In a recent thread, several people gave accounts of marriages which are problematic in some way. There were stories of several so-called “complementarian” marriages in which the wife is not able to make any decision without running it past her husband. There was the so-called “egalitarian” marriage in which the husband showed no impulse to protect, support, and cherish his wife in her time of need. There were seemingly “model” marriages which can only be described as whitewashed tombs. And, of course, there were the horror stories of abuse. After several of these negative examples, one commenter opined that she wishes she had more positive examples to cite. Another replied with the following hopeful plea:
Maybe there are some folks with “beautiful marriages” reading this who could lead the way?
On the whole, the institution of marriage is in a state of disarray today. Divorce, marital infidelity, and domestic violence are rampant, and there does not appear to be much appreciable difference between Christians and non-Christians. Anecdotally, we all know plenty of broken homes and miserable marriages; and we can think of few marriages we can genuinely describe as “beautiful.” Beyond that, we all know too many families which appeared to be “perfect” but which suddenly seemed to implode. Who can blame us, therefore, if we grow cynical and wonder if any marriage is truly happy?
Then there are our suspicions that no marriage on the other side of the complegalitarian divide can really be happy. If I claim that my “complementarian” marriage is a happy one, at least some egalitarians will dismiss that claim. “Of course you think it’s happy! You’re the one with all the power. But your wife is likely in a state of quiet desperation.” If my wife were to write in and tell you what a wonderful marriage she has, those same egalitarians will assert that she is somehow deceived, ignorant of what true freedom and equality feels like, afraid to speak out, or trying hard to convince herself that she really is happy. Conversely, if a male egalitarian talks about how wonderful his marriage is, many complementarians will suspect him of just settling for the easy way out and abdicating his leadership. Or if an egalitarian woman describes her happy marriage, those same comps will suspect her of somehow “running the show”.
All of these suspicions and stereotypes can make it difficult to cite positive examples of marriages that work. But it seems to me that comps and egals would find much common ground if we actually began talking about how to have a successful marriage. I have long contended that there is not much visible difference between a good complementarian marriage and a good egalitarian marriage. I have read moderate comps and moderate egals say essentially the same thing in the comments on this blog. I have also read comments by hardline egals who cannot accept that it is possible to have a complementarian marriage in which the husband leads without becoming authoritarian; and comments by hardline comps who cannot accept that an egalitarian marriage can function well without one person clearly being in charge.
If we spend all our time reacting to the hardliners, we’ll do little to improve the state of Christian marriage. But if we set aside our assumptions and prejudices long enough to consider some positive examples, I think we’ll find there’s much about which we agree.
I’ve been married to Lisa for fourteen years. During that entire span, I’ve been blessed to be able to work at home, and during almost that entire span, she’s been a stay-at-home mom and homeschooler. That means that she’s had to deal with my presence more than most women who have been married twice as long. Yet rather than smothering each other or growing tired of each other, we have become incredibly close.
We’ve certainly had our conflicts, and some of them have gotten ugly. There have been times when we seriously wondered if our marriage would survive. Thankfully, those times have been relatively few and far between. And when we’ve had them, we’ve eventually swallowed our pride, repented, and worked through them.
Aside from my relationship with Christ, my marriage to Lisa is my greatest source of happiness. I regard being her husband as my highest “calling” and most important “vocation.” I’ve seen that by the power of the Spirit, a husband and wife truly can die to self and live for each other, and that when they do, they can experience rich delight and inexpressible joy.
Lisa and I have forged what we see as a “beautiful marriage” in a complementarian framework, and I would love to write about how we interact with each other on a daily basis, how we work through the times when we don’t see eye to eye, and how we view authority and submission. I wonder, however, if any such discussions will be taken seriously. Will the examples I give be regarded as a valid working out of complementarian principles? Or will they be viewed with suspicion and summarily dismissed? Am I able to reach across the aisle to find common ground upon which to build “beautiful” Christian marriages? Or is my only option preaching to the choir?
Preaching to the choir certainly is easier, but that’s not why I participate in this blog.
I appreciate this post, David! I don’t often comment on this blog, though I read it regularly, because I’ve gotten tired of hearing the worst cases.
I’ve been married to my husband for 16 years. We do have a head in our marriage – and it’s Christ.
We have never had a situation where we needed any other head. We’ve never had a situation where a decision had to be made “right now” and we couldn’t come to an agreement on it.
We talk about things that haven’t happened yet (usually at my insistence because I like to be prepared) so that when those times do happen – and they have – we have already come to some awareness of how the other feels and make the decisions easier.
There are areas where my husband is strong and he leads there. There are areas where I am strong and I lead there.
We aren’t perfect. He tends to want to be a little lazy and not do the things he knows need to be done. I tend to want to take charge and make all the decisions. This would certainly be an easy, fleshly habit we could easily fall into. But we haven’t. We’re both aware of these tendencies and work to rise above them.
We never put a name to our marriage type. We never said we were egalitarians. We just came to the conclusion after watching this debate (while attending two different churches – one So Bapt and one Nazarene) that we’re egals. But what name gets slapped on us isn’t likely to change how we function.
I think we both would prefer to discover that other people see that we both submit to the will of God in all our lives than that someone see, well, anything else.
David,
The very short description of your marriage sounds very much like Gary Thomas’, Wife’s name included! Are you him in disguise? lol.
I’d love to hear stories of how complementarian married couples have dealt with conflict. How does your authority play out in those conflicts, and how do you define submission.
I am a very loose, soft complementarian, one of those who doesn’t understand the concept of “male authority” in marriage because she just doesn’t see it from Scripture, but she does believe that a wife is called to be a helper to her husband and to submit to him. As such, I am not interested in pursuing my own thing, but seek to work alongside my husband in “our thing”.
I believe the final authority in our marriage is Christ. He is the definite head.
A lot of Complementarian teaching regarding marriage is difficult for me to read because it places so much emphasis on a man’s authority in the home, and sadly, I’ve seen wives loose themselves in those marriages. Interestingly, if you talk with the wives, they are the stronger ones. Their husbands go from being a tad puffed up, to being so full of themselves they are ready to burst.
Did I answer your question, or did I just throw a bit more wood in the roaring fire?
David, we can lead a horse to water but we can’t make him (hmm, or her!) drink! I have seen beautiful complementarian marriages, and I would very much appreciate hearing more specifics of how you and Lisa live out that beauty in your own marriage. I realize that it hurts to get dismissive comments. But I hope that everyone who visits this blog have been maturing so that those kinds of comments would not occur as much now as they might have in the past. I’ve seen some evidence of that in recent comments, with better listening to one another. From my own POV, I’d encourage you to go ahead, risking some hurt. This may be the only blog where we really do try to have all sides heard. I’m doing my best to disapprove comments which do not reflect the safe environment we are striving for.
I very much appreciate this blog post of yours. I want to hear how a complementarian husband treats his wife as someone worthy of his love and respect and not demeaned in the process of your complementarian belief that at some point you are the spiritual leader.
Thanks so much for this post, David, and for all of your recent posts! I want to echo your sentiments. When I started posting to this blog, it was to learn. Instead, I found myself engaged in a debate. While I occasionally contributed positively to that debate, I too often felt backed into a corner and responded in an unloving fashion. Since my response is my responsibility, that is a negative reflection on me. I deleted a couple of posts I regretted. But, that didn’t seem appropriate, in that it left an inaccurate representation of my contributions (or lack thereof) to our discussions. So, I deleted most of my earlier posts.
Nonetheless, my original reason for following and contributing to the blog remains. The reason that I want to learn how egalitarians work things out in marriage is that I’m in complete agreement with Bonnie’s earlier statement that most comps AND most egals have engaged in significant overcorrections. As a result, neither comp materials nor egal materials do a very good job of addressing some of the practical issues that my husband and I struggle with. Sadly, the secular marriage literature has been as helpful to me as much of the Christian marriage literature. It is the Christian literature that tells me the principles by which I want to live my life, but it is the secular literature that has provided a lot of practical advice on how to live out my Christian beliefs.
That’s problematic to me, because underlying much of the secular literature is a philosophy of pragmatism that is decidedly anti-Christian. If I spend too much time with that literature, I face the danger of having my thinking subtly corrupted by a worldly philosophy.
It’s also problematic to me because I have a young daughter. In a few years, she will need to make basic choices about who/whether to marry, whether to work outside the home, etc. I want her choices to be informed.
I’m willing to share snippets of my journey, but hesitate to do so because when I’ve done so in the past, my sharing has come across as triumphalistic. I don’t have a perfect marriage, but like David, next to my relationship with Christ, it is my complementarian marriage that is my biggest source of joy. I’m willing to share, and I can handle negative feedback. It’s the general slamming of the comp paradigm that arouses my ire, not the posts by folks who’ve disagreed with particular choices my husband and I have made. Yet, I also know that I need to learn how to share without leaving others who contribute to the blog with a mistaken impression that I think I have found all the answers. As a practical matter, I haven’t yet learned how to share without leaving others with the mistaken idea that I think I’ve figured everything out.
I’d love to hear from you, David (and others).
Ellen,
Just because some people have issues with Comp. teaching, it doesn’t mean we believe Comp. marriages can’t work.
I, for one, would like to hear how people apply complementarian teaching in a loving marriage.
Btw, I wanted to add some rambling thoughts to the conversational mix…
In my opinion, comp or egal philosophies don’t *make* a marriage good. They provide a framework for relating, which can be helpful, but the *goodness* of the thing lies in the fact that the two married people can say of eachother, as the scientific theory of relational attachment goes, “You are my best bet.”
When a husband is controlling or otherwise abusive, the fact is that a wife can’t look at him and say, “You’re my best bet.” He’s her best bet for hurting her (in various ways)…but not for helping her. So she’s unable to be attached to him in healthy ways (and the comp paradigm, if she believe it, makes it that much worse for her. That’s not to say the comp paradigm is bad in and of itself, but more that it is bad for women who are married to controlling or otherwise abusive men). The same is true for a controlling wife (or any other majorly disfunctional relational charactaristic)—a spouse cannot look at the other spouse and say, “You are my best bet,” when that other spouse is a source of constant pain. The ties of attachment are severely cut, if not altogether severed, at that point.
However, in a comp paradigm where two people *are* attached in a healthy way, I can imagine it would be just as wonderful as any other paradigm—because the thing that is beautiful is the healthy attachment of two souls, NOT the paradigm that they call themselves in name.
That’s my theory, anyways.
Personally, I am struggling to see my husband as “my best bet.” That’s a very honest appraisal of a situation that I spent many years trying to deny. I’m not sure, in that sense, how *good* things can ever be. It seems to me that in marriage, you can get a good match, a tolerable one, or you can make a really bad match…
And while the match is affected by relationship practices, at the core level, if two people aren’t very compatible, applying relational principles will do very little to change that. Principles might make a bad match more tolerable…but outward principles will never make “soulmates” out of anybody. In the end, it’s what you do with what you have that matters.
In my case, I’m thinking my marriage wasn’t such a great match…I can look back at our dating years and see many red flags that I completely ignored… I was not a healthy person…and I did not make a healthy choice. The handwriting was all the wall, as it were, and I put a blindfold over my eyes and refused to see it. Now I am in a situation where I have to experience the consequences of that unhealthy choice.
That’s not to say I don’t deeply love my husband. He truly loves God and is a very tender soul, underneath it all. But I have a tolerable match—it’s not a bad one. But we are not soul-mates and we never have been.
I have dear friends who happily say they are married to their “best friend.” I have never been able to say that, not during our dating/courtship nor after marrying. This is more to say that I’m facing reality and realizing that applying principles is fine and good, in it’s place, but that deep relationships are built, in many ways, on compatibility between two people.
Those who do not have a decent degree of compatibility are probably always going to struggle, *if* they think that marriage requires being best friends plus a deep romatic love. The folks who live in the lands of arranged marriages think of marriage in an entirely different way, almost business-like, which is actually something I’m striving to do.
Some of us aren’t going to have a soul-mate, a best friend, or sometimes, even a friend. I’m coming to terms with that, and seeking to love and honor as best as I am able to, where I’m at. If my marriage grows into something deeper, in a healthy way, then praise God. If it doesn’t, am I willing to praise God just as much? I want to be and I choose to be. I want to be committed to being the best spouse I can be in the situation I’m in.
I love my husband in a very deep way. But we aren’t best friends. And from what it looks like, we aren’t ever going to be. We’re doing good just to be friends…in that sense, we’ve come a long way just to be able to use the word, “friend.” We are currently seeking to figure out how to relate in ways that are constructive to working together as a team with kindness and respect.
Learning to relate in love and honor, as we recognize what is, is a new thing for me. I prefer the blind optimism of denial. It’s much more comforting. But here I am. I am a follower of Christ and I am called to love. That much I know. I want my husband to experience God’s love through me. This can be SO hard, I freely admit it. But if I cannot love here, I am not worthy of being called a follower of Christ.
You were worried about being painfully honest, David (and for good reasons). I am sharing my own painfully honest thoughts, knowing I might get slapped soundly for them. Conversation will get nowhere if we’re not real. I appreciate your heart and your gentleness.
Love,
Molly
((( Molly)))
That’s sad, but I think that mismatches or tolerable matches are a lot more common than “soul mates”.
I really recommend the book “Sacred Marriage”. Yes, the author is Complementarian. It’s about how marriage is a tool God uses to work on making us holy. It’s helping me to view marriage from a very different perspective, setting aside expectations and learning to grow through the circumstances. As you already know, it’s not easy. I enjoyed the book.
Molly,
I empathize so much with you. I look back and I know that I was married for 15 years before I made a peep about the fact that our marriage was not happy. I defended the comp paradigm to others and was incredibly loyal.
However, as the child-bearing years passed, and my focus shifted to how I would live out my life, I realized that I had no plan or vision of the future.
When my mother died, I realized that her visceral disapproval of divorce had been a deep bondage for me, and that I had uniformly presented to others a view of our marriage as positive because of her influence, that her daughters must be successfully married.
For the next 15 years, I quietly worked towards independence with the stated and clearly expressed (to my husband) intention of leaving unless he would treat me as an equal. That never happened.
However, my point is that only after 30 years did I admit to anyone that my marriage was not good. It takes a lot of courage to admit the truth.
To contribute something positive, one marriage that I have seen where the wife just dotes on and cares for her husband in every way, is Maude Fee, Gordon Fees wife. He is thoroughly egalitarian and when you see them together you know that they live for and care for each other in the way no comps that I know do. She is truly caring of him in a wifely way. She is worried about his health right now and goes with him when he speaks to support him. No feminist, just a loving wife.
Molly,
Please don’t be too discouraged.
Don’t forget that Abba Father weeps with you.
Don’t forget that marriage is a marathon, not a sprint. Most couples who report a significant period of dissatisfaction with their marriage work through the dark period and are subsequently happy and very glad they stuck it out together.
Don’t forget that you and your husband are coming closer to agreement on the meaning of marriage. Comp couples typically report that their marriages are happy, as do egal couples. The unhappiness typically arises in marriages in which the husband and wife disagree about the appropriate marriage model. Be encouraged that while you and your husband are not in agreement about what your marriage should look like, you are moving closer to agreement that you were a few months ago.
Marilyn
Sue,
I think you bring up a really good point. Of course, as I’ve previously expressed, I can’t state anything from a position of having had a marriage that “worked.” However, I am so totally blessed to know quite a few really amazing couples. One thing they have in common is the thread you discovered as time passed–vision of a purpose.
I can say fully all of the amazing marriages I’ve seen have at their heart a sense of purpose. I’m not talking about “shared ministries.” I’m talking about a certain sense that the marriage itself was a purposeful thing and a means of serving God–just being married and working things through. The understanding that the relationship was “the purpose.”
My faith tradition stresses a strong emphasis on relationships (every kind). It’s nice to see that perhaps this might be more than just a denominational “quirk.”
Molly–thanks. I can tell you spend great effort contemplating what you believe. I appreciate that. (You go girl!!)
MQ,
I am trying to explain that being egalitarian has nothing to do with being a “man-hating feminist.” The CBMW is the organization which has had a campaign for many years to discredit Gordon Fee and Bruce Walkte. I was asked to work on this. I am trying to explain that men that I respect have been deeply hurt by the CBMW. To love and respect male leaders that I know, means to disclose dishonesty when I can. I have written to CBMW and they know that they have published stuff about the TNIV translation that is not true. This is no secret.
I would appreciate if you could take back your “man-hating feminist” remark. Did you see my comment here. We have to be free to say things that are provably true in this forum without being called names.
I see by the poll that I’m definitely in the minority here. I’m an egalitarian. I’ve been married to my husband for 16 years although we were late marrying.
My one piece of advice to newly-marrying couples is ‘always say thank you to your spouse and never take him or her for granted.’
My husband and I have built our marriage on each of us putting the other first. I think that’s agape love and I struggle to understand why it’s allegedly against God’s will.
Sue,
I am trying to explain, that if you wish to hold Mr. Ware accountable for the regrettable behavior of a few people who misuse his teachings, then, you must also be accountable for those regrettable few who misuse the track of your position.
I’m not asking you to give up your overall position regarding comp/egal issues. I am suggesting that what is good for the gander is also good for the goose.
Molly,
I love you and thank you for sharing your story. I am quite sure that it has touched a lot of hearts. I know it has touched mine.
Madame,
I am going to pick up that book today at the library. It sounds good and just what I need to hear.
coming out of retirement to say that David, you do not sound the same guy who wrote this post and for that I am grateful!:
http://complegalitarian.blogspot.com/2008/02/can-complementarian-man-submit-to-his.html
“Physically exhausted, stressed out, worried about the future, and probably more than a little Post-Partum, Lisa began asking me about the possibility of using birth-control. At first, I tried to give her perspective and reassure her, I made it clear that I still believed this was God’s will for our family, I pointed out the need to follow God’s will even when it proves personally costly, and I generally tried to get her to see things my way. I also prayed repeatedly that if this was truly God’s will for our family, he would change Lisa’s heart. Conversely, I prayed that if I had gotten it wrong all these years, God would change mine.”
At the time, I thought that your wife’s stress WAS your sign that it would be ok to let up a bit as it was mostly ‘personally costly’ to HER for YOU to follow God’s will.
From the last 2 posts, it seems you have become much more of a soft comp.
Sue, if it helps at all, when I read that (for me at least) you did not come to mind. Not at all.
I have also asked at least for a certain comparison not to be made. That has not happened, so I realistically move on.