“It never fails!” Daisy said. “When a man is in the dumps and business is bad, he immediately gets infatuated with his wife all over again. They put you on a pedestal, and think you are the most beautiful woman in the world, and they give you no peace.”
I found that in The Golden West, a collection of stories and essays about early Hollywood by screenwriter Daniel Fuchs. That quote came from a story set in Hollywood during the lean WWII years, and the female speaker was responding to news about a troubled independent movie producer who had just lost a major studio project.
I know Daisy’s observation to be true, from personal experience and general observation. Struggling men often lament that they can’t provide better for their wives. They feel or express astonishment and gratefulness that their wives stay with them.
But I’m more interested in the flipside: The man’s reaction to his wife when things are going well.
Many of the newly-successful men continue the affection that they showed during the lean years. The quarterback Kurt Warner comes to mind: His wife stuck with him as a stock boy after college, and he appears to love her today, after he has made millions and been named the NFL’s MVP. There’s also the example of Mel Gibson who, if memory serves, underwent lean periods with his wife during his early days in Hollywood and still loves and respects her after all his success.
And then you have the Howard Sterns of the world. At the end of his autobiographical movie, Private Parts, he told the world that he could never cheat on his wife. Alison went through all those lean radio years with him, put up with so much, how could he leave her? But he did, in about five years.
This type of thing happens so frequently that it has become caricatured: The middle-aged man (40-55) leaves his wife for the PYT (Pretty Young Thing) now that the poor years of his career are past. These men have attained success in their fields, accumulated savings, paid down their mortgage.
And now they’re leaving. Why?
There are many possible explanations.
It could be partly the wife’s fault. She becomes less attractive, leaving the man to yearn for better action (it’s a biological fact that physical attractiveness means a lot more to men than to women). The wife undergoes menopause, along with a change of personality that might make her less pleasant.
It could be a biological factor. Studies show that after age 40, men’s brains change in a way that makes them less capable of weighing long-term consequences against short-term satisfaction. The result: middle-age men are less capable of seeing the devastating effects of their decisions.
And, of course, there’s the simplest explanation: The guy is a self-centered jerk.
Which is the explanation I lean toward.
It's also the most plausible explanation if Daisy's observation in the first paragraph is true — that when a guy is worthless, he's grateful to his wife — and if its flipside is true: when he's successful, he's less grateful.
Few things breed sin like material success. Although we’re called to make a living, the effort to earn money and save it can easily morph into greed. Success at a career, a necessary thing if one wants to provide for his family, can easily morph into pride.
Such pride may have been exactly what led the men of Malachi’s day into this very sin of being unfaithful to the “wife of your youth.” Abandoned for a PYT, she would “cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning.” And don’t kid yourself; God is on her side: “[L]et none be faithless to the wife of his youth. For I hate divorce says the Lord, the God of Israel… (Mal 2: 13-16).
The down-and-out man is far less likely to suffer from pride. Money is scarce; he feels his worthlessness. On a scale of one to 100, he might feel like a five.
And if his worthlessness adversely affects his wife, he can barely help but feel admiration and gratitude to a woman who puts up with him and the circumstances.
But for the man who tastes success, it’s different. He feels like a 90, or maybe a 100. And maybe he starts thinking his wife doesn’t measure accordingly, especially if she’s getting older and less attractive.
In other words, he is no longer aware of his relative worthlessness.
And he is relatively worthless. We all are. As beings stained with original and actual sin, we are all zeroes, including the successful man. Our worth is tied solely to our status as creatures of God and beings redeemed by Christ.
If the successful man were to keep that truth in the forefront of his mind, he might keep a proper perspective.
And that perspective would prompt him to continue to love his long-suffering wife.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
