The Christian Husband's Painful Pleasure

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...
Ephesians 5:25 (emphasis added)

The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church—read on—and gave his life for her (Ephesians 5:25).

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable. For the church has no beauty but what the bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.

The chrism [anointing, consecration] of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of the bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labors to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.

--C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, p.105-106.

Jesus...for the joy [pleasure] that was set before him endured the cross [pain].
Hebrews 12:2

Out of the anguish of his soul [pain] he shall see and be satisfied [pleasure].
Isaiah 53:11

Like Jesus, the sweetness of a husband's pleasure in marriage emerges from the depths of the pain he endures for the sake of his bride. It doesn't get weightier than that.

HT: Desiring God Blog