The Problem

• Most men are not unhappy with their marriages, but they don't really enjoy their wives -- they are less than happily married.
• Men need to have a friend with whom they can let their hair down, someone they can really trust. Too few men find that friend.

The Role of a Wife

• One of a man's deepest needs is to be respected.
• Your wife's duty is to submit to you, which is the ultimate expression of respect.
• To yield to another person is impossible unless you respect them. You can be forced to obey someone, but not to respect them.
• The goal of this instruction is not to reduce women to servants and doormats, but to provide an authority structure in the marriage.
• Where is your wife on the submit/resist continuum? How is your management style?

The Role of the Husband

• The Scriptural instruction to husbands is to love their wife.
• The kind of love Scripture directs us to is volitional rather than emotional. We are to love our wives volitionally, as an act of the will by choice.
• Where would you place yourself on the love/hate continuum?

Four Types of Marriages

• Love and Submit. Ozzie and Harriet
• Hate and Submit. The Bunkers
• Love and Resist. The Lockhorns
• Hate and Resist. J.R. and Sue Ellen Ewing

• The Love and Submit Marriage. I have known only a handful of men whose marriages are really working.
• The Hate and Submit Marriage. This is the most common type of marriage that is not working.
• The Love and Resist Marriage. The feminist movement has fueled the Love and Resist marriage syndrome.

Time Together

• Every marriage needs a balance between talking and listening.
• A thirty-day experiment: spend twenty minutes each day talking with your wife.

Shared Responsibility

How Do Marriages Get Into Trouble

• Most marriages tend to break down because the partners are critical of each other.
• Power struggles over unyielded rights can doom a marriage.
• Our self-centeredness is the root problem.
• When it dawned on me that she wanted to be a teammate and not a slave, I became angry -- both at her for not capitulating, and at myself for being so foolish.

Sex!

• No temptation causes more problems for men than sex.
• Our culture does not prize fidelity as one of its values.
• For a marriage to survive today, a man and his wife must be at least as committed to the institution of marriage as they are to each other as individuals.

Money

Communication