A Wise Woman Builds Her House

"The Wise Woman builds her house. But with her own hands, the foolish one tears hers down." Ancient Proverb

Who is "a wise woman?" What characteristics does she possess? How is a wise woman different from a foolish woman. Here I talk about 3 essential qualities of the Wise Woman mentioned in Proverbs 14 and Proverbs 31.

In the summer of 2021, I closed my clinical practice and decided to launch a whole new endeavor called A Wise Woman's Guide to Men and Marriage. Now, a lot of folks out there think that I'm saying I'm the wise woman. And although I have some wisdom, that's actually not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is ...
I’m the guide to the wise woman,
and the wise woman is you.

That's pretty cool, isn’t it? So I really value what you have to say. I value your experience. I know the struggles that you're having because I've been there, too. You know, my parents split up before I turned three years old, and I didn't see my dad for 37 years.

If that doesn't leave you confused about men. I don't know what does!

Then I married at 18, had three sons, and ended up divorced. With three sons! You know, I had to figure out guys, so I know what it's like to not know which way is up. To try to figure out how do you create a better life? And what I did was I started studying men.

I went to college, I went to grad school, and I worked in counseling with men for more than 20 years, oftentimes men and their wives, sometimes just the wives. So I've had lots of experience in the area of relationships. And what I've learned is that the woman has far more power than she realizes she does to change a situation, but she needs to have three qualities.

The first thing is that she needs to be brave. She needs to be brave enough to want to learn that. About what relationships look like and what a man's experience is, particularly her experience or his experience of her and their relationship. That's hard to hear. And most men won't tell their wives. What they experienced is.

I know because I've been listening to men talk about their hopes and their fears for more than 20 years. So trust me when I tell you what the guy’s experiencing. There's like a 99% chance that I'm right in telling you what it's like for him. Nobody else is going to tell you that. He is certainly not going to tell you. Because he doesn't want to hurt your feelings, and he does want to make you angry.

So he keeps his pain to himself. And leads a life of quiet desperation. You know that quote is a famous one and really fits here. But it takes a brave woman to be able to look at his experience. To ask, “How does he experience me? What things have I believed about him that just aren't true?” It’s incredibly important for a woman to be brave enough to seek the truth about who a man is.

The second thing that a woman needs as a wise woman is confidence. She needs confidence to put into practice, to experiment with the things she learns about men. I'm really very big on giving practical advice, as in “Try this and then let me know how it goes.”

But it takes a confident woman to step out and actually do that. If you're timid about it, you won't try. But if you have confidence, you will try it. And if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.  And you move on to the next strategy. That's why I'm here to help you figure out what that next strategy is going to be.

The third quality that a wise woman has is being focused on receiving goodness from her Creator. She's also focused on creating goodness in her life. That is, she doesn't get caught up in negative stuff. Instead, she dwells on things that are good and right, and pure, and she brings goodness to everyone she encounters. That doesn't mean she's always happy and upbeat.

It means that her bottom-line goal is, “Where can I find the good and multiply the good in my own life? in my own relationships? in my family? in the world?”