Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Wife-Worship Syndrome


Okay, maybe wife worship is just a bit offbeat. Maybe husbands aren't supposed to get stuck in perpetual courtship mode. Some wives might say, Enough already with the flowers and gold Godiva boxes, all the pedicures and footrubs. Take me for granted, please, why dontcha?

Maybe.

But if so, as personality syndromes go, this one has got to be pretty darned benign. And, unless the affected hubby is really relentless in his ministrations, his wife is unlikely to complain about all the amorous attentions. More likely is she to complain if they’re suddenly discontinued.

So suddenly she is seen plainly, wrinkles and all, and no longer transfigured as a goddess. What happened, she might wonder, to those rose-colored glasses he’d taken to wearing around the house? Is it a bad thing to be beautified by the eye of the beholder you’re married to? Couldn’t a wife get used to that kind of amorous impairment in her man?

In my book (chapter 5, page 38), I touch on this briefly: “My wife accused me of having a foot fetish,” said one [husband], “but I told her no, I have a wife fetish.”

“By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” (Matthew 7:16)

With effects so pleasingly benign, the aberrant condition of wife worship may be infinitely preferable to the ho-hum-drummery of marital normalcy.

4 comments:

enoch said...

"I told her I have a wife fetish"

Heh. I frequent a vanilla marriage message board, and I recall a complaint from a woman from a couple of years ago. She was complaining that her husband was always working - he claimed to be a workaholic. Her comment was "Workaholic. Hmph. I wish he was a wifeaholic."

Mark Remond said...

Enoch, I think I used this in the book, but when I was first thinking of doing the book, I pitched the title and concept to a female writer friend. "Oh, fantastic, a book on uxoriousness! I wish my husband would read it!"

enoch said...

That's a great word! I have a big vocabulary, but that's one word I didn't know. I'll definitely remember it, though, and maybe slip it into conversation with my wife!

Anonymous said...

Well really there can be great harm in uxoriousness. If the wife takes license to use this tendency to control the husband even against his rational desires it can be very bad. Since a very young child I had decided to treat my future wife as a queen. Which I did. But she was a self centered person and probably was drawn to someone she could control. The second wife wasn't much different. With the first her mental disorder grew so bad she demanded I divorce her. With the second I was awake enough to require the divorce myself. If I marry again I will not wroship her. But I will treat her well.
Just give you a glimpse with wife 1 after 22 years of marriage I was writing her a love poem every week which was given inconnection with a date every Friday. We would stop on vacations at nice women's clothing stores and it was typical to frop over $1000 in one store. At the last I was making over $110,000 a year (she never worked out of the home for the 27 years of marriage) we had zero debt and I once spent $7,000 in one department store outfitting her the two up coming weddings of our daughters. No it was not healthy. But it was uxoriousness.