The Empowered Wife isn't a Lover

Husbands deserve our love not because we get anything out of offering it

I’m lucky to have married a man whose financial literacy is rivaled only by his father’s, who manages a mutual fund for a living. In fact, dinner conversation around the holidays included my Bill explaining to his dad that you should never use HSA funds for medical expenses because HSA can be an additional retirement account. I don’t think I knew what an HSA was before we met. So he handles the bills in our house. I mean, I’m there, I’m sitting there while we spend two hours on a Sunday in a tax appointment in which my husband walks the woman through the financial implications of every one of our investments. With remarkable specificity he asks questions that she needs the chatbot to answer and I am sitting there, getting warm and thinking, really, this woman should be paying you for this appointment.

I see the same thing in lots of men I know—intense concentration on developing expertise in their field, beating the competition, supporting their family. They are so willing to become excellent providers, the same way women dive into instincts to be attentive mothers. What I’m piecing together is that a husband finds the sacrifices so much easier when he feels appreciated. I have found, eight months into marriage, that our peace always increases with my attentively receiving this care.

It astonishes me, then, that so many women feel the opposite. As many as 70% of divorces are initiated by women. And latent rancor in this conversation is on display here, in an argument about whether dads are simply useless or actively problematic for new moms. Kat Rosenfield’s recent piece on ‘Dying for Sex’ reveals an apparently prevalent emptiness women feel in their marriages. She explains that the show condones rejecting not only one’s husband but, really, all men. Women, at the end of the day, are the only one who can make themselves happy.

One of the options for readings at a wedding mass includes St. Paul’s memorable, “wives, obey your husbands.” The phrase rubs most women the wrong way. In a culture saturated by the fight for women’s empowerment, I felt similarly when I was young. But I read on: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her…” [Eph 5:25]. As Christ gave himself up for the Church: the annually commemorated passion of the Christ, not only in his agony, scourging, crucifixion, and abandonment by those who loved him, but also the ridicule and estrangement he suffered throughout his public life. With one hardly noticed phrase, St. Paul tells husbands to be martyrs for their wives, and women recoil at the exhortation to honor their gift.

Enter The Empowered Wife.

Laura Doyle has an admirable end in publishing her books to end world divorce and promote healthy marriages. And by and large, from what I can tell, her advice is good. At the same time, reading her turns my stomach. She, and the women she addresses, actively depreciate the men in their life with alarming consistency (well, they used to, before they were empowered). I wish I could imagine her examples are caricatures, but, bearing in mind the above examples, it isn’t likely. Her book is a comprehensive manual on how a wife’s commitment to change her behavior can save a failing marriage. Strangely, she acts like what she is writing is new information.

There have been women that have implemented St. Paul’s counsel, with great success, for a long time.

When I was in middle school I performed Katerina’s “Fie fie” speech from the Taming of the Shrew (which goes to show how a classical education can organically lead young children to profound truths). I initially thought it was like a fossil, like St. Paul’s teaching, that must have received a modern update. But reading Laura Doyle brought it back to mind.

Petruchio taming Katerina after their wedding

The play follows Petruchio’s “taming” of his bitter bride. No doubt it is politically incorrect, except Doyle’s book could be a volume version of this speech Katerina supplies at the end of the work. Katerina is the only woman of a group who will come when her husband asks for her, and this is how she berates the other wives:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor…
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled-
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

She points out that unkind, headstrong women don’t attract anybody. Doyle makes her readers do an experiment to learn the same: imagine something disgusting, like eating children, and freeze when you make a face. Look in the mirror. You will stop wondering why your husband and you don’t get along if you realize that this is the disgusted face you are often making at him. At the end of the play, Katerina’s display of obedience (which is simply loving enough to come to her husband when he asks for her), while controversial to a modern audience, is symbolic of their marital bliss.

The text came back into my head in my twenties, the first time I read Augustine’s Confessions. Around the time of her death, Augustine reflected on what he knew of his parents’ marriage. It was public knowledge that Patricius, his father, was a pagan, unfaithful, and a drunkard for most of his life. Many women used to ask Monica why, then, her marriage was peaceful. Augustine provides the following explanation:

Monica, speaking as if in jest but offering serious advice, used to blame their tongues. She would say that since the day when they heard the so-called matrimonial contract read out to them, they should reckon them to be legally binding documents by which they had become servants… The wives were astounded… Yet it was unheard of, nor was there ever a mark to show, that Patrick had beaten his wife or that a domestic quarrel had caused dissension between them for even a single day.

The obedience and respect she advises is a rejection of the progressive narrative of women’s satisfaction. As Kat Rosenfield diagnosed “Dying for Sex,” women are taught that ultimately they can only count on themselves for fulfillment. But the proof is in the pudding: Monica’s contemporaries, whose relationships were struggling, were coming to her to ask for help. Augustine says that, having heard what she said,

Those who followed her advice found by experience that they were grateful for it. Those who did not follow her way were treated as subordinate and maltreated.

The Confessions taught me the value of humility in love. Within a relationship I can decide that I am my own advocate, and therefore pursue (often aggressively, we are taught) my own goods and needs. But Monica taught that the most effective path may not be becoming a lawyer for yourself. If you married a stable, normal person, you can, humbly, trust that being receptive rather than domineering will be better for both of you. It’s not being a doormat, but more along the lines of the father is the head, the woman is the neck. Patricius did, in fact, convert at the end of his life, and was father to one of the most important saints and authors of the early Church. Monica’s views and disposition have immortalized her fame.

Augustine’s famous conversion

Pondering feminine, Christian receptivity in The Confessions disposed me to the healing I found in opening myself to espousal to Christ. What will one day be its own essay is how living in the convent was the best preparation for marriage, teaching me to give up the control that inhibits intimacy and the insecurities that summon defensiveness. What I have found is that relationship advice dating from various times such as the 4th century (Monica), the 16th century (Shakespeare), and over the span of two millennia (in the convent) still works.

But the problem with the book is that the “empowered” wife isn’t a lover.

While the book is pragmatic, I don’t think it has a heart. The advice she gives, inasmuch as it corresponds with what women who love their husbands have known for all of time, is extremely useful. But, upon finishing it, I realized I couldn’t recall a single use of the word “love” in the entire book.

This is why her book emphasizes acknowledging your desires: to feel “cherished” and receive “the intimacy you crave.” By talking to women in successful marriages she has learned the effectiveness of humble love, but she doesn’t learn why they live that way. So the book feels like a strategy to achieve the intimacy that ought to grow organically. Intimacy follows love, it is not be pursued to feel good in a relationship. Intimacy is the closeness that results from a woman’s letting go of barriers to love. She is right, shedding those barriers will open the space for love; the problem is that she didn’t start there. The gap causes her to generalize into a few questionable mandates that reflect a lack of nuance. Some examples include that you should never ask your husband how he feels; and sometimes, when he wants you to help him with something, you ought to take care of yourself and say, “I can’t.”

These two pieces (among others) symbolize that she doesn’t write from a Christian standpoint, i.e., one that thinks marriage, and a happy marriage, comes from loving the other person. Sometimes love will mean overcoming your desire to keep sitting on the couch and help him in the garage, sometimes it will mean taking responsibility for your emotional life and being pleasant when you don’t feel like it. It will mean a sensitivity to the fact that men and women are not the sum of stereotypes; my husband would be heartbroken if I stopped asking him how he felt.

She treats relationship like an algorithm, with knowable inputs and outputs. The reality is that husbands deserve our respect, honor, and receptivity not because we get anything out of it, but because they are eminently lovable. They have offered up their lives for us, yes, hungry to make us happy, but this is because they want to love. They shine when appreciated because they find being a martyr easy when they feel their love has been received. Honoring my husband’s long hours, his drive to succeed at work, and his interest in improving financial expertise is far more important to me than insisting that I get my way.

Perhaps we could argue that not all men are this way (in which case implementing Doyle’s strategies might disabuse a fair number of such critics). But the point of Doyle’s work and this essay is the fact that women play a huge role in encouraging self-sacrificing behavior. Months before I met my husband, I was visiting my older brother when he expressed a low opinion of online dating¹. “Dating sites shield a guy,” he said. “But a man has to stick his neck out for a woman to pursue her; he has to put everything on the line” meaning, women ought to select for those that do. I met Bill a few months later and he texted to ask if we could meet up. He drove two hours to get frozen yogurt with me. When I said I had to go home he said, “The reason I drove here was to ask in person if you would go on a date with me because I think you deserve that.” This looks sticking your neck out, I thought to myself.

It is not only husbands who have these qualities, but men, inasmuch as they cultivate their self-sacrificing capacity, all embody it. They embody a willingness to risk everything to be able to support a wife and children, break their backs doing it, and stay married. I think St. Paul is right, and that men really do want to lay down their lives for women, and that women are lucky to receive their gift.

But the most important thing is that love means only love. We have these complementary strengths to offer to each other (initiating and receiving acts of love), and would do well to attend to them. I am so lucky that Bill has the drive to pursue unreachable goals out of love for me and that his world revolves around making me happy. Of course gratitude helps me appreciate him, and it is sweet to honor him, but pre-eminent is that I not do any of these things because of what I will get out of it. He takes care of all that. I just get to love him.

1. For what it’s worth, my point about online dating is not that it is categorically unfruitful. The point can be valid, but it doesn’t mean all online dating is bad. Like online school makes it much easier for people to get away with wasting their time in class or cheating; that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to have a good learning experience online if you use it the right way and you have a good teacher. The same is obviously true for the many happy couples who have met online. I think his point was that men and women have to be aware that that’s a pitfall that comes with the territory. Other aspects/types of dating have other ones.