Having exhorted wives to shift from resistance to submission, Paul goes on to urge husbands to give up control and gain companionship. They must love their wives. The very fact that it seemed necessary to the Apostle to give this instruction at all proves that it is neither easy nor natural for husbands to do so. Men tend to take love within marriage for granted! They are too busy, too manly, or too strong to love. Husbands could be too vain and inhibited to confess their need to love and to be loved. A husband, who would fight another man for making advances towards his wife, may not love her with half the intensity with which he fights his adversary. From courtship to marriage, the radical change a man undergoes is the shift from love to ownership.

Yet nothing matters as much to a woman as being loved. Why is that so? Why does the Bible define the psychology of women in terms of “desire”? Desire of this kind is driven by the need to complete the self. The male need to dominate is also a form of 'desire'; but it is a different kind of desire. It is the desire not so much for completion, as the desire to be reassured. This too, admittedly, implies incompleteness. As God sees it, it is good neither for man nor for woman to be alone. “Being with” is, hence, a supremely important aspect of being human. The desire to own the partner is a distortion of this deep need. But the paradox of life is that, contrary to widespread assumptions, you cannot ‘have’ what you ‘own’. You have to choose between owning something and having it. To ‘have’ is to value its worth. But as soon as we come to own something we begin to lose a sense of its worth. Not many men continue to love their wives with the same reverential and exaggerated love with which they adored them in courtship. We ‘take for granted’ what we own. This is almost inevitable, and it helps to be aware of it and remain alert against it. The Biblical exhortation to ‘cherish’ each other is meant to be a safeguard against this universal human failing. ‘Cherishing’ enables us to remember and respect the value of what we have and protects what we have against the aberrations of the ‘ownership mentality’.

The 'desire' of woman aims not at having, but at being. Her desire towards her man involves her identity and personhood. It engages her personal worth. While psychic insecurity torments men as husbands, women as wives are burdened by a sense of low self-esteem. Though the degree of this problem varies from culture to culture, it is universally prevalent. The most classic symptom of this psychological malady is the secret resentment that women harbour that “it is a curse to be born a woman”. Love is the only antidote for this malady; and, fortunately, it is a sufficient one. Love is the ultimate alchemy of personal worth. Love effects a miraculous leap in the worth of the object of love. Paul, in exhorting husbands to love their wives, is instructing them to minister to their partners in terms of their basic need to regain and celebrate their self-worth. But the issue of the low self-worth of the wife has consequences that involve the well-being of the husband also in a substantial way. A sense of low self-worth disables the wife from believing that she is her husband’s equal. Love presupposes equality. So the deep-seated anxiety of the woman in this relationship inhibits love in the relationship. Love is necessarily an egalitarian force. The vague sense of inequality that inwardly riles the wife inhibits her capacity for companionship. She then tries, and tries desperately, to improvise compensations for this disability in the form of 'slaving and slogging' in the house, the denial of basic comforts to oneself, though readily available and affordable, and exaggerating the burden and weariness she endures sacrificially. Or, to adapt the words of Paul to this occasion, she gives her body to be burned only to make up for her inability to enter into a relationship of love and companionship. She tries to prove her 'worth,' her usefulness to the household as a self-sacrificing person, though often a disgruntled one. Predictably, this brings poor dividends. Husbands who look for companions in their wives feel disappointed at gaining a superior servant, instead. The ownership-oriented husband gets disappointed even more, because the self-deprecation, and the personal elusiveness that goes with it, make the catch a counterfeit trophy! This disappointment inhibits love further and aggravates the cycle of bitterness and resentment.

It is necessary and helpful to recognize some of the practical implications and complications of this epidemic of low self-esteem.

1. It stifles companionship. No woman can be a companion and a slave at the same time. This does not mean that service is incompatible with companionship. True companionship expresses itself through mutual and joyful service in love. For one thing, low self-esteem corrupts the idea of service into an unfair extortion. For another, it becomes a disappointing substitute for true companionship. The capacity for companionship is corrupted in the male, as we have seen, by control-orientation. In the female, it is crippled by her low self-esteem.

2. Low self-esteem blinds its victim to the value of what she has. This expresses itself not much in terms of direct expression of disapproval or disappointment. Hardly any wife says explicitly that her husband is useless. She indicates as much by being indifferent to him and by being excessively appreciative of others. These are covert weapons wielded deftly in domestic warfare. Given the hypersensitivity of insecure male ego, it is not necessary to tell a man to his face that he is worthless. All a wife has to do is to praise someone else on his trivial achievements. Exaggerated admiration is a calculated barb that rarely misses its target. Women who do not take themselves seriously, as it happens in low self-esteem, find it difficult to believe that anyone else, especially their husbands, can cherish them either. She, then, projects her grievance of ascribed worthlessness on to her whole household. She assumes herself to be worthless, resentfully. If she is worthless, her husband too must be. Also, her home and her belongings. This makes it a matter of 'inspired self-interest' for the husband to minister to his wife and enhance her self-worth, making a clear distinction between self-worth and self-importance.

In respect of her relationship to her husband, the wife has the following options:

[Serialized from recently published book]

FAITH AND FAMILY
Sign-posts to Fullness of Life
By : Rev. Dr. Valsan Thampu
GLOBAL OUTREACH FOR JESUS

[Faith and Family: Signposts to Fullness of Life addresses the foundational issue of our times: wasting of the family. Tragedies arise, often, out of trivial things. Fortunately, the remedy too is simple. We do not have to move mountains to heal our homes. But we do have to turn a new leaf. Sadly, moving a mountain rather than turning a new leaf appeals to most men and women. Those who refuse to make even minor adjustments move inexorably to desperate remedies like divorce or suicide. Millions of men and women live in avoidable domestic purgatories. That should not happen to you. Healing and happiness can come to your home. This book tells you how. ]

CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2 - WIVES, OBEY YOUR HUSBANDS