Are Wives Raising Their Husbands?
Dale Partridge wrote this on his Facebook page a few days ago. “The deeper Veronica and I get into the ministry of marriage, the more we’re realizing that wives are basically raising their husbands. They’ve become the mother to an aged male. A boy masquerading in boots with a mortgage and a video game addiction. Instead of having a marriage with a man who orders his life to serve, equip, and instruct his family how to follow God, they’ve got a husband and a father who needs to be weaned off fantasy football, guy nights, and lazy days on the couch.”
I have a few thoughts about this. I believe women are reaping what they have been sowing since the 60s. Feminism has caused so much destruction in it’s path, including the breakup of homes and boys being raised without fathers. Even if fathers are around, the mothers interfere with the fathers trying to toughen up their sons by saying their husbands are being too hard on their sons. None of these situations are conducive to raising good, responsible men.
I tried “raising” Ken when we were first married. I wanted him to help with the housework, not watch so much TV, not eat so much junk food, etc. I had a laundry list that I was trying to train him up with. All of these were NOT my responsibility and I’m afraid when women see a comment like the one above, they will wholeheartedly agree and continue to try to raise their husbands in these areas.
Yes, there are some husbands who haven’t grown up and still act irresponsibly and not as men, as the men Dale was referring to in his post. The only way a wife can TRY to raise a husband up like this is to speak the truth in love to him, set boundaries if need be (especially if his actions are dangerous or destructive), and seek wise counsel about the situation. Wives don’t have a great capacity to raise up their husbands unless the Lord uses their “chaste conversation” to win them “without the word” which is God’s prescription in 1 Peter 3:1-6.
We must be so careful about defining “being raised” since most women are using the term to simply say they are trying to change the behavior or habits of their husbands that they don’t like or agree with. This isn’t our job to do. It’s women’s innate desire to change (raise up) their husbands to their standards and it’s not a good desire. The more we learn to be satisfied with the man we married, the more content we will be. Besides, as we treat them with kindness, respect, love, and gentleness, we will most likely reap what we are sowing.
…and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
Ephesians 5:33
13 thoughts on “Are Wives Raising Their Husbands?”
Great post!
I think with my husband all the problems are due to his parent’s divorce.
I think it’s pathetic that I’m the first person he’s had certain conversations with. It’s not his fault, it’s his parent’s fault.
It makes me very angry. There’s this basic level of information that is just missing now in a lot of people. It’s not even morality Lori…It’s Information.
You can’t have Christian morality when you are devoid of Information.
If you spend your teens and 20s in a divorced household that holds no real conversations…then you spend the rest of your time drunk and out with friends….You Acquire No Information. So of course Christian values would make no sense.
In these situations I believe that a wife that nagging and belittling her husband will sow nothing but discord and other unsavory fruit into her marriage. Almost every man I have observed being told what to do seems to hate it. A wife is better off praying about it and serving her husband in the meantime by fulfilling her godly role as a helper.
Counseling married couples is often frustrated by the effects of feminism. Though the word says that men are supposed to be the head, men have told my husband that they feel that going against their wives wishes is “mean”.
This is why raising godly boys is just as important as raising godly girls. Mothers should be encouraging their boys to lead, be masculine, be wise, be discerning, be responsible, and teach them proper marriage roles, etc. Unfortunately, mainstream media, just about every secular thing seen or read, and public schools opposes and sabotages the role God created for man. Today boys are encouraged to let women lead, that there is no difference between them and women, gender is ambiguous, feelings trump facts, the truth is hatespeech, and so on and so forth. That’s why raising boys differently from girls, in a way that compliments God’s design and role for them is so very important even when they are young. They certainly are not going to learn the truth from the world.
A quote from CS Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Many [most?] wives, with the approval of their own conscience [and recent support from the church] have destroyed more in their behind the scene control than the very visible destruction of people by evil governments, which all have an end.
One is against the body; the other against the soul.
One is death from without; the other from within …against itself.
“as we treat them with kindness, respect, love, and gentleness, we will most likely reap what we are sowing.” And sadly, sometimes not. There are those of us out here desperately trying to continue “with kindness, respect, love, and gentleness” and we are not reaping what we are sowing. I don’t know all the reasons why, but I do know how many years I’ve continued to try to do the right thing, and his attitude and behavior have continued to go down hill. It breaks my heart. But I want others who may be facing the same, that they aren’t alone. And you may NOT be the one who brought this on; however, I made a covenant I am going to do my best to keep. And sometimes when I read this type of thing I get sad thinking no one understands, but God does. And He will never leave me nor forsake me. And whatever He allows in my life is for my good and His glory.
Love this! There is freedom and peace when we stop “mothering” our husbands. Saying things in love and praying, praying, praying is definitely the way to go. The things that “bug” us about our husbands… God can use these things for our good actually.
You haven’t reaped it yet, Kathy, but the fat lady has sung yet. God promises that you will reap what you sow. It may not be in the way that you think it will be, but it will be good. You are storing treasures in heaven where neither rust nor moth can destroy so it’s the best place to reap what you are sowing!
No, you aren’t alone (besides the Lord being with you, there are other women in your same situation) but never be afraid to seek encouragement and support from others, especially godly, older women. I encourage you to read “The Lifelong Love” by Gary Thomas. It will bless you!
This is such a hard one, Lori. I agree with you that you can’t “raise” or “parent” a husband into maturity. For one thing, they just tend to dig their heels in and hang on to their bad habits even harder when one does that! 🙂 But I believe that wives nowadays are facing an unprecedented culture-wide phenomenon of husbands who are immature, unmanly, lazy, and addicted to various pleasures (usually sports and screens). This is how we’re raising them as boys, and this is how they’re turning out as men. When women end up married to these men, there is a massive amount of suffering involved – either marital strife (which won’t work to improve the situation), or years of praying, weeping, and waiting for a man to mature and grow up, usually while watching children copy their father’s habits. As a culture, we need to do better.
This post is very true. Trying to raise (control/change) our husbands doesn’t work and we shouldn’t even try.
I’ve read a few places that say something along the lines of a woman marries the man she wants him to become (or thinks he should become) not the man he is, and the man marries the woman he loves. The woman marries the man expecting him to change, and he doesn’t. The man marries the woman expecting her not to change, and she does. And neither are happy.
I did that. I married a bad boy (don’t we all find bad boys attractive?) with a leather jacket, motorbike, goatee beard, addictions… and wanted to tame him. I did, to a certain extent, but the truth is, he actually tamed himself. He’s “tamed” as much as he wants to be tamed. He grew up in the same church I did, and holds the same beliefs in his heart, and is helping me raise our children with the same standards we were both raised with. But he still struggles with his rebel nature. And now that I’ve been married to him for 16 years, I can look back and see it’s the very thing that attracted me to him in the first place – his rebellion – that I have had/still have issues with.
Kathy – my heart breaks for you.
One lady, who has always been an inspiration to me, battled for more than 30 years to keep on loving and being kind to her unfaithful, wayward husband. He would up and leave, then one day he would just turn up out of the blue after months away with no contact, ask what was for dinner and did he have any clean shirts? This went on for 3 decades. He would gamble away all their money, be rude and unkind, yet she just quietly kept on loving him.
One day, totally out of the blue, he came back to church, went back to her, begged her forgiveness, and spent the next 4 years of his life treating her like an absolute queen. Sadly, he died of cancer. She was heartbroken, but at the same time she cherished those 4 years with him and said all the heartbreak had been worth it, because those final 4 years were so, so good.
This lady has always been so inspiring to me, and maybe her story can encourage you, too.
Great quote from C. S. Lewis! Thank you!
Kathy, your example is inspiring me right now! You may not see results, but your witness is incredible. Thank you.
Dang Lindsay, you raise my hope. I sense you get the Hell perpetrated on men. It is the death of the church. Thank you for speaking. Bless you for speaking.
I tried for several days to just let this go but I could not. Your comment comes across a bit judgemental as if you are the final authority on whether a man is mature, masculine, hard working and whether or not some of his hobbies or things that he enjoys doing (pleasures) might be addictions or sinful.
With that said, what you claim is not completely untruthful. Many of today’s men are severely lacking in many of the areas you listed and we as a society do need to do better but that is not the complete extent of the problem. Also, to do better, we have to know where we went wrong in the first place.
To the extent that you are right regarding men, you can (primarily) thank Feminism and single mothers who have divorced their husbands (or been divorced because they were impossible to live with) thinking they can raise their children without a father in the home. Little boys raised in single mother homes are not growing up as healthy masculine men without fathers to teach them and little girls raised in this gynocentric environment are also not growing up functional and don’t know a good man (or how to treat him) when they meet one.
Men are also facing an unprecedented culture-wide phenomenon of women who are immature and woeful is the man who ends up married to one of these prideful, over-opinionated, ungrateful, entitled, spoiled brat little princesses masquerading as a woman. There is a massive amount of suffering involved from the constant contention and disrespect dished out by these childish women leading to severe marital strife and years of praying, weeping, and waiting for that woman to mature and grow up, usually while watching their little girls grow up to copy their mother’s bad habits and the little boys growing up to become MGTOW (or wishing they had).
There is enough dysfunction with both men and women these days but while women are busy roasting all men on a spit, they need to remember where this all started. Just like in the garden where it started with the woman, the massive decline in our culture over the past 100 years (leading to our current unprecedented culture-wide phenomenon of immature women and men) also started and continues with the woman… i.e. Feminism.