Over Easy: Believe the Sweet "Nothings"

Do you believe your husband?  Mine taught me an important lesson recently.  He was giving me a compliment, and I started in on the grocery list of things I am not.  My hair is graying.  I don’t come close to fitting into my wedding dress anymore.  No more pampering manicures.  Glasses instead of contact lenses.  Health struggles and various surgeries have taken their toll.  I don’t view myself as the “beautiful, bodacious brunette” of our courtship years anymore.  He made an important generalization that I think can be instructive to wives.  He suggested that if a husband shares with his wife that he thinks she is beautiful, she ought to believe it, and that it is not because she is an airbrushed vision of perfection.  It is because she is his.  His to fully delight in, to look at, to embrace.  His, “to have and to hold.”  His alone.  For the godly husband, this is paramount over anything external.  For the godly wife is the exhortation to “get it.”

When you look through “Song of Solomon,” you find lots of  “sweet nothings.”  Beautiful descriptions from a loving heart.  Lovely, loving, wooing words.  But, are they, in actuality, “nothings” (well, of course, being inspired scripture…no)?  The “strange men” (Prov 2) know how to employ words such as these to flatter and lure women.  There is power in them.

We women are continually saying we wish our husbands talked about their feelings more.  Could it be that, when they do confide in us, share a thought, make an observation, pay a compliment–we count it as “nothing”?  Do you want your husband to open up?  Then, listen.  Believe him.  Be a delight to him.

In one of my favorite old movies, “Mrs. Miniver,” Greer Garson plays a lovely wife, in character as well as appearance.  Her husband asks her one night, “Do you know, I think you are more beautiful now than when I first married you.  Could that be possible?”  Her reply was, “If you say so, darling.”  Not, “But, my hips…my crow’s feet…my [fill in the blank--even the loveliest of women knows her own flaws].  She luxuriated in the sweetness and sincerity of his devotion.

Next time your husband pays you a compliment, try saying “Why, thank you dear (honey, darling, snookums…)”.  Sincerely.  Practice in the mirror if you need to.  Do you know what it will do for you?  It will not only help you convey to him that you believe that he thinks you are beautiful, but you will begin to believe it as well, in the best sense.  And nothing is more attractive to a man than a confident (in this case, confidence from the right Source) woman.