Personhood

Photo by The HK Photo Company on Unsplash

I recently had a long conversation with a friend wherein we talked about the traditional teachings of our particular conservative Christian culture and how we can see what those teachings have produced after decades of living them. Things don’t always turn out the way we think they will.

Just one of the problems with relationships in fundamental Christianity is that for so long our community (both the men and the women) has given men a pass in the name of them being the “head.” We’ve told both men and women that being the “head” means husbands make all the decisions. What our women have heard is that they should never say no, never disagree, never have opinions or thoughts or ideas of their own. They should always be supportive, no matter how outlandish the idea. That they should adopt whatever their husbands’ opinions, thoughts, and ideas are and make them their own. That a wife should “find herself in him.”

Think about that. We are teaching that a woman should set her very self—who she is at her core—aside and become (change herself into) what her husband wants. But as she does that, her personhood necessarily disappears one acquiescence at a time.

She should always be cheerful (repress her emotions) and always support her husband in whatever he wants to do (even if she has more expertise in this area and knows there is a better way). She should never be disagreeable because that’s not feminine. Being “sweet” means always going along with him (be a people pleaser). “Honor your husband” means make him look good to others no matter what he does in private (e.g., look at pornography).

Men have stopped cherishing their wives because they’ve been allowed free reign to be and do whatever they want rather than invest work in a two-person relationship that could be good for them both (more on that later). They don’t care about their wives because they don’t have to. And no wonder—we’ve taught the wives to give and bow and make zero demands and just take whatever he dishes out because he is the “head.”

My friend said, “Good women are being treated like slaves and have lost their dignity.” Our culture/community has taught wives to think like this. We have taught them that to have dignity is to be prideful. That their opinions and desires and preferences have no place in marriage, and that it is all about the man and what he thinks and what he wants and what he prefers. I saw a post the other day by a woman who said her husband liked creamy peanut butter and she liked crunchy peanut butter. She hadn’t had crunchy peanut butter in 16 years. A commenter asked, “Why don’t you just buy two different kinds of peanut butter?”

Indeed. Why can’t you have both? Why does the wife have to give up her preferences, but the husband does not? Can’t there be some kind of compromise? Creamy one month and crunchy the next? Or just buying both kinds? Why is it all for one person and none for the other? Is that what God intended when he made a “help meet for him”? Why do we teach this and wonder why women don’t have a sense of personhood?

Women unknowingly marry abusive husbands and then stay with them, full of guilt and shame, because we tell them they are responsible for their husbands’ actions. If you were sweeter (less emotional, more compliant, etc.) he wouldn’t be so angry. If you gave him more sex, he wouldn’t look at porn (this is the biggest lie ever told). If you . . . he wouldn’t . . . Fill in the blanks, it’s been said to a Christian woman in a lousy marriage.

And they two shall be one flesh.

We argue “but they are supposed to be one.” As always, I will say that I am no Bible scholar, but I think what it says is that they are “one flesh.” Now, I am observant enough to look at my husband and me and know that he has his flesh and I have mine. If I pinch his arm, he feels pain and I do not. We are two separate bodies with two separate brains and we joke all the time that we are as opposite as two people can possibly be (except for our love of ice cream). He is an early riser (4 am); I sleep until the sun comes up. He loves a huge breakfast; I don’t want to eat until 11. He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow; I want to read in bed for an hour before I turn the light off.

We are two distinct people who come together as a married couple and become one flesh. It is my opinion that “one flesh” is talking about intimate relations in marriage. You get the picture.

So we are still two distinct people with our own preferences. As a married woman, I am still allowed (by God) to like what I like, and he is allowed (by God) to like what he likes. Why would it be wrong before God for me to prefer creamy peanut butter when my husband prefers crunchy? Yet that is what we are teaching. We tell the wife that, because her husband likes crunchy peanut butter, she must change her preference to be the same as his—not just eat the crunchy, but actually make herself prefer it.

She must think the same things as her husband.

This teaching is harmful on several fronts.

First, it takes away her personhood. She no longer has permission to be who she is with her own likes and dislikes and thoughts and preferences and ideas. She comes to the marriage with 20 (or more) years of life experiences that have shaped her into the exact person that she is, good and bad. The husband marries her in that state—just as she marries him in the state in which he comes to the altar. We tell her she cannot expect him to change, and in the same breath we tell her to change herself to suit what her husband wants. But if he married her, isn’t that what he wants—HER, as she is? I am not saying we should never change; obviously we all do change over the years based on the life that comes our way. I am also not saying we should never compromise and do things the way our spouse prefers; compromise is part of marriage. But to ask one partner to give up who they are? That’s a step that has far-reaching negative consequences.

The second way this teaching is harmful is that it removes the wife’s ability to be the “help meet for him” that God created her to be. Sometimes being a help meet looks like stringing hot wire from one end of the farm to the other so we can move cows to a new pasture (not something I would have chosen if I had stayed single). Sometimes it looks like me telling my husband, based on my expertise in a certain area, that his decision is not the best one and maybe he should consider this alternative (something that comes more naturally to me).

We don’t know what we don’t know. ~Tony Overbay, LMFT

I have said for years that God gives husbands a help meet (specially suited) for them because they need help. They don’t know it all. They don’t see all the perspectives. They have blind spots and they need someone to help them see what they don’t see. If a wife has to stop being who she is, her ability to be that help specially suited for her husband is stripped away. She is ham-strung, unable to give the help she thinks he needs. She becomes nothing more than a yes-man, and that is no help to him.

Proverbs says,

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

Is a wife not a friend? She should be. Husbands and wives should be willing to sharpen each others’ countenances—and receive sharpening.

Weaker

Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered. (1 Peter 3:7)

I am not in the habit of telling husbands how they should act, but I share this verse because I want us to make a distinction to wives. God tells husbands to live with their wives according to knowledge, honoring their wives as the “weaker vessel.” Is that talking about physical strength? Emotional fortitude? Something else? As a non-Bible scholar, I can’t be sure, but here’s what it does not say: lesser. A wife is not lesser than her husband. He is told to honor her as the weaker vessel, which sounds like she gets more honor because she is weaker, not because she is in some way defective and needs to be fixed.

God told Paul, “. . . my strength is made perfect in weakness,” not in lesserness. Clearly, weakness is not a character flaw. Let’s stop using the term “weaker” like it’s derogatory. God does not use it that way.

Rest

A year ago I wrote about my observations on the book of Ruth. I saw the story of Naomi and Ruth and Boaz in a different way, and shared the whole thing in this post. Something I specifically noticed was how God kept referring to marriage as “rest.” Here’s what I wrote about that:

One of the things I found interesting in this story is that in verse 1:9 when Naomi is telling the girls to go back to their mothers, she prays they will find “rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” She wants them to go find new Moabite husbands so they’ll have someone to take care of them and they can have rest.

Then in 3:1 while the whole process between Boaz and Ruth is going on, she says to Ruth, “. . . shall I not seek rest for thee, that it may be well with thee?” Naomi was trying to help orchestrate the marriage of Boaz and Ruth so that Ruth would have rest.

And finally in verse 18 of that chapter, Naomi tells Ruth to wait and watch, that Boaz “will not be in rest, until he have finished the thing this day.” In other words, once the marriage was finalized, Boaz would also have rest.

Clearly, God’s plan for marriage is rest. Probably for a woman, it is physical and emotional rest. She would be provided for and cherished. A woman can rest in that. For a man, maybe it’s psychological rest. He would have a partner, a helper, someone to stand by him through it all. But for both the husband and wife, marriage is intended to bring rest.

If a wife has to constantly change who she is, is she really at rest? She is not. She is in a state of high alert, always trying to be something she is not to make sure she’s staying within the lines drawn for her by her husband. That’s not rest—that’s hypervigilance that causes high cortisol levels and a perpetual state of nervous system dysregulation that results in chronic health problems.

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How do we avoid all this? By letting women be who they are. By not forcing them into one preferred mold. By letting them think what they think and allowing the Holy Spirit to correct them, just like we do with men.

If, as David said in Proverbs 21:1,

The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will

then certainly God can change the heart of a husband or a wife, and we as a conservative Christian community, as teachers of good things, and as examples of godliness don’t need to force our preferences on them. We need to pray and trust God to turn them whithersoever HE will.