About wives: Men please be men

The third need of a wife is for her man to fulfil his role, whilst complementing hers.

In all armies, role differentiation is very clear. Infantry members do not cook, but they would be useless if the cooks did not cook. Likewise tank drivers are not medics, but they are grateful that medics command their specialization, for that has saved many lives. It’s no less useful if minesweepers decide that they might be good pilots, or if fighter pilots try to do bridge-building. A good army requires mustering. If each person does what they are trained for, the team works well and is effective in executing its overall responsibility.

When a general is told to establish an army, it is a sense of overall organization that occupies his mind. He does not simply go out and raise up a whole lot of front-line fighters, but builds a broad-based, diverse corps of well-trained specialists. The better he does that, the more effective he will be at delivering his mandate.

Now God also designed the marriage to work around complementary roles. The family is the most discrete battle unit under God’s command. He specifically equipped husbands and wives for different and interdependent roles. As children take up the slack in the home and assume their own usefulness, their roles further enrich the overall effectives of the family battle unit.

The word, “androgynous” came up at our breakfast table today. I went to the Internet to find its meaning. It means, “not obviously gender consistent, as in when “males” are not obviously masculine or females are not obviously feminine”.

I fear that our world, which loves to pigeon-hole everything, has tended to over-classify ambiguity. A softer male, is not effeminate per se, for I have seen many gentler men make outstanding fathers or husbands and I have seen disfunctionality in many macho men.

The classification of people who don’t fit our gender stereotypes has at least partly reinforced homosexuality. The biblical gender role of a father or husband is clearly to shepherd what God entrusts to him. David was a shepherd, so were Jacob, Abel, Abraham and Moses. Clearly the bible was not merely referring to their careers, but to their social roles. They were shepherds of men as well.

For a woman to be effective in the world, and I am of the view that the bible makes adequate room for feminine empowerment and significance in the world, she needs a platform. It is a brutal world for women, for which their instinctive approach to the complex dynamics of the workplace involves networking and relationship building. Men need to acquire some of those skills and by that I am merely alluding to the healthy attributes of collaboration and the value of adapting to new ways of surviving in an ever-changing world.

The problem for women is that whilst networking may be a vital part of their survival, it is also generally not encouraged in a male-dominated workplace. This can lead to frustration and depression. So how does she cope without a safe, trusted network to relate to? Well she has a ready-made one to come home to, if she could only see her husband as a vital role anchor.

One vital value of a husband is in helping a woman stay in touch with her own feminism and to keep herself on the level in an ambiguous world. It is as true for men in their relationship with their wives.

The other, even more vital role, is to help her focus on what she was designed for. If men would fulfill what God designed them for, women would find it easier to find their own rhythm and experience fulfillment.

Women are generally limited at discipline issues in the home or in the handling of threats to the home. Men are better at those roles and have particular strengths in decision making that are well complemented by wise women. This is a sensitive thing, but what Paula brings in terms of that indefinable sixth sense or intuition is such a vital input to my own decision making, but what I bring in terms of unemotional decisiveness has spared us many problems, especially in the handling of our boys. How many times I looked beyond her emotional concern about the boys and found a balanced perspective in discussion with teachers. That not only saved the boys from pain, it also sheltered Paula from what could have become an awkward backlash or an embarrassing consequence.

Hey, I can’t explore all the angles here and I want to avoid typecasting anyone. The principles I allude to here are not finite, for we are all unique individuals in our own peculiar social, cultural and familial contexts. I merely want to state that a woman needs her man to find his role within the male identity that brought him and her together. Abdication of a man’s role frustrates his woman and leaves her unfulfilled within a cloud of gender ambiguities.

(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com