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Commenter King A had this to say in response to the A Typical Day post (I encourage you to read his whole comment. It is excellent and takes my post to the necessary next level):
Consider that your husband’s expectations are a gift, the guidance and leadership that allows you to be a woman in full.
It seems many women today are appalled at the idea that any man, especially their husband, could dare have expectations. But, what would it be like if your husband did not have any expectations of you? Expectations show trust, respect, and a knowledge that you, as a wife , are capable of doing these things and further (and more importantly) doing them as well or better than he needs them to be done.
Think about that for a second. If your husband, or the man you love, has no expectations of you, then it means one of two things: 1) he is doing everything for you because he thinks that is what you want of him or 2) he doesn’t trust you or think you capable of doing these things because you have not shown that you are.
In the first case, a woman who lives like this has not brought herself above the level of a child. She may think she is capable of all of these amazing things, but if you live in a one sided relationship where you give nothing, there is no happiness to be found. You will find yourself wallowing away as all you would be is what is given to you and nothing more.
In the second case, where there is no trust, no giving of responsibility, then he may think you a child. And why shouldn’t he? If a woman cannot be depended upon to do more than her work/career then she can not be depended on to care for or nurture more than herself. If she cannot be trusted to care for others, then why should expectations in a marriage be placed on her?
A wife should be aware, or at least partially aware, of what is expected of her without her husband ever really having to put voice to them. The giving that comes in a marriage is done utterly out of love. It is done because it will bring joy/comfort/relief/etc to your husband and because he needs you to do it. He needs you to do it because you love him. Who else could ever do it as well?
On the Rock 
Im very curious about the amount of hamstering this will produce.
What kind of hamstering are you imagining? To me, it just drives home how simple it all should be when two people with similar viewpoints are matched. Then the roles and expectations are assumed and understood instead of constant clashing over every little thing or one person abusing the other’s generosity.
Possibly, but I’ve found that when I hear ‘similar viewpoints’ it most often REALLY means ‘similar talents, skills, and knowledge.’ So usually it means you wind up with two people that are incredibly similar – same college, career, etc. They usually have nothing to offer each other in those areas because they’re both already advanced in those areas. Then they start bickering over their actual beliefs and outlooks on life. Where they thought their outward actions indicated similar viewpoints each was working off of, all it really meant was they has similar lifestyle choices.
Yes. The “next level” after rediscovering the wonder and utility of the sexual difference (“Vive la différence!”) after a century of abuse is to recover the manliness of love.
Right now, since down is officially considered up, we relate ideas of love to softness, womanliness, weakness, passivity — rather than the unflinching strength more common to men than women. So every gesture of charity is interpreted by the PUA brain as white knighthood born of fear rather than the noblesse oblige that only the strong can offer.
I don’t really blame men for being suspicious of white knightery. Our transitional era is one of massive confusion, and it is better to err on the side of strength if only to reconnect with that vestigial trait of manliness. But to love something or someone is the strongest action in the universe, like the nuclear strong force, which binds together by sheer power that which the rest of physics is determined to tear apart — and thereby to create the building blocks of all matter.
Really, this Strong Interaction is quite a metaphor for love. Physics recognizes only four forces, two of which are familiar to our practical experience: electromagnetism and gravitation. But the binding of positively-charged protons are at once so contrary to all the other laws of physics and yet so fundamental to matter as we know it that an entirely new exception had to be devised to explain so extraordinary a quirk of nature.
That condition is the same with love. Deus caritas est is the only way to explain the paradox of life without destroying the entire edifice of our observable wisdom. Everything in the universe asks us to be selfish and self-centered — “The Selfish Gene” — to survive and to thrive no matter what the cost or whom we destroy. It is the animal inclination, kill or be killed, hoard resources, cooperate only when forced or through suspicious exchange. And yet, and yet, and yet. The “small, still voice” nags at us, knows the way of the miser is askew and low-born, and intuits down that path lies madness.
Love is an action, an act of the will, not a sentiment, not a feeling. Men are best prepared to love! Men are the active sex, the willful sex. And so this manly quality — like so many in which the male of the species enjoys superiority — had to be subverted with all the others. It had to be reinterpreted as weakness, softness, and passivity — the feminine qualities — before feminism could be presented as viable without being laughed off the stage as absurd.
Now here we are on the other side of that subversion, trying to retrofit our philosophies to what the supernature of our bodies have never stopped screaming at us. Love is all.
Men, the active creatures we are, are better made to love. Passive women are better made to be loved. But we took this fundamental stability of social interaction to such an extreme — we loved women so much — that we gave them our manliness when they gathered enough strength to ask for it. As stupid and destructive as that gift was, the good news is, the gift remains conditional on our perpetual giving. Game/MRA/PUA consciousness is the first hint that we realize we have overfed our beloved and need to reimpose some dietary discipline on the cows.
As this is a woman’s blog, I will conclude with a warm-fuzzy. The well-adjusted man does not go in for MGTOW hatred or resentment for the feminist subversion. Once you know the score about how we got into this mess, it is easy to be gentle with those shrews who became shrewish through no fault of their own (cf. “gentle”man). Women don’t want to be hags. They don’t fit well in mens’ suits, and they know it. Yes, men are superior in many of the most important ways, but that superiority is in the service of you, as love dictates.
We are your better in so many ways, it’s true and undeniable. But we still are the cheap gamete. All the worldly advantages doesn’t quite make up for your eternally essential one. We can spark life if one of trillions of expendable thieves wiggles its way into your precious store, but you carry life, nurture life, and create life a thousand-times over our contribution — and then as mothers and citizens form animals into men. All masculine triumphalism and bravado aside, without you we are nothing.
As if motherhood is not enough, God gave you dominion over beauty too. It’s okay for the beautiful to be passive. Beauty is the quality that justifies itself. And woman is where God turns beauty per se into flesh. For all our erotic longing over your beauty, we will never possess it the way you do. We can only rub up against it, grasp at it. We can never be it. That should be enough.
Matt
“All masculine triumphalism and bravado aside, without you we are nothing.”
Neither side can truly create without its complement.
Passive women are better made to be loved.
And to aid Men in their journey. Our strength, I believe, is to give to men what they need to complete these tasks of love. To stand behind and support them, unflinchingly, in it.
You and I talked about something similar to this before at Chateau Heartise. I don’t know if you recall or not, but as I mentioned a movie in that old post I was able to find it again. I hope to repost it here in the next couple of days.
Our womanly qualities may be seen as inferior to men’s, but as you say, it could not be done without us.