Marriage Tirade

Ryan and I were watching TV last night when a commercial for a sitcom came on that really made me sad. The commercial depicted a "typical" married couple where the husband is only concerned with sports, his buddies, looking at other women and beer while the wife sat by mocking her husband and rolling her eyes at this "man child" saying things like "men are pigs."

Now I know that this is just fiction but it really upset me, is this how we want our kids to view marriage...or any relationship for that matter? Is it right for a woman to mock her husband and refer to him as a child or for a man to ogle other women and care more about sex or his sports team than the state of his marriage?

Forgive my tirade but I truly believe that next to a relationship with Jesus Christ your relationship with your spouse is the most special and sacred that we are blessed to have in this life. With this said, I just hate to see marriage shown in this light on TV, even in jest.

Now I know the statistics and believe me, I know that marriage is not easy but could part of the problem be that we have fallen into this trap of thinking that the things I have just described above are ok? There are a lot of women out there (unfortunately myself included at times) who disrespect their husbands with side comments and eye rolls that they don't think will phase the man but in reality are slowly chipping away at him. We nag our husbands and treat them like children which only brings them down further when what we need to do is build them up and pray for them so that they can become the men that they were designed to be....the men that we want them to be. To paraphrase something that our pastor has said in the past: How do you expect a man to be respectable if you are not giving him respect?

In addition, I know that there are plenty of men out there that think it is ok to look at other women or go to strip clubs because they're not touching after all. Well I don't think it is ok, isn't that just lusting after a woman other than your wife? What woman would be ok with that?

I also don't think it is ok for a man to bad mouth his wife or complain about her to his buddies, is this loving your wife? If you have a problem with her, talk to her about it, not some third party who is just going to form a bad opinion of her from your careless words. Again, to paraphrase our pastor: If you want your wife to be loving you need to love her.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that the world makes me sad at times but we don't have to believe what the TV is telling us. Ryan and I are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and we both make mistakes in our marriage and in life, but we are trying daily to love and respect each other and to not fall into this trap. We talk about and pray for our marriage all of the time not only because we are in this for life but also because we want our children to grow up with parents that show each other love not disdain....what kind of example is disdain?