Friends do not let friends be doormats. [Quotage]

Posted on By pukeko

I do not do linkage really well. I do quotage. I go through comments, texts, tweets, and find things that need a bit of polish and put them up. Sometimes with a theme. There is a new category for this stuff.

So today the theme is nicely unfashionable: Old stuff. On unfashionable things, and the theme is a passage that make feminists spew.

Ephesians 5:22-24

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

So let’s start by quoting Elspeth to SSM.

I went looking for that post you referenced and couldn’t find it Sunshine. Alte has a mind like a steel trap though so I’m sure she’ll remember the link when she sees your request.

As to the OP, I like things now that I never would have imagined liking when I first met my husband. The shock that a guy with his reputation liked old sci-fi like the black and white Twilight Zone and original Star Trek series was big enough. I kind of like that stuff now.

To a large degree, my willingness to give the stuff a try and see the appeal was instrumental in his growing attachment to me as we were getting to know one another.

Still can’t get with the horror movies though, LOL.

This reminds me of an anecdote an author offered in a book I recently read that I’m planning to review on my blog. She talked about how much her husband likes to run. So when they were dating she would run with him regularly. She hated it, but she did it to be with him and be a part of something he enjoyed.

They get married, and suddenly when he asked her to go running with him, she always had an excuse. She just didn’t feel the need to do something she hated anymore. She got back into it for health reasons and finds it tolerable, but it was a source of stress in the early years of their marriage.

So there is that caution to offer to the single gals. Be honest with any guy you’re getting to know because it’s not fair to pretend you like something that you don’t.

I told my husband that I did not like sci-fi but that I was willing to watch it with him. I have grown to like a lot of the genre now. Even the older stuff.

He still refused to take me to see anything like The Notebook. Ever.

Alte does have a mind like a trap and wrote wisely on this very topic.

I think it helps a lot if you know what wifely submission really is, and why men value it so much. It’s not supplication. Some men like to be supplicated to, just like some women like to have men dote on them. Others don’t. This is a preference-thing.What isn’t a preference is submission. It’s universal and cross-cultural. Most men in most countries prefer a submissive wife over a disobedient one. He wants her to be on his team. He wants her to have his back. He wants to be able to leave her alone for five minutes without her turning into a traitor and selling out on him, or sleeping with his best friend, or running off to join the circus.

If he gets a great job offer that requires a move, he doesn’t want to come home all happy and then have to listen to her wail and beat her chest and otherwise rain on his parade. He wants her to suck it up and smile and congratulate him, and then start planning how to box up the housewares for the move.

That’s what it means to be a help meet. That’s what men really crave. They want one person, just one person on the whole freaking planet, to be on their team.


When I acted like a mindless doormat, he never came home. He worked all of the time, went out to business dinners every night, avoided even looking in my direction when he was here and basically hid behind his computer. I was like, “But I’m being the way everyone tells me you should want me to be!”

And he was like, “Great, so some Internet People are my new masters and get to decide how my life should be. I had my own wife, and now I’ve got someone else’s wife. She’s an idiot who doesn’t talk to me like a normal person. I don’t need an echo. I already know my own opinion, and I don’t get off on having it repeated back to me by my resident sexbot and housemaid. And I like your hair short and I want some damn bread in this house!”

So, I cut my hair, bought some bread, and tell him what I really think. He rushes home now, I have to push him out the door in the morning, and he has even quit his crazy job so that he can spend more time with me. True story.

Friends don’t let friends be doormats. LOL

That thread — which is still up because Traditional Christianity is still up — is well worth reading. For it is primarily female, discussing how they handle their husbands. Alte makes many points, but two really matter: you only have to have the back of one man, not all men, and that man usually loves you, or at least liked you enough to marry you, putting his future (in these times) into your hands because he trusts you to be at his back.

And men do things differently to women. Thank God.

5 thoughts on “Friends do not let friends be doormats. [Quotage]”

  1. This is an annoying pick of a paragraph in isolation and with a book as deep and complex as the Bible that’s dangerous territory. You miss the other bit which says “Husbands love your wives like Christ loved the Church” (or something like that). Is there a bigger ask ? The men do not get a free ride and the cultural shift for men of that day was significant to say the least.

    1. Well, no it is not: it’s fairly consistent teaching in the Bible. Consider for a second Timothy being taught to tell the older women to teach younger women how to love their husbands and children, or Titus being told that an elder must be able to control his household. And, yes, gender matters.

      I am going to quote the geek of the reformation here.

      22. Wives, submit yourselves. He comes now to the various conditions of life; for, besides the universal bond of subjection, some are more closely bound to each other, according to their respective callings. The community at large is divided, as it were, into so many yokes, out of which arises mutual obligation. There is, first, the yoke of marriage between husband and wife; — secondly, the yoke which binds parents and children; — and, thirdly, the yoke which connects masters and servants. By this arrangement there are six different classes, for each of whom Paul lays down peculiar duties. He begins with wives, whom he enjoins to be subject to their husbands, in the same manner as to Christ, — as to the Lord. Not that the authority is equal, but wives cannot obey Christ without yielding obedience to their husbands.

      23. For the husband is the head of the wife. This is the reason assigned why wives should be obedient. Christ has appointed the same relation to exist between a husband and a wife, as between himself and his church. This comparison ought to produce a stronger impression on their minds, than the mere declaration that such is the appointment of God. Two things are here stated. God has given to the husband authority over the wife; and a resemblance of this authority is found in Christ, who is the head of the church, as the husband is of the wife.
      And he is the savior of the body. The pronoun HE (?????) is supposed by some to refer to Christ; and, by others, to the husband. It applies more naturally, in my opinion, to Christ, but still with a view to the present subject. In this point, as well as in others, the resemblance ought to hold. As Christ rules over his church for her salvation, so nothing yields more advantage or comfort to the wife than to be subject to her husband. To refuse that subjection, by means of which they might be saved, is to choose destruction.

      24. But, as the church is subject to Christ. The particle but, may lead some to believe that the words, he is the savior of the body, are intended to anticipate an objection. Christ has, no doubt, this peculiar claim, that he is the Savior of the Church: nevertheless, let wives know, that their husbands, though they cannot produce equal claims, have authority over them, after the example of Christ. I prefer the former interpretation; for the argument derived from the word but, (????,) does not appear to me to have much weight.

      25. Husbands, love your wives. From husbands, on the other hand, the apostle requires that they cherish toward their wives no ordinary love; for to them, also, he holds out the example of Christ, — even as Christ also loved the church. If they are honored to bear his image, and to be, in some measure, his representatives, they ought to resemble him also in the discharge of duty.

      Do not want to argue with me? Reject my authority? Frankly, I don;t have any: I’m lay. But the theologians of the church argued pretty much the way Calvin did until the last two or three generations. I agree that this is deeply unfashionable, but If you look at the other post for this day, you will find that I linked to a Churchian fool who is following the fashion of these egalitarian times and leaving men outside of his quite feminist church.

      For the church is supposed to be based around families, not some weird hyperspiritual harem.

      Is this place dangerous? Well go look around here a bit: the site is about dancing on the third rail and going for the difficult parts of scripture. I am reformed in theology, classically liberal (by which I mean John Milton, not Rosseau, nor the Jacobites, nor the Progressives) in politics. That, in this time, is not a safe position to take.

      Which is another reason I do not visit the lands of hyper political prosecution.

  2. And I play a mean game of WoW… ’cause my husband likes it when I game with him. But like Alte’s hubs, he is more than man enough to swat me on my nose if I’m a pest, and prefers me opinions intact otherwise.

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