Fellas. Here’s a thing that nobody taught you about God and women, because everyone is always talking about what woman gotta do for men. Y’all keep trying to change fruit without addressing a major root.

Let me help you be great.

When a woman accepts your last name, she is saying one of two things:

1. she trusts you as much as or more than her father (good relationship with dad); or
2. you have convinced her that you will be trustworthy with her heart UNLIKE her father (bad relationship).

It is VITAL that you cherish that trust.

A woman’s love is bound up in her ability to see the best. She gets moved by compassion and potential, locked in on what God sees. The mercy for mistakes overflows and when the Lord says a man who finds a wife obtains favor? Understand that she is the favor. God empowers her to operate in ways you could never. The multi-tasking of home and heart, work and wealth, health and happiness, children and family, friends and enemies, past/present/future mundanities twisted around vision and dreams and plans and purpose… and not just for herself. For you. For your kids. Sometimes for the community she left to cleave to you, too. You’d keel over and die; she wakes up and puts in her lashes and lipstick and leans into it. Even the ones you erroneously call ratchets tend to have the same heart and mindset, ten toes down for men who might be gone til November, taking charges, making moves and choosing you all in their lime green lace fronts and lengthy lioness nails. The love in their actions is the same blind love that assumes you can be trusted. Literally taking Ls for you.

Until you can no longer be trusted.

That is why the word instructs men to love wives as Christ loves the church—it’s about trust. If you lay down your life, how can I NOT trust you? I will give you whatever you need if I can walk across the bridge of trust.

The day she realizes she cannot TRUST you? She loses respect for you, and now you got a FIGHT on your hands. Either she was raised to be downright disrespectful and fight you til you leave, or she was raised to drop down into “lifelock” mode while she shuts you out. And it doesn’t matter how “saved” she is; she WILL close that door to her heart in your face until such a time as the wounds to her TRUST are healed.

Whatever her response? The level of work required to open that fortress is… the most.

You’re welcome. 😘