Colossians 3:18

Wives be in subjection to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.

This begins Paul's instructions on certain reciprocal relationships, that of wives and husbands being treated first. See extensive teaching on this in Ephesians 5:22-33, where Paul elaborated it. The glorious difference between the Christian conception of duty and that prevalent in the world of Paul's day lies in the fact that obligations, even the sacred obligations in marriage, are "reciprocal" obligations. The duty is never all on one side. In the Roman Empire of Paul's day, there were no recognized rights of women, children or slaves, who were all expected to obey husbands, parents and masters upon penalty of death. Christianity changed all that. As observed in the parallel place in Ephesians, here Paul enunciated the great ethic of mutual respect and obligation in these sectors; and this ethic destroyed slavery and other abuses, although, of course, not immediately.

As is fitting in the Lord ... As Guthrie said, "This would at once transform current ideas and invest the wife's position with an adequate safeguard."[43] As spelled out fully in Ephesians, husbands were to love their wives, a command to regard the wife as an extension of the husband's own self, having every true claim against him that ever pertained to himself.