The purpose of this blog is to help wives to learn to honor God by learning to respect their husbands and to cooperate with their husbands’ God-given leadership (God’s design for marriage is found in Ephesians 5:22-33). I only address wives on this blog – for more information for husbands, this author’s blog is available, and, men can check out my husband’s blog www.respectedhusband.wordpress.com.
Respecting our men is a VERY counter-cultural and counter-intuitive approach for most women. We don’t naturally think, speak or act in respectful ways – we are usually thinking about being loving, not being respectful. Unfortunately, much of what we think is loving, comes across as disrespectful to our men. And much of what they think is respectful, comes across as unloving to us. And we sometimes unintentionally communicate a lot of disrespect to our men, and then we don’t know why our men get angry or unplug from us. But God created men to need respect even more than they need love, so we are wise to learn all we can about this subject!...
When our men feel respected, honored, admired and trusted – they will almost always respond (eventually) by being loving, selfless, kind, generous and servant-hearted....
This is a guest post by Daniel Robertson. He writes about Christian marriage advice over at God’s Help For Marriage. He also has a free report available for download: “The 7 Pillars of A Godly Marriage”.

THE SHOPPING INCIDENT EARLY IN OUR MARRIAGE

One day my wife and I went shopping at Costco. I began to lead her in one direction fully expecting her to come along with me, but instead she seemed upset and asked me where I was going. Being the boneheaded man that I am, I didn’t tell her, but instead just motioned for her to follow me. Now she was beyond upset. In fact, she actually stormed off in the other direction. We did most of our shopping separately that day.

I was floored. I went to grab the double loaf of bread I had been aiming for, wondering what on Earth I had done wrong. I remember feeling very frustrated.

Why couldn’t she just follow my lead, I thought. Did I really need to explain to her that I just wanted to grab some bread?

Apparently, I made one other fatal mistake as well. The bread was at the front of the store. You never start at the front of the store. You go all the way to the back and work your way forward.

The point of the story is that I felt completely disrespected. All I wanted was for my wife to follow my lead through the store and not question which direction I was taking her.