Looking to see the reality behind the effort

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I watch so many videos of women complaining about their husbands. So many, really. And despite everything I have written on this blog, despite even what I am going to share on this post, my first question that always instinctively springs to my mind is always: “Well why did you marry someone that was that bad?!”  And yet I should definitely know better than to ask that question. This entire blog deals with just how easy it is to marry a poor choice of husband, and this post specifically.  I have tried to share the basic concept contained within this post so many times, but I have never been sure that I am clearly expressing what I am trying to say. The difference with this particular post is that I have now taken the time to create 2 simple diagrams, which should hopefully make it clearer.

Please observe the two diagrams above. The first one represents what happens in many marriages or relationships. I believe that when you are dating someone, their behaviour can be divided into two distinct components:

1. The first and most important component is this: the reality of who they are.  Throughout this blog, I have mostly spoken of this as their “character”. Everyone has a character score, whether it is mostly good, or mostly bad.  It is not just one thing, but it is a mix of lots of different things like honesty versus dishonesty, integrity versus lack of integrity, someone’s score in terms of selfishness etc. Someone with strong character will consistently score highly in terms of positive traits. Now someone’s behaviour can fluctuate from day to day, for instance someone might tell the truth one day then lie the next day. Yet someone’s character at any one point will be how they consistently behave. Do they consistently tell the truth, even when it is difficult? Character can change, someone who started off as excellent can get worse, or someone who started off as poor can become better.
   Actually, the reality of who someone is is more than their character. It also includes traits such as punctuality, tidiness versus messiness, common sense, prudence, judgement, self-control when it comes to eating, even working hard versus workaholism. Actually, looking at all these things, I’m sure many people would indeed include them under character! All of these things that are potentially included under character is can be worked on. There are certain aspects of our lives which we cannot realistically change, so it is not really fair that someone should be judged on those. However everyone is still entitled to their preference of course. And people can hide those things too.I tend to think of someone’s relevant character as the character that they have developed before you start dating them, plus also their commitment to keep improving. Here’s the thing: if someone likes you, that in itself does not change the person who they built themselves up to be, or did not build themselves up to be, before you started dating them. Yes, meeting you could be the turning point in their lives! They could change and sincerely become outstanding, prayerful, sacrificial etc. On one hand, yes that has happened. On the other hand, firstly that is not guaranteed, and secondly that does not track with the experience of most women. For most women, it seems that whatever happened before marriage, within marriage things slowly settle into women making most of the effort to keep both the marriage and the household running.  What is guaranteed is who they were before you met them. Actually, even that is not guaranteed longterm.  Which is why I would also look out for their commitment to keep improving.

2. The second aspect of someone’s behaviour when you are dating them is this: the effort that they invest to try to win you.

Now to all the ladies reading this, please remember that marriage benefits men. Reading the list of character traits clearly anyone would want someone with better character, who is more reliable. But listening to many women complaining about their husbands, and interacting with people generally in the world, it is clear that many people, and especially many men, lack good character. But even those (many) men who lack good character still desire marriage, still want to be able to benefit from the many advantages that a woman would bring into their lives. So what do they do?  They pretend of course.

So from the first diagram above, the effort that a man applies before marriage to win a wife often amounts to creating a whole different persona, mimicking the strong character traits that a woman would want. I think that I can safely generalise that many men, if not most men would invest lots of effort in two specific ways:
1. Generally pretending to be better people than they are.  It is not just men of course. Obviously we as women often do exactly the same thing!  This is such basic human nature that I am sure it is present even where marriages go on to be mutually satisfying and nurturing for both parties. It is like presenting the most polished version of ourselves at job interviews – everyone does it, it’s perfectly normal and natural.
2. Pretending to have higher regard for the women they’re dating, and women generally, than they truly do. This also includes men pretending to be “feminists”.

So then what happens is that many women are taken in by the effort, and falsely think that the man is truly like this. And then once actually in marriage, the effort often evaporates, leaving only the often far less attractive reality of who the man is.  And it is this often unattractive, uncompelling reality that the woman then complains about.

No longer makes an effort
Everyone knows this. Every woman who watches feminist videos about marriage knows this!
And yet many women complain that their husbands “no longer make an effort”. No, because they have now secured what they wanted! Their “effort” was only ever going to be a short term investment for a long term goal. That effort was costly, demanding, expensive, requiring men to exert themselves. There is no way anyone is going to keep investing that level of effort if they don’t feel that they absolutely have to.

My experience…
I have already spoken at length about one particular incident involving one specific individual, but I have no problems sharing the story again!
So there was this guy. Without going into detail, I can let you know that I was the one doing the chasing. Naughty me! (Not the only time I chased a man either! I have a very good excuse – really!) So because I was the one doing the chasing, he apparently thought that he could sit back and let me chase him while he evaluated whether or not he was prepared to give me a chance.
I told him that I believed that this was of God. At the time, I did not appreciate it but this very aspect that I am about to share was what was of God: the fact that he did not make an effort, but rather sat back and let me make all the effort. This is represented in the second diagram. So because of this, unlike in most relationships, there was no big cloud of effort from him to obscure who he truly was.  (To be clear, we were not in a relationship.) So please believe me, I looked, and I made sure I saw everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!  Errything!  Everything that would usually become visible only after marriage was all out there for me to see. He made no efforts to disguise or hide it whatsoever. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that I acted as if what I saw of him was utterly, automatically amazing, so it probably did not occur to him that I could be thinking very, very critically about him.  Technically he was the one who turned me down. However, truth is that I forced the issue when I had already seen all that I needed to see.

Now this next bit is something I am so grateful for. This happened decades ago. God gave me the power of imagination/asking the right question in that one situation, and I sat down and imagined how things might have looked if he had made an effort. And I imagined how sweet, charming and winsome he might have been if he thought I represented someone that he wanted to win. And yet the fundamental reality of who he was would have remained the exact same. And I realised that behind the exterior of many of those other men who might henceforth present as sweet, charming and winsome would also lie equally uncompelling realities – it is just that, if they were interested in me, unlike him they might actually bother to hide it.

After him there was also another interaction with a second guy, where again, I was the one making all the effort and doing the chasing. Taken together, both of those interactions showed me that I absolutely need to know who someone is before I marry him, and I need to be honest with myself about it.

Following this there was a third interaction yet with another man. For the first year he was all but perfect.  For the second year however – well! Actually, as I write this, it occurs to me that the seeming perfection was actually a big red flag. I would suggest that you should look for someone real over someone perfect, unless you want to be interacting with performative fakeness over sincerity for the rest of your life. Ultimately, the main lesson I deduced from that third interaction was to take two full years to evaluate someone before you can consider yourself to have an accurate idea of their character.

So these three interactions formed the basis of what I share here. What I advise ladies, as I advise myself is this: don’t look at the temporal dating effort, don’t consider that effort at all. Rather what you will be living with, what will or will not be driving you crazy is the day to day reality of who this man is. So what I say then is that you should insist on looking at the reality of who someone is. Because character reveals itself over time, the most reliable way of seeing who someone truly is is to give it serious time. Taking two full years to evaluate someone might sound unrealistic, but in the same way men make investments to win us, we also need to make investments of time to make sure we avoid poor choices of husband. I would advise taking that time to evaluate the guy in a completely non-romantic context so you can get a clear-eyed view of who he is without the emotional pressure of feelings. Remember that if you are not romantically involved with any of them, you can evaluate an unlimited number of men in that 2-year period.  Look free at who he is, my sisters. Look look look. Watch freely. Observe quietly. And please insist on outstanding character. If you don’t, it will be the character you settle for that will be driving you crazy in marriage, that you will be arguing with, complaining about online like everyone else.

Let me save you all this time and effort and let you know that there are not really any compelling guys I have come across.  We as women are typically the ones going to be making more of the effort in marriage, and investing more into the marriage, so it makes sense that we should be the ones going out of our way to evaluate the men more thoroughly.  Good character, much less outstanding character is rare. When you are married to someone, you are so vulnerable to them that you  need them to be outstanding across a wide variety of character traits. Failure in just one point could be a deal breaker.
For instance, this is just an example that occurs to me off the top of my head. A husband could be excellent, even perfect in every other regard. However, if he is financially abusing you, then that in itself could be enough to walk away from the marriage, no matter how excellent he might be in every other regard.

Not too long ago, perhaps a year ago or so, I read about (or watched a video about) a woman who divorced her husband for the most implausible reason ever. And yet, everyone who read the story or watched the video agreed that she was right to divorce him.   The one thing that her husband did wrong was – wait for this – that he used to overtighten the lids on glass jars. Seriously.  And she divorced him because of that. And everyone (most people) agreed with her that she was right to do that. The point is that he used to do it deliberately, to make sure that she was not able to loosen the lids and thereby open the jars herself. So she had to come to him. She explained this would often be extremely frustrating if he was out of the house, for instance . Everyone agreed that it was obviously a small thing, but indicative of a bigger issue, that he was subtly sabotaging her within their marriage, asserting control, and that in itself was an expression of abuse.
As I sit here editing the post after initially writing it, the following occurs to me:  If this lady intends to try to find another relationship, and if the overtightening of jars was genuinely the only thing that this first husband did wrong, she might well find that other men out there are far worse, or might not be able to give her the same sort of lifestyle as this first husband did. Because of this, she might well regret moving straight to divorce with this first husband without even trying counselling. If however, she intends to embrace singleness, then yes, I imagine she would be able to throw herself into her best single life without any regrets whatsoever.

Check out a video here about this story (new tab)
https://youtu.be/G0icJd-8cxA?t=2513

There are actually lots of videos about this one story. More are available here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+divorced+my+husband+for+overtightening+jars

Faith?
Well faith should make a difference, of course. If men outside the church or religion generally have no contractual commitment to outstanding character, then good Christian men who are committed to being like Jesus should have excellent character, right?! Let me tell you, fellow Christian ladies, that faith does not make the immense difference that it should do. Let me tell you that excellent, outstanding Christlike character is just as alien within the church as it is outside it. In fact, all three men I have referred to above were men of faith, in fact, men who were all supposedly very strongly committed to Christ.
All the same, I have not given up hope, but I rather continue to hope for a man “after God’s heart”. But when you appreciate just how rare excellent character is, then I suspect that like me you will be wary about giving just any guy a chance that you meet in just any casual circumstances.

Ultimately though, we have to make sure that we look to make sure that the reality of the man beyond the short lived effort is truly attractive and compelling. Because it is that reality that we will be potentially living with for the rest of our lives.