Who Needs Whom?

The first letter in this series can be found here.

Tyler,

Well, that was a really interesting report. I have to say that you have had yourself a couple of weeks.

As anticipated, you did have the flame out before you went to the different church that first week. Everything went right on schedule. Which church did you try, by the way?

When you showed no signs of changing your mind for week two, the tone changed completely. After a few badgering sessions, she seduced you. A couple days later, there was some mild badgering, and then she seduced you again. And she asked you to come back to your regular church, but you went off to a different church again. Do I have it basically right?

It is not surprising that all your questions have to do with what the heck is going on. I will get to that in a minute, but I think I can clear up your by-the-way question first. No, there is no problem associated with having sex. You are married, after all. Correction, there is a problem with it, but it is not a moral problem. You are married. But obviously, it is not the kind of sexual union and communion that God intends for married folks to have. Something needs to be fixed there, but the good news is that it looks like you might be in the process of fixing it.

Well done on sticking to your guns. That is the thing I need to impress on you as forcefully as I possibly can. Under no circumstances should you go back to your former church. You have made great gains, and to return now would be to throw all of those gains away. Your wife is going to show her displeasure in every possible way, doing everything she can think of, but remember that the reason you first wrote to me is that she was already doing that. Her behavior over the last several weeks shows that you have successfully destabilized the previous arrangement. Things are not fixed yet, not by a long shot, but the central thing that was wrong has at least been disrupted. This is the central thing.

So if you fix in your mind the one action point you will do well. That action point is to continue to check out these other churches, and the way you do this is also very important. You must doggedly stick to this plan, and you are to do it without losing your cool, raising your voice, or arguing about it. Your line is “no, honey, I am going. You are most welcome to come with me.” That’s it. That’s the entire plan. No more Wellspring Community, where they do church differently, and no drama in the driveway.

All right. So let me explain for you what I think is going on here. I want to warn you in advance that some of what I will say is not going to sound “very Christian” to you, but this is because of the kind of teaching you have been sitting under for decades. I can assure you that all of this is under the authority of the sovereign God, who communicates with us through His Son, through His revealed Word, through the created order, i.e. natural revelation, and through the conscience. Your task will be to take what I say and see if it lines up with all four. It really needs to line up with all four.

Let me start by showing you how falsehoods get smuggled into this. Christian men all know that the Bible tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. That is the second item in the line up of four. Love your wives, the Bible says. But then an erroneous assumption about the created order is surreptitiously smuggled in and contaminates everything.

It is simply assumed that loving your wife means finding out what her desires are, and then just giving her what she wants, whatever that is. So long as those desires are not overtly sinful, it is thought that the husband’s job is to find out what pleases her, and then to please her. Now this is an excellent approach when shopping for her birthday present, but it is a disastrous approach when it comes to your overall relationship. It is marriage-bane.

Here is why. Her desires are not simple. Her desires are layered. And if you approach her wrongly for long enough, her desires will get completely tangled up. Desires being what they are, there can be many more than three going on at one time, but in order to keep the math simple for us, let’s limit it to three distinct desires.

First, she has a desire for the “thing,” whatever it was that you had the dumb fight about. Let’s say that she decided she didn’t want to go to the restaurant where you had made the reservations. That is the presenting problem. The second layer of desire is that she has a desire for mastery. This is a fallen desire, and is a downstream result of the curse on men and women that God pronounced after the Fall in the Garden.

This desire for the husband is not a desire for a romantic weekend getaway, or more special time together. It is a desire for mastery, and taking one thing with another, in the conflict that ensues, she will lose. There are times when it seems like the opposite is happening—in a rebellious feminist era, or in a situation like yours has been—but this is not the way it usually goes. Believe it or not, such times are the historical exceptions. It is not true in our day, but women usually have the short end of the stick. “He shall rule over thee.”

The only other time in the Bible where this construction occurs is in the very next chapter, where God is warning Cain about the temptation that is coming after him.

There is this looming conflict between sin and Cain. Sin has a desire for Cain (obviously, a desire for mastery). Cain is charged to win that conflict, which he fails to do—just as you have, to date, failed to do. Thank the Lord, though, that appears to be changing, and I have higher hopes your marriage might be saved than I did when I got your first letter.

The third level of desire is one that she is actively engaged in trying to suppress. This is a creational desire to honor and respect her covenant head. When she is fighting down her desire to look up to you, she is not just disrespecting you. She is disrespecting her own womanliness. She is insulting her own feminine nature. When she is calling you a loser, there is an echo in the back of her mind, calling herself a harpy. She knows that every time she says that you are not much of a husband, it is equally true that she is not much of a wife. But she doesn’t let herself dwell on that. What you are now doing is making that question unavoidable for her.

So here are her three tangled desires. Her desire for a different restaurant, her desire for mastery over you, and her deep creational desire that wishes that you wouldn’t let her get away with what her second desire is getting away with. What is happening is this. She is using Desire #2, with the instrument of Desire #1, to suppress Desire #3. Your desire for peace and quiet in the home has conspired to help her ignore Desire #3, and ironically, it has also destroyed peace and quiet in the home.

Now remember, in any relationship—roommates, friends, siblings, parent/child, or husband/wife—one person needs the other one more. I am speaking here of the mere physical and psychological realities. And continuing on that same level, the person who needs the other person less is the one who will tend to call the shots. She discovered, early on, that you needed her more than she needed you, which meant that on a carnal level she had all the leverage. She had enough leverage, or so she thought, to overturn God’s requirement that she be more dependent on you. And so you wandered into a bad place, the combined result of a number of factors—your easy-going nature, your hatred of the very idea of divorce, the winsome affability that she is able to present to the outside world, and so on.

What you have done is create an isolated issue—where you attend church—and you are now involved in a struggle with your wife over that isolated issue. But never forget that it is a struggle for mastery. And never forget that although I just called it an isolated issue, it is not really isolated. It is a symbolic issue, and it symbolizes the whole. It is a proxy battle. if you win there, if you refuse to bend, there is real hope.

Again, keep me posted.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson