My Marriage Testimony

I thought I would share here what a large part of the impetus was for me to start researching all that Greek that I've referred to in earlier posts, about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. The impetus was my own marriage.

First of all, my husband suffers from clinical depression. He's usually okay when he's medicated properly, but sometimes he builds up a tolerance to the medication and it simply stops working. His depression isn't expressed as sadness or feeling "down" -- it's expressed as anger. All anger. He is usually the most laid-back man around, but when he goes into a depression all bets are off. He has never been violent to me or our son, but he starts fantasizing about random violence to strangers... ALL the time.

Anyway, it was during his last MDE (Major Depressive Episode) that we actually started to work all this stuff out. When we first got married, he was a new Christian and had never been exposed to "Christian" sexism before, and I had been attending a secular university for 6 years. We married as equals and functioned very well that way. If anything, I made more of the decisions simply because of the two of us I'm the more "Type A" -- he just doesn't care about the same stuff I care about, or as much. It worked out very well for us.

Then I got involved with a patriarchal church and a couple of spiritually abusive message boards. Hearing the message from all these sources that we were in sin and shirking our God-given responsibilities made us start questioning our relationship. Even though it goes against the grain of both our personalities, we gave in to the "peer pressure" of the church and decided that we should try to be more like we were being taught husbands and wives should be like; that we should fight our "sinful" personalities and sublimate them so that he could "lead" us and I could "follow".

So I backed off. When we had to make a decision, I would do all the research and legwork required, all the information-gathering, and then present it to him and he would make the decision.

When he got angry and yelled at me, or at our son, for no reason, I "submitted" and tried to be self-effacing. I did what he asked me to do. I ventured opinions, sure, but always left the final decision up to him. According to the teachings of our church, the people on those forums, and the likes of Debi Pearl, our marriage was finally "in line with God's will."

Living like that caused so much grief and discord in our lives and household that we very nearly split up. It even affected our sex life. He would get angry, actually angry, when I tried to initiate, an HE never initiated anything at all. The results of some of his bad decisions came back to haunt us, and knowing that he was the one who had made them made him even more depressed. Mind you, those few times when we had both done the info-gathering and decided things together, those decisions had great results! But living like that, with him being the boss and my unilateral submission, nearly killed our marriage... and definitely did kill our joy, love, and pleasure in each other.

It wasn't until I lovingly told him, "The next time you snap at me or our son for no reason, I'm taking him out of the house and you won't get to see us for the next [span of time]," that he discovered lo and behold! He didn't HAVE to yell and berate us all the time! (Thank you, Cloud & Townsend!)

He hadn't wanted me to even bring up the topic of medication for his depression, so I hadn't. Until things got so bad I just decided "This is insane. I'm doing everything according to God's will and not being rewarded for it. If not submitting is a sin, then I'll by golly sin and take the consequences for it, but I'm not going to continue like this anymore."

About the same time as I made that decision, my husband (during an angry outburst) told me he didn't WANT a submissive wife anymore! He loved the wife he used to have, doggone it, and why couldn't I be her anymore? If we were going to go against God's will in going back to the way we were when we married, then if he was the leader, he'd take the consequences for it, but he wasn't going to continue like this anymore.

Hmmmmmm.

So after that, I started mentioning his medication more often. As I said, he NEEDS antidepressants in order to function at a human level. He'd been off his meds, or on the wrong ones, for a long time. He didn't like hearing that he should go back to the doctor and get new ones, but I kept mentioning it and kept mentioning it persistently (and lovingly) until he did. A month later it was almost like I'd gotten my true husband back.

Worried that now that we were being true to our own personalities and each other's desires, we were outside the will of God, we started to research and study the scriptures about it...

Only to discover that what we'd been taught was the "will of God for marriage" was only the teachings of our church for marriage... and that God's will is something VERY different. Not only that, but it was something of a "duh" moment when we realized God gave us our personalities, too! And we had been rejecting that gift thinking we were more in line with his will by calling them sinful. God made us this way for a reason, and it was very wrong of us to try to preempt God and tell him how he should have made us.

That's our story. We walked together through the valley of the shadow of patriarchy, and God be praised, came out egalitarian on the other side. Hallelujah!