Serve your husband or love yourself?
In recent years the idea has become very popular that you should reveal your purpose as a woman and build a family according to ancient traditions, in which the husband earns the money and the wife is a domestic fairy who lives by the Vedas or by some other religious tradition. It is very inspiring, and I too, as a Christian, believe that the husband is the head of the family. So what are the dangers here if you apply it all without reflection, literally by the list? Where do you need to be careful?
At first glance it seems that you can simultaneously concentrate on serving your husband, develop your femininity, carry out your feminine duties and take care of yourself. But in practice it turns out that our women already do a great deal for their children, their home and their husband, and when they start doing even more, the effect can be the opposite.
An enormous list of a woman’s duties can drive her into depression and make her feel guilty if she does not do something. Enduring anything and everything can reduce a man’s respect for a woman. And constantly comparing yourself with the ideal image of a wife and mother can lead to a nervous breakdown. Instead of service you get servility and appeasement, whose flip side is revenge.
Revenge in the form of anger and resentment that our efforts are not valued enough, that little changes in the relationship. Tiredness and disappointment build up. “Feminine light-heartedness” can turn into irresponsibility, when we fail to keep our commitments because “family comes first”, into frivolity in the bad sense, when we hurt other people.
Also, constantly concentrating on thoughts about your husband can create dependence, an expectation that the source of love, approval and attention is outside you. Who is the main person in our life? Our husband? No, it is ourselves. First of all it is essential to concentrate on your inner state and to keep track: what am I feeling now? What are my own wishes? Am I doing something because it is expected, because somebody said so, or because it really does make me happier and improves my relationships with people?
Is it possible to serve anyone at all without loving yourself? It is very dangerous, because if there are only pitiful drops of love inside us, what will be left if we give those away too? First you have to fill your own vessel of love, and if there is a great deal of love inside you, it no longer matters so much whose teaching you follow — you will be able to take the best from it and discard the rest anyway.
That is exactly why, when I start working with people, we give attention first of all to developing love for yourself, and my basic programme of work is built on that. Almost everyone suffers from a lack of respect for themselves! In men it shows up as a lack of self-confidence, and in women as a lack of love for themselves. In a word it can be called dissatisfaction with yourself. If, out of dissatisfaction with ourselves and with an equally insecure husband, we try to praise and value him, he may simply not believe us.
Otherwise, ironing his shirts and giving up our own self-realisation out of a wish to serve rather than out of love, we will simply drive ourselves into the state of a victim, out of which it then takes a long time to pull ourselves — and not everyone manages it. Appeasement is not love. It is understandable that in our time there are few “manuals of family life” and we are ready to snatch greedily at grains of information, but even what there is should be applied exactly up to the point where we start losing ourselves and our real wishes.
And the best thing you can do is learn to value, love and respect yourself. Only then will we be able to do the same for those around us!
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