HOW TO SURRENDER IN THREE EASY STEPS
A book review of The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man, Laura Doyle, Simon and Schuster, New York et.al., 1999, 2001 from kategoria magazine Issue 22.
At first our marriage was blissful. Then, I started to see John’s imperfections more glaringly, and I began correcting him. It was my way of helping him to improve…he didn’t respond well. And, it’s no wonder. What I was really trying to do was control John…Our marriage was in serious trouble and it had only been four years since we’d taken our vows… My loneliness was so acute I was willing to try anything to cure it… I talked to other women to find out what worked in their marriages… I decided I would try to follow in these women’s footsteps as an ‘experiment’ in my marriage… Today I call myself a surrendered wife because when I stopped trying to control the way
John did everything and started trusting him implicitly, I began to have the marriage I’ve always dreamed of. The same thing will happen to you if you follow the principles in this book (pp. 13-14).
That, in a nutshell, is what The Surrendered Wife is about. Author Laura Doyle found herself in the midst of a marriage that was going sour. At the same time, she noticed that friends were not having the same problems. In fact, her friends seemed to have quite good marriages. How did they do it?
So she asked them, thought about it, and worked out a model of marriage. When she tried it, it worked. Being a Californian, she did not just enjoy the results herself, but set up a counselling network to help other people have happy marriages. Now, evidently, she has reached (and helped) thousands of couples around the world.
In the current climate this might seem surprising, for this book is politically incorrect in the extreme. As the title suggests, Doyle advocates a deliberate hierarchy in marriage in which the husband is the boss, and the wife supports him in that. For instance:
A surrendered wife is:
- Vulnerable where she used to be a nag
- Trusting where she used to be controlling
- Respectful where she used to be demeaning
- Grateful where she used to be dissatisfied
- Has faith where she once had doubt (p. 20)
In the contemporary media this is simply unacceptable. Thousands of couples might be grateful to her, but reviewers and commentators have reacted to her work in horror. Her book has been almost universally panned, and she personally has been derided as a throwback, a doormat. Her advice is considered a recipe for women to be abused and their lives ruined as they surrender to appalling behaviour in a husband. Feminism has saved us from just these behaviours, the comments go.
The criticisms of the book are frequently quite unfair. For one, she takes trouble to make it very clear that she does not consider her advice applicable to all marriages. In fact, she explicitly advises that a wife must never surrender to physical abuse to herself or her children, to active addiction, or chronic unfaithfulness. Those who have criticized her on the basis that her ‘surrender’ philosophy will inevitably lead to wife-bashing have simply not read what she writes. The advice is, quite overtly, to submit only to good, loving husbands.
It is hardly surprising, nonetheless, that the public reaction to the book has been negative. Her response is simply to point out that her philosophy regains much that the egalitarian view of marriage has lost: things like commitment, love, faithfulness, intimacy and so on. The bottom line is that her programme works. Women who follow her way get many of the things that they want. In a utilitarian world, this is the test of a philosophy. The fact that it goes against certain contemporary ideals is neither here nor there.
Christians, of course, are not at all surprised that her model works. Doyle, by empirical investigation and observation, has worked out some of the nature of submission, and has seen that there are great relational benefits in putting the other person first. Whether or not she realizes it, her enthusiastic endorsement of ‘surrender’ ratifies what Christians have always known from the Bible. When you put the other person ahead of yourself, you are likely to have a relationship of great joy in a way that will never happen when you insist upon your rights.
However, we must be clear about what it is she recommends. This book is not about biblical submission of wives to husbands. Her understanding of submission is profoundly defective and unchristian, precisely because her philosophy is utilitarian. That is, she is driven not by what is right, but by what works. The reason for sub- mission is, in the end, entirely selfish—so you can enjoy your relationship. In the end it is no different from a feminist philosophy which encourages putting one’s own needs first and demanding one’s rights. They both see the actions as a means to an end, and the end is selfish. All that Doyle has done is to work out that surrendering can be a far more effective means to that end, than being selfishly assertive. For the Christian, the utility of the behaviour—a successful marriage—is a by-product. The reason for putting the other person first is because that is how to love someone; that is how to treat someone rightly; that is right, moral behaviour that God desires. The fact that it brings personal happiness is wonderful, but is not the reason for acting this way. Even when personal happiness does not result, Christians are obliged to continue to act in the self-sacrificial way demonstrated by Christ.
So while it is tempting for Christians to endorse her book, and for non-Christians to regard her work as an example of the ‘Christian’ model of marriage, this is not Christian at all. It is not derived from God or Christ. In fact, Doyle’s weakest chapter is the one on religion, where the self-delusion involved in this philosophy of marriage becomes sadly evident. It helps her, she finds, if she has a god to follow. So she invents one. Then she listens to what he says.
I had rejected the God of my child- hood for being too neglectful, punishing, and insensitive…[so] I fired the God I had been brought up with and I wrote about what I wanted in a higher power and decided that he existed for me; I had faith that he would show me the way. It worked (p. 239).
This would have to be the most inane religion ever practised. Doyle listens to ‘Spirit’ (as she calls her god), prays to him, and thanks him for his gifts—despite knowing that he is entirely her own creation. She has surrendered far more than her behaviour here. But clearly she doesn’t mind the inanity—as she says, it works.
But even more than that, this philosophy is not Christian in its emphasis on sur- render. It has taken the idea of submission and pulled it out of all recognition until it becomes little more than legalism. Consider, for instance, what it means to ‘respect’ one’s husband:
Respect means that when he takes the wrong freeway exit you don’t correct him by telling him where to turn. It means that if he keeps going in the wrong direction you will go past the state line and still not correct what he’s doing. In fact, no matter what your husband does, you will not try to teach, improve, or correct him. That is the essence of a surrendered wife (p. 35).
That is also plain silly, for most couples. It is entirely possible for a wife to let her husband know, in a respectful way, that she saw an exit sign which he didn’t. Of course, it can also be done in a mean, nagging way. The basic attitude towards the other person is what counts; the action itself is neutral.
For Laura Doyle, however, it seems these rules were very beneficial. She was, and perhaps still is, a strongly controlling person. She married in order to control her husband, and failed. She has now worked out a new way to control her husband—submission. It is working, but that doesn’t make her actions less controlling.
Having seen this work for herself, Doyle generalizes to all women—but because her ideas are empirically driven, she can only assume that what worked for her will work for everyone. So instead of principles of love which can be applied differently in different situations, she can only give rules of behaviour—let your husband look after the money, don’t give him directions in the car. As absolutes, these are fairly useless. For women exactly like her they may be appropriate. But she has totally failed to understand why they may be appropriate. She is simply seeking the new mode of behaviour that can achieve her ends, when her old mode of behaviour did not.
This provides an insidious undermining of pure motives for good actions:
Now, I treat my husband respectfully not only to cultivate closeness in our marriage, but also to preserve my dignity. I don’t miss the hostility hangovers (p. 37).
In fact, Doyle seems to find it necessary to justify her advice on the grounds that it is good for the wife. It is not good enough to respect one’s husband because of who he is, or because he deserves respect, or because that is a good thing to do. No, the reasons are entirely self-ish—to cultivate closeness, and to preserve one’s dignity. These are indeed good things to have; but they demonstrate that the only basis Doyle has for her advice is self-fulfilment. She has not managed to see beyond that.
This is not to say the book is worthless. Laura Doyle has a shrewd awareness of her own personality and her own tendency to take control. She has also worked extremely hard to give it up. Because she has worked so hard, she has a very clear understanding of how self-deluding we can be. For instance, listen to the wisdom of her advice on how to apologize:
When you apologize, be sure to reference the specific situation. For instance, you might say, “I apologize for being disrespectful when I criticized the way you were helping Taylor with her homework”. Next, allow him to respond. The temptation to comment on the original situation in response to what he says will be enormous. Don’t do it (p. 42).
There are bits and pieces of good common-sense advice like this all throughout the book. But as a programme for marriage, this is very much focussed on women with an excessive tendency to control. Doyle’s particular problem may not be everyone’s problem. For women who are control freaks, this is a useful book to help them see how unconscious and all-pervasive their nagging, domineering character can be. But just as not all husbands are wife-bashers, not all wives are domineering shrews.
Overall, then, this book provides a useful analysis of one woman’s struggle to escape her own control problem. But for women who do not have this particular problem, this book could be disastrous. It could be encouragement to a servitude that is totally opposed to the Bible’s understanding of submission. This book does not provide teaching for the normal person. It is a corrective for the woman with a dominant personality who rides rough-shod over her husband.
Our culture certainly needs this corrective; in the backwash of feminism, families are suffering the consequences of misguided mothers (and fathers) who believed feminist propaganda. But this is not a Christian book, nor is it ultimately a good marriage-guidance book. It is a secular, well-meaning but self-seeking, utilitarian account of how to make a particular kind of relationship run more smoothly. It has some similarities to God’s ways, because God’s ways work. Without his wisdom and the framework of revelation, however, The Surrendered Wife is sadly deficient. The real thing is much better.
