Yesterday I talked about needing better options for marriage. Today’s post is about equality being our option.

 

I grew up with a domineering, sometimes emotionally abusive mother, and a mild-mannered dad who just wanted to keep the peace.

I can’t write about my marriage without talking about my parent’s marriage. 

I wish I could pretend all the yelling and drama didn’t exist.

I wish dysfunction hadn’t touched my life.

But it did, and it shaped me.

The freedom I’ve discovered has partly been borne out of the pain I grew up in.  I can only hope to inspire my kids to the same freedoms and equalities without giving them a foundation of drama and dysfunction.

Growing up, I heard two phrases all the time, that make me cringe even now, as I can still hear my mom screaming them as she followed my dad across the house, making sure he knew she was there and unhappy.  They were “peace at any price!‘ and ‘you are supposed to love me like Christ loved the church!’

Even now, when I read that verse in Ephesians, I want to throw up.  Peace at any price was about how my dad tried to handle conflict.  He actually, unbelievable as it seems, wanted to bring conflicts to a peaceful resolution, even if he didn’t get ‘what was his.’

Not to completely throw my mom under the bus; she grew up in a very abusive and dysfunctional home, and has never really dealt with those issues. So I can logically understand where her pain and drama comes from; I can’t logically understand why she still, 35 years later, refuses to get counseling.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I did learn some good things from her.

I learned that sometimes you need to stand up, passionately defend and even fight, for issues, for people.  I have seen that sometimes the cost of peace at any price is genocide, starvation, and slavery.

But when it came to marriage, I knew my mom didn’t submit, even though she claimed that was all she did.  And I saw the fall-out from my dad capitulating to her on everything, even when it was harmful.  I felt the absence of a defender when I was being oppressed and demeaned, which I now realize is why I am so passionate about justice issues, particularly human slavery.

As I grew up in the typical, conservative evangelical culture, where I was told over and over again that men need to lead and women need to follow, and seeing the failure of that in my own home, I thought that if my parents would have actually been biblical, life would have been great. That was my mindset as I eventually got married.

Life is funny, and I now realize my husband is more like my dad than I thought, and I am more like my mom than I wish.

I have known since I was a teenager that I was strong and stubbornly independent.

As we matured in the early years of our marriage, I knew I had to restrain that aspect of myself, or I would run over my husband, and he was immature enough to think loving me meant letting me.

Because of that, our marriage has been one of equality since the beginning, even though we both thought the only right way was complementarianism. 

I was independent enough that I was not going to ‘let’ a man tell me what to do.

I was aware enough that I tried not to be ‘the ball and chain’ telling him what to do.

Obviously it wasn’t perfect, and we married at 19 and 20, (yes, I’m the older one!), and we were both immature, struggling with having kids, work, college, and there wasn’t a lot of time or energy to spend thinking about or debating marriage issues.  We just did what we knew worked for us.

*******

Five years into our marriage, we read the book Sex God, and that was the first time I had heard of the term ‘mutual submission‘.  I just remember reading that section over and over, in shock, thinking ‘there is a term for what we’ve been doing?  And it’s biblical???‘

(I had the same revelation when I read God of the Possible and realized I had believed that since I was a kid. Seriously. What 7 year old ponders open theism?  I was weird.  But I digress.)

It was one of the most freeing things I’ve ever read.  All this time I had been under a secret burden of guilt, feeling like I wasn’t really being a good wife, because I was only trying to moderate my personality, instead of trying to completely change it.  I (thought I) knew that to really be a good wife, I needed to follow, submit, trust, respect, obey.  I thought that if I wasn’t obeying and following, it was because I didn’t trust or respect him enough.

I was viewing him as a master, and my willingness to obey depended on how good of a ruler he was.

And then when I threw in the important values of trust and respect, it turned into a snarled mess where I was measuring his worth as a person, his value as a husband, against how good of a boss he was to me.

So even though I was happy that I wasn’t being forced to obey him, I thought I didn’t respect him because he wasn’t making me.  I would tell him I didn’t trust him, because unconsciously I saw him as a failure because he wasn’t ‘head of the house’, whatever that meant.  Even though if he truly had been a complementarian husband, I would have turned into a caged beast, wanting to escape.

But that was what I had been taught.  That was what I thought, and our marriage suffered because I wasn’t able to trust and respect him on his own merits as a man.  I limited myself to viewing him through the lens of a husband, and however much he failed his role, meant that he wasn’t good enough for me.

Discovering that mutuality is a good thing, even the ideal thing, was like the sun shining in full force on our marriage.

The shadow of guilt disappeared.  I wasn’t ashamed anymore of being strong or feeling some responsibility for the direction of our family.  The embarrassment of not being submissive, of feeling like I was doing it all wrong and didn’t want anyone to know, disappeared.  I think it even took some pressure off him, the feeling that he wasn’t living up to his potential as super-husband.  The church puts so much pressure on men – no wonder they ‘don’t lead’.  I realized I could truly relate to him as an equal, and I could trust and respect him because he was a good man, a faithful husband who wrestles with following Jesus in the way that fits his personality.  We didn’t need the church standard to measure our marriage against.

Imagine what it would be like if, instead of using and promoting curse-based marriage resources, the church started creating and using creation-based resources? 

These patriarchy-based conferences give men an impossible task, and an unbearable load of responsibility, and at the same time, severely limit what a woman can do.

Which  in turn, causes so many husbands and wives to sit under guilt, feeling like they are never going to have a truly godly marriage.

Then they have to worry that someday they are going to have to stand in front of God and give an account for all their failures.

No. 

Not anymore for this marriage. 

There is another option. 

A better way.

Equality does not demean men or lift women over them.  It doesn’t emasculate men or cause women to ‘act like a man‘.

Equality in marriage gives husbands and wives the freedom to express their God-given personalities to work together honestly, without guilt or shame that they’re not doing it right.  Living life together with an equal partner creates balance, acceptance, and the joy that exists in freedom.

The possibilities that exist when the shackles of tradition are lifted are infinite. 

I don’t know that the pain of my childhood was necessary, but I do know that the freedom that has come out of it is priceless.

 

How has your parents marriage shaped your view of your own marriage?

 

This post is part of Rachel Held Evan’s Week of Mutuality.