"I Will Respect You"

A young woman speaks from her own difficult experience about what healthy man-woman relationships look like. 

 “I Will Respect You”

by Mariah Wild

It is in the look she gives him, that he just does not seem to understand. It is in her sighs when his back is turned. It is in her tears that she has to cry alone.

A woman, she expresses herself through emotions and by them is how she loves deeply and hurts most. Yet those same emotions have the ability inexplicably to trip her up when they prevent her from leaving an unhealthy relationship. She has found herself having allowed an emotional attachment to have taken place between her and her man, one that has now become a detriment to her when the questions arise. Why is he asking me to “submit” to him, when I do not feel comfortable doing that? Why am I getting the feeling that I am worthless? How much does it hurt when he does not appreciate my personal gifts and talents that God has blessed me with?

A woman does not easily acknowledge that her boyfriend is mistreating her. And once she is able to remove the rose tinted sunglasses rather than peeking over the top every once in a while to see the truth, what does she do then?  She forces herself to go back and take a deeper look at what the things she thought she was doing wrong the whole time, coming to the conclusion that the problem is not so much her as was him. She searches for the key to this downward spiral. She wants to find what was driving him to be this way, and how had she been so taken in by him while being misled.

I was once this woman, and if your man was anything like the male counterpart I had at one time, even though he was a Christian, he had a misinterpretation of this Bible passage. Perhaps, hurt wife or girlfriend, you can see that this is where your man also derived his own ideas.

“Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” (Colossians 3:18)

The “submit” in this passage, if interpreted correctly, is about respect. Respect your husband as God asks us to. Men look for this respect, as they look for the encouragement of that we are proud of them. We can be proud of our men in many circumstances and give them the respect that they look for. This becomes a challenge however, when they mistreat us or when they see submission as a form of servitude or forceful compliance in terms of physical affection.

We cannot as women make the men in our lives re-evaluate themselves. Rather we can offer another Bible verse to encourage men to make the adjustment for their women that God has entrusted them to care for; “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy.” (Ephesians 5:25)

Christ is the ultimate example for how men should love their women. Christ was the first to love all of us and was willing to show that love even to the point of laying down his life on the cross. When men have Christ in their hearts, love and commitment and unselfish sacrifice will flow from them to their wives, their own beloved. When women see and feel this, their men are truly worth respecting.