Partnership Over Compromise
A Marriage Story
Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.
— Wendell Berry
My wife Hannah and I have been married for just about twenty years, which is probably not enough time to start giving out marriage advice on the internet. So naturally, here we are on the internet giving out marriage advice. Through our years of counseling younger couples, the number one piece of wisdom we keep coming back to is this:
“Convert every compromise into partnership.”
Before explaining exactly what we mean, let me first try to state the problem to which this advice is the solution. In a word, the problem is marriage itself.
Whenever two people “tie the knot,” they’re also, at the very same time, given a new knot to untie. Marriage is a kind of riddle: How can two distinct persons, while remaining two persons, also become truly one? I propose that compromise and partnership are something like two competing solutions to this riddle, where compromise has to do with the balancing of distinct interests and partnership with the progressive forging of shared interests.
To give away the end in the beginning, most of us choose compromise most of the time, because, well, it works. Compromise yields results almost immediately. Partnership, on the other hand, doesn’t bear fruit so quickly or easily. For a time, it feels more like failure than success. And yet, it is the infinitely better way.
The Union of Unlikes
In life, it is often necessary to do a thing before you know well what it is you are doing. Modern people often call this “inauthentic.” But consider how an infant learns to smile. She looks up at the smiling faces above her and attempts to do likewise. Her smile, at first, is not “her own.” She smiles before she even knows what a smile is. You might even say, she smiles in order to know what a smile is. This is far from inauthentic. Rather, doing in spite of knowing is what makes her authentically human. It is how humans come to know almost everything. Small children are blessedly too young to be tempted by the contemporary fallacy of inauthenticity—that nothing which is not first fully formed “within” can be truly acted out—otherwise they would never learn to smile at all (or to talk or walk or do anything else). Over time, the smiling and walking and talking become “her own.” But in the meantime, the child does her best to participate in what she does not yet fully understand, and in so doing she embodies the truer truth: that most often, we do in order to know.
The same is true in marriage.
When two people come together in holy matrimony, no matter how well they know each other, no matter how long they have taken to “make sure it was the right decision,” they will inevitably find that they did not know what they were doing. Like the baby learning to smile, the bride and groom will participate in an ancient ritual which has not yet become their own. Vows will be exchanged. The congregation will pledge its support. The minister will pronounce you husband and wife. The entire tradition of Christian marriage will assure you that, on this day, the two have become one. And it will truly be so. And yet, in an important sense, it will also not be so.
I do not mean that any part of it is “inauthentic.” Two will become one. But you will also not yet be one. For newlyweds, it may be hard to believe that what I am saying is true. But it will not take long. A week, a month, a year maybe. Christian marriage does not resolve the timeless problem of “the one and the many” by simply declaring that “there is only one now.” Love has a different way. You are two and also one, retaining your individual differences—one male, one female, one born to this family in this town, the other to that family in that—yet fully surrendered to each other for a lifetime of inseparable union. This, of course, is beautiful. But as all married couples discover sooner or later, it is also complicated.
“The honeymoon period” may convince you that you happen to agree on almost everything. But this is not so, not because you constantly disagree, but because—what is far more terrifying—you have not yet uncovered all the ways in which you and your spouse are still completely different people with wildly different expectations, desires, and even values. You do not disagree, because the relationship is not yet mature enough for disagreement.
Religious skeptics complain about the absurdity of having a relationship with a God you cannot see. But the truth is that every human relationship is like this. Every human being is a spiritual being. We are mostly invisible to one another until we learn, over time, often by means of promissory love, to see each other rightly. And marriage, far from being immune to this problem of mutual invisibility, is perhaps prone to suffer from it most dramatically, at least in the early days (you know, the first twenty years or so).
What I am saying is that differences will arise. Not mere differences of opinion. Incongruities in your very souls. Not only because of sin, but because of goodness. Marriage is, by design, the union of unlikes. This is why, in Scripture, it becomes the ultimate symbol of our union to God at the end of all things. But as you may have noticed if you’ve ever read the Bible (or been married), arriving at that union is no simple task. “For better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, til death do us part” is not some high aesthetic ideal; these are the very practical terms within which marriage is possible. These are, in fact, the only terms by which two distinct souls can become one.
In the first ten years or so of our marriage, we struggled so hard to be unified. In many ways, we simply weren’t. When I look back now, I am still embarrassed about how hard-headed I was, how tightly I held onto my own desires and schemes, not seeing that you can’t really have anything that you don’t first place on the altar. Marriage can be an altar. I remember sleepless nights for the both of us, not understanding each other’s needs, trying and failing “not to let the sun go down on our anger.” I remember, then, not wanting to pray, because prayer itself seemed akin to despair. We should be able to talk this out, I thought, to get on the same page. But that was impossible. We were two different people. The desires of our hearts were like two foreign languages to one another. And so, finally, we would pray. We would have so few words after all the tears. But the prayer we would pray, the one we could agree upon, was this: “Bind us together, Lord. Bind us together.” This is one such story about how God answered—and is answering—that prayer.
Compromise and the Problem of “Equality”
What do we do, then, with the incongruities of early marriage? Typically, we compromise. “You have this dream and I have that dream. That’s okay. We can both pursue our separate goals and make sacrifices as needed.” “You like this; I like that. You do this on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’ll do that on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” “You take the baby while I do X. I’ll take her while you do Y.” “We’ve lived near your parents for a few years now. What if we lived near my parents for a bit?”
This assumes a couple with especially egalitarian sensibilities. More often, the sacrifices are not so evenly distributed. “You have this dream, and I can’t exactly relate with it or participate in it. But I’m sure I can find something to do in this town while you pursue it.” Everyone has seen this type of inequality arise, if not in their own marriage, in someone else’s. Even the most “egalitarian” couples struggle with it.
But the problem of inequality is not my main beef with the compromise model of marriage. It might be natural to assume that compromise is sustainable as long as both parties are sacrificing to a similar degree, as long as the tit-for-tat scales are kept balanced. But I don’t think that’s true.
First of all, who is ensuring this balance and how? How are the audits being performed? Generally, both parties tend to believe they are sacrificing substantially for the sake of the other. Both parties also tend significantly to misunderstand and/or mis-value the other’s sacrifice, with gender difference often playing a major role in the disconnect. Ensuring an equal distribution of costs in any given season is almost impossible. Agreeing that the costs are equally distributed is harder still. Not to mention, all of this requires a dangerous degree of accounting for self (“do not let your left hand see what your right hand is doing”) and other (“judge not, lest you be judged”).
Second, and perhaps more fundamentally (though also more problematically to the modern mind), equality is a fickle measure of love and is often at cross-purposes with it. As a measure of political health, it functions quite well; as a measure of relational health, less so. “Equality,” says C. S. Lewis in his essential essay “Membership,” “is a quantitative term, and therefore love often knows nothing of it.”
In the same essay, Lewis goes on to point out that creation lays itself out in shockingly asymmetrical relationships, which are not easily rendered “equal” in a quantitative sense. In the pages of the New Testament, hierarchies between servant and master, parent and child, leader and follower are assumed almost as facts of nature.1 This would seem to present an obvious obstacle to the neighbor-love to which Christians are called. Yet surprisingly, in the context of such asymmetries, love works not so much to “make equal” as to forge new centrifugal forms of reciprocity and mutuality amidst difference. Consider the relationship between mother and infant. At first glance, the scales of love seem utterly imbalanced. The mother gives her whole self; the child, in practical/scientific terms, seems little more than a parasite, having almost nothing to give in return. But this is not so. Anyone who has been a parent will know that what an infant has to give is qualitatively profound—the unique experience of beauty, hope, meaning, joy, and life which comes from caring for a newborn child is more than enough to make the relationship reciprocal and sustainable. Both parties have something profound and profoundly dignifying to give to the relationship, though the offerings are not of the same kind. Likewise in all human relationships, in different ways, to differing degrees. “Bondservants, obey your earthly masters,” says the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6:5, following with a similar but different exhortation to masters: “Masters, do the same to [your servants], and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him” (6:9). A similar pattern is presented in the previous chapter with regard to household relationships: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (5:22). “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25).2
It is not lost on me that such passages are, shall we say, contentious to our modern ears. If, at this point, you are beginning to worry that my proposed solution to the problem of compromise in marriage is simply, “obey your husband,” allow me to allay your fears. My purpose is of a different sort. But the point being made here is still crucial. In Paul’s (and Lewis’s) understanding, relational incongruities are not meant simply to be neutralized or eternally re-balanced in the scales of compromise and equality. Rather, they set the stage for the dance of love. Husband and wife, parent and child, are not the same and are not meant to be. You may have valid reasons in our cultural moment to distrust the term “complementarianism” (I do too), but the fact remains: throughout Scripture and throughout life, God made asymmetrical relationships to be complementary, not merely flattened into sameness. Where I am weak, you are strong and vice versa. Love does not destroy nature, but perfects it.
For Lewis, this is simply how the economy of the Body of Christ works: ever-deepening unity amidst radical diversity. The differences which might have threatened divorce—without being ignored, avoided, or cancelled—turn out to deepen the marriage. Borrowing from Paul’s more explicit teaching on the subject, Lewis calls this dynamic union “membership,” and offers “membership” as the Christian solution to the warring extremes of “individualism” and “collectivism” which have shaped and continue to shape the modern secular world as we know it. (My word “partnership,” by the way, is based on this same notion.) Lewis:
The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body of which the family is an image on the natural level. If anyone came to it with the misconception that membership of the Church was membership in a debased modern sense—a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters—he would be corrected at the threshold by the discovery that the Head of this Body is so unlike the inferior members that they share no predicate with Him save by analogy. We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with sinless redeemer. […]
After that it seems almost trivial to trace further down the diversity of operations to the unity of the Spirit. But it is very plainly there. There are priests divided from the laity, catechumens divided from those who are in full fellowship. There is authority of husbands over wives and parents over children. There is, in forms too subtle for official embodiment, a continual interchange of complementary ministrations. We are all constantly teaching and learning, forgiving and being forgiven, representing Christ to man when we intercede, and man to Christ when others intercede for us. The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and the ear. That is why the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints. Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. […]
Even in the life of the affections, much more in the Body of Christ, we step outside that world which says, “I am as good as you.” It is like turning from a march to a dance. It is like taking off our clothes. We become, as Chesterton said, taller when we bow; we become lowlier when we instruct.
In a word, membership (or partnership) is the unity we were made for. Love makes us one, not primarily by balancing our distinct interests, but by inviting us to lose ourselves through mutual submission and find ourselves as members of something bigger than ourselves. This is most true in the church, of course, but marriage is a kind of microcosm of this same fellowship.
Now, this is not to say compromise for the sake of equality is all bad. Certainly not. Everyone does it, in marriage especially. Everyone must do it, to some degree. How else would we even begin to navigate the built-in incongruities of our distinct bodies and souls? Compromise is a foundational skill in marriage. We do it not because it is a profound act of unity, but because it is most necessary where unity has thus far failed. It is a stop-gap until the deeper union we long for becomes our reality. Where trust and trustworthiness are not yet strong enough to bind us together, compromise becomes the temporary solution—a medicine to treat the symptoms, though not to cure the disease.
In this sense, early marriage requires the same sort of “political” treatment as our modern pluralistic societies, since both tend to suffer from high levels of asymmetry and low levels of trust and trustworthiness. We compromise not because our relationship is mature and healthy, but precisely because it is immature and not as healthy as we would like it to be.
Forging Partnership From Compromise
So then, if compromise cannot forge the oneness we seek in marriage, what can? For Hannah and I, the answer has been partnership. Our goal has been to convert every compromise into partnership over time. And it has taken time, but it has been worth it.
For the first ten years or so of our marriage, Hannah and I both operated under the assumption that I was called to formal ministry in the church. I followed the normal path, more less: youth and college ministry → seminary → ordination → associate pastor. The trouble was, for pretty much the whole ten years, we weren’t on the same page about this. My wife’s desires did not match my own. She loved the Lord just as much as I did, but her heart and my heart—for ministry, for community, for our family, for our future—were not quite aligned. It was subtle. We weren’t fighting about it all the time. She didn’t “hate” church ministry, and I wasn’t “forcing” it on her. But the thing which arrested most of my attention and effort and passion was not the same as hers. And that bothered us, though we didn’t know exactly what to do about it.
So we compromised.
We were both from the same town, but in the very early years of marriage, we lived in my college town, where I was much more connected than she. She often felt out of place. She was also overwhelmed by the church community we were ministering in, where the needs were immense and ongoing, but where her role was much less clear than my own. We decided to move back to our hometown to work for our home church, which solved some aspects of the problem but not others. She started a Masters program to pursue a career in professional counseling, which solved other aspects of the problem, but not enough and not sustainably.
Around this same time, two other things were brewing which would fundamentally change the trajectory of our lives and our marriage. First, in the transition back to our hometown, we found ourselves with three months free (June, July, and August to be exact). In that time, almost on a whim, we developed and ran a small overnight surfing camp for kids in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, enlisting a couple of dear friends as seed investors. It was not the sort of thing anyone expected would go very far, but we loved that first summer so much (and it went just well enough) that from that time on, in every church role we assumed, we asked for those three months off to keep running the camp. The second thing that happened was that Hannah got pregnant with our first child. These two things were transformative for us because, in a word, we did them together. We were partners. Perhaps not very good partners, at least not at first, but partners nonetheless.
The camp was always ours, never hers or mine. She liked it more than I did at first, but in our world of overwhelming church ministry experiences, that was actually a blessing. In the early years, if I’m honest, I saw the camp as a necessary compromise, something which would bless Hannah as I continued to pursue what I considered to be my true career in the church. (I am still embarrassed, by the way, that I thought of church ministry in terms of career.) What I couldn’t see then—or at least couldn’t fully appreciate—is that in the camp we were building something together: not just a summer program, but a way of life, a community, a ministry, and an increasingly complex business venture. We fumbled with roles early on, not knowing who would be best for this or that. We stepped on each other’s toes, but eventually we found our places and rhythms. Hannah was excellent at all things hospitality, which was pretty much everything in a camp like ours. I handled sales and the surfing part. There were things we did together, things we did separately, and many things we thanked each other for not having to do ourselves. It was understood that I was “in charge” of the business in general, but in almost everything we were partners. Through the camp, we learned not only how to complement each other with our differing gifts, but also how to be one. We were Ross-and-Hannah, not Ross and Hannah, nor, as was sometimes the case in church, Ross and his wife.
Having children had a similar effect on us, but in a way that took longer to pan out…
Partnership And Parenting
In our increasingly gender-blind modern frame, people tend to think more in terms of “parenting” than of fathering and mothering. And this tends toward a model of quantitative compromise in raising children rather than complementary partnership. Being children of our cultural moment, Hannah and I struggled to find and assume complementary roles with our young children, the ironic upshot of which was that much of the “parenting,” early on, fell to her. Sure, I could (and did) change diapers, go for walks, hold the still-crying baby in the middle of the night after Hannah had fed her (again), run errands, etc. But she did all that too, and did it better, and did much, much more besides. And she loved it, but it was exhausting to say the least. Our children needed a mother and a father, but it was not immediately clear to us what that meant. Ivan Illich has an intriguing take on this in his book, Gender. He argues that our modern “genderless” society, far from achieving true “equality” between men and women, has actually increased the tension between the sexes, often placing even more undue burden on women in particular.3
The point is, for a time, parenting felt like her thing. I was just “helping out” whenever I wasn’t working on the surf camp or at church or in seminary. But this, too, was a misalignment, and it proved unsustainable.
Don’t get me wrong. Hannah enjoyed being “home with the kids” (we had three more) so much that she gave up her professional counseling career path entirely. And I enjoyed being the primary “breadwinner,” with my work at church for nine months each year and surf camp for the other three. We had become a “traditional” American family in that sense. Hannah still partnered with me in the surf camp, though to differing degrees in different seasons, as child needs took center stage. She also made jewelry out of our home, which became a side business of its own. But lurking beneath all this was a compromise we couldn’t quite see. As it turns out, “isolated-wife-at-home-all-day-keeping-kids-alive-while-husband-works-somewhere-else” is not actually a traditional approach to marriage and family, but rather a thoroughly modern one, and not exactly the ideal.
What many “conservatives” today are intent on conserving is a tradition, if you can call it that, not even as old as our grandparents (i.e. man at work all day; woman at home alone with kids). For thousands of years before that, the household was the center of production for most men and women. The production of food, clothing, shelter and tools were handled, at least in part, from within the household and the immediate community. Men and women usually had separate but complementary roles in these tasks, overlapping daily in shared spaces with shared purposes, while also passing down their crafts to their sons and daughters. But with the onset of modern industry, much of this production moved outside the home, eventually giving rise to a world in which men strove for abstract (and often relatively meaningless) “careers” far removed from the household, which neither their wives nor their children understood, but which provided the income to buy all the things which the household used to produce.
The final stage of this transition was, of course, to convince women that, in order to be fully “liberated,” they too should take on abstract and often relatively meaningless work outside the home, that they should choose “career” before children, and if they have children, should of course pay other less liberated women to help raise them while they pursue more important and more liberating work elsewhere. Thus marriage, on a structural level, became more of a compromise than a partnership. As Wendell Berry puts it, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.”4
I don’t know exactly when the change began to happen for us. I think it was shortly after the birth of our third child, about a decade ago. But somehow, we just sort of stopped seeing our family through this lens. The stacking compromises of work and parenting were subtle at first, but in the end they had an absolutely disintegrating effect on our household. Parenting needed to be an integrated partnership, not a compromise. Otherwise, as Berry warned, we were just formalizing compromise into a kind of ‘married divorce.’
A few things took place, which at the time seemed like unrelated incidents, but in retrospect, were almost certainly the hand of God. First, church ministry was getting very complicated. Though I had convinced myself (wrongly, by the way) that Hannah and I could sustain the compromise that allowed me to be a pastor, despite our lack of full coherence in that calling, some things were happening in our church, which made me question my own calling there, even apart from Hannah. Second, the surf camp, which had begun as a kind of thorn in my flesh, was now quite successful and life-giving. It had slowly become not only our primary source of income, but also, somehow, our most fruitful ministry. And third, Hannah wanted to try homeschooling our kids, which was an idea I had never really considered, but which matched our way of life quite well.
I am terrible at quitting things, which can be a virtue at times, but it can also be a vice. On my own, I’m not sure I could have ever stepped down from my role as a pastor. The burden I felt for our church was so great. But at the end of a very hard season there, the Lord made it as clear as I needed it to be that it was time for me to step back from formal church ministry. I wish I could say that deeper partnership with Hannah was my main reason, but I still couldn’t quite see that clearly enough. Instead, deeper partnership with Hannah became the fruit of that transition. God was merciful, and my “career change,” though I still mourn it—what a privilege it is to be a shepherd in God’s church!—was one of the best things that could have happened to us in that moment.
Around the same time, surf camp was starting to become a place of almost magical integration for our family, where even our kids were becoming members/partners in our labor. There was a time when we saw the camp more like a career, as in, “How will we balance this with having kids?” What we didn’t realize then was that having kids would be the thing that really made surf camp worth doing in the first place. It was as though all that labor, even before they were born, was really all for them—not merely to make money to feed and clothe them. What we had done, inadvertently, was given them a world in which to live and play and work and thrive alongside us. It was their home, their community, and their growing craft, as well as ours. We had somehow broken into what Jon Askonas has called the “third oikos,” a kind of reclamation of the traditional productive household in a post-industrial setting.5
Homeschooling only added to this integration. It’s not the perfect solution, and I would never defend it as such. But what homeschooling, for us, has been life-changing. It has integrated our family. It has become yet another way in which Hannah and I partner on a daily basis. When our kids were in school, Hannah felt like she still spent most of the day dropping them off and picking them up, keeping the youngest entertained in a car-seat for far too long, yet not getting the best out of any of them in the few hours she was with them. Meanwhile, I was simply “at work.” Now we are with them and with each other. We know and continue to learn more about what they love, what they struggle with, what they need, what they care about. And they know it about each other. In my “career” in the church, I had always worked from an office outside the home. Now I work at a desk in our house. In the non-summer months, my schedule of teaching and writing and surf camp upkeep is flexible, so I join Hannah in teaching our kids for the first part of the day most mornings along with another child from our community who homeschools with us in our home. Hannah does far more in this regard, but we are in it together. If a child acts up, I can hear him or her from my desk and can immediately intervene. In the summer months, Hannah and I are very hard at work with the running of the camp. But the work is very often of a nature that our kids can partner with us—first, by imitative play, then by small tasks and chores, and finally by taking on real responsibility. Our kids, to some extent, understand and are integrated into our work lives, our ministry lives, and the life of our community. This is not always easy or pretty—certainly not (ask our surf camp staff or our kids or our wonderful friend Mercer who helps us homeschool)—but we’re getting better at it, bit by bit.
Conclusion
It’s been twenty years of marriage, and we still pray that same prayer, “Bind us together, Lord.” But though the words of the prayer have not changed, my understanding of them has changed, just as the prayer itself has changed me. At first, as is often the case with a newly-birthed prayer in a moment of desperation, “Bind us together” was more like a wish before a genie, as though asking for a kind of magic trick: “Just, you know, make us one, just as we are right now.” But that isn’t ultimately how unity works. Sure, as we’ve seen, temporary unity can be bought through the magic of compromise. But sustainable unity requires partnership, and partnership requires participation: mutual submission, repentance, trust, and trustworthiness. Rather than zapping us into oneness from the beginning, what the Lord actually did was answer our prayer by reshaping our hearts, one day at a time. He has bound us together, just as we asked, yet not by fulfilling each of our individual interests and purposes; he has bound us together by giving us shared purposes, and by making us mutually dependent partners, in one another and ultimately in Him.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the major risk in sharing these autobiographical details. I chose to share them, because I hoped our own journey would provide at least a rough plausibility structure for what I have called “partnership over compromise.” We learn better from people than principles, as they say. The risk, however, is that it would have the exact opposite effect. Our situation is quite unusual and, in many ways, completely accidental. We did not write our life’s script. We thank God for it, for all its blessings and even for its seeming curses (of which there are no small number). Yet one might be tempted to conclude, despairingly, “Great, all we have to do to have a healthy marriage according to Ross is quit our jobs, start a seasonal business, have a bunch of kids and homeschool them.” I hope no one will be tempted to this way of thinking from my writing, but just in case, let me be clear. I am certainly not proposing that anyone try to reproduce what we have done, nor could we reproduce it if we tried. Life does not work that way. Furthermore, even if one could, they would surely find the path beset with all kinds of risks and traps and trade-offs, just as we have. All one can do is take the people, places, and gifts they have been given and steward them well, not like the man who buries his master’s talents, but like the one who invests them. My proposal is simply this: compromise buries the talents of marriage. Partnership is a riskier venture, but it pays off exponentially in the end.
Special thanks to , Zach Kuenzli, and Hannah Byrd for the massive editing help on this one. (Sorry I didn’t succeed in making it very much shorter.)
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I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.
That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. […] But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. […]
Equality is for me in the same position as clothes. It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it. […] I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women’s property act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food.
— C. S. Lewis, “Membership”
In a previous essay devoted to this passage, I referred to this as “the union of trust and trustworthiness.”
When, from infancy, men and women grasp the world from complementary sides, they develop two distinct models with which they conceptualize the universe. A gender-bound style of perception corresponds to each gender’s domain of tools and tasks. Not only do they see the same things from different perspectives and in different hues, but early on they learn that there is always another side to a thing. […]
The genderless key words of contemporary discourse compel us to describe the ambiguous two-sidedness of vernacular reality as a sex war started by Adam and Eve. Invidious comparison now replaces awe as the reaction to otherness. The rituals that orchestrate the dance of life, marking bodies, intertwining genders, then pushing them apart again, are now dressed up as primitive sex education.
— Ivan Illich, Gender
Wendell Berry on compromise v. partnership in the household (h/t
). Context: Berry begins by answering feminists critics who accused him of wife abuse after mentioning in a previous essay that his wife types his manuscripts:That feminists or any other advocates of human liberty and dignity should resort to insult and injustice is regrettable. It is equally regrettable that all of the feminist attacks on my essay implicitly deny the validity of two decent and probably necessary possibilities: marriage as a state of mutual help, and the household as an economy.
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.
There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, “mine” is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as “ours.”
This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture, and even of woodlot management and wood-cutting. It may also involve a “cottage industry” of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.
It is obvious how much skill and industry either partner may put into such a household and what a good economic result such work may have, and yet it is a kind of work now frequently held in contempt. Men in general were the first to hold it in contempt as they departed from it for the sake of the professional salary or the hourly wage, and now it is held in contempt by such feminists as those who attacked my essay. Thus farm wives who help to run the kind of household economy that I have described are apt to be asked by feminists, and with great condescension, “But what do you do?” By this they invariably mean that there is something better to do than to make one’s marriage and household, and by better they invariably mean “employment outside the home.”
I know that I am in dangerous territory, and so I had better be plain: what I have to say about marriage and household I mean to apply to men as much as to women. I do not believe that there is anything better to do than to make one’s marriage and household, whether one is a man or a woman. I do not believe that “employment outside the home” is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home, for either men or women. It is clear to me from my experience as a teacher, for example, that children need an ordinary daily association with both parents. They need to see their parents at work; they need, at first, to play at the work they see their parents doing, and then they need to work with their parents. It does not matter so much that this working together should be what is called “quality time,” but it matters a great deal that the work done should have the dignity of economic value.
— Wendell Berry, “Feminism, The Body, and The Machine”
See also James Wood’s excellent piece in Mere Orthodoxy,“Sexuality After Industrialism”
I really enjoyed this one.
It reminds me of what my Dad says at lots of the weddings he officiates: "Marriage isn't 50/50, it's 100% and 100%".
Funnily enough, that's how a partnership works legally too - you are totally liable for the entity if you are a partner.
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you for writing this!