For the first 14 years of our marriage, I thought I was the best Christian wife ever and that my husband was just unloving and needed to change.
Turns out, I hurt my husband in many ways and didn't even realize it.
(Video about that here • Ways I Disrespected an... )
How did I not see my disrespect and the hurtful things I did to him? Here are the 11 reasons.
1. I didn't have any teaching, books, or classes about what respect meant. I understood some things about it. I was avoiding the extremely disrespectful things (violence, cursing, name-calling, threatening divorce, etc...), so I thought I was being respectful.
2. No one addressed my wrong attitude. I assumed if I were doing something hurtful that someone would tell me about it in my family, at church, among my friends, or somewhere.
I especially assumed that Greg, my husband, would tell me if I hurt him because I told him the second he hurt me. He never did. I wish he had!
3. I wasn't as bad as a lot of the women around me. And I wasn't anywhere near as disrespectful as some women on TV.
4. I didn't have any godly mentoring wife in my life to give me feedback or teach me what it meant to be a godly wife.
5. I had my parents' Christian marriage and my mom was respectful of my dad, but we had totally opposite personalities and marriage dynamics so I didn't relate their marriage much to mine.
6. My pride went unchallenged for decades. Pride is very blinding.
7. Greg didn't look or act hurt by me. He seemed stoic. I eventually thought he really didn't have feelings and that nothing I could say or do could hurt him.
8. I point blank asked Greg many times what he needed and what I could do better over the years. He always responded with silence.
9. I had been marinating in a radical feminist culture all my life and had inadvertently absorbed a lot of terrible messages about men and women like:
- Men are idiots.
- If there is a problem in the relationship, it's automatically the guy's fault.
- Women are practically perfect and nearly goddesses.
- Men's faults are much worse than women's faults are.
- Men are like children.
- Women have so much more wisdom than men do.
I would never have said these things out loud. But I had received these messages loud and clear, never really stopping to think where they came from or if they were true.
10. I had no idea how differently men see the world from women and how different their masculine perspective is. I also had no clue how different their needs can be in marriage.
I didn't know that for most men, feeling respected and admired can be more important to them than feeling loved, for example.
I assumed he needed and wanted exactly what I needed and wanted. Love, lots of attention, long emails, hours of sharing feelings/words, face-to-face time, emotional bonding, affection, etc... But those things weren't what he needed and wanted most.
I didn't know that most men bond through shoulder-to-shoulder activities without words. And that he tried to show me love through acts of service, many times, that I didn't even recognize as his way of loving me in those earlier years.
11. I didn't understand my husband's introverted personality and unique strengths/weaknesses. I assumed he would think and process things exactly like I did and when he didn't, I couldn't understand why he was doing what he was doing. So I made a lot of wrong assumptions.
For example, I made decisions very quickly. He didn't. And when he couldn't come up with an answer immediately, I thought he was purposely keeping his thoughts from me. I didn't know he needed a lot more time to think and process before he could answer.
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