Nice Guys and Jerks

Dear Dawson,

I think I have laid enough groundwork now. Let’s go back and do some post-game analysis of your break-up with Jan. Now keep in mind that some of this might sting a little bit, but that is a whole lot better than the long-term chronic misery that results from not facing up to these sorts of things.

The point, of course, is not to rub your nose in the mistakes you made, but rather to head off and prevent similar mistakes in the formation of any new relationship. The first thing to recognize is the fact that you didn’t see the break-up coming means that you probably still don’t understand the causes of it. You were thinking of your position in the relationship as being stronger than it actually was (Rom. 12:3), and this means that you were looking at the wrong markers, the wrong indicators.

Some of what I am about to say Nancy and I both observed the few times we met with you guys, and some of it I am deducing from certain descriptions and phrases in your letters. That said, I think I am pretty confident about what happened. So here we go.

In your relationship, you were the quintessential nice guy, and would turn yourself inside out to do whatever she wanted. And that is how you drove her off. Not only would you do whatever she wanted, it was starting to look as though you were willing to be whatever she wanted.

But a woman wants what she wants from two different places, two different realities—and both of those realities are formidable. First, she has certain desires that are built-in, part of her framework as a woman. She is created by God to respond to and follow her head, her husband. She is called by God to respect her husband, and she has a deep creational need to be with someone who is easy to look up to, easy to respect.

But a woman is also part of a fallen human race, and she also wants certain things the way all of us do. She, like everyone else, wants her own way. She has selfish desires, selfish moments, and things she wants to insist on—how you were going to spend an evening, what restaurant you were going to do to, whether or not you were going to go to that dance or not. Now if, when she is being selfish, she gets her way one hundred percent of the time, she knows that she is not being protected, not being led. Let’s say you had a little spat, one that she was entirely responsible for, and at the end of it, in order to make peace, you were the one who apologized. That meant that you were trying to build your relationship with her on the foundation of lies—and she knew it. You were both lying, but she was more aware of it, and didn’t like it more than you didn’t like it.

When you interacted with her in this way, you set her up for an internal conflict. There was a standing conflict between the way God made her and what her flesh wanted. As created by God, she wanted to look up to you and respect you. She wanted to lose sometimes. As fallen and selfish, she wanted what she wanted, like we all do. She wanted to win. More on this in a minute.

In a husband/wife relationship, the man is the appointed head. It would be tedious to cite all the verses, right?

For a Christian woman to agree to marry a man—when she has a Bible and has read all those verses—is risky business. It is like she is being commanded to walk out on a frozen lake. If she has any sense at all, she will need to know how thick the ice is. So she might stomp on it. She might throw a cinder block on it.

And if you, steeped in those servant leader sermons you have heard at that church you go to, think something like, “if she likes throwing cinder blocks, then let her throw cinder blocks,” there are many things you are doing there, but one of the central ones is that you are failing the test. She is not throwing cinder blocks for her health. She is throwing them because she is desperately hoping that she has found a guy where the cinder block doesn’t go through the ice, and where he says something like, “Okay, you can stop that now.”

Unfortunately, we live in a time when a significant portion of our evangelical leadership has come to believe that the phrase “man up” means that the men in every relationship have a responsibility to figure out what the women want, and then to go and do whatever it is. But that is actually the opposite of what it means to man up.

But remember that you also have a dual set of desires. You were created by God to be the head, which means that you have a deep creational need to provide for her and protect her. That is what you are by God’s creation design. But you are also a sinner, and you also have your selfish desires. And one of those selfish desires is to have absolutely no conflict with your girl. Her selfish desire may lead her to demand something, your selfish desire leads you to acquiesce, and God’s design for both of you is frustrated.

I should insert here the recognition that there are men whose selfish desires run in a different track than yours. You are a nice guy, and so your temptation has been to appease. There are other men out there who are royal jerks—demanding, censorious, critical, irascible, and all the rest of it. As you mentioned, the guy your ex is now dating is someone who runs along those lines.

But what should this tell you? It tells you that your ex was looking for something different that what she said she was looking for. This doesn’t mean she was lying to you—the chances are excellent that she is as muddled on this question as you have been. But the fact remains that she told you many times that she was looking for sensitivity (which you, poor chump, tried to provide), when she was actually looking for authority—real leadership.

Now in dating a jerk, she is not getting the kind of authority that Scripture talks about. A biblical head is the authority in the relationship, but it is an authority that is direct, immediate, sacrificial, and true. Christian authority bleeds for others. So her current boyfriend is offering her a counterfeit, not the real thing. There will consequently be disillusionment for her at some point, if it hasn’t hit already. But instead of you complaining about it, you should be taking a lesson to heart. That jerk is not being biblical, right? But his counterfeit authority seemed closer to meeting her creational needs than your counterfeit servant leadership was. When she went from you to him, she thought (at least in the moment) that it was an improvement. He was offering something that you weren’t offering.

If Christ is functioning as the Lord of the relationship, both parties, the man and the woman, have their assigned domain. Each should respect the authority that the other has in that domain, and those responsibilities are laid down for us in Scripture. But the two are in a shared relationship as well, with shared territory, and there are many places where Scripture does not assign the responsibility. We know who is supposed to have the babies and nurture them (1 Tim. 5:14), and who know who is supposed to fight to protect the home (Neh. 4:14), but we don’t know who is supposed to keep the checkbook. That has to be decided by the two of them. There are actually a host of decisions and responsibilities like this that have to be decided between the two of them.

Now, in such areas, it is crucial that there be significant areas where the wife gives way, where she does not get her way. And the reason should be obvious. If she always gets her way in those areas, it is going to become almost impossible for her to avoid the conclusion that she married a pencil-neck. Letting her have her way in all these areas is tantamount to consigning her to a life of frustration. Not only so, but the husband gets frustrated as well. So they then go in for marriage counseling, and they get this, their central and devastating mistake, endorsed by a pastor—whose own wife, incidentally, has cheated on him a couple of times.

So let me conclude with that example of the checkbook. Let us say that both want to keep the checkbook, and let us also stipulate that they are both decent at math. Both would do a good job. As they discuss it, it is important that the husband stay in fellowship the entire time, and not give way to any kind of frustration, annoyance, or anger. There will be other areas where the assignment goes to her, but here, he makes the decision that he will keep the checkbook. And in this decision, he must make it stick. He must win.

Now I am happy to put “win” in scare quotes here because a relationship is obviously not a competition. But in every relationship there will be moments where husband and wife must interact with one another as though they were adversaries. They are not, and if they are godly, they know that they are not. But there will be moments where that phrase as though they were must absolutely be remembered, and especially by the husband.

I mentioned earlier that a husband is assigned the responsibility of providing for his wife and family, and protecting his wife and family. Those are, on the practical level, his two central duties. They are to be driven by love, obviously, that love being imitative of Christ’s love for the church. Christ loved the church, remember, but He did so through His provision and protection.

And so if one of a man’s central duties is to protect his wife, we now come to the bottom line. Women usually have a much better instinct for this than the men do. A woman knows that a man who cannot stand up to her is going to have difficulty standing up for her.

Your uncle,

Douglas