She wanted to follow God and be a good complementarian wife.
But after a few years it all fell apart!
Before I jump into our story, a few definitions.
Complementarianism is the belief that God created men to be in authority over women, in the church and the home (some complementarians just believe in one or the other, but not both).
God created men to be in authority, so a woman must honor that authority if she wants to honor God, which often results in feeling as if it’s somehow sinful to bring up anything that’s wrong in the marriage, or to have opinions of your own (after all, like best-selling author Emerson Eggerichs says, a woman is supposed to value her husband’s insight and ideas over her own, since women are easily deceived).
This dynamic can go so wrong so easily, as my husband Keith talked about in this blog series on complementarianism.
today I want to bring the effects of complementarianism home with a personal story.
One of our patreon supporters left an amazing comment in our private Facebook group, and I wanted to share it today. She wrote:
Spending most of the last 30 years doing my level best to be the complementarian dream wife until it about killed me and almost destroyed our marriage has me making the following observations.
1. Complementarian wives can be terrible helpmeets.
If my job is to support my husband and the only options are “yes, dear” and “of course” then how could I possibly be trusted as a safeguard for ANYthing? Being forbidden to engage in critical thought or the alternative of feeling immense guilt when the need to challenge a potentially disastrous decision made it nearly impossible for either of us to grow.
2. Complementarian wives can easily fall into the parental role in the household.
It’s a hard position to hold while simultaneously doing our best to make sure we are also sexually available at ALL times. Not to mention feeling rejected and anxious when our husband doesn’t have the Every Man’s Battle level of libido. Surely, I must be doing something wrong. I couldn’t accept that his lower than “evangelical average” libido was anything other than either my failure or his. No grace for the way he was made. Very little gratitude either.
We are so much happier now that we can rest in the knowledge that we love each other all the time and sometimes we have sex. Great sex every so often is WAY better than what we had before. Also, it has created space for us to love each other differently in the off time.
3. My drive to be the perfect Comp wife was my own drive.
It took me a long time to realize I was forcing an identity my husband didn’t ask for. It wasn’t even a thing he saw as needful.
He was trying to live in a paradigm that he believed was meeting the need I kept expressing. It was super humbling to realize I drove that wagon and demanded those roles solidify in that way because I had been so deeply indoctrinated in those ideals.
I believed our marriage struggles were solely because he wasn’t leading more strongly. To the point, and to “build strength in him”, I demanded he existed front and center in roles and responsibilities where I was easily more comfortable and more competent… All of which lead to me resenting what I perceived as his ineptitude and feeding resentment that left me feeling like he just wasn’t trying hard enough. Once we started recognizing capacity was more important than hard line roles and adjusted responsibilities accordingly? So much more peace.
…
There’s more. We have been on quite the journey these past 2-3 years. I have been so grateful for the words and wisdom here and on the podcast. You have given me verbiage to explain what is happening in my heart and have given our marriage a second chance. Even after 30 years.
Many women have put themselves–and their husbands–in cages to meet a complementarian ideal.
Her story is so interesting, isn’t it? It wasn’t that her husband was trying to lord over her, but rather that she believed that to honor God, their marriage had to look a certain way, with him leading and being opinionated and sexually insatiable, and when that wasn’t his personality, she tried to foist something that didn’t fit onto both of them.
And made them both miserable in the process.
This is what we mean when we say that stereotypes don’t work.
It’s amazing that Christians can look at the world that God has made and glory in the deep, rich variety of creation (for pity’s sake, there are 400,000 species of beetles alone!), and yet we think that marriage has to look only one way, and that men and women need to look only one way.
We ignore different personalities, different interests, different gifts, and try to force ourselves into a mold.
And it makes us miserable (which is what we found in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue, as well. We talk about this in chapter 2!).
“Biblical womanhood” does not look only one way.
In fact, it is actually quite rare in Scripture to find a husband/wife relationship which mirrors the complementarian “ideal.” What we see instead is women hearing from God and acting on it. We see women taking initiative (and bad things happening when women don’t think for themselves). We see men being kind and empathetic and emotional. We see the whole gamut of personalities and emotions and giftings being celebrated.
When churches and authors and theologians insist that there is only one way to do marriage, and that it must look like a man being in charge and a woman being under his authority, supporting him and not saying much of anything, that is not biblical. That is them wanting to continue a patriarchal culture. And I hope that one day the church will wake up and be honest about that–and that women will see that this quiet, supportive wife who doesn’t think much for herself has very little resemblance to any actual woman in the Bible.
If biblical women who are lauded and praised don’t exhibit traditional “biblical womanhood”, then maybe it isn’t biblical?
And to remind us of that, we have “biblical womanhood” merch that you can use as Stocking Stuffers or quick Christmas gifts (you’ve got to order soon to get it by Christmas!). We’ve got mugs, tote bags, notebooks, stickers, magnets, and more that show all the different things that biblical women did!
These make great conversation starters! No one can fault you in a complementarian church for bringing an insulated mug celebrating all the women of the Bible. And who can fault you for having a tote bag at your women’s Bible study with all these biblical women?
But perhaps it will help people think, and notice that women did lead (like Deborah); they did teach (like Priscilla); they did set boundaries (like Vashti); they did win battles (like Jael); they did protect (like Abigail); they did propesy (like Anna). Biblical women were strong, and used their gifts.
And we can too!
And when we get this new vision of what biblical womanhood is, then maybe, like this Patreon supporter, we can stop trying to force ourselves into a mold, or our husband into a mold, and we can instead celebrate who God made us, together.
Have you ever felt stuck in a mold that didn’t fit? How did you get out of it? Let’s talk in the comments!
There wasn’t one mold for men or for women in the Bible. If so that would mean that God created two cookie cutters: one pink and one blue. I like to say that I am not a cookie cutter Christian! I am custom built.
I love that! “I am custom built.”
How many women could write that entire piece almost word for word?
I know I could.
Same.
“I demanded he existed front and center in roles and responsibilities where I was easily more comfortable and more competent…”
And that’s the funny thing I’ve noticed with so many complementarian marriages. The husband is supposed to be ‘the boss’ of the wife, and it’s the wife who is ‘demanding’, ‘forcing’ or ‘insisting’ that they each fulfil a specific role. My own mother was a classic case. She was adamant that the husband was the head of the house, and my father was going to be head “whether he likes it or not”.
No one ever seems to stop to ask “If I’m demanding that my husband lead, then which of us is really doing the leading? If I’m having to force my husband to lead and constantly prop him up so that he can do it, might that suggest that he is not actually designed for leadership?”
I tried so hard to be a “biblical” wife, and took onto myself a LOT of work that I thought I “had” to do, but which left me exhausted and overwhelmed (and was definitely not thanked for what I did!) By the time I was ready to change and learn to do things differently, our trajectory was written in stone, as far as my ex was concerned. I don’t know if we could have changed things earlier, but we definitely couldn’t at the later date. Those teachings are so very harmful, and I am glad we can speak out against them now.
It really does breed such dysfunctional relationships. I’m sorry for what you went through!
The patriarchy existed two thousand years ago. Doesn’t mean that Jesus blessed it.
Not much else to say than that.
Yep. Yep.
I once heard someone make the observation that Ananias and Sapphira basically followed the rules to be the model complementarian couple. The husband lies to the apostles, and the wife goes along with her husband’s plan- and they are judged and struck dead by God for that. (Yes, complementarians would say that a wife shouldn’t submit to her husband when he wants her to sin, but it’s unclear how this can possibly fit in with the rest of their teaching which says a wife shouldn’t really think too hard about what her husband tells her to do.)
Also, I learned in purity culture that “God’s plan” for all of us girls is that we will follow the purity rules and therefore have a perfect marriage. A LONG time later, it occurred to me, wait, there aren’t really ANY women in the bible who followed the purity rules and had a perfect marriage.
Yes, exactly! Emerson Eggerichs tells women that they can’t trust their own insight or intuition. So how exactly are women supposed to say no when a husband is leading them into sin, if they’re not supposed to think?
And the women in Jesus’ genealogy certainly didn’t follow purity culture rules.
Technically, Mary followed the purity rules and had a beautiful marriage. 🙂
That I need explained. 😁
I’m not seeing the “beautiful marriage” part.