External AI Movie: A husband’s insecurity
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As with all external sources I post here, and indeed all my own posts, please watch with caution. However, I have watched a few, approx 3 videos from this Christian channel, and I have found it to be spiritually sound, and I have been impressed by its sophistication regarding Christian phrases or concepts which can often be used to manipulate.
I have found this particular video to be excellent, and it illustrates a frustration that I have with marriage. This is exactly what I mean when I say that many men represent glass ceilings over their wives. So what, are we as women supposed to keep our earnings below those of our husbands just to make sure we salve their insecurities, or for fear of “emasculating” them?! I know some men out there reading this will be shouting at this screen “Yes, Tosin, that is what you are meant to do!” For me, the answer to that is “No way!”
As ridiculous as that idea is, the scenario depicted in this video is even more worse. So what happens then, when, as here, the husband is initially outearning his wife, but then loses his job, as here, and gets a far lower paying job, lower paying than his wife’s, or is unable to find anything at all. Is she supposed to quit her job altogether and scramble around to try to find something lower, just to make sure that she is never earning more than him? There are two issues with that:
1. In this particular economy it is extremely hard to find anything, so why on earth would anyone reasonably walk away from something stable?
2. It is precisely because he has lost his own earnings that the family is in deeper need of income and the wife needs to think of ways of generating more income, not less, to compensate for those earnings that he was previously making.
And then, just as depicted in this video, as a woman you’re stressed from all your extra shifts, you’re running around desperately trying to do everything that you need to do, likely exhausted, and then on top of everything you have to deal with this passive-aggressive attitude from your husband.
Yes, this is a movie, but it is all the same a depiction of a true statistical reality. Marriages are more likely to break up where the wife is the primary breadwinner, even adjusted for every other variable. (Link to Google search) :
https://share.google/3TmPctlh0QgmOVIFc
Admittedly there could be more factors to it than merely the man’s ego, it could also be the wife’s dissatisfaction or a combination of different factors.
The truth is that men in this situation really need to get over themselves and their ego, fast. As a wife, I definitely would not be able to deal with this, and definitely not as graciously as the lady in the video. I hope that I would be able to avoid erupting at him. However, I would probably just leave. Not forever, but I would likely go to a hotel or to stay with someone, and just remove myself from his stress until everything calms down. (However, I would definitely resent any extra money that I had to spend because of him).
“So Tosin, are you saying you don’t love me more than your dreams?” Firstly, why is it always women who are asked to give up precious things for the sake of proving love? Our goals, our dreams, our careers? Why is it implausible to think of a man giving up his career, for instance, for the sake of “proving” how much he loves me? Perhaps because as women we understand that loving someone should not mean having to give up an essential, beloved, hard-won part of who you are. However, your ego is not an essential part of who you are! This is something that you as a man (or woman, anyone) should be working to give up anyway, at least if you are a Christian man. This is what the Apostle Paul means when he says “I die to myself daily” 1 Corinthians 15v31 https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Corinthians%2015%3A31 or “Crucifying your flesh” Galatians 5v24: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Galatians%205%3A24
All of this makes it all the more ludicrous when you as a supposedly Christian man, ask your wife to give up her earning potential, something precious, and an essential part of who she is, potentially highly lucrative, that she has worked extremely hard to attain, for the sake of salving your ego which is something that you are supposed to be working hard to remove from your life.
Secondly, no, no I don’t love you more than my dreams. There I said it – you happy?! Precisely because of what I have written above, because it is an essential and God-given part of me. So no, I am not going to be giving up my goals and dreams for the sake of any man, any more than I would give up my faith in God or voluntarily surrender a limb. Rather I am going to find a man who is truly compatible with those goals and dreams – and my faith – or happily stay single.
Rational men?
These are the same men who are always proclaiming that they are more rational than we “emotional women” are. (In the movie, and even in the thumbnail above, note how his sulky pouting is “definitely not” an expression of emotion (If it is not clear I’m being sarcastic; I’ve previously said on this blog that I don’t subscribe to the emotion/reason dichotomy anyway.))
In this situation, what is clearly more rational? To ask your wife to give up her higher earning potential which would potentially bring more money and financial freedom to the family, or to give up your own ego which has absolutely zero earning potential and routinely contributes nothing positive but merely destruction around the world? I mean that men are clearly responsible for most of the mayhem, chaos and destruction around the world. This self-evidently demonstrates that they are far more led by their dark passions than women are, (rather than the elevated reason they arrogate to their gender) and these dark passions are largely driven by what I call their “itchy egos”.
What men will often do in situations like these, then, to disguise their irrational behaviour, is that they will gaslight using “Christianese” or twisting Christian concepts – not just the husband himself, but likely the men around him, including his pastor and Christian brothers, to make themselves sound reasonable. They will make it sound like the problem is not the man himself, but rather that by outearning the husband, for instance, the wife is automatically “unsubmissive”, regardless of the circumstances in which she found herself to be outearning her husband. For instance in this movie, the wife was extremely supportive and carried on respecting her husband and was not even tempted to look down on him.
Yet this is exactly the kind of woman that would be gaslighted as being “unsubmissive”. Which is why I commend this particular channel for being sophisticated about this type of gaslighting which is sadly all too common in today’s church, and which I have personally encountered many times. And to make it worse, unlike the wife in the movie, I am not the kind of person who is likely to be that gracious in the first place, which probably makes the gaslighting terms all the more plausible.
This is what I mean when I say that a man (or anyone) is lying to himself or herself: when they embrace the gaslighting version of a story rather than the plain truth, for the sake of assuaging their own ego or otherwise; ie “she is unsubmissive” rather than “I feel threatened by her perfectly legitimate success.” This is one of the things I mean when I talk endlessly about character; this is one of the things that you as a Christian should be working on; not only ridding yourself of ego, but also working to tell yourself the real, candid, unvarnished truth about yourself in any situation, rather than embracing the type of gaslighting which both spares and flatters your ego. This is the same ego that as a Christian you are supposed to be crucifying and dying to daily, rather than coddling and gratifying.
All of this is is why I keep repeating that if any potential husband is likely to be intimidated or made to feel insecure by my achievements, past present or future, or by any period in our marriage when I outearn him, whether my outearning him would be normal in our marriage or uncharacteristic, it would be best if he acknowledged that within himself beforehand and declined to marry me. The reason for this is that I am extremely ambitious, and I do not want to have to be constantly gauging the level of any other human being, likely far less ambitious than me, to keep myself and my achievements a safe distance beneath it. I already have enough things to think about, and I just do not want to have to be worrying my head about that. (I may or may not just have sucked my teeth!) I also do not want to have to deal with all the gaslighting from the type of people who might surround him and who would take part in spiritual gaslighting.