Encourage the young women to love their husbands

While celebrating the 10 minutes I was able to steal away and freshen up in the shower, I was contemplating the topic posed by my good friend (though he doesn't know it himself) Dennis Prager on loving your husband, or wife, with the same devotion as your pre-marriage dating days. Now he was certainly not suggesting that your love was at its best in those romance-filled days of love's early blossoming. Instead, that we are much in danger with the progression into married life of losing the consideration to self presentation that we, and I mean especially us as women, made sure to not forget when seeking to allure our mate. And I find this especially challenging with the busy days of child-rearing where baby spit-up and mashed broccoli are more like to be seen decorating my appearance than a pretty necklace paired with a crisp white dress and high heels. Good luck seeking me gliding about our home chasing Jacob in those heels while Audrie strangles me with the necklace. Not a pretty picture even if the dress did manage to stay white! But I began wondering if I shouldn't be putting in more of an effort to keep up my personal presentation. In fact, I became convinced that I should be striving higher than I had been to become a beautiful women and thereby love my husband more. This didn't necessarily mean walking in the high heeled shoes of dating days for my routine home life, but putting on a fresh (child-friendly) outfit at the start of each morning and pulling out that lipstick and sweet-smelling perfume before he gets home from work. Certainly part of loving my husband is continuing to show him that I care enough about pleasing him that I will take a few moments of each day to look pleasant. It also involves striving to eat well and exercise to keep my body healthy, active and more attractive to my husband. But more importantly, as Prager too was emphasising, the outward appearance alone falls short of the beauty we should be striving after. Daily we should be striving to present an attitude that is pleasant, encouraging, gracious and godly to our husbands. I'm sure that I put my best foot forward when Michael was considering me as a potential wife--I wanted him to trust that I would make a beautiful women to be his wife and the mother of his children. Now that I am his wife and the mother of his two children, how silly of me to let that same devotion to drawing those beautiful qualities to the surface fade to the background in the busy chaos of diaper changes and menu-planning. Perhaps the Hollywood emphasis of love simply at its earliest form (if that) has done us more damage than we realized. I, for one, have fomented a new passion and dedication to loving my husband in such a way that, with the deepening of our love after four years of marriage, the girlish desire to be modestly attractive and pleasing to my husband is not forgotten!