IKDGB, frowns on that practice. I bet 99% of the men here, dated their current wife for at least one year before marrying her or even proposing to her FTM. I bet these men did so, because they wanted to make sure that she is the right woman, before making that huge of a commitment, but IKDGB, and Elizabeth Elliot, and that other book I read, "Choosing God's Best", all discourage this notion that you should make sure she is the right woman before you marry her. How sad!
All these folks (who wrote these books) are trying to address the question of why we have so many marriage failures in the US, and their solution to the problem, is not based on evidence or even proper use of the Scripture, but rather Eisegesis and opinion and antiquated ways of courtship that could never work today. They have good intentions and some of the stuff they promote is useful, where they don't deviate from Scripture into their own concept of how to make love work, but today's women are not like the women whom men courted, back when divorce was rare. Feminism has poisoned the minds of people in our society to such a degree, that it is an imperative to weed out the wise women from the foolish ones!
So getting back to the OP's point, it is interesting to see how God has separated the wheat from the tares, and that should be a wake up call to the entire Christian community.
I dare say most of the men here at BF, dated at least one other woman before they met and married their current wife, but IKDGB, frowns on that practice. I bet 99% of the men here, dated their current wife for at least one year before marrying her or even proposing to her FTM. I bet these men did so, because they wanted to make sure that she is the right woman, before making that huge of a commitment, but IKDGB, and Elizabeth Elliot, and that other book I read, "Choosing God's Best", all discourage this notion that you should make sure she is the right woman before you marry her. How sad!
All these folks (who wrote these books) are trying to address the question of why we have so many marriage failures in the US, and their solution to the problem, is not based on evidence or even proper use of the Scripture, but rather Eisegesis and opinion and antiquated ways of courtship that could never work today. They have good intentions and some of the stuff they promote is useful, where they don't deviate from Scripture into their own concept of how to make love work, but today's women are not like the women whom men courted, back when divorce was rare. Feminism has poisoned the minds of people in our society to such a degree, that it is an imperative to weed out the wise women from the foolish ones!
So getting back to the OP's point, it is interesting to see how God has separated the wheat from the tares, and that should be a wake up call to the entire Christian community.
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I think you would be hard pressed to squeeze that out of the verse found in Proverbs. It simply states that [if] she is wise, she builds [up] her home, and [if] she is foolish, she tears it down with her own hands.
I have found that it is only true when a man doesn't stand up and tell his wife that the behavior she exhibits when she is not happy, is ungodly, when she lashes out, which is what in fact, makes everybody else unhappy.
There is some truth in it (you can't neglect your wife and expect a good marriage), but not at all in the way people interpret it. Mostly what it does is make it ok for women to make everyone miserable around them when they aren't 'happy'; instead of dealing with their own discontentment/bitterness/whathaveyou.
That is the fatalistic passive approach I don't agree with. Many men will try to lead but then give up when the wife doesn't follow; and that's all but guaranteed to occur when men first own up to their failures as a husband and start to lead. It requires both leading from the front and pushing from the rear.
Well to be clear, when I said 'work on yourself' I wasn't speaking of you personally, I know next to nothing about you, I was speaking generically about the usual applicability of the advice. Nor was I directing 'no man is perfect' to you, but rather towards those who would place all the blame on men any time a marriage fails or a woman rebels.