Many men fantasize about having a submissive wife who will love and respect them unconditionally. What many don’t understand is that such women don’t grow in trees, but are the product of the treatment they receive from the men around them. Most of the time it is not about “finding” the ideal woman, but about nourishing her.
Although the scriptures speak about ladies being submissive to their husbands, it’s important to understand that this is not an innate feminine characteristic. On the opposite, ladies by nature have a tendency to seek their own interests, just like everyone else. The point is that this characteristic can be minimized if a lady has the good fortune of having a loving father and later a responsible, reliable, and caring husband. A lady who has this opportunity may gradually come to the conclusion that being under the protection of a reliable man is better than being selfish, and this is how a chaste wife is born. In other words, a chaste wife is the result of a loving relationship with a caring father and later with a loving husband. The reason this type of woman is rare nowadays is exactly because the type of men who produce such type of ladies are now very rarely found.
A man who desires a chaste wife should thus first work on his own qualities, becoming a proper husband, then get married and invest in the relationship with the wife, so she may gradually come to the conclusion that she can lower her guard and trust him. Trust doesn’t come automatically, it comes after years of successive positive experiences. Most ladies nowadays have to go through a series of bad experiences during their lives, having to face exploitation from the part of men they trust, both before and after becoming devotees, and it can take a lot of dedication on the part of the husband to revert these past experiences.
There is also another point that is lust. Women generally appreciate when the husband is attracted to them, but at the same time, they can instinctively understand the difference when the man is attracted to them as individuals and when they are just attracted to their bodies. This is a crucial difference that can be difficult to understand for a man, but it can make a big difference in the relationship. When the relationship is predominantly physical, women tend to feel used, even if the man is doing well in other areas, and this can affect their perception of trust. As you can see, it’s not as easy as it may seem at first. Being a good husband demands a lot of perception and often we have to learn things on the job.
Another problem with lust is that lust is like an energy in search of a target. One may feel lust for his wife, but at any moment he can become lustful to other women, leading to infidelity, which is another common problem. Marriage is an institution that helps us to control lust, but in any case, lust has to be controlled somehow since it is not very useful for our spiritual life, nor for our relationships. Lust has to gradually be converted into love. The basic difference is that lust is about exploiting, while love is about serving. Lust is about putting ourselves at the center and love is about putting another person at the center.
Everything put together, we can see that it’s not so easy for a man to have unconditional love on the part of his wife. It requires the man to have a type of qualification most of us lack nowadays, and even if such a qualification is present, it is not guaranteed to work, since women who have been mistreated in the past find it difficult to fully trust someone again.
There is however another opportunity for a man to have a relationship with a lady who will love him unconditionally, right from the beginning. However, this is a different type of relationship, that is much purer and non-sexual in nature: the relationship with a daughter.
Girls naturally love their fathers. While the mother is responsible for giving them a sense of protection and security, it’s through the father that they can know the world. The mother provides stability, while the father brings adventure, so to speak. As long as the father treats her well, she will continue to love him, despite his imperfections. With a new body, any traumas from the future are pushed far to the back of one’s consciousness and a lady has the opportunity for a fresh start. If a girl is properly cared for by her father, she again has the opportunity to learn to love and trust.
When a girl has the opportunity to grow up under a caring and loving father, she also learns how to choose a proper husband, since they will have the perception and self-esteem to look for a man who will treat them in a similar way. In this way, they can grow up into supportive wives and caring mothers, who can in turn provide a similar environment to their sons and daughters.
Men look for unconditional love in a sexual relationship with a woman and try to avoid the responsibility of raising children out of fear of children disturbing such a relationship, but ironically the material nature puts the unconditional love a man looks for not in a sexual relationship with a woman, but in the pure relationship with one’s children, especially with a daughter.
The relationship with a daughter can also help us to understand something about relationships in the spiritual world. Although people there have loving relationships, such relationships are non-sexual in nature. It’s difficult to understand the nature of such relationships when we think about relationships between men and women, which are more often than not based on lust, but the relationship between fathers and daughters is much purer and nature and is more based on the idea of service, of giving, instead of taking. It’s definitely an important step in the direction of a pure relationship with Krsna.