Marriage Is Only As Good As The People Within It

We are reaching the point in Maverick’s development where he is, slowly but surely, transitioning from formula to solid food. He’s his father’s son, so the change hasn’t been that tedious; we can’t say we’re all that surprised by his gravitation toward all things meat.

But I had a bit of an epiphany as I racked my brain trying to remember how all this worked the last time I did it. Granted, it was fully eleven years ago, so the details are understandably fuzzy. But another thought occurred to me about my hazy recollection: One of the reasons I don’t really remember transitioning my older two kids from bottles to food is because they were in daycare eight hours a day when it happened; someone else was doing this work in my place.

I experienced a flood of conflicting emotions as this realization hit me: guilt for outsourcing my parenting responsibilities, sadness for what my kids may have missed, gratitude for different circumstances this time around. And let’s be clear: my present privileges are afforded me because of a good man and a healthy marriage. It’s how marriage is supposed to work, how God designed it- both members contributing to the household needs and sharing the workload while the children have access to both their mom and their dad in a healthy, flourishing environment where everyone is safe to thrive. This is God’s plan A.

To be crystal clear, I am NOT championing gender roles here. The system can just as easily work with stay-at-home dads or even with kids who have to go to daycare a bit. In today’s society with the economy and inflation being what they are, single income families find it harder and harder to get by. I myself work part-time from home. There’s no condemnation here. I mention all this to illustrate my primary point, which is this: Parenting is easier and more fulfilling for all parties within the context of a healthy marriage.

A good marriage is a good thing. When kids are involved, it needs to be the goal.

But the focus here needs to be on the word “good.” Because marriage won’t save the kids from any kind of anything if the marriage is rotten to the core.

And it’s upon this hill that I will plant my flag or stake my claim or whatever other idiom better applies. Because it’s here where my unique God-given calling to bind wounds often conflicts most aggressively with the well-intended spokespeople on the frontlines of the great marriage crusade.

Earlier this week, I had a pretty spirited debate with a woman whose work I greatly admire. She had posted something on her page about how wonderful her life is because of her super healthy marriage. Her husband supports her in every way. He amplifies her voice. He prioritizes her heart. His love and integrity empower her to be the best version of herself. And she was sharing her story to counter the secular view that marriage is oppressive.

I understood and agreed with her intent. But she lost me in the delivery because, in her zeal for lasting marriage, she inadvertently lost sight of the reality that toxic, abusive marriages are not worth preserving. And when I challenged her on this, she repeatedly wrote off stories of abuse and trauma in marriage as “the outliers” and “edge cases” and “narrow samplings,” as though they were some sort of fluke, fringe anomaly, completely divorced from the reality of the average everyday couple. Any story I shared was written off as an anecdote with the firm insistence that “the exception cannot define the rule.”

I actually agree that the exception cannot define the rule. But the exceptions do need to matter, too, and that’s where I think a lot of the idealogues drop the ball.

Church, it is beyond time to stop insisting that abuse in marriage is rare. It is not. And if you’re approaching this topic from some sort of academic angle, removed from the painstaking existence of the broken, battered spouse, then I implore you to do some more face to face research because the statistics upon which you are trying to build your case for truth are woefully inadequate at helping you achieve it.

All the statistics will show you are that there are an enormous number of no-fault divorces. But if you’re reviewing this data and concluding that a no-fault divorce indicates an abuse-free marriage, then you’ve got another thing coming. My no-fault divorce certificate doesn’t tell even a fraction of the whole story. It was the quickest, safest way out of an abusive mess. People don’t realize how difficult or how dangerous life could be for battered women before no-fault divorce was allowed, especially if the man held the purse strings and had monopoly on the ability to lawyer up and prove his case. Most battered women I know went this route, as well. Their circumstances aren’t represented in the numbers you’re using to write them off as irrelevant.

If you’re really set on analyzing data in order to draw your conclusions, I would suggest that perhaps an assessment of the current porn statistics might be a good place to start. Do you have any idea how much time and money American men (both inside and outside the church) spend on pornography each year? Recent studies indicate that roughly 87% of college age (aka marrying age) men watch porn. Studies also indicate that nearly 90% of porn scenes contain acts of physical aggression and that another almost 50% show verbal aggression. The average porn addict watches at least 11 hours of porn a week. And there are millions and millions of porn addicts spending hour upon hour rewiring their brains to objectify, demean, and abuse women to the degree that they cannot achieve sexual gratification without the element of harm. Is anyone really so naive as to believe that this is somehow inconsequential when it comes to those peoples’ engagement of romantic relationships? They can’t sexually climax without the element of an abused woman, but you think they treat their women like royalty in the real world? You think abuse is standard in their private thoughts but absent in their actual living? How does this work?

If this blog exists to do anything, it’s to challenge the notion that abusive marriages are fringe realities. They’re much more common than anyone might realize, and we’ve reached a point in society where we forfeit any claim to ignorance in this regard. And when the big “C’ church is so blissfully unaware and underequipped to navigate these waters, we really have no right to condemn women who turn to ideas and movements that at least ATTEMPT to prioritize their needs the way we ought to have been doing all along.

My kids may have been in daycare for eight hours a day, but you know what? That’s better than the alternative. I shudder to think what may have become of us if I DIDN’T have a job outside the home, if we were entirely dependent on my abusive ex for sustenance. I’d rather pay a kind group of women to spoon feed my babies than have my babies trapped in a home where their dad breaks household objects every time he flies into a rage or shoves their mom against the wall while he screams at her that she’s a “worthless cunt.”

What do you think will happen to kids when they endure years of hearing their father scream demeaning obscenities at their mother? What might this teach your sons about how to treat their wives? What might this teach your daughters about what they should expect from men?

Last week, an abused woman reached out to me and shared a little of her story with me. I listened and sympathized and prayed and pondered, and when I finally asked her, “Do you think you’ll ever leave him?”, she responded with kind of a haunting question: “Where would I go?”

Another woman I know once threatened to leave her narcissistic husband, and he sneered at her in contempt, “I’ll destroy you in court. I’ll use your mental health against you. (She struggles with anxiety- I wonder why.) You’ll never get to see the kids.” He’s the breadwinner. He has worlds of influence and the keys to his kingdom. What will happen to her if she leaves? How does this weigh against the harms she will suffer if she stays? What will become of the kids? And why the hell does all the burden fall on her shoulders? When she hears the church tell her she’s going to destroy her kids if she files for divorce, what does that communicate to her about God’s value of her dignity?

Where do any of these women in abusive patriarchal Christian marriages go when their husbands abuse them, especially, if they’ve been trained from infancy to find their entire identity in their roles as housewives?

I want the marriage advocates to really start contending with these issues, not on a peripheral, “Well I wrote a few pages in my book about severe abuse” way, but in a much more substantive, deep and tangible way.

Stop insisting that marriage is never oppressive. Stop insisting that it’s always good. Start insisting on the goodness of the people who enter it. Start requiring goodness of the men who lead it, rather than shaming the women breaking beneath the weight of mistreatment. Stop gaslighting these women into belief that their circumstances are rare when they are not.

It’s good to champion marriage as God’s design for human flourishing. I can get behind that. But any given marriage is only as “good” as the people within it. And we have to remember that God loves His people more than He loves His institutions. We cannot sacrifice women on the altar of our ideals.