Spouses Are Made to Depend on Each Other
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So, what do you think you know about marriage?
When I got married, I knew that things were going to change. That is kind of the point of marriage, no? As we stand at that altar in front of the priest and with our loved ones behind and beside us, we vow to leave behind our past-self. God, in His mystery, joins two into one. “Therefore, a man must leave His mother and father and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh" (Gen 2:24).
Yet now, almost seven years into marriage, there is still something from my single years that I find myself hanging onto. Something that I’ve pinpointed as a cause for unnecessary strain in my relationship with my husband: my independence.
Independence as a trait is not intrinsically wrong. From a young age, in fact, this is the goal set out for us by our parents and society as a whole. No well-adjusted citizen should depend totally on another for all of their temporal and psychological needs.
Yet in some ways, independence goes against Christianity.
We are, after all, called to be like little children (Matthew 18:3), not in our maturity level, but in our disposition towards God. God wants us to view Him as a loving, all-knowing, all-providing Father; and we, His beloved children. So while our “adulting” in life may lead us to a deeper independence and sense of “I got this, I can do this,” our faith life holds us in tension to that, reminding us that we are never quite in control.
Okay, we can agree on that to some extent, right? But what does that have to do with marriage?
Well, as I mentioned, I recently pinpointed a cause of strain in my almost-seven-years of marriage. For years, I’ve felt the need to “prove” my worth as a wife and mother by how much I can do. I felt as if my success in my vocation relied on the results I could produce. This was, after all, my vocation—what I was made for. So why shouldn’t I be able to do it all, and do it all excellently?
I felt like my husband deserved, and maybe even expected, a wife who had all the answers, kept the house running and the children tame—all while making a 5-star dinner every night. My mantra that I found myself living by was the ever-popular, “I am enough.”
Yet over the past few months, God began pulling this rug out from underneath me. Through self-reflection and deep prayer, I began realizing the flaw in this logic. Not only was the anthem of independence detrimental to my disposition towards God...it was steadily poisoning my marriage.
You see, when God made marriage, He did not intend it to be some sort of business partnership.
As if each spouse takes equal shares in the household, child rearing, and life-building, and then you just go about doing your part and pulling your weight. No. The ultimate purpose of marriage from a theological standpoint is to image the love of the Trinity, and to serve as a tangible reminder of Christ’s love for His bride, the Church. Those metaphors are impossible to represent if one—or both—spouses refuses to be dependent on the other.
Ironically, the moment this reality began to click for me was while recently praying through one of the scripture readings from our wedding: Ephesians 5:21-33. There was one part in particular that really stuck out to me. Of course, it’s the part that always lends itself to eye-rolls and elbow jabs between spouses when it’s read from the lectionary at Mass—
“Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord… As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”
In prayer, I suddenly felt prompted to swap out the phrase “subordinate to” with “dependent on.” Go back and try it for yourself (I already bolded the words to make it easy for you ).
Do you see how that changes everything?
We are called to be dependent on each other in marriage, just as the Church is dependent on Christ! The Church only works because it depends on God for everything. He set it up that way.
In that passage, St. Paul draws the parallel between the Church and marriage to show us how spouses must also depend on each other in this same way. Marriage is the image of Christ’s love for the Church and the love of the Trinity. And that love is not self-sufficient and independent. That love does not say “I am enough.” That love lends itself to humility and dependence on the other, and most importantly on God.
You could perhaps even call it interdependence…it’s not just me depending on my husband, but he needs to depend on me as well. We are dependent on each other.
Perhaps the lesson that took me almost seven years to learn can be a lesson for you, too. Perhaps you are still waiting to meet your spouse, or are preparing for marriage in the near future. Be sure to enter into it with the proper disposition. One that instead says, "together with God and one another, it is enough."
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