Laura Doyle's husband, John, couldn't do anything right. He dressed poorly watched too much TV and didn't make enough money. For years Laura nagged him about all the things he did wrong -- but her criticisms just seemed to make the problems worse. So she gave up ruling with an iron fist and became a "surrendered wife".
From that moment on, John reclaimed the power in the Doyle marriage.
That was six years ago. Now Laura defers all the decision-making to her husband and hands him her pay cheque in exchange for an allowance. Not surprisingly, John has never been happier -- and Laura is equally content, as are roughly 1000 other American women who have joined the surrendered wife movement since it was set up two years ago. Hardbitten career girls they may be in the office, but once home, they become modern-day Stepford wives.
Laura and John look incredibly happy and in love. They hold hands and laugh at each other's jokes. You'd never guess that Laura once dictated her husband's every move. Before she surrendered, she chose everything he wore. She told him how to behave at work. She made him get the credit cards and even had him buy an apartment he didn't like. Now the tables have turned. "As a surrendered wife, you defer to your husband's thinking unless it hurts you physically," says 32-year-old Laura, who has been married for 10 years.

It's hard to believe that Laura ance lobbied for the right to abortion, attended feminist meetings and took women's studies classes in college. Curiously, she claims to be "feminist to the core". But, she adds, "Feminism addressed what we wanted at work, not what we wanted in relationships." Laura believes a lot of women have controlling tendencies, that it's a by-product of career advancement.
While women have made great strides in the workplace. It's difficult for them to turn off their management role when they are at home. "It takes a little more effort for a modern woman to change her hat and go from being really in control at work to coming home and being less so," she explains. "It's not that I would forget and think my husband was my employee; I would just be in bossy mode because I was the boss."

Husbands who are controlling at work, on the other hand, should continue to be so at home, according to the surrendered wives. Take Laura's friend and fellow surrenderee Lorri Keevern. There was a time when she controlled everything her husband, Michael, did. Now she doesn't even give him directions in the car.

Laura's philosophy has been criticised by numerous psychologists, including John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. He finds the concept of the surrendered wife "personally offensive and scientifically unfounded" and has called Laura "a dinosaur, a throwback". His own work "emphasises the importance of men accepting influence from their wives".
Laura defends the movement by saying, "There is nothing about surrenderingthat says you don't influence your husband. Of course you do. It's just a different approach."

During the first four years of their marriage, when John was under Laura's control, he never rebelled. "I felt like I had nothing to offer," says John, a tall, softly spoken man 11 years Laura's senior. "I thought her opionions were probably better than mine. She alrady had all the answers." He describes the transformation of his wife's behaviour as "magic". But it isn't magic. It's just another example of US-America's love affair with psychotherapy, which is where the idea of the surrendered wife first cropped up.

It was four years inot their marriage, during a drive to Disneyland, that Laura and John realised their union wasn't what it had once been. "I was feeling really lonely in our marriage," Laura tells of that time. They decided to enter marriage councelling as they barely spoke or had sex, and John spent most of his time wathcing television. "My fantasy was that this therapist was going to tell John all the things he needed to do differently so we could live happily ever after. Instead she pointed out that I had a lot of control issues."

As a challenge the therapist suggested that Laura and her husband go on a date where he was allowed to make all the decisions -- something he hadn't done for nearly a decade. He told her what to wear and drove the car. He picked the restaurant, ordered the food and paid the bill. "I felt in my element" he recalls. But Laura was miserable, "She was incredibly frustrated," says John. "She couldn't tell me how to order or what she wanted. She could barely sit through dinner." After the meal Laura demanded that they return home.

At that point, she knew something had to give, so she began to experiment with different behaviour. If she caught herself yelling at John for being a slob, she stopped to say, "I apologise for being disrespectful." Instead of complaining when he came home late, she said "I miss you." If he was unkind, she didn't fight but said "Ouch."
When he gave her a gift she didn't like, she thanked him instead of giving it back. Whatever the situation, John knew best.

To Laura's surprise, John had no reaction. "I spent a long time scratching my head, thinking, "What's the deal? I've changed so much," she says, "But when you think about it, treating someone respectfully is baseline behaviour. If I'm punctual at work every day, my boss doesn't come over and say, 'Laura, great job. You've shown up every day on time.' It's expected." Laura doesn't view her behaviour as being subservient, explaining, "Beginning to treat John respectfully was not big news>"

Fellow surrendered wife Lynnae Bennet,a 33-year-old massage therapist, had a similar experience. When she first met her husband, Stephen, she did everything for him. "I thought I could make him a better man by doing all these things." says Lynnae. She ran his business. She filed his divorce papers from a previous marriage. She even instructed him on how she wanted him to propose to her -- by the ocean while they were on holiday in Cancun -- and picked out his clothes.

It wasn't until they had their son, Zach, that Lynnae realised she could no longer keep up the pace. "I was crashing. I just couldn't do it all anymore," she says of the time about 18 months ago when she went to a financial workshop and met Laura.
"She suggested I go home and give all the chequebooks and businesses to Stephen. It went against everything I believed in, but I did it that day."

Stephen, a 30-year-old builder, didn't protest, but admits, "It scared the shit out of me because when she'd been taking care of me it was like, 'Hey, Mom, thank you.'" Then lynnae's every fear came true. Creditors called to complain about unpaid bills and the telephone company cut them off. The electricity was turned off not once, but four times. "He would come home and I'd be sitting in the dark in front of the fireplace with my son, crying. But it wasn't my job to do anything. I thought I was going to die a couple of times," she says wide-eyed and serious. "It was so scary just to let go and let him take care of me. Every day, I was on the phone to Laura saying, "Why am I doing this? This is stupid."

Despite her reservations and their financial problems, Lynnae continued to allow her husband to control the family budget until he eventually learnt to pay the bills on time. Now she sits back happily and relaxes while hubby does the paperwork.

Laura and Lynnae co-founded the surrendered wife movement in mid 1998, but at that time it didn;t have a name. It was just two women with similar problems, commiserating about their marital misery. They didn't have any other options, or anyone else to turn to besides each other. All their friends and family seemd to have the same problem.
"The way I had been acting was the way everyone around me had been acting. It was the norm," Lynnae explains. "My mom was doing it. My sister was doing it. My friends. We werre just making our men do what they needed to do." Or so she thought at the time. Fully surrendered for one year, three months and eight days" (Stephen is keeping track), Lynnae says she and her husband are closer than ever.

Before she surrendered, when she managed both of their lives, she was too tired to have sex. "My biggest excuse for not having sex was that I was doing it all. If he just did more, we;d have more sex." She turns to Stephen: "Did we not have that conversation a billion times?" Sex had become so infrequent, in fact, that they kept a journal of when it happened. These days, they don't need to put it down on paper, they make love all the time.

Laura now holds workshops at a local community centre, an outgrowth of the surrendered wife support group she founded at home with friends. When her living room could no longer accommodate all the women clamouring to come, she started a waiting list but soon realised shee needed to expand. One night a week she still hosts a "potluck" evening where a half a dozen other surrendered wives come to swap stories and learn new techniques.

Landra Buchanan is a 26-year-old office manager. She has been married for six years and has been attending the surrendered wife workshops for three months. After listening to the other women's troubles at her first meeting, she realised she didn't have as many problems as she first thought. Still, Landra feels she is controlling. She says she often complains to her husband about how often he shaves (not enough) and the condition of his car, which embarrasses her because it's constantly full of fast food wrappers. She says the workshops have helped her so see the positive aspects of her marriage.

One of the techniques Laura uses in the workshops is to turn on an eggtimer for five minutes and have the women write a list of "gratitudes". "I instruct everyone to give their husband three gratitudes a day. So in that moment when you're thinking he never helps out, and he's such a baby, instead you have to say, 'OK, he works hard to support the family and he did load the dishwasher last night."

Landra says this exercise helped her to "start to think of the glass as half-full instead of half-empty". Rather than thinking about husband Brett's run-down Ford Mustang. she concentrates on his thoughtfulness, "He still has a lot of great manners," says Landra. "He holds the door open and clears the dishes. Once in a while, he'll realise he's been neglecting me and he'll buy me a whole outfit and have it laying on the bed, or bring me flowers." Like other surrendered wives, Landra says Brett is oblivious to the techniques she is using to elicit his behaviour. "He hasn;t brought it up, but he's been so much more complimentary of me. He just notices I'm great."

Laura advises aspiring surrenderedn wives to keep techniques a secret from their husbands. In her new book on the subject, The Surrendered Wife, she counsels: "For best results, do not discuss what you learn from the book with your husband." As the original surrendered wife still follows the rule. She keeps her husband in the dark about what she's done to bring the magic back to their marriage. According to John: "If you go to see a magician, you don't really want to see how the tricks are done, you just want to enjoy the results." And he does.

Laura admits there a re days when she struggles with the ideas she herself formulated and had helped more the 1000 women put into practise. "There are still times when I want to tell him what to do." On those days, she calls on what she learnt in therapy, that control is rooted in fear, and that if you are not afraid of what's going to happen, you don't have to control it. Being a surrendered wife, one thing's for sure -- it is unlikely she'll ever live in fear of loosing her husband.