It's worse than vanity, mate! It's sheer appalling hubris and overweening egotism of the most extreme sort. ;-) It's thinking that YOU are the center and source of everything important, which is exactly what every ego loves to think about itself. It's thinking that you're the boss.

Great philosophers and great theologians are aware of this problem that arises with ego, but the average man is not, because he's been quite sure that he was the centre of everything important right from the moment he first drew breath as a wailing infant. This makes his life a survival/competition game...that is, "survival of the fittest" (or the most devious)(or the cleverest)(or the richest)...and from that is derived pretty much every ugly, sordid, and brutal aspect of human life. The ego's triumph is to assert that it is number 1 and it plays the game to WIN. Anyone who wants to be number 1 surely doesn't want a God in the picture, do they? That would imply that they're not number 1, and it would also make it incumbent upon them to treat others as they would wish to be treated themselves, given that others are just as valuable in the sight of God as they are.

You're right that most men have a wife. However, my father was never under the impression that his wife was in charge of how he was going to live. Hardly. ;-) The man was as self-governing as Genghis Khan. As for his wife, my mother, she was equally self-absorbed and determined to have things HER way, so they butted heads for an entire lifetime and both had it THEIR way...in most respects...although my father did so to a greater extent, being utterly oblivious to anyone else's "way". I have seldom seen a more flagrant case of 2 grimly determined egos in my life than those two. And never for a moment did religion play any part in their lives. They managed to make a Hell for themselves entirely without religion.

I was not well impressed.