Today I listened to my mom recount yet another story of a woman in her 40′s who decided she was tired of being a wife and mom, so she abandoned her kids to start living the single life again. Now she drives a trendy SUV and socializes with 20-somethings. Her kids are age 8 and 10.

Several months ago I wrote a post entitled Why Women Leave in which I contemplated the growing trend of women leaving their marriages. Since writing it, I’ve heard many more stories and I’ve continued to ponder this strange pattern. One the one hand, there are plenty of single women who are dying to get married, but on the other hand there are many women who are dying to get out of their marriages. What gives?

As I mentioned in the original post, there are a lot of reasons for this trend, many of which deal with unrealistic expectations of marriage. However, I’ve also begun to suspect some of this behavior is rooted in our culture’s conception of womanhood. In particular, I’ve pinpointed two particular areas of confusion and misdirection when it comes to understanding what it means to be a woman:

1. Independence from Men

2. A Preoccupation with Beauty

Both of these issues have repercussions that can negatively impact our marriages. In this post I’m going to examine the first point. I’ll examine the second in the next.

Independence from Men

To be perfectly honest, there’s a part of me that is definitely a feminist. If feminism means treating women as possessing equal value and granting them equal rights and opportunities in our society, then I am a feminist. Women should be able to vote. Women should be paid the same amount as their colleagues. To that end, I fully support feminism.

However, feminism has a tendency to go awry in so much as it values women more highly than men. To be fair, feminism has offered a much needed voice at times in history when women were treated more like property than people. But there is a temptation to swing too far in the opposite direction. Just the other day I read about a study funded by gay and lesbian activists in which the children of lesbian parents were compared with the children of heterosexual parents. Shockingly, the study concluded that children do better with two moms than children with a mom and a dad! The subtitle of the study might as well have been “Why We Don’t Need Men Anymore.”

More and more, strong womanhood has been equated with independence from men. To confess that men bring something to our culture that women do not is to somehow imply that women are weak or incomplete. So who needs them! We don’t need no stinkin men!

We see this “I am woman hear me roar” ideology espoused in shows like “Sex and the City.” Marriage is viewed as a kind of compromise or a limiting box. It is only truly valued by the Charlottes of the world who don’t have much personal ambition in life. But strong, adventurous women don’t need marriage, and they certainly don’t need men. They’ve got their girlfriends and their careers, and that’s all they need.

Or, you might watch a sitcom in which the beautiful, sassy smart wife is married to the chubby dufus of a husband. Her life is reduced to laundry and putting up with her husband’s latest hair-brained schemes. Her life is little more than a faded shadow of her previously glamourous, single self.

These are just two examples of the very clear message our culture is selling: Men will hold you back. They stand in the way of you and self-actualization. You can’t realize your potential with the dead weight of a husband slowing you down. Men are great accessories, but if they get in the way of your dreams or the glamourous life you KNOW you were destined to have, then kick ‘em to the curb.

This is the message that women are constantly being fed. And as a result, it’s affecting our marriages. The call of freedom can be intoxicating when marriage is a struggle, and the culture is whispering an oh-so familiar lie into women’s hearts: “Did God really say that? Does God really want you to give up your calling, your freedom, or your happiness to stay married?” And like Eve, many women conclude, “Of course not! My God wouldn’t say that!”

In response to this cultural trend, let us not be like the catty middle school girls who tear others down to build ourselves up. We need not denigrate men in order to affirm the value of woman. To do so betrays weakness, not strength. The position of true strength is not threatened by the strength of others.

As Christian women, we have two dogs in this fight. The first and most obvious is our marriages. If we do not affirm the value of men and esteem them as important contributors to our society, families, and lives, we can expect our marriages to suffer as a result. The devaluing of men is the perfect foothold for bitterness and discontent to set in when marriage is challenging.

But more importantly, the character of God is at stake. Scripture tells us that both women and men are made in His image. When we devalue men we belittle the image of God in them. When we question their value and purpose on earth, we question the God who created them.

With all of this in mind, be on guard against the messages you are consuming. How are they shaping the way you see men? How do they affect your relationship with your husband? Are they filling your heart with bitterness and ingratitude towards the men in your life? Are they making it difficult for you to worship God because of the ways He reveals Himself to us through the male gender? These are questions we need to be asking, because our marriages are clearly at stake.