Old Hims

Every Tuesday we’ll post something to do with strengthening marriages. Hope it helps.

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Old Hims

“If your husband and a lawyer were drowning and you had to choose,

would you go to lunch or to a movie?”

~Author Unknown

I’ve no idea when husband bashing came into vogue, but it’s a popular sport, sanctioned across the board, played with enthusiasm. I know, because my friends and I play it more vigorously than anyone else. When husbands get together, at least in my circles, we sure don’t discuss how great we are. Far from it. We swap stories about how smart, strong and spiritual our wives are, trying to top each other with accompanying stories about our own ineptness. Why men do this is a mystery, and I’ve got more than a suspicion that conversations among wives take a very different course. But for whatever reason it’s been open season on the guys for some time now, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.

That’s OK to a point. Heck, we may even deserve it as payback for the decades of Dumb Blonde jokes, or the male stand-up routines many of us grew up on in the 1960’s. (“Take my wife, for example. In fact, take her, please!”) And we can take it. We can laugh at ourselves, and if we can’t, then we deserve to be laughed at all the more.

But, as Roy Orbison once sang, “It’s always something cruel that laughter drowns.” There are marriages in which the man has been assigned the bad guy role, or the dunce role, or the victim role, incessantly and, yes, destructively. That’s when jokes about discarding the Old Hims stop being funny, because they reveal an ongoing, deep rooted contempt for the man which prevents the marriage and home from being what they’re meant to be.

I’ve seen this time and again in marriages wounded by a man’s sexual sin. He transgresses; she’s heartbroken and enraged; he’s in the doghouse, rightfully so. So we all start working together, first to correct his wrongdoing and take steps to prevent it from repeating itself, then to address the damage he’s done to his wife and home. Then, eventually, long term patterns in the marriage need to be looked at, patterns that often existed long before the sexual sin ever happened. And that’s when things often heat up.

They heat up because what emerges may be a pattern of domination which both parties are loathe to admit. The wife has been calling the shots for years, bossing the man, criticizing him in front of the kids, and setting up a political situation in the home by which wife and children form the majority party; Dad’s the Minority Whipped. Both are to blame – she for instigating the pattern; he for allowing it to continue. So instead of showing the integrity and energy needed to correct the problem, he retreats instead, resenting the situation hugely but unwilling to exert the effort to change it. Eventually, when sexual temptation beckons, it’s now that much easier for him to justify giving into it, since he sees himself as a victim entitled to relief and understanding.

To correct the sexual sin in his life he needs to take full responsibility, never allowing himself to blame her for his deliberate wrongdoing. But to correct, heal and strengthen the marriage, both parties will eventually need to take responsibility for their part, strategize how they’ll correct the pattern, and try a new and better way. Looks simple enough on paper, but believe me, when challenging couples to do this, I’ve gotten much more resistance than cooperation. And why not? Change is hard, hands down, and changing patterns in a relationship is usually much more complicated than changing them in one’s self. But the rewards, it goes without saying, fully justify the effort.

Husbands, this one included, need to always start with themselves. We’ve got to get, and keep, our acts together, not perfectly but with reasonable and appropriate consistency. Then, at times, we need to love our wives as Christ loved the Church, gently and clearly pointing out where all of us need to repent and renew, and not allowing ourselves a default into old, passive patterns of compliance just because that’s been the traditional route. Because believe me, if I tallied the number of complaints I’ve heard from men damaged by their father’s passivity versus those damaged by a father’s cruelty, the “passivity” column wins out every time.

Men can be jerks, to overstate the glaringly obvious. But the race was created male and female, the sin nature is one of the few institutions that has never been guilty of gender discrimination, and in marriage, if something’s wrong, both parties must ask what role they play in the “something.”

When they ask, and are willing to hear and respond to the answer, the benefits cannot be measured.