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TAN Books - Costanza Miriano

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105 pages

English

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ARE You REALLY CALLED TO Die For Her?You better believe it! What else is man made for, but to die for a noble cause...? The good of your wife (and your family)? Well, there aren't a whole lot of better causes out there, are there? Man up, because Costanza Miriano is back in Marry Her and Die for Her. Guys, if you thought you were off the hook after Costanza's first book Marry Him and Be Submissive, you've got another thing coming. Now, she's here to challenge you and give it to you straight about the many ways in which you must die for the woman you love. (But don't worry...she has plenty of reminders for the women as well.) Inside, Miriano provides insight into what women want from men, and how husbands can "die" for them and their families every day.Miriano doesn't just dole out advice; she comes bearing gifts as well. Chief among them are the gifts of sword and shield-the shield to defend your wife, children, even your free time once in a while; and the sword to cut away all that is unhealthy and destructive in your most important human relationship. And, oh yes, she encourages men to return to, or start anew, a life of prayer. A man who knows Christ knows true sacrifice and so will be better able to truly "marry her and die for her."

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	04 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781618907233
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MARRY HER
____________ AND ____________
Die for Her
MARRY HER
______________ AND ______________
Die for Her
C OSTANZA M IRIANO
TAN Books Charlotte, North Carolina
Copyright © 2017 TAN Books.
English translation by Ronnie Convery.
Originally published in Italy as Sposala e muori per lei – Uomini veri per donne senza paura . Copyright © 2012 Sonzogno di Masilio Editori ® S.p.A. in Venezia.
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover Design: David Ferris Design
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miriano, Costanza, author. Title: Marry her and die for her : real men for fearless women / Costanza Miriano. Other titles: Sposala e muori per lei. English Description: Charlotte : TAN Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051796 (print) | LCCN 2017002730 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618906946 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781618906953 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781618907233 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage. | Marriage--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. | Man-woman relationships.
Classification: LCC HQ503 .M477 2017 (print) | LCC HQ503 (ebook) | DDC 306.81--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051796
Published in the United States by TAN Books P. O. Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 www.TANBooks.com
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
C ONTENTS Introduction Gifts for Men
Chapter 1
Till Kids Doth Ye Part , or Love in Daily Life Chapter 2 This House Is Not a Hotel , or Paternal Authority Chapter 3 The Problem With Love Is That Many People Confuse It With an Upset Stomach , or Love Is Not Just Emotions Chapter 4 Are We Nannies or Soldiers? or If You Love Him, Let Him Be a Man and Stop Giving Him Orders Chapter 5 The Wife of Gudbrand the Mountain Man , or The Need to Give Him the Benefit of the Doubt Chapter 6 All’s Fair in Love and War , or What Is Virility? Chapter 7 “Yes, I Want to … What Was That You Said?” or It’s Worth Getting Married Chapter 8 G Stands for God, Not Green , or Education Should Have a Noble Objective Chapter 9 Smile, Please , or Being in a Good Mood Is Hard Work, but Somebody Has to Do It Chapter 10 Sleeping With the Enemy , or Strange but True—Even in Marriage, Love Comes First Chapter 11 You Are Wonderful, Wonderful, Wonderful , or The Eternal Adolescence
Acknowledgments
I NTRODUCTION
G IFTS FOR M EN
There is one single, infallible, unmatchable way of speaking to men—a killer method. It’s just that I personally don’t know what it is.
So unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do. I mean there’s nothing I can do to really communicate, as in exchanging profound thoughts that actually penetrate the other’s mind and provoke responses.
Speaking—just speaking—doesn’t count. That’s easy—in fact, it’s my specialty.
I can speak to men effortlessly, especially when it comes to responding to basic questions … like when my husband has to go and pick up my son from school because the little guy is running a fever, and he calls because he doesn’t know which class his son is in and therefore hasn’t a clue where to go to pick him up. (“No, I haven’t forgotten his name, thank you very much,” he says.) So I can speak to men in that way, transmitting clear, precise commands. Though my husband still has to call two or three times for clarification—“Where did you say the kids’ doctor’s office is?” or “Do you really want pine nuts? Would ham do instead?” or “Do you mind if I don’t go to the place you suggested?” Of course I mind, but I will deny it even under torture!
At first, I thought this might be some strange defect of the ear canal—my husband’s ear canal, that is—and I started to check it out only for my mother-in-law to remind me that whatever the problem might be, I had to look after that son of hers from now on. So I decided to speak to other people’s husbands, and carried away with a preacher’s zeal, I set about writing my “letters to men.”
I spent night after sleepless night hammering away on the keyboard of the laptop. OK, so I also spent a bit of time putting on geranium-pink nail polish, eating bread and salami, and reading, all the while with my eyes fixed on the physics lessons that come on TV at 4 a.m., unable to take my eyes off the professor’s yellow tie. But in the end, the following morning, when I had a semilucid mind, I would end up pressing the delete key eliminating everything with one stroke of painful resignation. It was a gesture of some dignity, I like to think.
The fact is that, in my experience, if a woman wants an idea to reach the head or heart of a male member of the species, not only are words not enough, but they can actually be counterproductive. When a man is confronted with advice, recommendations and instructions on how to do something, he immediately succumbs to an attack of rheumatoid arthritis, an urgent desire to go and check the brake fluid in the car, a sudden need to give a fresh coat of white paint to the restroom, or an overwhelming urge to wallow in nostalgia for his favorite music from his youth, which he has to listen to from start to finish, reverently, in silence, on his knees.
And on the rare occasions that men don’t disappear while we are talking to them, they just don’t listen.
As I was writing these words, I was struck by a qualm of conscience. Maybe I was being too harsh. So I phoned my husband and shared with him my thoughts, my deep, passionate, meticulous study on communication difficulties between the sexes, after which I waited for a word or two of wisdom or judgment from my dear consort.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About the fact that men don’t listen.”
“Huh?”
“Your opinion.”
“I don’t know. Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
Personally, I took that as a compliment. I’m sure what he meant to say was “Well said, darling. You always find just the right words.”
I get the distinct impression that when I call my husband at work, he props up the telephone receiver and goes off to sort who-knows-what into alphabetical order, a job he has been meaning to do for ages. Knowing him as I do, he probably changes his mind halfway through the operation and sets about putting them in chronological order. Then back to alphabetical, but alphabetical order is always such a bother for Italians like us because we never know where to put that letter j that doesn’t appear in our alphabet. Anyway, whatever he gets up to while I’m talking to him on the phone, his contribution to the conversation is always the same: zero.
Despite all that, the fact that no one listens to us women is clearly not enough to deter us, because “advice” is our middle name. Helping men to improve seems to us so basic a function that it forms part of our normal duties—along with stopping at red lights, applying bandages to skinned knees, putting on the proper foundation before makeup, or putting the lunchbox in the school bag for kindergarten. I use those words “helping men to improve” advisedly because I’d like to gloss over that very different situation of the plotting wife who, from the shadows, manipulates and maneuvers her husband for her own ends. I know plenty of women who could be fully paid secret service agents.
This effort, whether it be laid out in an official five-year plan or plotted secretly in documents shared only among our twenty-seven closest friends, can end up draining our energies and causing us to lose sight of the most important thing of all—namely, the need to love selflessly. It’s only by doing this that we give the other person the pleasure and the will to improve freely and spontaneously. That is the only real change possible. (The need for change on both sides in a relationship is constant; that fact must be accepted, whether you want to call it growth or conversion.)
I don’t know where the high school headmistress syndrome comes from, but we are all affected by it. In some ways, it’s a kind of laziness. It’s easier to stay on autopilot, in educator mode, treating men the same way we do children. But this “Mom-setting” makes us impossible to put up with.
A man is a man and never a child—despite the sense of triumph he displays when he tells you he’s managed to fit that awful blue cardboard with silver stars behind the nativity scene, despite the fact that he’s done it with yellow insulating tape that doesn’t look too much like Bethlehem’s skyline!
And if that fortysomething man at your side seems to still show some signs of immaturity (I mean serious signs, not just a passion for metal and plastic model-making of dubious worth or the joy he seems to take in using a mobile phone app to set off a dummy explosion in his colleague’s office—behavioral traits that do not diminish his moral standing!), he has to take steps forward himself to reach maturity; you can’t do it for him.
The crisis in virility—which I would define as a man’s capacity to give his life courageously, to take on himself the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so as to defend those in his care—seems to me to be very obvious, and it’s not a new thing. The man who acknowledges his “feminine side” by showing the same sensitivity as a woman seems to be the great triumph of modernity. If I hear one more round of applause for such men, I will not be responsible for my actions! In protest, I might even stretch out on the sofa and sleep. (I’ve been looking for an excuse to do that for ages!) As for women who consider themselves superior to men, I’d say they are now in a majority: This is the accepted view nowadays.
But when you think of it, this is the issue of our day: the devastating crisis in what it means to be male and female—one might say the lack of real men and real women and thus of functioning marriages. We’re not talking about the so-called crises of the 1980s: the wall-to-wall carpeting anguish that struck