Maxwell Mania: Good Wives Ignore Husband's Flaws while Praying for Change....

He is risen!  Alleluia! Alleluia!

I recently began a part-time job at a home-improvement chain store in the paint department.  Since my son is too young to understand anything about Easter, I volunteered to work a shift on Easter.  The staff at the store is very friendly, very knowledgeable and delightfully nerdy so I had a great time.  Added bonus: management brought a great spread of sandwiches and sides for lunch to go with the associates' dessert contest! 

I'm pretty sure I gained a pound or two in spite of being on my feet and spending an hour working on double-digging a garden bed in our front yard.  I know that various people have strong feelings about double-digging and how it can destroy soil structure - but this bed is located in a highly compacted area of nearly pure clay.  The soil isn't pure clay because of a smattering of rocks; there's no sand or silt. The soil is so clayish that I'm building the retaining walls of the raised beds out of the soil.  All I need to do is use one foot as a guide and stomp with the other foot and we've got a retaining wall.  By the end of the seasonal drought combined with hot temperature in late June through fall, it'll be nearly indestructible.   For amendment, I'm simply working in a generous amount of Canadian peat moss.  I plan to mulch heavily with straw chaff from the barn on our property, grass clippings and dead leaves so hopefully we'll get a better soil type naturally over the next decade or so.

My husband and I have been married for six years now - seven in June.  Our marriage has been a wild ride of external stressors combined with the normal rubs of two people living together.  Communicating about what needs to change has been hard.  My issue is that I don't like bringing up problems that me.  My natural response is to dig in and try to make do - while getting frustrated or angry until I explode. 

That method has some obvious flaws - namely that my husband was generally oblivious to the situation that I was fuming over until I start ranting.  There was never any sensible build-up to my rants so my husband would think everything was fine and then I'd be infuriated over his failure to fold my permanent press clothing when he emptied the dryer and my subsequent need to iron before work....at like 11:30PM at night.

My husband is an easy-going nice guy and he makes a solid effort to mitigate issues I bring up so I decided that I should be more proactive in discussing what I need instead of waiting for him to read my mind.  That's worked well for both of us except perhaps for the second trimester of my pregnancy with Spawn when I went completely bonkers over the fact that my husband ate the last of the Wheat Thins AND didn't throw the box out.   My husband's still a bit  traumatized over that one because I went from rage to sobbing in like 30 seconds; all I remember is that I was still struggling with morning sickness 24-7 and Wheat Thins were the only thing that didn't make me feel nauseous and not having them available for dinner felt like the end of the world.

I bring this up because Teri Maxwell has published a new book titled "My Delight: Loving My Husband" which I have no interest in reading - but the existence of this book did cause me to start looking at articles tagged with "When a Wife Disagrees with Her Husband" because I'm a masochist like that.

Mrs. Maxwell wrote a series of six posts on the topic - but the main gist can be boiled down to "1 Peter 3 says women shouldn't disagree with their husbands, but should keep silent and pray."

I...find that assertion to be palpably absurd even based on a literalistic reading of KJV.

Mrs. Maxwell's claim mostly hinges on 1 Peter 3:1 which states "Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of their wives" in KJV.    The problem is that she treats the phrase "without the word" to be identical in meaning to "without a word".   But that interpretation makes no sense because the previous clause is clearly identifying husbands who are not followers of the Word - in other words, not Christian believers.  That antecedent clause means that the phrase "without the word" means that the husband's views on Christianity can be improved without his wife pressuring him to convert.

She also ignores the fact that the husbands are won over by the conversation of their wives.  Using context clues, the meaning of conversation is closer to "behavior" than "talking"...but the only way her argument about "without the word" works is by ignoring all context clues.  Therefore, 1 Peter 3 implores women to talk to their husbands!  It's Biblical!

Maxwell next attempts to explain why disagreeing with a husband will end badly either way by using....it's not logic....um.....by hoping the readers have no life experience, I guess.

Teri Maxwell's reduction of the two outcomes of wives disagreeing with their husbands is strangely skewed.   She assumes that in a disagreement that one person is right and the other person is wrong.  I find that assumption to be simplistic since most disagreements have a wide range of "kind of right" or "sort of wrong" positions.  From her assumption, she lays out the predetermined outcomes:

Situation One-Wife is right; husband is wrong.

• Wife explains her disagreement with her husband.
• Husband doesn't change behavior.
• This cycles repeatedly over years.
• The couple is distressed because the wife brought up the problem when she should have been quiet.

Here's the odd thing.  At no time in this situation does the husband DO anything.  He never speaks.  He never yells.  He doesn't explain his position.  He doesn't change his behavior. Hell, in the post, the husband doesn't do the behavior either.  He simply exists and his actions are implied because the situation remains static.  This husband is a silent, unchanging member of the marriage who is less able to communicate than my two-year-old....but the problem is that the wife talks.

Situation Two - Husband is right; wife is wrong.

• If the wife had said something, the husband would have done something Scripturally wrong!

Mmm-kay.  Instead, we've got a wife who is watching her husband do something she thinks is a Scripturally wrong and staying mum.   CP/QF folks including the Maxwells harp on about how important correcting any perceived flaws in other people are - but apparently men have to spend their adult lives winging it at home without any support or advice from their wives.  Seriously, these people pull out that verse from Proverbs about "Iron sharpening iron" as an excuse for all sorts of intrusive behavior; why are adult men completely immune to that?

Next irony: in the sixth post, Mrs. Maxwell declares that her posts do not apply to women with women who have abusive husbands.   Normally, I'd give her some kind of brownie points - but most domestic abuse experts counsel women to avoid confrontations with an abusive spouse and focus on putting together a plan to get out of safely.  So....and the irony is killing me....women with abusive husbands are probably better off being silent until they can escape.

Irony part two: I'm not a Biblical literalist - but the Maxwells unabashedly are.  In that light,  1 Peter 2:18-22 tells Christian slaves to obey their masters even when the slaves are unjustly beaten because it's good PR for the Christian religion.   So....and the irony is killing me...I really doubt the author of 1 Peter would agree to women leaving abusive husbands so Mrs. Maxwell's caveat excluding abused women is non-Scriptural by her lights.  (By my lights, victims of abuse should get out - and religions should support that unquestioningly.)

Mrs. Maxwell's statement that abused wives should do something....albeit without any actual advice...is the high point of the series.   It's followed immediately by a women writing in about her husband who 1) teases his kids until their feelings are hurt and 2) complains and criticizes his boss.  The wife doesn't think either of these things is right, but is unsure if she should speak to him privately about the issues.

Teri Maxwell's reply can be summarized as "No."  

Here's her longer response:

I would suggest that this mom not speak to her husband, even privately, when he has hurt the children’s feelings by teasing—unless he has asked her to point such things out to him. The husband is probably already aware of the children’s reaction to his teasing. If he won’t stop his teasing when he observes his children’s hurt feelings, I would be surprised if he would respond well to his wife bringing it up. However, when he has a good conversation with them, the wife could praise and encourage him in what a great father he is and how he is building relationships with his children.

It is true that we want to teach a child not to criticize his father. If the child is being critical, we can help him to think about the positive aspects of his daddy and being grateful for those, even using Scripture. The wife wouldn’t bring up that the child’s father has a critical spirit toward others. When Dad is criticizing his boss, that is a time for Mom to be quiet. She might be able to help alleviate those critical feelings her husband is experiencing by telling him she wants to make him his favorite dessert because of what a hard day he has had or rubbing his neck while expressing her gratitude for his diligent work in a difficult situation. Those expressions of love and tenderness by the wife will be as strong an example to the children as the father’s negative example.

I have a question....or a few questions, actually.    What if the husband is NOT aware of how his teasing hurts his kids' feelings?  Men are often steered away from learning how to read other people's emotions especially in the hyper-masculine confines of CP/QF society.   A well-meaning father who works a lot of hours to support his family may be at a disadvantage when reading his kids' body language especially kids who are more introverted or not very demonstrative. 

What if the husband IS aware - but doesn't realize how petty his behavior seems to other adults like his wife?  CP/QF society tends to expect believers to form social clumps that bleed into other venues of life.   In tight communities like that, it's much more likely that a possible business contact or potential client will see how the husband interacts with his kids and decide against working with him.  Does he really want to risk income for the cheap thrill of bothering his kids?  Equally important, does he want to risk his marriage?  CP/QF communities abhor divorce - but that hasn't prevented the divorce rate from being equal to or higher than the US mainstream.

I just realized that Teri Maxwell's method for managing a husband is a positive behavioral intervention system designed by someone who has minimal understanding of human motivation!
Positive behavioral intervention systems (often called PBIS) used frequently in elementary schools to encourage prosocial behaviors instead of solely focusing on negative behaviors .  For readers unfamiliar with PBIS, this method assumes that positive behavior has to be actively taught, that positive behaviors should be identified in real-time with rewards, that negative behaviors should be redirected into positive behaviors. 

Here's what it looks like in a classroom of high school students with moderate cognitive issues.  Everyone starts the day at "Ready to learn" in the middle of a chart.  When students do positive behaviors like doing their classwork, listening to another student's story, or using their words instead of screaming when frustrated (all of which have been taught previously), the teachers congratulate them on their good choice and move the clip upward towards rewards.   When a student has a string of negative behaviors - like when Annie spent 90 minutes refusing to work and complaining loudly that she didn't want to be there - teachers attempt to redirect the student back on task, but if the student refuses repeatedly, the clip moves down.    Later in the day, Annie participated well in gym  which is a class she often balks at.  The teacher praised her for doing good work in gym and moved the clip upward.

These systems work pretty well because teachers define positive behaviors, teach the behaviors to the students and focus on giving positive feedback instead of only commenting on negative behavior. 

Teri Maxwell recommends giving positive feedback - but she messes us the whole process by recommending that the wife also give the husband positive feedback in terms of desserts or a neck rub when he's complaining about his boss.  Hint: this husband is likely to complain more about his boss because he gets nice treats from his wife when he does!  The killer is that it's not like the husband will think "Hey, I should complain about my boss; I'll get cookies!"; it's more likely that he'll do it all unconsciously....as his wife gets more and more exasperated about his complaining about his boss while baking tiramisu for the 6th time that week. 

Look....it's not that hard.  Talk to your  husband.  Rather than assuming he's a jerk, assume that he's unaware of his behaviors and that he'll respond well to the feedback because he's an adult and he's hurting the people he loves.   If the behavior is harmful like teasing the kids, hold your ground.  If the behavior is just annoying like dissecting his boss' flaws, maybe you can reach a middle ground of not complaining in front of the kids or limiting the amount of time on the topic. 

Give your husband a chance to act before condemning him as immoveable on a topic; that's polite.

Happy Easter!