A Contentious Wife: A (weather) sailing story
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
I recount life aboard a sailboat, enduring the elements as a metaphor for the emotional toll of living with a contentious spouse. Drawing on Proverbs and Matthew Henry’s Commentary, I urge wives to foster peace at home, emphasizing kindness, self-denial, and Christlike love as a sanctuary for their husbands.
In the early 1990s My husband and I fulfilled a dream of living on a sailboat and cruising up and down the eastern seaboard. We had a Tayana 37 which is both a sturdy little yacht and a beautiful one. It had a wooden mast, a wooden bowsprit, a full keel, and a generous living space below.
If you choose a lifestyle that involves RV-ing, sailing, camping, hiking, or any other outdoor lifestyle, you live with the weather. If it is cold and it’s my turn for the watch and I’m standing at the wheel, it’s cold. Nothing to be done. If the sun is blazing down, I can’t leave the wheel to refresh. It’s just hot.
Similarly, if it is raining, you are just wet. Period. We did not have an awning because when the boom moves from one side of the boat to the other, the awning would be in the way. If it rains, you are dripping. Rain drips down my neck, wets my clothes, is relentlessly noisy, and is highly unpleasant. When my turn for the watch is over, it is a relief to go below and get warm and dry. But until then, standing or sitting at the wheel, guiding the yacht through the seas with constant rain dripping down my glasses, my neck, sloshing in my shoes, is a misery.
If you’ve ever camped in the rain and did not have an awning, or if your tent leaked, you know what I mean. Constant rain while living outside is miserable, and worse when you can’t get away from it.
Turning to the Bible, the writers liken constant rain to a contentious wife in numerous verses. Here is one-
A constant dripping on a day of steady rain
And a contentious woman are alike;
Proverbs 27:15-16
Let’s dig into this a bit. Matthew Henry Commentary explains,
Here, as before, Solomon laments the case of him that has a peevish passionate wife, that is continually chiding, and making herself and all about her uneasy. 1. It is a grievance that there is no avoiding, for it is like a continual dropping in a very rainy day. The contentions of a neighbour may be like a sharp shower, troublesome for the time, yet, while it lasts, one may take shelter; but the contentions of a wife are like a constant soaking rain, for which there is no remedy but patience See ch. 19:13. 2. It is a grievance that there is no concealing. A wise man would hide it if he could, for the sake both of his own and his wife’s reputation, but he cannot, any more than he can conceal the noise of the wind when it blows or the smell of a strong perfume.
Source- Henry, M. (1994). Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (p. 1016). Hendrickson.
There is no relief for the husband who lives with a contentious wife. As the Commentary states, if th is a bad neighbor next door, the husband can get relief inside his house, but if the contention is inside his house, there is no relief, just constant misery, like dripping rain.
Proverbs 21:9 says, “It is better to live on a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman.” Notice the specificity. It doesn’t say to live on the roof, but to live on a corner of the roof. You can visualize the husband huddled up in the furthest space away from the wife he can find, in order to get away from her.
Imperial China used to employ a method of execution called Death By a Thousand Cuts. It was called Lingchi and was used by Imperial China from about 900 till it was outlawed in 1905. It was a slow and methodical form of execution, especially painful.
That is what it is like for a husband to live with a wife who is constantly contentious. There isn’t one slice that pierces the heart, like adultery does. It is just a slow descending into pain with no relief, until sometimes, the marriage dies. Such a wife necessitates the husband having to work hard at forbearance. See this Matthew Henry comment on Proverbs 19:13, a parallel verse that also describes the constantly chiding wife,
A cross peevish wife is as great an affliction: Her contentions are continual; every day, and every hour in the day, she finds some occasion to make herself and those about her uneasy. Those that are accustomed to chide never want something or other to chide at; but it is a continual dropping, that is, a continual vexation, as it is to have a house so much out of repair that it rains in and a man cannot lie dry in it. That man has an uncomfortable life, and has need of a great deal of wisdom and grace to enable him to bear his affliction and do his duty, who has a [drunkard] for his son and a scold for his wife
Henry, M. (1994). Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (p. 997). Hendrickson.
Women, if you are married as I was (before salvation) I know the flesh wants to chide, cause discord, strife, nag. But when the husband returns from working in the outside world, he has already dealt with chiding bosses, discordant co-workers, contentious employees, churlish drive-through workers, surly waitresses. Such behavior is everywhere in the world. It should not be in the home, too.
When he returns home it should be an oasis. Calm, lovely, soft, private, cloistered. When he opens that door, his shoulders should drop in relief, his cares tumbling away like Christian’s burden at the sepulcher.
We wives must battle the flesh. We are especially good at snarky comments, the silence tactic, a sniff here, a raised eyebrow there. The absence of a smile. Let us warmly greet our mates with love, kindness, understanding, putting aside our own minor dissatisfactions for the greater good of harmony with our mate, and modeling kindness for the children.
I know it’s hard. It’s why Jesus said we must deny our flesh. But the alternative is our children picking upon the tension and later modeling our same behavior in their lives, and a husband huddled on a rooftop corner rather than smiling at you in love and relief. Let the Christ in you be his relief.
