I read another post on Instagram today that goes well with the one I recently commented on. This one was posted by @feminine_not_feminist. Something about it stood out to me as true and relevant to the things that I’ve been thinking about for a while now as well. I have found for myself that my twenties was primarily the decade of processing motherhood, and my thirties was the decade of processing marriage. I don’t mean to keep using other people’s words as a crutch for writing, but posts like this help me with articulating what I still find hard to say. I will post what she wrote slide by slide in bold then follow with my own thoughts if I have something more to add.

~~~~~

I’ve had some profound paradigm shifts this past year, and I think I’ve sat on them long enough to share publicly. So here’s the story…

…..

Several years ago, I began a journey of embracing radical responsibility in my marriage. No more excuses. No more finger pointing. I sought accountability, even when it was uncomfortable. God mercifully granted me awareness of my own sin and the problems it was causing.

Something I recognize here is the idea of a paradigm shift. I do not doubt for a single second that God renews our minds and thoughts. He cares about the way we think and wants to be loved by us with even our whole minds. A beautiful New Testament description of God is that he “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4)”.

I began writing on Instagram shortly after, chronicling my lessons in real time, publicly and openly. I saw the fruit (still do) of rejecting bitterness, entitlement and selfishness in marriage and I just wanted other wives to experience the same.

…..

But problems began to steadily manifest themselves. What began as a desire to be self-aware and honest with myself eventually morphed into a condemning relationship with my mind.

I can definitely relate so much to this. Just like women can become very critical and disliking of their own bodies, the same thing can happen with hearts and souls. You go under the knife for a nose job or tummy tuck. In her case she mentions the bitterness, the entitlement, the selfishness. These were all parts of her that needed to go.

I became obsessive about working on myself. I believed that any kind and every problem in my marriage could ultimately be traced back to me. I had a standard in my mind about what a “perfect wife” looked like and failure to live up to this produced in me a self-hatred.

Perhaps this isn’t true in 100% of cases, but most of the time where the teachings of biblical/traditional womanhood and femininity are involved, there is an outspoken contempt for and rejection of feminism. The “bad guy” in the story of the world’s problems is feminism, and the terrible women who defiled the world with it. The logic of this plays itself out in the individual.

In my pride, I believed that I could be the perfect wife. And that by being the perfect wife, I could resolve any issue through behavior modification. I not only assumed responsibility for my actions, but also for the response with which my actions were met. It drove me mad.

The greatest sin in my life, always, was obviously pride. Being able to admit that meant I was humble, that I was open to letting God do his work in my heart. I was open to God and his corrections of me. I was open to men and women and them telling me that women possessed a tremendous amount of power in a marriage. A man’s needs were sex, food, respect, and encouragement. Give him all of those and you would be richly blessed.

Ironically, trying to be the perfect wife made me less pleasant to be around. I didn’t give my husband the freedom to have bad days, because I made it all about myself and what I was doing wrong. What a heavy burden to bear.

Not realizing my own needs or knowing how to express them made me, at times, less pleasant to be around. Bringing up faults was not something you were not encouraged to do much as a wife, being directed instead to patience and prayer where God would indefinitely meet your deepest of needs. When whatever power you had did not seem to be working, when you could not impact your outer world to produce the radical adoration and love that you wanted or whatever basic thing you hoped for together but at the time there was no time to even now know it, the one sure thing you could count on was coming back to changing yourself, and especially changing the way that you think, to experiencing yet another paradigm shift that would help you make sense of things.

It’s one thing to encourage a woman to make positive personal changes that may improve her marriage. It’s another thing to promise her that it is within her power to make her marriage perfectly blissful simply by doing all the right things. That is a lie that hurts people.

It’s tough because there is a legitimacy to focusing on yourself and your own personal issues while being at peace with whatever ways that God is working in your spouse’s heart and life. I think for most people there is a journey you have to go on in marriage that is part of the experience of intensely knowing another person. When followed it leads to genuine change both within yourself and within your marriage and with these changes come a truly Christian love and joy in it. It is true that you cannot change another person, or rather, you cannot force another person to change. But God really does do his work in our hearts using people, situations, experiences, and his actual word.

I got caught up in “measuring up” when I should have been focused on walking with God. I forgot the part about grace. I forgot that Jesus’ yoke is easy and His burden is light.

We take love covers over a multitude of sins to be true about the sins of others, but why not also about ourselves? The focus on ugliness, obsessing over where God is needing to convict us, the confessing of pride to show we are open and humble. Christ has made us beautiful and whole again in him. This isn’t to say there is never a time to share more personal stories and the sin that is included there, but more and more I just feel comfortable, not in hiding from sin, but in knowing Jesus is the real one who covers it for me.

There is a kind of marriage advice which, when believed, becomes a tremendous burden to bear. It is a kind which I have both believed and passed along, and for that I am sorry.

In Christian love we forgive one another, just as God in Christ Jesus has forgiven us. I still think there is a place for teaching and learning practical skills in a relationship, that can be taught without it becoming a legalistic burden, and considers the thoughts and needs of each person while encouraging us to grow in knowledge and love.