Evangelicals, particularly Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFB), have a strict definition of what a “good” marriage is. I was taught by my IFB pastors and professors and I later taught to church members a patriarchal and complementarian form of marriage and family. Husbands are to be the heads of their homes. Wives are to submit to their husbands in all things. Husbands and wives have strict roles. Husbands are to lead their families and be breadwinners. Wives are to be keepers of their homes, bearers of children, and coin-operated sex machines. Children are to obey their parents in all things under the penalty of corporal punishment for disobedience.
I spent most of my twenty-five years in the ministry teaching and modeling a patriarchal marriage to church members. Within that framework, Polly and I had a “good” marriage. It wasn’t until we began the slow process of leaving Evangelical Christianity that we realized we had a warped understanding of what constitutes a “good” marriage. We’ve been married for forty-three years. We were virgins on our wedding day. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that our marriage began to change in appreciable ways, moving from a complementarian marriage to an egalitarian one. Our marriage is very different today from what it was forty, thirty, or even twenty years ago. Is our marriage a “good” one? Maybe. Good is such a subjective term, meaning different things to different people. The same goes for dysfunctional marriages. By what standard do we determine whether a marriage is good or dysfunctional?
Years ago, I sold insurance for United Insurance in Newark, Ohio. I had one married couple who was a client that I saw each month. I would stop by their home to pick up their insurance premium, and inevitably they would start screaming at each other. They had been married for fifty years. The first time I heard them hollering, I thought they were going to kill each other. After months of watching them holler at each other, I realized the hollering was just a part of the ebb and flow of their life together. They deeply loved one another.
Polly and I have had more fights than I can count. I explain it this way. Temperamental Bruce loses his temper and hollers. Quiet, passive Polly says to herself, “I’m not putting up with his shit!” I will draw a metaphorical line in the sand, and Polly, with few words, will step right over the line. And then we fight, albeit briefly. I can’t remember a fight that lasted more than a few minutes. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had a fight that mattered. We deeply love one another, and according to our own standard, we are 98.9 percent of the time happily married. What works for us may not work for others. That’s why I don’t encourage couples to follow in our steps. We’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years. We’ve gone through tough times, some so serious that the future of our marriage was threatened (1981-82 comes to mind, when our second child was born, Polly devoted herself to two children under three, and I was working 60-70 hours a week for Arthur Treacher’s).
I take a live-and-let-live approach to life and marriage. It’s up to individual couples to judge the quality of their marriages. What may work for one couple may not work for another. This is not to say that there is no such thing as a “bad” marriage. I counseled countless Christian couples over the years, people who had “bad” marriages; marriages filled with violence, abuse, and infidelity. Oh, they may have loved Jesus, but they treated their spouses and children like dog shit on the bottom of their shoes. Over the years, I encouraged women to separate from their abusive husbands. Sadly, none did. I witnessed child abuse, and, quite frankly, practiced it myself when I whipped my three oldest sons. Fortunately, I came to understand that it is wrong to use violence (and beating children is violence, regardless of what the Bible says) to discipline children. Unfortunately, I can’t undo what was done in the past.
What are your thoughts on good, bad, and dysfunctional marriages? How do you describe your marriage? I would love to hear what you think.
I am content to say that I am happily married. If I had to do it all over again, I would still marry Polly. We’ve had a rough-and-tumble roll in the hay all these years. When it’s my time to die, I hope I have the opportunity to tell Polly one more time that I love her. Most of all, I want to be able to tell her, “thank you, it’s been good.”
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Regarding the illustrations, Satan is at the head if a woman leads the family? Really? What about single mothers? Widows? Wives with severely disabled husbands? Just when I think Evangelicals can’t insult women anymore, they find more to pile on.
It is even more laughable when you consider that Bill Gothard, on whose teachings the illustration is based, is: 1) never married and 2) accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment.
This is the Protestant equivalent of celibate priests giving marriage counseling while themselves regularly partaking in naughty conducts hidden from the public.
There are no perfect marriages. When spouses think of each other and treat each other as equals, care for each other, and respect each other, most stuff that comes up can be sorted out. But that means the default mode of engaging is compromise. There is no single head of the family, just two people metaphorically standing back to back against the world, with children (if any) between them, being protected by both.
My parents didn’t have an egalitarian marriage. Dad wanted a sort-of-egalitarian marriage, a relationship of equals but acknowledging that he was much smarter and better at problem-solving than she was. My mother wanted a nice, comfortable, authoritarian relationship where Dad would take care of her and not require her to think too hard. In return, she could bitch about him behind his back, and gripe that he didn’t read her mind and figure out what she wanted him to do about various things. The unhappy, captive audience for this complaining was me, as far back as I can remember, but certainly when I had two digits to my age. In high school, though, I started saying things like, Did you discuss this with Dad? Did you ask him what he really thinks? Are you really sure he’d object to that? All of which annoyed her. By the time I got to college, my response became, It’s your marriage, it’s between the two of you, work it out.
I have no idea why deliberately placing oneself in a submissive position to a spouse was so attractive to her, except that something in her upbringing made her long for it. I realize that she is far from the only woman I know who craves that submissive position, and every one of them will gripe about their husbands. Not being into griping, I don’t get it.
I think marriages are most fulfilling to both partners where we both hold the umbrella handle, knowing that no deities are holding one above us.
How did Satan get so much power? In the OT, Satan is a loyal servant of Yahweh, but these NT evangelicals puff him up to being an opposing god of strength equal to Yahweh. How did this happen? Why could not Yahweh make Satan go away and erase any memory or record of his existence? Would only require a simple thought, no?
I have spent time with my therapist talking about this very issue. I was taught complementarianism as a teen in church, and I rejected it as not for me. I watched my grandma try to do it, but my grandpa wasn’t on board with it. My grandma tried her best but would end up making comments about hee rebellious nature and denigrating herself for trying to live submissively instead of as a partner.
My mom was married 3 times. Her 1st marriage lasted a year. Her second was to my biological father who was a horrible person, and I don’t remember much about him – but I know they he cheated on my mom and she left him. Her 3rd marriage was to a sweet divorced man whose wife had cheated on him, and my mom was much brighter than he was. My mom was awful to him – having been bullied by 2 previous husbands, she became the bully. I really don’t know how he put up with her 😕. He had his own passive-aggressive ways, so there’s that.
So I don’t know if I have witnessed a “good” marriage. I have been married 25 years, and the past 2 years we have finally been in a situation where we’re actually speaking openly and honestly. There have been issues with depression and substance abuse which made things hard, like navigating a mine field. It’s better to communicate and not to assume something about the other person, using an assumption as a reason not to communicate. A “good” marriage requires communication, respect, and commitment.