Love.

It’s time we realize the love a man feels for a woman differs from what we experience in return.

Before we go further, let’s define love. I will not use a dictionary here, because I want us to work from a Biblical definition of love, which includes the following qualities:

patience
kindness
not envying
not boasting
humility
not being rude
not easily angered
not keeping a tally of wrongs
not delighting in evil
rejoicing in truth
protecting
trusting
hoping
persevering
unfailing

So you see we’re talking about men who truly love, not those who use, abuse, misuse, etc. Please, let’s also not talk about those adult-age boys who only pipe-dream about love, but never go there.

Let’s talk about real men who really love.

She can do no wrong.

I have found this kind of love to be nearly unbelievable. The man truly cannot fathom that the woman has done wrong.

And I think it’s because really, they don’t want to.

And it is scary. I mean, look at Abraham, letting Sarah talk him into taking in Hagar. Or Adam and Eve. We have such power in even the glance of our eyes . . .

Contrast that love to the woman who, though she “loves” can find fault with anything, even things that are not bad, not sin, not wrong. The lyrics would read, “He can do no right.”

Isn’t it so!

And yet, that driven love of a man causes him to want to do everything right and we all know that is impossible for anyone to do. They forget, though, and it just kills them to make a mistake, especially in loving the woman.

If she is bad, he can’t see it.

It’s so ingrained in them that when we gripe senselessly, they think we are right. They do not DREAM perhaps we are being irrational. Never occurs to them. Our every griped word just slays them. I mean, we can gripe about the weather, even, and make them feel guilty.

And fearful. He just wants to see a smile, and when he dares to check the response and finds a frown, he dies inside.

Weird. I know. But true. I’ve seen it so many times. They check us like a wind vane and they think it takes a cyclone to blow us away with happiness and they must have picked the wrong color of cyclone.

Yet we were only forgetting to smile.

But here’s the hard part:

Turn his back on his best friend if he puts her down.

This line, also, is too true. I’ve seen it. It’s a big reason for so many awful events of history. I just read in Ezekiel, today, about how God had punished Israel, but to the gloating, celebrating neighbor country, He administered even harsher punishment: How dare they be happy at His precious Israel’s demise!

Ladies, it’s almost a thing of unspoken etiquette among men; no real man attacks a woman.

All this is why, when a woman joins her husband in crime, he becomes glued to it.

It’s why armies are made of men.

It’s why dads accept their sons’ fiancées.

It’s why the Heavenly Father accepts us through the Son.

And it’s a big reason for the following verses: 1 Corinthians 14:33-38.

I know—ouch.