The Submissive Wife

The Submissive Wife’s 20 Answers

Is there anything that will help me understand if this is wrong or not?

Only your heart. This is not the kind of thing that modern society supports or encourages, and you will never be able to explain it your friends. In fact, most of what surrounds you works against your own best instincts. The very phrase “submissive wife” either conjures images of religious fundamentalists or suburban perversity. The fact that “submissive” and “dominant” describe the roles that have informed most relationships shared by most people in most places at most times in our common history is forgotten, overwhelmed by a nihilistic culture that celebrates role confusion—despite the great distress that confusion brings.

Our community is a diverse one, but each of us is respectful of the strong link that often exists between submission and spiritual health. We devote one of our private forums to this topic. Our past and present members include women in religious orders, women clerics and women married to church pastors.

nelly: “When I first started talking about the way I felt conflicted between my religious and spiritual desires and the feelings I felt in my body, I was uncomfortable. Why? Because so much of this instruction is definitely not about spirituality alone. It’s about sexual submission, first and foremost. But then I was sent a very wonderful quote from an eastern Christian monastic:

‘It is only when with the eyes of faith a person is open to the presence of God within all things that he will see Him in so central a part of his identity as his sexuality. In other words, a person who is not trained to see Eternity in time, nor the Feast in food, nor the Kingdom in possessions will not be trained to see the Mystery in sexuality.’

Without this instruction, I don’t think I would ever have seen it myself.”

c.: “My husband is a youth pastor and an extremely dedicated man. We are under a microscope 24/7 and it has taken its toll. I am here because I want to feel worthy of him again. I want to make a better wife of myself for both of us and for our family…thankfully, I feel under control for the first time in years.”

jj: “I almost wonder if arousal is connected to clarity of thought. I am seeing things much more clearly, strikingly so. Arousal seems to increase my overall awareness, of my submission, my role or status, our connectedness to each other, the way of things, life, my Creator, everything.

I thank you for your role in this, for your guidance. I am amazed at the tremendous impact it has had on my life in such a short period of time. I have a great hunger for knowledge right now. I am also very aware of the short time that we have here on earth. I hope to use well all of the gifts that God has given me. I feel like Thoreau in Walden, where he says that he wishes to be a chanticleer to the world, calling the world to WAKE UP! I want to praise God and sing His glory. I feel alive! My heart is full of LOVE...my cup runneth over.”

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Reviewed and edited February 2005.