The High and Holy Calling of Being a Wife
An
excerpt from “Glory
and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage,” edited by David and Mary
Ford, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Why do
people get married? How do they stay married? If there is a sanctity to
marriage, a holiness in the wife’s and husband’s calling, what is the nature of
that holiness? Just how much exalted significance can married life bear, when
it has to be conducted by people who are crabby, oblivious, or bored?
I don’t
have wisdom adequate to such lofty questions, but over the years I’ve learned
some lessons that, I hope, might prove helpful to others:
- Perhaps
the first difficulty is that we don’t expect marriage to be difficult. We
think, “We’re in love, and that solves everything.” But as long as the two
people in love are human, there are going to be misunderstandings,
miscommunications, and misplaced expectations. The most pernicious factor in a
marriage (or any other relationship, really) is a sneaking suspicion that the
other person has more power—that he’s getting his own way too often, and things
aren’t fair. You can develop a habit of wary watchfulness, standing guard over
your rights and viewing your husband with suspicion. It’s easy to do this, and
it’s entirely contrary to our calling in Christ, which is to bear all and
embrace humility.
A power
struggle is a teeter-totter that never comes to rest. As both partners adapt to
it in self-defense, they form a long-term habit of vigilance and mistrust. This
makes them unwilling to risk generosity, unwilling to let past “unfairness” go.
Nothing good comes of this.
This
mutually-assured dysfunction occurs so naturally that preventing it requires
deliberate counter-moves. We already know that we’d rather live a different
way; we already know that the people we most admire are those who are kind and
generous, and that the best love stories are the ones marked by great
self-giving. You can start living in such a story any time you want. All you
have to do is start practicing generosity, humility, and self-giving.
But,
since we’re human and timid and afraid of loss, it helps to make this goal
mutual and explicit. One couple I know made a vow on their wedding day to
“out-serve” each other. My husband and I evolved a pattern of making decisions
based on who feels most strongly about the matter. If I want Chinese food, but
he really wants Italian, we get Italian. If I really want him to watch a Jane
Austen movie with me, he does, until he falls asleep 45 minutes later. It
doesn’t matter who “won” last time, because a next time is always coming up.
The future just keeps rolling into the present, and more good things to give
and to receive will always be appearing.
-Sometimes
it is harder to receive than to give, actually. Receiving implies need, and
admitting need takes humility. Allow your husband to serve you sometimes. Take
notice and be grateful, and say so, out loud.
- Learn this: many regrettable situations can
be avoided by keeping your mouth shut.
- A good time to keep your mouth shut is when
your husband is telling a story and gets something wrong. If he’s doing
anything less serious than teaching brain surgery, resist the urge to interrupt
with a correction. If the listener walks away with a misremembered anecdote or
a fumbled joke, no lasting harm is done.
This is
an example of a larger principle, that of honoring your husband: “Let the wife
see that she respects her husband” (Eph 5:33). When you love your husband, you
come more and more to be on his side. You want him to succeed. You want people
to look up to him. You don’t want people to notice that he’s getting the story
wrong; you want to cover his flaws and highlight his gifts. You come, that is,
to feel for your husband the kind of fierce loyalty that you feel toward your
children.
Married
people should praise each other. Praise your husband to other people. Everyone
can use a cheering section.
- A corollary is: Don’t complain to others
about your husband. Don’t tell stories designed to make him look small or
stupid. If your relationship needs help, get help, but don’t be a casual
traitor.
- Nobody
talks about this, but one of the best things in marriage is the way you can get
punchy and silly when you’re both over-tired late at night. That’s when some of
the best long- running jokes of the relationship are going to make their debut.
Much can be said about the archetypal dignity of the marriage bed, but being
silly there is a great joy, too.
- Defenders of traditional marriage often point
to procreation as its self-evident purpose, and it’s true that mating holds an
irreducibly basic place among human activities. But many things we do have
meanings beyond their simple physical effects. The basic purpose of food and
drink is to keep the body alive; yet we eat and drink for many other reasons,
having a slice of cake at a party, a cup of coffee with a friend. While
marriage is the right setting for sex, the sexual union of two people means
much more than making babies. As St. Paul says, “This mystery is great, and I
am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32).
- Here’s something practical I wish I’d known a
long time ago. It’s something I learned from an episode of WNYC’s RadioLab. In
it, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky explained that our bodies go through swift,
predictable changes when we get angry: muscles tighten, heart beats faster, and
adrenalin starts to surge.
When the
argument is resolved, men’s bodies quickly go back to baseline normal. But not
women’s bodies. Her body keeps telling her “You’re really angry!,” even when
the argument is over.
In trying
to figure out why she still feels angry, a wife may cast about, looking for a
reason. She might land on an entirely different topic to argue about. The
husband suddenly finds himself re-accused of past events that he thought had
been resolved.
A woman
can’t force her body to return to physiological equilibrium, but she can
decide, in the interim, to stop arguing and go do something else. Sapolsky said
that he and his wife have found it useful, in the throes of an argument, to say
“Honey, don’t forget what the half-life is on the autonomic nervous system.”
- Here
follows a way to put that information to practical effect. Go ahead and go to
bed angry. Those lingering late-night arguments are the worst; you’re
exhausted, bleary, and miserable, and you’re not making any sense. Just stop
talking. Turn out the light. Sleep is truly a blessing, and things actually do
look better in the morning.
- One of the most difficult tasks in marriage
is forgiveness. My husband has been a pastor for nearly 40 years, and we’ve
seen many a marriage struggle back from a severe violation of trust. It’s not
easy, but it’s possible; and since love is the essence of marriage, recovery
should be the goal.
One
reason people find forgiveness difficult is that they don’t know what it is.
(I’m thinking now of forgiveness in general, and not only in marriage.) Some
think it means pretending that the hurtful deed never happened, or that it was
excusable, or wasn’t really wrong. On the contrary, the very premise of
forgiveness is that real damage was done. That’s the basis on which God
forgives us. Forgiveness does not preclude justice; it might still be necessary
for that person to pay for his wrong, even though you have forgiven him.
So
forgiveness is not denial or overlooking a wrong. It simply means making a
decision to move on—a decision to stop cultivating anger and cherishing
revenge. As they say, staying angry is like drinking poison and waiting for the
other person to die. Even when the other person is unrepentant, the injured
person can decide to forgive for the sake of her own soul’s health.
Forgiving
the past does not obligate you to trust the person in the future. In some
situations, you may need to break off the relationship entirely. That would be
the usual course in a low-commitment situation, for example, if a person you’d
hired for some home repairs failed to do what he promised. But in marriage a
lot more is at stake. It’s possible to make a new start in the ashes of
disappointment; some marriages come back even stronger, when pain and
humiliation have opened a way to deeper honesty. There will be plenty of
reasons over the years to ask forgiveness, and to give it, in every marriage.
- Always remember that marriage does not exist
in theory. It exists only in specific real-life manifestations, an ongoing
improvised project conducted by two fallible people. Our ideas about marriage
(or Marriage) are encumbered by so many preconceptions that at-home reality can
suffer in comparison. We may think something is going wrong if marriage doesn’t
fit our expectations, but it might be merely that this is what this particular
marriage is going to be like. One partner’s pre-set notions of what a
theoretical Husband or Wife should be like can hurt the real-life spouse in
untold ways, even to the point that he or she gives up.
As an
early-seventies feminist, my image of what a marriage was, or what a husband
was, was pretty dour. It was a surprise to find out that real marriage was
something else entirely. It turned out that I didn’t have to be married to “a
husband;” instead, I would be married to G.—my love, my hero, my fun and funny
best friend. I felt like I had cheated the “oppressive” expectations of
society; I had married G. instead of a husband.
- The
purpose of every life is union with God. Those we journey with—in friendships,
families, and particularly in marriage—are put there to help us on our way. A
husband and wife, knowing each other’s faults and struggles, can make up what
is lacking, and learn from each other’s strengths. Accountability shores up
resolve. Unity is a bulwark. “And though a man might prevail against one who is
alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” (Eccl
4:12).
The
common center of their love gives each partner greater stores of stability,
security, and generosity, resources that flow from them out to the world. We
can see a parallel example in the pairs of saints who worked together in this
life, like the physician-healers Zenaida and Philonella, the “roving reporters”
Sophronius and John Moschus, and the spiritual fathers Barsanuphius and John.
They felt for each other love of a familial or friendly kind, and married love
is of a different order; yet, like them, married couples can find that sharing
great love with another person in no way limits your ability to care for
others. In fact, having the support of another person enables more love for
others, giving twice the resources to draw on, twice the strength, insight, and
compassion.
When
spouses are praying for each other, encouraging each other, they spur their
mates to greater heights. “Let the husband hear of these things [the ways of
virtue] from the wife, and the wife from the husband,” said St. John
Chrysostom. “Let there be a kind of rivalry among all, in endeavoring to gain
precedence.”
- The older I get, the more clearly I see that
I need my husband. The last decades of life are unpredictable, and potentially
tragic. It doesn’t stop being tragic just because tragedy is so likely. I heard
that the wife in an elderly couple I know was losing her mind to dementia, and
was sad to hear it, but accepted the news in the usual way; it’s just one of
the unfortunate things that can happen when you’re old. But if you imagine that
it was a couple in their twenties, and heard the wife had begun gradually and
irreversibly losing her mind, you wouldn’t just say, “Ah, what a shame.” It
would be horrifying. Well, it’s just as horrifying to lose your beloved at the
age of 70 or 80. The fact that everyone is treating it as “just one of those
things” would only make you feel more alone.
Old age
is surprisingly hard. My husband had had, from the time we met, a sentimental
expectation that our golden years would be restful and content; but as we march
through our 60s we’re discovering that everything hurts. And nobody prepares
you for this. When you’re a teenager, people are always shoving booklets into
your hands with titles like “Your Body is Changing.” When you’re old your body
once again goes through dramatic changes, but nobody warns you ahead of time.
Old, reliable parts start unexpectedly failing. It seemed there was a wry joke
hidden inside the saying, “Two become one.” We used to be two whole people, but
now we have only one functioning pair of knees, one reliable pair of ears, one
pain-free right thumb. We’re being gradually whittled down from two to one.
It does
no good to go to a doctor expecting healing; you’re more likely to encounter a
shrug. I went to a neurologist to find out why, after a lifetime of being a
great speller, I was now forgetting how to spell even some simple words. He
told me that this was perfectly normal: by the age of 60 we have lost 25% of
our brain cells.
How can
that kind of loss be “normal”? It’s not normal for me. In my experience,
“normal” means enjoying use of 100% of my brain cells. It is normal only if you
mean that what happens to my brain doesn’t matter, because I am last year’s
model and being phased out anyway.
These
losses would be hard to bear at any time of life, and being old and weak and
facing multiple losses at one time doesn’t make it any easier. This is when you
really need a good marriage. You need someone who will be on your side, who
will care about you and fight for you, as you become weaker and less able to do
everything for yourself. You might wind up with dementia. You might be
incontinent. People hired to give care in such cases are not well-paid. Few go
into that line of work because they love old people. (Not all old people are
loveable; some are angry or verbally abusive. That could be you, too.) When you
are old and helpless, you are only as safe as the amount of love inside the
person beside you.
Are you
saving up for retirement? Save up for this impoverishment every day. It might
turn out to be a hard job, being with you in your old age. If you pour yourself
out in love for the other every day, you make the best possible investment
against that time.
***
The
calling of being a wife is high and holy because it is eternal. Look at the
things in the room around you right now: everything you see is temporary. The
only thing that last forever is people. Each of them is an eternal being,
called and destined to blaze up with the glory of God. Wives and husbands are
especially called to tend each other as they walk the way of the Cross, the way
of transformation, a way that never ends.
When St.
John Chrysostom comforted a young widow, he reminded her that she would be with
her husband for eternity, not in his earthly beauty but in radiance of an
eternal and unimaginable kind. “You shall depart one day to join the same
company with him, not for twenty or one hundred years, nor for a thousand or
twice that number but for infinite and endless ages. […] Then you
will receive him back again no longer in that corporeal beauty which he had
when he departed, but in luster of another kind, and splendor outshining the
rays of the sun.” This is our destiny, as wives; let us spend our humble,
earthly lives in the sort of love that prepares us for such glory.
Source: http://frederica.com/writings/the-high-and-holy-calling-of-being-a-wife.html
