Men and Women: Enjoying the Difference
Most of us are at least vaguely aware that things don’t bring us lasting happiness. Experience has taught us (or is trying to) that the good feelings generated by a new dress, a trip to the Orient, a house on the beach, dinner at the Ritz Carlton, or a promotion to vice president are neither deep nor lasting.
The simple truth is that true happiness cannot exist apart from personal relationship. At some level, we all know this. But if we have never tasted real joy through another person, we may find ourselves addicted to good feelings and miserably enslaved to shallow pleasures.
For too many, however, the relationships that are supposed to bring the most happiness serve up the worst misery. Tensions with parents, frustrations with children, and angry distance between spouses sometimes make shallow pleasure seem preferable.
Because family relationships are sometimes more painful than satisfying, many people manage to find someone outside of their family with whom time together feels good. Lonely wives talk at length with special women friends. Frustrated husbands enjoy golf with a good buddy, and meaningful relationships with someone of the opposite sex often develop. We want to feel connected with somebody, to share with someone who understands and cares, to be with someone who lets us go off duty and relax. It feels so good to enjoy who we are in someone else’s presence.
And when we are with that someone, it is entirely natural to think of this relationship as good. But notice how the word good gets defined: a good relationship, in this natural way of thinking, is one that provides us with whatever we need to feel happy. Using this definition, a happily married couple could call their relationship good for precisely the same reason adulterous lovers might value theirs. In both situations, people feel good about themselves in the presence of another.
Something is clearly wrong with a definition of relationships that can be claimed by both committed spouses and immoral roommates.
Part of the problem with our understanding of what makes a relationship good is that we start with the wrong data. Finding couples who seem to be happy and looking at their relationships to sort out the ingredients for successful relating is risky. A fallen world filled with deceived people who often feel good for wrong reasons is no place to do our research. We may as well formulate moral principles by studying the mating habits of animals.
In six weeks I would be twenty-two years old. In three weeks I would be a husband. The first I was prepared for, the second, well, that’s what I was here for.
I was sitting on an old worn velvet loveseat in the preacher’s living room. Nestled close beside me was Rachael, my beautiful bride-to-be.
Across from us, in separate chairs, sat the preacher and his wife, both in their late seventies. As we discussed the details of our wedding ceremony, I found myself watching the old couple. Suddenly something struck me. Those two conveyed more love with a single meeting of their eyes than my fiancée and I were exchanging with all our snuggling, grinning, and whispered endearments.
I still remember thinking, “How do we get from here to there, from where we are in our eager young love to where they are in their loving maturity?”
Marriage is a stage on which real love can be enacted for the world to see: the kind of love that enables us to endure wrong with patience, to resist evil with conviction, to enjoy the good things with gusto, to give richly of ourselves with humility, and to nourish another’s soul with long-suffering.
When all these virtues are present, not only is each marriage partner incomparably blessed, but sometimes a couple of young apprentices about to take their place on this same stage can catch a glimpse of what the marriage relationship could be—a glimpse that won’t let them settle for anything less.
But wanting is one thing; becoming is quite another.
Why are so few on the path to enjoying the kind of love the preacher and his wife could share from ten feet apart?
We must focus on the real problem: self-centeredness. And nothing brings self-centeredness more clearly into focus than anger.
Everyone knows what it’s like to be angry with someone. And when we’re angry, we’re not really concerned with the welfare of the person we’re mad at. Anger, at least the kind we’re familiar with, is incompatible with love.
Two observations about the experience of anger often escape our notice. First, we can be angry and not know it. Parents are sometimes deeply resentful of their children, but they hide their resentment behind displays of excessive warmth and disciplined reasonableness. Anger can be present but denied.
The second thing about anger is we sometimes assume that our anger is justified. Without thinking it through, we see our anger as reasonable, natural, warranted by what’s happened, and therefore quite acceptable.
A quick peek beneath the surface of anger is enough to see that much of the rage we feel when something bad happens to us grows out of self-centeredness. We become less concerned with other people’s welfare and more protective of our own.
Think how commonly this occurs among “good” people. Reflect on the past few weeks. Remember when you felt annoyed with your spouse, perhaps only mildly and momentarily. Notice what you did or said that was intended to cause pain or get even or keep someone safely under control. Remember when you:
Careful inspection of ourselves, particularly when we’re angry, makes it clear that we suffer from a defect more severe than mere self-centeredness. The greatest obstacle to building truly good relationships is justified self-centeredness, a selfishness that deep in our souls, feels entirely reasonable and therefore acceptable in light of how we’ve been treated.
The apostle Paul, I think, held a similar notion. Before moving into a clear presentation of the gospel of Christ in his letter to the Romans, Paul spends nearly three chapters clearing away all excuses for sin. When people are utterly unable to justify their sinful, selfish ways before God, then Paul introduces the wonder of God’s grace. The gospel cannot be enjoyed until all excuses for sin are removed. And the fruit of the gospel—getting along with God and with one another—will develop to the degree that we recognize self-centeredness, see it as inexcusably wrong, and repent of it.
When we confess our faults to God or to one another, we usually try to explain away our sin. Explanations are requests not for forgiveness, but for understanding. When we regard our wrong actions as understandable, we feel only a little guilty. But meaningful repentance and enduring change require more than casual confession of guilt. And they also require more than others strongly denouncing our selfishness and firmly exhorting us to selflessness. Movement from self-centeredness toward other-centeredness happens only when we expose our excuses for selfishness and regard those excuses as entirely illegitimate.
But this is not easily done. Whether our sins are big evils, like adultery, spouse-beating, and alcoholism, or lesser ones like impatience, overeating, and gossip, the inclination to excuse ourselves, to see ourselves as right, is terribly strong.
Those of us not guilty of the more heinous sins shake our heads in disbelief that anyone could ever rationalize such obvious evil. We are proudly unaware that the same mechanism for excusing sin operates regularly within us, rendering us vulnerable to the worst sins imaginable.
A simple illustration will make this point clear. A husband arrives home an hour late, detained at the office by pressing deadlines. As he walks through the door, his wife, without bothering to get up from the couch, greets him flatly: “Your meal is on a plate in the micro. You can heat it up if you want.”
Immediately he feels defensive, considers explaining his late arrival, then thinks better of it (“What’s the use—she’s too irritated to listen”). Without saying a word, he walks past her to the bedroom. As he takes off his tie and splashes his face with water, he rehearses an attack on her for her unsupportive attitude, decides to skip it (“It would only cause more hassle”), and just go eat.
It doesn’t occur to him that she may be feeling neglected and insensitively treated. If it had, the thought of gently moving toward her would feel to risky and weak, certainly uncalled-for at that moment.
He therefore returns to the kitchen, pushes the appropriate buttons on the microwave oven, and stares at his meal through the glass door until the bell sounds. As he carries his plate to the now deserted dinner table, he feels angry satisfaction in meeting her irritability with his noiseless sulk. “Does she really think I enjoy working late?” he mutters to himself.
As he plunges his knife into the barely warm meal, his mind drifts to last weekend’s shopping trip when she bought a dress and he passed up the sport coat he had wanted for months.
As he continues eating, the pleasure generated by his angry thoughts fades; loneliness arrives in its place. He realizes that he could have called to say he would be home later than he expected. He decides to make things right with his wife.
He walks to the living room, sits down next to her, and speaking loudly enough to be heard over the television, apologizes for being late. He gently explains his lateness, showing understanding to his wife’s mood.
She softens under the influence of his tender spirit and, with mutual promises to be more thoughtful of one another, they unite in a hug that begins a pleasant evening.
The harmony thereby restored is not solid. The promises are not strong. As I have described this event, it’s clear that the husband apologized to relieve his own loneliness rather than to soothe his wife’s hurt. Like most apologies, his include an explanation for the offense, making it into a request for understanding. His was not a true apology.
True apologies never explain, they only admit, acknowledging that the error was without justifiable cause. Repentant people realize that inexcusable wrong can either be judged or forgiven, never understood and overlooked, and so they beg for forgiveness with no thought of deserving it. Truly repentant people are the ones who begin to grasp God’s amazing grace, the ones who know that they need only confess to experience the forgiveness that is always there in infinite supply.
Whether we are adulterers or thoughtless spouses, the problems with all of us is that we stubbornly regard our interpersonal failures not as inexcusably selfish choices, but as understandable mistakes. The things our spouses do to us seem more like the former; the things we do to them more like the latter.
Excuse-making has been a natural tendency in people ever since Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake. Without some means of self-justification, we would be forced to face ourselves squarely as we really are, corrupt by God’s standards and deserving punishment.
And seeing ourselves as we are would mean taking our place as condemned sinners, worthy of judgment, powerless to improve ourselves, humbled that our very best deeds provide no defense, and utterly at the mercy of a righteously angry Judge. This doesn’t sound like much fun. Surely the path to the top would never begin with a descent this steep! How can joy emerge from such misery?
Perhaps the hardest thing to get through our brain-damaged heads (when Adam fell, he must have fallen on his head) is that this painful point of nakedness and humility is not only where life begins, but also where joyful growth continues.
More than anything else, what gets in the way of getting along is self-centeredness that seems reasonable. God does his deepest work in making us more truly loving when we more clearly see how utterly ugly our selfishness is.
Getting along with each other requires that we stop making excuses for all the selfish things we do. And if our tendency towards self-justification can be weakened, perhaps then we will more easily recognize our anger when it’s there, call it wrong, and experience the thrill of Christ’s forgiveness and the power of his cleansing. We’re not condemned and we’re empowered to love.
Weakening this inclination to self-justification is hard work. Not many undertake it. Why are we so rarely gripped by our own unworthiness? Why don’t we weep in stunned appreciation at the Lord’s table? How exactly do we manage to excuse in us what God condemns and then forgives?
Whatever may be the distinction between men and women, it is clear that both sexes share one fundamental similarity—they’re both fallen. Although the process by which Adam and Eve fell is not identical, both fell, and both men and women are flawed by an inbred disposition to rebel against God and to find life on their own. By turning away from God and depending on their own resources, men and women have made it their first priority to look after their own welfare. Both have become self-centered.
In learning to get along, it is important first to understand this common moral identity before sorting out whatever may be our unique sexual identities. Once we see how self-centeredness operates to keep us from getting along and then figure out how to become more other-centered, it will then be important to ask whether masculine other-centeredness is different from feminine other-centeredness. But that’s a later topic.
Think how naturally we explain our impatience with the kids as the product of a frustrating day at work and how easily we regard their impatience as an expression of selfishness worthy of discipline. What an incredible double standard!
So what should one do to disrupt self-centeredness? When my friend states that my jealousy is ugly, I should ask myself first whether I agree with his evaluation. If I do, then I need to ask whether I am gripped by the ugliness of my attitude to the point of brokenness. Am I reduced to begging for mercy, and then enjoying it limitless availability?
For most of us, the honest answer to this question will be no. We rarely feel deeply broken by our sinfulness. When we admit that we are not broken, we must then notice how strongly we resist seeing our jealousy (or impatience or pettiness) as truly ugly. We prefer to view ourselves as fascinating, complex, and deep, and to see our ugliness as an unfortunate by-product of our complexity.
“Okay, I’m selfish. So what else is new.” We tend to view self-centeredness the way we look at eating a second dessert: it may not be right, but it isn’t that big a problem. Most of us are occupied with other, much more serious problems—controlling sexual appetites, coping with loneliness, trying to get along with family and colleagues, making financial ends meet, keeping ourselves in decent health. Selfishness just doesn’t feel like a major concern. But it is!
Times we are struck with the sheer evil of self-centeredness cannot be arranged. Most often, they come at surprising times and deliver unexpected impact. One of those moments seized me during a casual conversation.
I was sitting in an outdoor café in Capetown, enjoying coffee and conversation with British theologian D. Broughton Knox. Around us bustled the life of beautiful South African city. Rising behind us was the awesome backdrop of cold mountains, shooting up proudly and then disappearing indifferently into white clouds. To one side, open fields stretched for acres, blooming with nature’s patchwork quilt of wildflowers.
A comfortable pause in our conversation allowed the surrounding beauty to put me in a pensive mood. Finally I broke the silence by posing to my companion what I had thought was a complex and thoughtful question, the kind that lesser minds wrangle over for generations.
“Why is it, do you suppose, that people have such a hare time getting along with each other?”
Dr. Knox is well known for his brilliant mind and is even seen by some as rather formidable. Challenging his views is risky business, for he never adopts a position without carefully thinking through the alternatives. He’s also able to express important ideas in simple words because he understands those ideas so well.
As I spoke he watched me with flattering attention. Then with neither arrogance nor hesitation, he said, “Well, the whole thing comes down to selfishness, doesn’t it. Isn’t it interesting how people complicate it all so much? I suppose we don’t like seeing ourselves as we really are.”
The fresh clarity and strong impact of his words staggered me. What enormous implication they held: All our relationship problems spring from one place—the foul well of selfishness.
It would be an interesting exercise to ask a group of Christian people to write down what they think they need right now, more than anything else, to make them truly happy.
Some, I suspect, would put at the top of their list a closer walk with the Lord. Still others would turn to the painful struggles in their immediate circumstances and record needs such as these:
These concerns are deeply felt both in the hearts of the listmakers and in the heart of God. And each one brings pain into our lives that won’t go away until someone else or something outside of ourselves changes. It is right and good to pray fervently that God would make the change we desire.
But each of these responses is a wrong answer to the question, What do I need more than anything else to make me deeply happy? There is only one correct answer: forgiveness from God that brings me into relationship with him and ongoing forgiveness that makes continued fellowship possible. Every other answer is wrong.
If we had asked, other than forgiveness, what do I need right now to make me happy, then many of the above answers could be quite correct. We tend, however, to define our problems in such a way that something other than forgiveness is seen as our greatest need. But this tendency reflects our darkened understanding of life.
Without the power of forgiveness operating in my life right now, even as I write this sentence, I remain alone and unloved, uncared for by anyone who is fully committed to my well-being, locked into an existence with no point, “tired of living and scared of dying,” capable of enjoying only those pleasures that mask reality and afterward increase my sense of emptiness, and afraid to face the awful freedom of choosing my way in the dark.
Somehow, and it is a tribute to the ingenuity of devilish wisdom, we manage to believe that we do not really need continued forgiveness. We may give forgiveness its pre-eminent place in public confession, but privately we’re quite persuaded that something else is really more vital to our lives. Forgiveness begins the Christian life, but, we assume, something else (moral effort? self-development?) sustains it. And whatever it is, we pursue it with evangelistic fervor, and thus continue on in an essentially self-centered approach to life.
A relationship with God established and maintained by his forgiveness provides the only framework within which we can be concerned with our own well-being without being wrongly self-centered. And this is because entering into that relationship, and learning to enjoy it more deeply, requires that we depend not on our own efforts to gain life or to protect ourselves from pain but rather on whatever a kind God chooses to do as we repentantly follow him.
When we in our sin meet God in his grace—this does the most to change us. And an ongoing encounter with God, in which we further probe the depths of his forgiveness, not by sinning more but by recognizing more of our sin, continues the process of change.
When more than anything else we long for forgiveness, we then learn to celebrate forgiveness as the foundation of our lives. His grace, not our effort, becomes everything. And as we value God’s grace more, we change from self-centered people who angrily yearn for relief from hurt to other-centered people who celebrate his forgiveness by longing to know him better and to make him better known. Change is not only possible for, but also promised to, the Christian who believes that God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him.
The core dynamic behind all change from self-centeredness to other-centeredness is an appreciation of God’s grace. Many forces promote change: admitting self-pity and behaving responsibly can lift depression; sorting through issues of control may relieve eating compulsions; talking sensibly to yourself during a crisis can quite anxiety. But only one force can move us toward that radically other-centered character of Christ: the celebration of forgiveness.
Nothing is more basic to Christian living than our celebration of God’s forgiveness. Nothing must ever be allowed to replace our gratitude for redemption.
And other-centered relating, the most crucial element in building a marriage, will develop only where husbands and wives value forgiveness as the most necessary element in their lives. This can be emphasized first by defining a good relationship.
Most of us are at least vaguely aware that things don’t bring us lasting happiness. Experience has taught us (or is trying to) that the good feelings generated by a new dress, a trip to the Orient, a house on the beach, dinner at the Ritz Carlton, or a promotion to vice president are neither deep nor lasting.
The simple truth is that true happiness cannot exist apart from personal relationship. At some level, we all know this. But if we have never tasted real joy through another person, we may find ourselves addicted to good feelings and miserably enslaved to shallow pleasures.
For too many, however, the relationships that are supposed to bring the most happiness serve up the worst misery. Tensions with parents, frustrations with children, and angry distance between spouses sometimes make shallow pleasure seem preferable.
Because family relationships are sometimes more painful than satisfying, many people manage to find someone outside of their family with whom time together feels good. Lonely wives talk at length with special women friends. Frustrated husbands enjoy golf with a good buddy, and meaningful relationships with someone of the opposite sex often develop. We want to feel connected with somebody, to share with someone who understands and cares, to be with someone who lets us go off duty and relax. It feels so good to enjoy who we are in someone else’s presence.
And when we are with that someone, it is entirely natural to think of this relationship as good. But notice how the word good gets defined: a good relationship, in this natural way of thinking, is one that provides us with whatever we need to feel happy. Using this definition, a happily married couple could call their relationship good for precisely the same reason adulterous lovers might value theirs. In both situations, people feel good about themselves in the presence of another.
Something is clearly wrong with a definition of relationships that can be claimed by both committed spouses and immoral roommates.
Part of the problem with our understanding of what makes a relationship good is that we start with the wrong data. Finding couples who seem to be happy and looking at their relationships to sort out the ingredients for successful relating is risky. A fallen world filled with deceived people who often feel good for wrong reasons is no place to do our research. We may as well formulate moral principles by studying the mating habits of animals.
To understand what a good relationship is we need to consider the only example of perfect relating: God. It is legitimate to question how the three Persons of the Godhead manage to get along so well.
It’s true that two’s company and three’s a crowd, one might expect that in all the years they’ve been together some trouble would have developed. Most couples can’t make it through their first night without fussing about something.
Such talk, of course, is nonsense, and if I were serious, blasphemous. But it does point up that relationships within the Trinity are very different from ours. But what does their manner of relating have to do with developing a definition of good relationships among mere mortals?
Just before he died, our Lord was reflecting on the closeness he enjoyed with his Father. He turned his eyes upward and with a heart filled with joy and longing said, “I pray also for those who will believe in me . . . . that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” ( Jn. 17:20-21).
In that prayer, our Lord set before us the standard for measuring a good relationship. Theologian D. Broughton Knox expressed it this way: “The doctrine of the trinity tells us that ultimate reality is personal relationship” . . . . and that “. . . . the characteristic of true relationship is other-person-centeredness.”
Consider just a few samples of trinitarian relating. “The Father loves the Son ( Jn. 3:35). He shows him all that he does ( Jn. 5:20). The Son in response always does what pleases the Father ( Jn. 8:29), and his obedience springs from his love for his Father ( Jn. 14:31). The Spirit is self-effacing. He does not speak of himself, but he takes the things of the Son and shows them to believers. He glorifies Christ” ( Jn. 16:13-14).
Beginning with the data of divine relationships rather than our experiences with each other, we can come close to defining a good relationship. A good relationship is one in which each member willingly and actively devotes whatever he or she has to give to the well-being of the other. In such a relationship, the highest criterion for deciding what to do at any moment is a person’s understanding before God of what would be the greatest service he or she can offer to the other.
Shifting from a primary concern for me to a primary concern for you never happens naturally, nor do I have the power to make it happen by sheer effort. If I am to be transformed into a person who more and more values my life as an opportunity for service, then grace will have to impact me so strongly and deeply that it shatters my self-commitment and replaces it with genuine concern for others.
But so often we’re moved by lesser things than grace.
A simple illustration will explain. I wrote most of this book during an extended stay in England. During this time my wife Rachael and I had the opportunity to see several plays in London theaters. At different moments we laughed, we cried, we felt excited, we were saddened, we became enraged. We were struck, as we often are after being well entertained, how mere human fiction or well-performed music can move us more deeply than divine drama.
Somehow we manage to miss the breath-taking reality of the Christian story. Yet the gospel, the good news of forgiveness, more than anything else, is worth celebrating. Biblical Christianity, like good drama, tells a story, a true one, that catches us off guard with its utterly surprising ending. And, as in the best mystery novels, when the surprise ending is revealed, it becomes wonderfully obvious in a way that still staggers and thrills.
I wonder if the drama of redemption sometimes seems commonplace because we tend to move too quickly from the reality of self-centeredness to questions that we find more compelling precisely because we are self-centered.
Part of the problem is that we feel the reality of our wounds more than the fact of our sin. We therefore react with more passion to those things that restore a sense of personal wholeness than to our redemption.
Everything we do has a deeply personal agenda. Sanctification includes abandoning every agenda that aims toward recovering or enhancing our own intactness, and pursuing God with not our wholeness, but with his glory, in view, with the confidence that his agenda includes satisfying every longing in our hearts.
As we celebrate forgiveness, sometimes with singing and sometimes with a determined awareness of its centrality in our life, other-centeredness develops. It is the Spirit’s work. We are motivated to go about the business of living with the well-being of others in view.
Understanding masculinity and femininity begins with learning what another person needs with the intent of supplying that need if we can. It does not begin by trying to understand ourselves.
When we emphasize providing others with what they need rather than on figuring out who we are, what is most valuable, real, and substantial about us will surface. Giving out of compassion for recognized human need stirs us to boldly give the very best we have.
True masculinity and femininity emerge and develop only in the midst of other-centered relating.
The more a man understands a woman and is controlled by a Spirit-prompted other-centered commitment to bless her, the more “masculine” he becomes. And he will become more masculine in an unself-conscious fashion.
In exactly the same way, the more a woman understands a man and is preoccupied with doing all she can for him, the more “feminine” she naturally becomes. We will neither understand nor enjoy our sexual natures until we take seriously our responsibility to use our distinct natures to serve others.
I therefore offer a beginning definition of masculinity and femininity: Masculinity and femininity are whatever comes out of a man and a woman as they do not try to excuse their self-centeredness, but repent whenever they spot it and as they learn to relate to others as Christ does with an increasingly passionate concern for their well-being.
If your marriage is troubled, my counsel is not to figure out what it means to be a man or woman, then try hard to measure up to your definition, nor to fit into whatever role may be implied by that definition. Nor is my counsel to determine who you are as a person, whether male or female, with your own set of interests, talents, and resources, and then learn to more fully express whatever you discover, committing yourself to removing whatever obstacles you encounter.
My counsel is rather to look hard at your spouse, to identify his or her hurts and wounds and frustrations, and then to do whatever is within your power to help. The obstacles you need to remove are those that interfere with your progress toward other-centeredness, not with self-expression.
Following this simply stated bit of advice will bring you into the legitimate and wholesome enjoyment of your true self, whether you are male or female.
Learning to be other-centered then is the foundation for masculine and feminine relating. Scripture does more, however, than lay the foundation. It also provides a basis for thinking more specifically about what it means to be a man or woman.
When does a man feel most like a man? What makes him glad that he is a man, grateful to be alive because of the unique joys of masculinity?
Because God created us for relationship, because we find our reason to exist in relationship, and because life’s deepest joys come to us through relationship, masculinity is most richly expressed in relationships. It is in relationship that a man achieves a satisfying sense of completion.
Two elements are involved in masculinity: a quiet confidence as a man moves purposefully through life, and a tender sensitivity to others that makes him willing to decisively and sacrificially involve himself with another.
Although God delegated authority over the earth to both man and woman, it is difficult to escape the impression that God intended the man to move into the world in a way that differed from his intention for woman. After the fall, God’s judgment on Adam introduced difficulties that affected him as he worked in the world. The judgment was not that he had to work, but rather that his work would not go smoothly.
Eve’s judgment on the other hand, centered on her relationship with the man, both as the one who would bear the couple’s children and in her efforts to enjoy companionship with him (see Gen. 3:16-19).
God’s judgments on both the man and the woman were neither petulant nor uncaring. God’s intent was to discourage Adam and Eve (and their descendants) from thinking that their lives could ever work without him and to help them realize that the full realization of joy awaits a new heaven and earth.
Directions for the husband specifically include nourishing his wife (providing for her needs) and cherishing (tenderly handling) her according to a thought-through understanding of her sensitivities ( Eph. 5:29; 1 Peter 3:7), whether it is in the tender, intimate life-regenerating physical relationship or in the confidence with which he approaches decisions in his life. Most men will, of course, go through troublesome times of uncertainty, but as long as there is a confidence beneath the turmoil that things will sort themselves out, the sense of masculinity continues to be felt.
A woman will not, however, enjoy the company, at least not for long, of a supremely confident man who never struggles with self-doubt, whose confidence is a swaggering belief in his ability to reach self-serving goals. The successful, talented, attractive man who doesn’t know how to expose his weaknesses and sensitively explore his wife’s feelings will not win her appreciation. Neither macho nor wimpy describes a man.
A man is “manly” when he moves through life with a purposeful and confident involvement, when he follows a direction that he values for reasons that are bigger than himself. If that direction reflects the purposes of God, then his style of relating will not be self-consumed, driven, or pushy; it will rather reflect a growing sensitivity to others.
When a man’s purposes are godly, that is, when he is ambitious for God’s glory and concerned with other-centered relating, he will experience a stability that anchors him through emotional ups and downs and a noble desire for tender, caring, intimate involvement with people, primarily his wife. In this involvement his wife will feel secure, conscious that she is more enjoyed and valued than his greatest achievements.
Masculinity is not so much a matter of what a man does, but that he does it and that he does it for certain reasons. This realization disposes a man to move compassionately into his world and toward family and friends with a joyful confidence that he can promote good purposes.
Womanhood must never be defined in a frivolous way that makes it necessarily “unfeminine” to be fully competent and highly respected as a physician, corporate executive, or biblical scholar. Nor should femininity be essentially connected to cooking, sensual clothing, or a sweet subservient demeanor. Womanhood, like manhood, has more to do with a woman’s attitude toward herself and others as she involves herself in relationships.
A godly woman is more interested in giving whatever she has to meet someone’s need than in developing her talents, and she is aware that her uniquely feminine contribution depends more than anything else on matters within her heart that affect her style of relating.
A woman is less centrally focused on achievement as a means for feeling complete. More, she tends to value giving something of herself to nourish relationships and deepen attachments. Her focus is less on going into the world and more on entering a relational network.
The ideas of separateness and achievement and entering seem more rooted in the masculine nature while involvement and attachment and invitation belong to the feminine identity. I do not think it stretches things too far to regard physical sexuality as a wonderful picture of personal sexuality. Men feel complete as they strongly enter; women feel enjoyed as they warmly invite.
Femininity, at its core, might therefore be thought of as the secure awareness of the substance God has placed within a woman’s being that enables her to confidently and warmly invite others into relationship with God and with herself, knowing that there is something in each relationship to be wonderfully enjoyed.
When we are more gripped by the sheer wrongness and persuasiveness of our self-centeredness and by the incomparable beauty of God’s grace than by the spirit of pain cause by another’s unkindness, then the Spirit of God does something wonderful. We being to feel moved, in the deepest regions of our being, to care about someone else more than ourselves and to be more passionately committed to knowing God than to finding immediate relief from our pain ( Ezek. 36:24-27).
One evidence that we are “moved to follow his decrees” (Ezek. 36:27) is our noticing thing about our partner that we formerly failed to see. We begin to recognize what our spouse would love to receive from us, and we are excited when we realize that we can give what he or she longs to receive.
Husbands in whom the Spirit is working look tenderly at their wives, knowing how badly women want to feel special and enjoyed. Cherishing their wives becomes more important than getting ahead in business. And wives sense how inadequate their husbands sometimes feel, and how much their support and respect would mean to them. They begin to see through the social confidence and the angry moodiness to the desperate desire to feel strong and to matter. And, as the Spirit continues to move, men and women spend more time thinking how they affect each other than about their own personal fulfillment.
Perhaps the most common misunderstanding of marriage responsibilities involves an authoritarian view of male leadership in the home. Some conservative Christians tend to think of headship as a kind of “authority-in-reserve,” a badge that sits in the husband’s desk drawer until the power it symbolizes is needed. When trouble begins and direction is required, the head of the home reaches into the drawer for his badge, pins it on his chest, and settles things with a manly display of decisive leadership.
But God does not grant authority to the “position” of husband and then permit whomever occupies that position to use this authority whenever he sees fit without a priority concern to serve the well-being of his wife.
A man longs to feel complete. Whether single or married, he wants to know that he can move toward a woman and touch her deeply. In order to exercise his manhood (which in marriage is the same thing as headship), a man must understand both what a woman was uniquely designed to enjoy and that he has what it takes to provide her with that enjoyment.
A man is completed by filling something or someone that would be empty if he had not come. A woman is affirmed when someone whom she invites and who enjoys her enters her life. Headship then is a man’s strong involvement with a woman—an involvement rooted in an awareness of the good-effect he can have and in a deep enjoyment of all that his wife is and will yet become.
Now, what is submission? Submission consists of a woman’s warmly receiving and meaningfully supporting a man’s involvement in life in a way that encourages his godliness.
Ever since Adam first had to work up a sweat to make the ground yield more food than weeds, men have wondered if they have what it takes to get the job done. The question mark is inherited, passed on from father to son. When young boys move into their worlds and fail, a lesson is learned.
A man once told me of the time, when as a boy, he helped his father build a workshop in their garage. They decided to hang pegboard for the tools. When the boy’s father was at the store buying pegs, the 12-year-old son decided to surprise his dad by hanging the board by himself.
Just as he stepped back to proudly survey the newly mounted board, his dad returned from the store. His dad’s eye was immediately drawn to the spot where the electrical outlet was covered by the board. The boy had forgotten to cut out a space to provide access for plugging in the tools.
“How could you forget about the outlets?” his dad yelled. “Now we’ll have to yank all those nails out and probably tear up both the wall and the pegboard.”
The boy learned his lesson, and as a man remembered it: it is dangerous to move with initiative into one’s world. In a fallen world, every decision, big or little, involves the uncertainty of possible failure.
When an other-centered woman discerns the deep questions that plague her husband as he carries on with life, she will sense a desire within herself to respond to that question. She must become thankfully aware of her power to provide answers. What are her resources for touching her husband? A woman has been equipped to welcome others into relationship with her and to offer that welcome with a spirit secure enough to be non-demanding and confident enough to be thoroughly inviting.
Peter counsels women to give their husbands what a man finds most deeply attractive in a woman, a gentle and quiet spirit. Nothing more clearly responds to a man’s questions about his own inadequacy than a woman who accepts him with unthreatened acceptance and inviting support even when his judgment is poor.
A submissive wife will exercise her authority to serve her husband with a spirit that encourages him in his manhood and with the joy that comes from giving oneself for the sake of another.
A really good marriage has the feel of a man and woman blending together into natural movement where individuality is obviously present but really isn’t the point, something perhaps like dance partners of many years who anticipate each other’s steps with practiced ease.
The rhythm of the music and the dancers’ movements are two separate ingredients, and although it’s clear that one directs the other, you don’t sense that the dancers are working hard to keep in step with the music. The rhythm is in them; they move with it naturally, effortlessly, with every movement fitting the music because the music is part of them.
Beginning dancers have to think about moving as they should. Old-timers neither violate the rules nor work hard to follow them, but rather blend together their distinct contributions as each one responds to his or her own “feel” of the same music. Learning how headship and submission actually work in a marriage is sometimes as clumsy as an inexperienced teenager learning to dance. There are rules to follow, there are roles that lay out the steps to take, but neither rules nor roles create the awareness of rhythm that makes for good dancing.
There is a rhythm in relationship, a rhythm that can only be heard as the great truths about God are played over and over again. Increasingly we recognize what they mean and embrace them as true: truths about his holiness and our sinfulness, about his yearning for relationship with us and the length to which he went to satisfy those yearnings; truths about how he has made us, and his good purposes for us; truths about his indwelling, which means I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me ( Gal. 2:20).
Perhaps there is no more important truth for us to ponder than the fact that we are somehow like God, that we bear his image. And as we reflect on the wonder of all that it means to bear his image, the Scriptures quickly require us to notice another fact, that God has made us as men and women.
One theologian [Werner Neuer] put the matter this way: “A person exists only as a man or a woman. A person can never deny his maleness or her femaleness. A person does not just have a male or female body; he is a man, she is a woman. Sex is therefore not just one personal characteristic among others, but a mode of being which determines one’s whole life” (emphasis added by Crabb).
Our sexuality is expressed in all that we do. God’s design is the music, and when we understand it and accept it with joy we begin to feel the rhythm of sexuality in our souls. Headship and submission represent masculine and feminine movements in the dance of relationship. They cannot be properly understood apart from realizing that in marriage, headship is what a man does when he is living as a godly man, and submission is what a woman does when she is living as a godly woman.
Headship and submission, when defined as opportunities to uniquely give to our spouses what they long to receive, become the route to enjoying the difference between men and women.
The differences are real and deep. Men are designed to enter their worlds of people and responsibilities with the confident and unthreatened strength of an advocate. Women are designed to invite other people into a non-manipulative attachment that encourages the enjoyment of intimate relationship.
For all of us, the disease of justified selfishness is the central obstacle to developing good marriages and friendships. The path to change begins with a hard look at our self-centeredness and at the wounds in our hearts that we use to justify the demand that others treat us well.
As repentance occurs, the path continues with an exploration of who we are as men and women. When we learn to warmly give what our sexual identity equips us to give to bless our mate, then we will become men and women who enjoy the difference.
Excerpted from: Crabb, Dr. Lawrence J., Jr. Men and Women: Enjoying the Difference. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991.
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