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“Old age or a pool of blood,” we will sometimes say to one another.

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Good post at DarwinCatholic about the problem of trying for "equality" in a marriage.

I'm not an absolutist about "traditional roles", although MrsDarwin and I have always felt strongly about maintaining a single income family with a full time parent at home, but the one thing I think is probably almost never healthy is a strong emphasis on doing everything equally in a marriage rather than having some sort of roles. If you both work full time careers, and both strive to do equal amounts of housework, parenting, cooking, etc., it seems to me that comparisons will almost invariably spring up. 

"I do the dishes every night, but she hasn't swept the floor in three days."
"I end up having to help the kids out with homework while she just takes them out to fun activities which cost lots of money."
"I make more money, but he's always going out to lunch as if money were no object."

And on, and on. Perhaps I'm an unusually unpleasant person, but in a work environment I can't help constantly measuring myself against the other people who are "doing the same thing I'm doing". This can be pretty harmless at work so long as one keeps a lid on it. After all, it's just work, and we get to walk away at the end of the day. But when you bring this same tendency towards competition into a marriage, I can see nothing but trouble coming of it. There it seems to me that it's very important to have complementary but different roles — not do everything together as "co-parents". This doesn't have to be some kind of radical partitioning. But if one of your major goals is, "We'll make equal money, do equal work, and have equal fun," I think conflict will almost invariably result. Marriage is meant to be based on complementarity, not measured equality.


This is all very well said.  I think where many folks go wrong is in the mis-application of the truth that men and women have equal dignity, worth, and importance.  It is good to say, and to believe, that "men and women should be equal," and it's also correct to say "Husband and wife are equal partners in a marriage," all as ways of communicating the truth of equal dignity, worth, and importance.  Equality of persons.

The error is in understanding that to mean "Husband and wife must expend equal effort and/or receive equal benefit."  That's the fallacy of interpreting equality to mean sameness or consistency.  It's an easy one to make because in many non-marital contexts, ensuring "sameness" and consistency is a handy way, or even the only practical way to ensure equality — children sharing a cake "equally" should get pieces about the "same" size, judges should try to apply laws in a consistent way to all the people before them, etc. 

But equality of persons is not dependent on equal effort expended and equal benefit received.  It has more to do with equally valuing the different efforts of both:  the classic example is to value the work that helps the family without bringing in money equally with work that helps the family primarily by bringing in money, but there are many other examples.   It has more to do with trying to equally meet the needs of everyone in the family — which almost surely means that some members receive "more" of something or other, because of needs specific to that person.  Trying to treat all your children equally is impossible.  Trying to meet all your children's real needs is worthy.  

Really, the essence of the "equality = sameness" error?  It ultimately assumes that someone who doesn't produce the same as another isn't worth the same as another.  It ultimately measures people against a standard of sameness.  A (the?) fundamental truth about persons is that persons are unique.  Which means unique needs, unique abilities, unique desires.

(I always find that a good mental test for any sort of philosophy of marriage and family is this:  "Would this idea hold up if one of us became permanently and severely disabled?"  Hard cases may make bad law, but hard cases also make obvious hash of bad principles.) 

Finally, I'm reminded of something one of my Indian co-workers said when someone asked her how it was that she'd remained happily married for 20+ years to a man she only met ten minutes before her wedding. "You just tell yourself you don't have any other options," she said. "If you really believe that, it helps you avoid starting problems that will make you want out." At this point in modern America's divorce culture, it's very hard to tell yourself that there are not other options, but I think that rebuilding that mentality — not just as in "I'd better put up with this, because there's no way out" but rather "I had better make sure that I'm easy to live with, because if I cause problems there is no way out of them" — is probably the only real path back towards marital stability and sanity in the wider culture.


I find that the "choice to have no choice" is an extremely powerful one, the purest act of free will, the best way to do what you really know is right or even just to achieve an optional, but dearly desired, goal.    That's true whether applied in matters that are small (I want to resist eating them, so I choose to consider these potato chips completely off limits), medium (I want a natural birth, so I choose to think of the epidural as Not An Option), or vastly, eternally important (this marriage isn't over until one of us is dead).  

The more firmly you believe in the Not-An-Option option, the easier it is to figure out what your useful options are.

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