Is a Wife Required to Stay Attractive?

Closely tied to the current melee over whether a sexually frigid wife is responsible for her husband’s pornography usage (stay tuned for posts on that topic) is the marriage advice that is both commanded and condemned in a variety of ways, but which basically boils down to this: a good wife must make sure that she stays physically attractive to her husband.

What is the Christian to do with this advice?

As usual, this advice is good advice, and also terrible advice, depending on how it is understood and applied.

1. Bless Your Spouse

It is good for spouses to love each other in a variety of different ways. This includes things like fitness and hygiene, to be sure. A man who perpetually smells like roadkill and a woman too addicted to ice cream to notice that she is 50 pounds overweight could both learn a thing or two about making some sacrifices and exercising self discipline – firstly as a good testimony to Christ and as good stewardship of the body that they have been given, and secondly as an exercise in putting in a little effort to show their spouse that they care.

If a wife knows how to make herself beautiful for girls’ night out, but she cannot be bothered to put on a little makeup and a nice dress for date night with her husband, something is deeply wrong. It is good for Christian women to radiate feminine beauty. If you can have pretty hair and wear a dress and a little perfume, this is much better than consistently looking like a homeless person with one pair of sweatpants to her name.

If a wife is just letting her health fall to rot and ruin because she is too lazy to do 10 minutes of exercise and take it easy on her chocolate consumption, this is firstly a sin against God, and secondly a missed opportunity to bless her husband – not only with a more healthy and attractive body, but also with the multiplied power of a healthy helper.

This is a good way to show love to your husband. To show him that you care – that you want to be beautiful for him – to give him feminine glory to delight in when he comes home.

And yes, by the way, this applies to men too. Guys, if you prefer your lady to look beautiful, then do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Hopefully you have more important things in life than hitting the gym for hours and hours to look like Mr. Universe, but it’s not that hard to do a few push-ups, skip a few desserts, and trim your fingernails.

2. Advice is not Legally Binding

This is all true, and it is all in the category of advice. In our Internet age, advice like this is often interpreted immediately as a legalistic standard, which can then be used to measure oneself or one’s spouse by.

But that’s not what these sorts of things should be. They should be understood as advice. Advice based on biblical principles, to be sure: Good stewardship (1 Cor. 4:7), do unto others as you would have them do to you (Luke 6:31), self-control (Gal. 5:22-23), rejection of gluttony (Pr. 23:21), etc. But there is no biblical checklist as to the ideal physique of a husband or wife.

Sweatpants are not a sin, and some days are messy bun days. Some people actually do have health problems that actually do make it hard to lose weight. I regularly return home from work filthy and exhausted, and my wife still greets me with a kiss and a smile, even though I am not exactly dressed to the nines.

Just be a good steward and be considerate. Simple as.

Now. On the other side of things.

3. It's All Her Fault

The truth in this advice can be weaponized as a tool by which to make women feel like they never measure up. “Yes, lady, I know you’ve had eight kids, and you have some health problems, and you’ve been trying to eat well and exercise but you’re still 40 pounds overweight. Well, it’s your fault that your husband is in pornography.”

This is absolutely hellish hogwash.

And often, to be fair, this is not the intention of the speaker, but rather what is heard by the woman receiving the advice. Either way, she is consigned to living in fear that if she doesn’t stay as sexy as all the women out there, her husband is in imminent danger of stumbling into an affair- and it will be her fault.

This is a burden no wife should have to bear. It isn’t her job to be the Holy Spirit in her husband’s life. He is responsible for his own thoughts and actions.

She can help, yes- but she can help by being a yummy feast waiting at home, not by having him on a leash or trying to jump out in front of- or out-advertise- every fast food restaurant he drives by.

It is his job to flee the Proverbs 7 woman and return to his Proverbs 5 well of pure water.

4. What is Beauty?

We need to meditate on a few Scripture verses.

“Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.” (Pr. 31:30)

“For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” (1 Tim. 4:8)

Scripture could not be more clear that the true and unfading beauty is internal. Yes, that internal beauty does manifest externally, and that does include manifestations like self-discipline.

But biblically-calibrated priorities clearly are much more concerned with a woman that radiates a gentle and quiet spirit full of faith and joy in Jesus (1 Pet. 3) than with a woman who perpetually looks like she’s 18 years old.

This is all good in theory, but it should actually manifest practically. You can mentally assent to these biblical standards of beauty, but if you still practically have your standards of beauty calibrated by workout videos and airbrushed billboards and Hollywood movies (let alone pornography), you will struggle to find your wife beautiful as she moves through the stages of marriage and motherhood.

If, however, you are drawing near to your wife and delighting in her and being thankful for her and becoming one flesh and one soul with her, you will discover that your standard for ideal beauty starts to look a lot like a picture of your wife.

5. In Sickness and in Health

Marriage vows include “in sickness and in health.”

The obvious implication is that we are not marrying each other simply because we like the way each other’s body looks at the time of the wedding ceremony. We are marrying an entire person.

God designed women so that their bodies go through amazing changes. My wife has given me five children. I have seen her in all shapes and sizes. It’s incredible what God designed a female body to do. Compared to the changes that her body has gone through, I look basically the same as I always have.

How shameful would it be for a man to marry a virgin, make her pregnant, and then despise her for the changes that happen in her body because of that? What kind of wicked scoundrel would do such a thing? That is not Christian marriage.

Admittedly, our sexually promiscuous culture makes it very easy to think that the only sexually attractive woman is the one that looks like a supermodel.

But this is simply not true, and it is certainly not a biblically calibrated way of looking at the world.

God designed marriage so that as two people become one flesh they become more and more satisfied in each other. So yes, it’s good for husbands and wives to take care of themselves and clean up nice for date night. But it is even more critical for them to be growing in their unity as one flesh.

When we are thinking of marriage biblically, we recognize that we would be wise to stop comparing our spouse to people out there, and instead to delight in our spouse as the only one in the world for us. That kind of mutual delight makes each spouse beautiful in the other’s eyes. (Song 6:3)

So ladies, find out your husband‘s favorite outfits. Look nice for him when he comes home. Exercise and eat well. This is all fine as far as it goes.

But don’t lose sight of the main thing – being a woman who fears the Lord. She is not a woman who is stressed out because she doesn’t measure up to the chicks on Instagram. She is a mighty force for good in her household – the trusted right arm of her husband. She has better things to do than to spend hours trying to retain her maiden figure. She’s too busy being a fruitful field to keep herself preserved like a rose in a glass case.

And a godly husband isn’t looking for a rose in a glass case. He’s looking for a fruitful vine – a table surrounded with olive plants – a battle-scarred and brave companion – not just a sexual outlet that incidentally can do the dishes.

A godly man wants a wife, not a statue of Aphrodite.

6. Mr. Beam-Face

Jesus tells us to take the log out of our own eye in Matthew 7:3. When dealing with sin, we start by dealing with our own sin. This means that if we are in sexual sin, we do not get to blame the woman. Or the man. Or the serpent. Or anybody else. We need to confess and forsake if we want to find compassion. (Pr. 28:13)

So the wife who would put away the salacious romance novels if her husband was just a little more interesting should repent and quit blameshifting.

The husband who wouldn’t struggle with thinking about other women so much if his wife would just lose 20 pounds should repent and quit blame shifting.

You cannot be free from sin that you cannot repent of, and you cannot repent of sin that is somehow never your own fault.

7. Go and Get You Some

When Scripture speaks of sexual purity and delight within marriage, it is always in a positive way. In Proverbs 5, the husband is exhorted to go get drunk on his wife. In Song of Solomon, each spouse is pursuing the other. In the more didactic passages like Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3, the counsel directed to each spouse focuses on what is their own duty.

Scripture knows none of this “love bank” ideology – where each spouse must make sure that they are checking all of the boxes, or their partner may wind up going off the deep end and making a deposit somewhere else. That’s exhausting, it’s stressful, and it’s not your job.

By way of personal confession, this was something that I had to repent of before God and my wife. While I of course knew that I was responsible for my own thoughts and actions, I focused far too much on how ostensibly helpful it would be if my wife would wear this or look like this or whatever else because then she would be so attractive that it would be easier not to be distracted by other women.

That is a terrible burden to lay on one’s spouse. It stressed the poor girl out. It made her insecure. It gave her a job that was never hers to begin with.

I wasn’t trying to be malicious or manipulative; I had just absorbed this ideology.

But it is a cruel ideology.

Fundamentally, it is an over-application of 1 Corinthians 7. Yes, sex within marriage is a godly and holy antidote to sexual desire. But you cannot extrapolate that out to say that each spouse has to jump through hoops to make sure that they always stay one step ahead of the attractiveness of everybody else.

So, instead of focusing on what your spouse needs to do to stay attractive, do what the Bible says, and focus on your duties towards your own spouse. This would include, for example, sexual pursuit and devoted love – Pr. 5, Matthew 5:28. It also includes friendship, kindness, considering their needs above your own, and many more.

It is worth noting that the love of Christ for His bride actually makes her more beautiful (Ephesians 5). I have seen in my own marriage that when I water my wife, she blossoms and blooms.

But if I am comparing her to others, grumbling, and nitpicking, not only am I already calibrated to see her faults and not her glories, but she is not shimmering with the beautiful glow of a passionately beloved woman.

8. Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Continuing in the category of putting off and putting on, this is as good a place as any to remind again that the antidote to lust is not “not lust.” It is love. When we put off sin, we have to replace it with something (Eph. 4:24).

The man who spends all his time fighting lust will find much less success than the man who spends his time chasing his wife around the house, while genuinely having kind concern for the other women that he interacts with on a daily basis.

9. Let's Be Honest

This can all be understood and discussed without pretending that basic realities don’t exist.

If a woman is a nagging, rebellious harpy who is 50 pounds overweight and has not slept with her husband in six months, and then if he ends up having an affair, he is completely responsible for his own sin.

But anybody who says that she has no log sticking out of her own eye is simply being dishonest.

Photo by Joachim Schnürle on Unsplash