Comedian Whitney Cummings recently said, in an interview on the popular secular podcast Modern Wisdom, “What I say to women, is like get to a place where you have nothing to prove, so you can totally submit to your man and it doesn’t feel like you’re like a bad feminist.” To my surprise, host Chris Williamson did not bat an eye or even ask a clarifying question. Instead, the two discussed how strange it was to think it completely normal for a woman to submit to an employer or the demands of a career, but oppressive to submit to a husband or the demands of a family. Touché.
Early in our own marriage, Flannery and I did not have any real sense of what St. Paul might have meant when he instructed wives to submit to their husbands. We were too committed to the authority of Scripture to reject his instruction. But we couldn’t tell you what it meant practically. Surely it could not simply mean that husbands make decisions and wives obey them.
We became familiar, of course, with the importance of interpreting this passage in light of Paul’s earlier comments about mutual submission. We learned about the Roman cultural context. And we knew that Paul’s call to husbands, to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, was an equally strong injunction, and one that mitigated against the abuse of the passage in question.
But we still had no sense of what the passage could mean in our day-to-day life together. Almost any homilies or other commentary we heard on this passage followed the same basic pattern. We found out what Paul most certainly did not mean, but were left guessing as to what he did.
Real but subtle differences
Almost 20 years into marriage, things are finally becoming clearer. We have learned a lot about the different needs of women and men and the different capacities each has to meet the other’s needs. But, since we live in a culture that denies such differences, we have had to learn the hard way. We have also learned that the same powers God has given men and women to meet one another’s needs (and to serve their families and communities) are the very powers that, misused, can devastate each other.
What baffles the contemporary mind is that, while St. Paul instructs both husbands and wives to submit to one another, that submission is described differently for men and for women. If men and women are essentially interchangeable, this makes no sense. Only real differences between men and women can account for both mutuality and asymmetry.
The differences between women and men can be subtle. And caricatures and stereotypes are not helpful. But neither is papering over real difference. It is not at all true, for example, to say that men make decisions based on logic and women make decisions based on emotion. All of us use logic and emotion in decision making. But the way that we use each tends to follow distinctly masculine or feminine patterns.
It was in our slowly dawning awareness of these kinds of differences, and our slowly increasing capacity to articulate them, that we have finally found some wisdom and solace in Paul’s words. For instance, both husbands and wives need to feel heard and understood by their partners. But what women and men need from each other in order to feel heard and understood is often not the same thing.
We can now understand this even at a biochemical level. The primary bonding hormones for men and women operate differently. But when we fail to recognize and honor this difference, giving what we need instead of what our partner needs, both of us end up feeling unheard and unsupported. What is worse, we are bewildered when our partner feels this way despite our best efforts.
Connecting to the other
For us, at least, the asymmetry between our different needs and capacities corresponds remarkably well to Paul’s instructions. Wives are far more likely to use their powers to undermine their husbands than to overpower them. Submitting is a kind of opposite to undermining. For their part, husbands are more likely to dominate their wives, the very opposite of giving up your life for her.
As to needs, everyone knows that when husbands try to solve problems without first acknowledging the feelings and experiences their wives are describing, women get frustrated. They want a connection before a solution. We speak less about how men reach out, often by explaining something they find interesting or exciting, and how they feel when those efforts are rejected (e.g., with accusations of “mansplaining”). Men need connection too, even if they seek it differently.
In our marriage, at least, submission is mutual, but it is also sex specific. It is not about who gets to make decisions, but about connecting with and supporting someone who is genuinely other. Whitney Cummings is part of a broader pushback against the erasure of sex differences in contemporary culture. Somehow this allowed her to see something that we, “good Catholics,” took almost 20 years to figure out.
