Ephesians 5

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord...Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her.  vv.22,25

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First off lets notice in this passage it's speaking to husbands and wives, not all men to all women relationships.  Also make sure you get past verse 22, for many feminist or whoever get so caught up in this verse about wives submitting to their husband that they dont go on to read the command for husbands to love their wives.  Also note Paul says pretty briefly in three verses the wife's role whereas he goes longer and more in depth through eight verse for the command to husbands. 

Have you ever read the book Love & Respect?  It's about the desire of the woman verse the man.  Men need respect to feel loved and women need love to feel respected.  Yet women show love to their husband in their way more than in teh way the husband needs and vice verse the man to his wife.  Thus Paul is encouraging wives and husbands not in what they do well but where they lack in understand of the opposite sexes need.  

Now submission is not a picture of the husband with a whip forcing their wife, but out of respect the wife is honoring the one they love by heeding what they say or desire.  How easy this seems to be done during the dating stage of a relationship and okayed by society but then thinks it a trap if it's still continued in marriage- ought it not all be the other way around!  And whatever the husband is commanding his wife, ought to be the same way he'd treat himself.  So the two, love and respect, go hand-in-hand; to have one you must do the other.  How have you struggled with this passage?  Do you just skip over it?  How can you live in whatever martial status you're in?