Even though Jessa Duggar has spoken about past troubles very openly, fans are still understandably concerned.
Is she really happy in her marriage. Can she ever be happy living a life that she didn’t really choose for herself?
These worries date back to a time before Jessa learned how to kiss from her parents, when she had her own thoughts and ideas.
Fans don’t have to guess how Jessa’s parents molded her to please her then-future husband. They saw it themselves on TV.
Jessa and Ben have been married for eight years.
However, a 19 Kids & Counting clip has been making the rounds — one that showed Jessa getting advice from the worst person to ask: her mother.
At the time, Jessa was simply in a courtship with Ben, but she wasn’t sure what to make of him and turned to Michelle for help.
“I am in a courtship with a wonderful man named Ben Seewald, and we’ve been courting for about four months now,” Jessa explained to the camera.
“It’s been good. I’m missing him, though,” viewers saw her tell Michelle.
“So he’s like super-emotional like a feeling kind of person and I’m really not, you know that,” Jessa explained to Mommy Dearest.
“I’m kind of just like, cut and dry,” Jessa noted.
“And,” she detailed, “so he’s always texting me like the sweetest things. “He’s like ‘If I had all the flowers in the world, all the rose gardens in the world I’d give them all to you.'”
Jessa very humorously continued: “And I’m like ‘Uh, where would I put em?'”
Unfortunately, this is when Michelle — the product of decades of cult brainwashing — offered her version of relationship advice.
“Even though I know that typically you just are real, you know, plain and simple about things, you probably should say something like ‘Oh Ben, that is so sweet, oh thank you!'” she suggested.
Michelle continued: “However he expresses love is probably the way that he receives it as well.”
“And on your part, you probably will practice learning how to express that love language that he needs to hear from you to him,” Michelle advised.
“And,” she admitted, “it’s a learning process.”
While learning to communicate is important, that sounded incredibly one-sided … and that’s what social media users are saying, too.
“This is gross,” commented a redditor after the clip circulated. “They act like Jessa has some kind of defect.”
The commenter continued: “There is nothing wrong with being direct and not demonstrative.”
Sagely, the redditor observed: “This is why these people need to stop marrying the first person they meet.”
“They needed time to find out if their personalities complemented each other or not,” the commenter reasoned.
“If Ben needed someone to reciprocate his romantic personality,” the Reddit comment went on, “he deserved that.”
They continued: “If Jessa can’t do that for him, she deserved someone who fit her better too.”
“She would’ve had much more fun with someone who also had a dry sense of humor and could push her, intellectually I mean,” a second redditor explained.
“I don’t mean someone mean and sarcastic,” the comment clarified, “but just someone who would get her.”
The commenter observed: “I think she’s lost a lot of herself in marriage.”
“She could have been more tactful in her response, but yeah, this was clearly a sign that they were not a good match,” a third chimed in.
“It’s sad that they encouraged her to double down and change her personality,” the redditor lamented, “rather than end the courtship.”
Another agreed: “I think it’s sick. Michelle’s response is gross. Others is not as gross, but close. Frightening how people think girls should be raised.”
“Sooooo….how come it’s all on her to learn his love language,” asked another.
“Why does she have to give and receive in HIS preferred way?” the commenter pointed out.
“Why isn’t she being encouraged to give in his love language and communicate her own so he can learn to give love to her in HER preferred way???Grrrrrrrr,” another expressed.
“They think that Jessa having her own romantic style is some sort of bad thing when that is not the case,” another stated.
That more or less summarizes the Duggar cult’s beliefs: women must warp themselves to ideally suit their husbands, not just sexually but in personality.
To them, Jessa’s literal-minded wit was a personality flaw because it was a sign of independent personhood, rather than something molded to please the man who is now her husband.
