Love and Marriage (without the Horse and Carriage)
He did it with just a touch of his big toe.
My husband and I were having coffee with friends, sharing our spiritual highs and lows of the previous week when he saw the warning signs. It was subtle: a rise of my shoulders, an intake of air, leaning forward, my mouth beginning to open, and he knew. He knew what I was thinking and what I was about to say. He knew that I was prepping myself to be argumentative and to say something unnecessarily controversial.
So he nudged me under the table. Just once.
In full disclosure, we’re not the stereotypical conservative couple—we simply don’t fit the personality paradigm. He’s type B; I’m type A. He’s quiet; I’m outspoken. He actually enjoys cleaning and after ten years, I think I finally believe him. (He says he likes bringing order to chaos, which on further reflection shines significant light on why he fell for me in the first place.) But there in that moment when he expressed his disapproval with the slightest nudge of his big toe, I immediately stopped.
Most conservatives would hail this as a great victory, that this is exactly how marriages should function. Husband directs, wife obeys. But I have to admit, my response to him in that moment had little to do with an immediate understanding of headship and hierarchy. It wasn’t mapped out by a complementarian flow-chart. It wasn’t because of a role.
It was because I love him.
Over the last couple of decades, there’s been a strong push to recover a Biblical understanding of roles in marriage. But somewhere on that path, we’ve started taking short-cuts. Short-cuts around the gospel and right into legalism. And these short cuts have led us to think that obedience to the roles, that our ability to have perfect families and properly ordered homes, will show Christ to the world. So we end up talking more about paradigms and less about people, more about rules and less about Spirit.
Maybe it’s time we remembered what it’s all about in the first place. The truth is that we were never made for roles; we were made for relationships. And just as Christ had to remind the first-century Jews that man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man, we have to remember that marriage was not made for roles but roles for the benefit of the marriage. That the relationship, the one flesh unity, the loving communion is what is of greatest significance. That this, the love we have for one another, is what will show the world that we are His disciples.
And if you think about it, the differences in marriage are one of the greatest opportunities to do just that. Because here you have two sinful human beings—so diverse that even their molecular composition is different—who must learn to live in loving, daily communion. Not temporarily, but for a lifetime. And we learn that as we fail each other, as we selfishly demand our own way, and as we run to Christ for mercy. For only there do we experience true love and only there will we learn to extend that same love to each other. We will never learn it by simply conforming to roles.
So in that moment, when my husband nudged me, my deferring to him had less to do with performing my role as his wife than it did with loving him already. And quite frankly, why would I have done anything else? Why would I have chosen to barge ahead knowing that the man I loved didn’t want me to? Why would I have insisted on my own way when I knew it would make him uncomfortable? What wisdom, what convoluted sense of liberation would have led me to do something that he thought was unwise?
And so I didn’t.
As quickly as he had understood what I as about to do, I understood his objection. We looked each other in the eye and smiled that knowing smile that comes only from living and loving together. I settled back into my chair and comfortably nestled my head against his shoulder as if to tell him, “Yes, dear, of course I won’t.”
handerson Bio
Hannah R. Anderson lives in Roanoke, VA where she spends her days mothering three small children, loving her husband, and scratching out odd moments to write. She blogs at Sometimes a Light and has recently published Made For More.
Hannah, I might agree with parts, although I see a different side to young (and older) women because of our blessed church situation, but the women who are struggling, wherever they may be, I believe, are not going to find more comfort, strength, enabling, etc. by diminishing their role of submission in their marriage, church, work, etc., which I believe gives a clear flow chart in Scripture. I think the most helpful thing is for young women to have a better understanding of the gospel. They are saved from the eternal effects of Gen. 3:16, specifically, “yet your desire will be for your husband.” That “desire” or lack of submitting to him is now transformed, through true, genuine gospel salvation, to thoroughly enjoy and joyfully submit—“in all things”=no more struggling, no more works, no more clawing at trying to fulfill Scripture. The gospel has the power to save from everything external to renew the internal.
The other helpful and useful resource given to us by Scripture is for a young (and old) Christian woman to be mentored from Titus 2:3-5 which absolutely says to “love husbands”—in every way, companionship, “one flesh”, etc., but the last line, “being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored” has been greatly lost in our age and will continue to be blurred if we, as young Christian women don’t defend what Scripture blatantly writes. It is a grave error on our parts, I believe.
I’m beating a dead horse here. I’ve stated (overly so?) my case—we just can agree to disagree. I took this conversation further than I really wanted it to go. Sorry about that.
Thanks Hannah for the exchange. You’re a thoughtful writer. I appreciate it.
Blessings, Kim :)
BUT… and here’s the crux… my identity as a woman is not summed up by ONLY this list. When the Scripture addresses women specifically, it does not do so to the dissolution of everything else it teaches about broader humanity and identity in Christ. So my personhood is not an extension of my womanhood; my womanhood flows out of my personhood. And every function that Scripture calls women to is FIRST rooted in their identity in Christ. As an aside, we do not take this approach with men: we do not look at them first and foremost as husbands and fathers, although those roles are spiritual callings and there are plenty of Scriptural passages that address how they should function in those positions.
Understanding this distinction is crucial to how men and women will relate to each other, both in marriage and in the church. If I (or the men around me) view me only in light of the list that you mentioned, they will overlook everything else that Scripture teaches about women as a equal believers and human beings. And if I did the same for them as fathers and husbands, I would overlook their essential humanity as well.
I think we have to start with the essential equality of all believers—in the church or home—in order to achieve a truly Christian understanding of hierarchy. I am called to submit to my husband not because I am less than him in nature or function, but precisely because I am not. By definition, submission is the free act of my will to defer to him; it cannot be based in the false sense of hierarchy or authority that Susan pointed out.
And so I do submit, but only because it is God’s calling for me to lovingly do so.
And just to clarify my concerns about roles, a lot of my thinking has been sparked by what I see as an emphasis on roles/functions to the exclusion of robust teaching on the nature of womanhood and relationship in marriage. Not to open Pandora’s box any wider, but here are some specific examples of what I’m seeing:
1. There are serious conversations about whether young women should achieve higher education, not because they are not smart enough or gifted enough, but because they have been taught that their exclusive role (i.e. function) as a woman is to be a wife and mother.
2. Godly young women who are actively mothering and “wifing” are struggling under the sheer physical load but feel too guilty to get help because they directly relate their spirituality with their ability to perform their function well. When they do confess their struggles, it is met not with grace that engages and supports, but with a further focus on their role—the very one that they are finding so hard to perform. (I once left a young mothers’ group where precisely this happened and I remember thinking that these young women had come in feeling like failures and instead of encouraging them, they simply left feeling like failures at something really, really important.)
3. When women are told that their role is the most important thing about them, they have a hard time justifying doing anything that does not directly relate to that role. (How do you and I justify this conversation if we should be actively performing our roles? How can a woman have any personal interests if it does not directly relate to her husband?)
4. Single women and infertile women feel less like women than their married and mothering counterparts because we have talked so much about roles and so associated them with a woman’s essential identity before God.
5. Empty-nesters and widows struggle the same way because for years their identity was wrapped up in a function that is suddenly gone.
I’m not saying that there are not other things contributing to these issues, but I do think that our emphasis on role over loving relationship is a significant part of the problem. The Scripture is a full, multi-layered text that addresses every part of our humanity, including gender roles, but we must be careful not to emphasize gender roles more than the Bible itself does.
Kim :)
(Do you take cream and sugar or prefer your coffee black?) :)
“Equal” implies sameness in a particular respect though not necessarily in other respects.
- A pound of butter and a pound of beef are equal in weight, though quite different in substance.
- A quarterback and a wide receiver are equal in their “team memberness” but different in function.
- To borrow from 1 Cor.12, a nose and an ear are equal in their “body partness” and, Paul argues, in their importance, but they are diverse in function.
We could list several ways in which man and woman (or husb. & wife) are equal, and also several ways—according to Scripture—that they are not equal. One of the latter is authority (and the responsibility that goes with it). Another is function in the family (and the responsibilities that go with that).
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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