Cannot bear to look at Ms. Alexander’s grinning face today as she promotes unhealthy levels of submission.

Too much Lori Alexander, but that’s only because the author of The Transformed Wife keeps ramping up the toxic ideas. Today’s posting makes me wonder what does submission really look like?

Say what? That’s not submission. That’s slavery to a petty tin-plated demi-God and his ridiculous desires. This is abusive.

Look, I get it! He’s been out and about all day, dealing with other folks, and does not want to have to interact with anyone else for awhile after he gets home. My husband has had jobs like that. I’ve had jobs like that, where I had to tell the family to give me thirty minutes alone to decompress before dinner. Usually this looked like having a glass of wine while cooking and listening to classical music. It did not involve making dinner weird, awkward and tense. This is not uncommon among introverts. Too much peopling stresses you out.

But he does need to find a way to deal with his needs without impinging on the needs of the family. When you harm your loved ones you’re merely evil, or ignorant, not Godly. Kids and wives need, crave, want the interaction with dad and husband. Particularly if they haven’t seen him all day.

But add in Quiverfull theology of submission and you can end up in some mighty weird places. No one seems to be able to agree on what submission is. Where is it abuse, and when is it mere submission? The problem is that many of these guys just take it to very abusive places.

Someone said on one of the sites that pushes back against Lori this:

Then what are the limits of what a husband can get away with before anyone can speak up about it? Cut her off from her family? Allow her to possess a single dress? Refuse to let her get a drivers license? Dictate what food she must eat?

Sadly there are those guys in Quiverfull, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism that require many of those things, expect perhaps the one dress thing because if anything, the men in this subculture do not like women doing anything that draws the wrong kind of attention to the family. I think pretty much everyone would recognize that a husband allowing his wife to have but the one dress is being financially abusive. The rest would easily fly under the radar, allowing the man to keep his abusive ways secret from others.

Personally I feel sad for the wife that cannot speak at the dinner table. So many times when an adult has spent the day surrounded only by little people by the time the spouse comes home the stay at home person is so relieved to have another actual adult to talk to that they might just talk a lot. Sounds like what’s going on here, She needs to vent and talk to another adult, he needs quiet to defuse from the day. All of which could be easily resolved if they just simply talks about their needs and came up with a way to handle it.

Most marriages tend to be somewhere on the continuum that it is a partnership, even those extreme submission ones. One partner takes on this, the other does that, and there are those things they will do together. The trick is to let each person handle the thing they are best at and happiest with without mixing in notions of lesser/greater.

Most folks do not feel the need to wrap it in toxic talk of submission. Besides, there is a verse that talks about submitting gracefully to one another in love. Nothing about anything Lori says speaks of love or grace.

A few more screen caps of the discussion ongoing:

All of this makes me so happy I am in a marriage where my husband and I talk, are in agreement most of the time and have compassion for one another.

Again, women are not farm animals or appliances. Men are not kings or gods. Communication is key. Abuse is always wrong.

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