If you don’t read Doug Wilson, you are missing out. I follow him on Instagram. He wrote an excellent post called A Matter of Rank. I am going to share the words on the slides he shared on Instagram. Go to the post for his entire thoughts about this.

“The desire that a woman has to usurp the rule of her husband is a desire that goes back to the third chapter of Genesis. This is the source of the running tension between the sexes. Finding and marrying a godly woman is going to mitigate this tension for you, but it will not erase it.

“Patriarchy can be godly or ungodly, but it cannot be erased. If you spend enough energy, money, and time jamming feminism down everyone’s throats, the end result will be dudes carrying off all the women’s track and field trophies. Patriarchy wins again, and in this case, it is a demented patriarchy. Feminism apparently doesn’t mind being ruled by biological males, just so long as they are godless lunatics.

“If a woman is a godly woman, dedicated to cultivating the submissive demeanor that the New Testament consistently requires of women (Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:4,5; 1 Peter 3:1,2), she will in large part rule over her own spirit by the grace of God. That means that she can give her husband the very real gift of not having to live in a constant rodeo.

“Complementarianism is simply an invertebrate form of the patriarchy, and feminists hate it just as much as they do the patriarchy. But because it is invertebrate, they want to squish it instead of smash it. In many marginal cases, a complementarian is an egalitarian who is still stuck with some Bible verses that have not yet been digested, and are still important to the donor base somehow.

“All Christian wives, in all Christian marriages, occupy a subordinate rank. And it is always bad for a subordinate to be insubordinate. If a woman’s first instinct is to stumble over the word subordinate, and say, “But in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, ensign nor lieutenant,” your response should be, “That is quite correct, and entirely true, and also not what we were talking about.” Your second response should be to cross her off your list of prospects. You would both be miserable together.

“It is essential that you look for a woman who loves the Word of God straight, no chaser. She needs to love the way God ordered the world, she needs to love the respective ranks appointed for husband and wife in the creation order, she needs to love the Scripture’s description of these things, and she needs to respect and love you.

“Avoid any woman who cherry picks her way through the Bible. If she has a high view of the permanence of marriage, and a low view of her responsibility to be submissive in that marriage, then the former promises to become your cage, and the latter will be the sound of her throwing away the key.

“You should want to be with a scriptural sweetheart, not with some egalitarian porcupine.”

Become this scriptural sweetheart, dear woman. Make your marriage what God commands it to be.

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Ephesians 5:22-24