AviraDeArah,
“According to that we still have the problem of why the rambam omits ahavah by a woman.”
Why is that a problem? We’re talking about a man’s emotional and behavioral obligations to his wife; what difference does the wife’s obligations to her husband make?
It’s too bad that commonsaychel took it upon himself to pull this into a new thread, because we lost the give and take that brought us here in the other thread, and the OP abandoned the thread anyway.
A quick and flippant recap:
1. huju claimed that the frum lifestyle was financially unsustainable so we’d have to give some of it up.
2. Shimon Nodel tangented off of that to claim that people who are bored with learning shouldn’t learn full time.
3. I asked him rhetorically what a man should do if he’s bored with his marriage.
4. Shimon Nodel surprised me by responding that a man who cannot love his wife should chuck her and get a new one.
5. You said in response that a man should stay with her even if the marriage is loveless, because where in the Torah does it say we must have a loving marriage? That’s Western values.
6. Shimon Nodel went off on you about how it’s a mitzvah to love your wife. You asked for a source, he provided a Rambam.
7. You kvetched out how the Rambam probably really didn’t mean love in the way we think of love and that he actually meant buying her stuff.
8. Commonsaychel redirected us here.
So on one side Shimon Nodel holds that love is halachically essential for marriage, and seems to also hold that love is not something we can actively inculcate within ourselves, so that one should leave a loveless marriage. You seem to hold that, despite Shimon’s Rambam, loving his wife is not something the Torah demands of a man, and thus one should not leave a loveless marriage.
I think both approaches are wrong. I think the husband is indeed obligated to love his wife, and that he is fully capable of developing those feelings via the behavior the Rambam lays out. You wrote earlier in this thread that the Torah tends to not regulate our feelings because they are sometimes not in our control. But that is also a Western sentiment and the same point Shimon Nodel is making. The Torah tells us how we must feel all the time! We say it twice a day, veahavta es Hashem Elokecha. Even in that same Rambam where he tells the husband he must love his wife, he also tells the husband to not become angry or sad. That’s hard to do! But it is important for a good marriage. As for why he did not explicitly say love by a woman’s obligations? I think because it is possible to love without respecting, and that is detrimental to a wife’s relationship with her husband.