It might be your fault
How men's abdication of their God-given leadership roles blows up their marriages
One of my buddies going through the super-fun-time-marriage-demolition asked me recently if he had done anything to cause his wife’s behavior.
I don’t know his situation very well, but by the law of averages and the authority of anecdotal experience, I thought he probably had done something. Rare is the blameless warrior poet…
I tried drafting several responses. I skirted all the issues, rhetorically fist-bumped him, gave some colorful observations about some wives’ entitlement problems and… I deleted every draft.
“Yes,” I finally told him. “You definitely screwed up your marriage.”
I softened the blow by pointing out two things:
So did I. So does every man at some point.
While we have to take ownership of our own failures, it IS a fact that most of us—men and women—are given a bunch of fairy dust and pink-hued hyperbole about marriage. It’s like trying to build a McLaren F1 with a two-year-old’s rendering of a car.
“Do you believe you failed?” he asked me.
I did. I enumerated some of my failures.
This isn’t some kind of woe-is-me situation. This time at the monastery has been a gift. Between the solitude, prayer, and the utterly flat geography, it’s impossible to outrun fleet-footed accountability. Authentic ownership of one’s shortcomings is a good thing.
Sucks, but it’s good.
I should note that in the situation above, and in all of the situations I personally know about or have read about, we’re talking about wives who are either cheating or constantly berating their husbands for real or imagined failures. The guys I know? They’re good men. They provide. They care about their wives. They cancel business-related appointments in order to coach kids’ sports , eschew “guy time,” and they don’t have “man caves.” They are invested in their marriages and their families’ well-being.
And when it falls apart, even if their wives are cheating on them, they ask, “What did I do wrong?” Their wives? Oh, he’s an “abuser.”
It’s led me into some stuff most normal people would probably consider “unnatural.”
It started with sliding into the Manosphere. That inexorably led to the “Red Pill” stuff, and while the red pill tastes a lot like candy at first, it doesn’t take long to detect a bad aftertaste redolent of manure.
Direction from the Church on this stuff has been…lacking. The best vignette I have about that is the priest (who I think is a good man) literally falling asleep during our marriage prep.
Figuring out what exactly how we’re supposed to conduct ourselves as married men has been a challenge, to say the least. As it happens, it’s pretty simple:
Reject everything you’ve been taught about masculinity or spiritual headship by the Church and the culture. Then, learn to lead.
That’s the tricky part because a toxic cloud of ideology is emitted every time a man says the word, “leadership.” Learning what this means is hard enough without every corner of society telling you that masculinity, which is to say leadership, is “toxic.”
It’s also tricky because most of us have simply not been taught the basics of life. Generations of convenience and abundance have made us soft. This is especially concerning because all those stories of our great grandparents saving soup cans during the Great Depression is about to be our reality, and we can’t handle life when the wifi goes out for five minutes.
Men have been taught to minimize their natural leadership roles, flattening themselves into “partners” until, one non-decision after another, they end up completely abdicating their roles. What happens next? Their wives develop a comprehensive disgust of everything they do while they simultaneously wresting control of the household from their feckless husbands.
It starts with avoiding conflict over something he sees as trivial. “Yeah, whatever you want is fine.” Years later it ends with, “Can we pretty please have sex?”
In my day job, I get a call from a certain elderly lady every couple of months. We handle the business in five minutes or so, and then she talks. Our average call time is about an hour. She usually forgets our past conversations (and I can remember everything about them for some reason), and so she tells me the same stories again and again.
She always talks about her husband. She tells me about what a wonderful man he was. How capable he was. How diligent, humble, and competent he was. He was a strong, mostly silent, leader.
I never hear wives talking about their husbands like that nowadays. I’ll have to take on that issue in a future newsletter, but in this one I’m talking about the men who fail to lead…
So, what is leadership? It’s doing the arduous things that benefit one’s family materially, spiritually, and, I guess I’ll concede, emotionally. And it means doing those arduous things amidst a hail of criticism and accusations, both from without, (which is to be expected), and even when they come from within the family, extended or immediate.
Leaders get arrows in their backs. That’s the nature of the game.
Most Christian men, however, have been told that they need to “die to themselves,” which they happily do. Many of us are suckers for noble, Quixotic causes. But to a certain type of woman, this “laying down one’s life for the other” is just too tempting. More is never enough. So the man doubles down, cedes more authority. The locus of his summum bonum becomes her happiness, which is always a moving target, and not the financial, spiritual, material or (sigh) “emotional” well-being of the family unit as a whole.
Her feelings become his compass, and eventually she loathes him for it.
I came across this the other day. Anecdotally speaking, I see it everywhere:
So, when guys ask me, “Is it all my fault?” Or, “Could I have done something better?” the answer is a solid “YES.” We all could have done something better. We could have, and should have, done almost everything better, starting with creating a good, true and beautiful vision for the family, and permanently affixing it before our eyes, and then doing all the arduous things necessary to realize it. Yes, we could point to the complete lack of real-life preparation in our lives, either from our fathers, the Church, or any other source, and that’s valid, but at some point a man needs to recognize when things aren’t working and handle them. No excuses, no complaints. Extreme ownership, in other words.
And, if necessary, a man needs to cut loose anyone or anything that harms the family unit.
The short version is that while not everything is the husband’s fault, it is all his responsibility. Embrace that and everything starts falling into place.
Agree, and true. What, however, should a leader do when a knife is stuck in an unreachable part of his back by his own crew member; by mutiny? The good and noble captain MUST wrest control to save the ship. Aargg! May the villain wall the plank!
walk