More of What You're Looking For

Sunday, August 19, 2012

More of What You're Looking For

10:07 PM | Posted by Scott | Edit Post

This is the second half of my reflections on web searches that landed people on my blog over the past 8 weeks. I’m using these search results to explore what’s up with marriages by looking at what married folks are looking for on the web.

You might want to read about the top 5 search terms before you read this post.

Top Searches (Part 2)

The topics below round out the top ten web searches

6. Dictator Husband – You’ll recall from my previous post that “husband refuses to lead” was number two, but historically has always been number one. This is the other half of the leadership dynamic that is causing marriage stress these days. A husband is called to walk in Christ’s image in his marriage and home by being both strong and good – the two are not mutually exclusive. That means leading with love. When a husband leads without love, does the strong without the good, that’s when a wife begins to feel she is married to a dictator.

Almost every one of the many searches related to this topic landed people on the post “What if My Husband Acts Like a Dictator?”

7. A Wife’s Submission – I categorized these searches separately from those searching in general about “submission and surrender,” which was number 4 overall. From the nature of these searches, I could tell that these were wives looking for teaching on how to surrender/submit to their husbands. These were searches like, “letting my husband lead,” and “surrender to my husband.” I’ll point out here, as I did in my last post, that husbands searching for “how to lead my wife” barely made it onto the search radar. The contrast is a bit sad and startling, because I write more about leadership than I do submission.

Searchers ended up on many different posts, depending on the exact terms used in the search. Among the more popular search destinations were “Respect, Submission and Trust” and “A Wife’s Sexual Surrender.” Also popular were “What if My Wife Won’t Let me Lead” and “What if My Husband Won’t Lead.”

8) Romantic Ideas – I haven’t been posting on this theme much lately, and based on the number of people looking for help in this area, I should get back to posting more romantic ideas soon. For a complete list of posts with romantic ideas, click here.

9) My Wife Won’t Submit – Just so you get an idea of the relative scale of this search compared to two for husbands, for every 10 searches for “my husband won’t lead” there were 7 searches for “my husband acts like a dictator” and less than 2 for “my wife won’t submit.” This isn’t a scientific analysis, but the comparison tells me that there are many more wives looking online for help understanding their biblical roles than there are husbands. Again, to me this is at least a mild indication that men are failing to step up much more than women are failing to walk in submission to their husbands.

Husbands looking for help with this were all directed to my post “What if My Wife Won’t Let me Lead,” in which I basically tell them that you can’t “make” your wife submit and that you shouldn’t even try. That’s not what you are called to. You are simply called to love your wife like Jesus loves the church.

10) Porn Searches – I’ve always had the occasional hit from people obviously looking for pornographic material, although recently the number seems to be on the increase. No, I’m not sharing details here, though some of them make me laugh out loud when I imagine the utter disappointment the searcher experienced when landing on my blog. I only mention it as significant because about half of these searches had themes consistent with the “Shades of Gray” phenomena that caused “sexual surrender” to rank number one this time.

If you’ve been living in a vacuum and wonder what all the “shades of gray” talk is about, I’m referring to the sado-masochistic erotica that has been on the number one best seller list for months now, 50 Shades of Gray.

Other than in this post and my previous one, I haven’t mentioned it on my blog, but because it seems to have figured so prominently in my search findings I decided I would point you to some of the many thoughtful posts fellow marriage bloggers have written about it. Check out these blog posts from Intimacy in Marriage, To Love Honor and Vacuum, The Generous Husband, The Generous Wife, The Romantic Vineyard, Mystery 32, and Hot Holy and Humorous.

What do you make of this list of most-searched topics? Any surprises for you? How do you interpret it all?