I found the book, a donation to the church library, in the church copy room. I held in my hand a yellowed, 5 x 9 paperback, published in 1981 - its 24th printing. Maybe, then, in the face of over 600,000 sold between 1974 and 1981, I shouldn’t have laughed.
But I did. I laughed at the title and chuckled over the cover art - a blonde, gazing up in adoration at her husband– before I turned the book over and smirked at the author’s feathered bob.
I took the book home and read the whole thing from the Forward to Recommended Reading. Quickly I had a lengthy bullet point list of what I consider to be dated and sexist marriage advice. It took me about three hours to turn these points into a scathingly witty blog entry, drafted and ready to post.
Satisfied that I’d finished December’s blog prior to Thanksgiving, I sat down to watch a recorded episode of Preachers of LA. If you haven’t watched the show, it profiles mega-church pastors and their “first ladies” from the Los Angeles area.
The scene I watched was one of the pastors speaking with Brian “Head” Welch, the former guitarist for Korn and born-again Christian. They talked about how Christians are sometimes the worst about tearing each other down. Exactly what I had just done with the blog I drafted on this book. Ouch!
So I’m not going to post that blog. But I do want to talk about marriage books, and I bit why I reacted so strongly to that one in particular. Many books, like this one, encourage wives to be pleasant and respectful so their husbands will be happy. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s Biblical and just plain common sense.
Where things start to get dicey is the premise of many of these books: that when husbands are happy, the wives will automatically be happy too. In other words, a wife’s goal is her husband’s happiness. Her life is to revolve around his.
Which makes me wonder if previous generations of women, especially Christian women, felt like they had two options with marriage: the so-called Christian option, a lifetime of devoting yourself to generating your husband’s happiness, or the culturally popular option, divorce. Underlying both choices is the message that marriage is not a vehicle for a woman’s happiness. Marriage is about wives making their husbands happy, because after all, that’s all a woman needs to be fulfilled – a happy man?
Wives, we do ourselves a disservice when our number one concern is making our husbands happy, rather than honoring God and being the Christians, women and yes, wives that He calls us to be.
I think the idea that wives are responsible for the success or failure of their marriages lingers. Wives are still trying to discover the keys of marital success, as if we could 100% control and dictate the direction of our blessed unions. But marriage as God intended is not for one side or the other to dominate or control. Rather, husbands and wives mutually submit to meet one another’s needs, and both submit to God (see 1 Cor 7:3-4, 11:12, Eph 5:21-33).
After 14 years and 11 months of marriage, I can honestly write that even with two imperfect people, marriage can be a continual source of happiness. It’s a way that we as fallible human beings approximate the infallible love God has for us.
It’s a fantastic privilege to be married, and to be married to my (happy) husband. Just don’t call me “the wife of a happy husband.” That’ll be our secret.
