What good wife doesn’t appreciate a husband who leads his family with “It’s time to say prayers” or “We all need to volunteer to help …” or “We can afford to take all of you on a trip this next summer, if we cooperate in …” Leadership means leading the way in pleasing God.

The keys to better loving are good leadership from the husband, hard work from both spouses, thoughtful words of appreciation, and charity to forgive each others defects.

A wife knows she is loved when she is appreciated by her husband; a husband when he is appreciated by his wife.

Okay, I think I can understand what you’re saying. It’s perfectly true that many people are so deeply confused about marriage that advice like this might not do them much good. They wouldn’t be able to understand it because too many other things are wrong.

In matters like this, you’re always going to be oversimplifying absurdly whenever you try to identify “the real problem” in a sentence. There are lots of angles from which things can be approached. People who absolutely reject the notion of genders will probably not be convinced or helped. But people who are reading Capon’s book are probably already inclined, for the most part, to be more sympathetic than the average population to St. Paul’s words on marriage. Likewise the readers of this blog. So it might sometimes be worthwhile to get into stuff like this.

Even for those who are tempted by traditional ideas of marriage, it can be difficult to actually grasp and live them, given the generally hostile conditions of our present society. Capon’s explanations might be good for the half-convinced, or as a helpful way of fleshing out the notion of headship for the more fully convinced. I mean, if the sexual revolution is responsible for the damage, we’ll still have to figure out practical ways, on the level of our own families, to repair matters.

The point I was trying to make, I guess, was that how both husbands and wives understand their roles as married people depends in large part on what they both believe marriage to be. If they are influenced by the liberationist movements deriving from Nietzsche and Marx (even without explicitly acknowledging it), then there is going to be the kind of confusion Capon describes. If they are influenced by St. Paul, and believe that there is a difference of roles rooted in the nature of things, then there won’t be as much confusion, although there will always be problems here and there.

So like I said, criticizing husbands’ behavior that is the result of a confused understanding of marriage doesn’t get at the problem. Like a religious communion, a marriage is constituted in part by shared belief about the nature of the institution and what it is for. If husbands and wives had a common understanding of marriage, there would be more harmony and little confusion about what was expected of them.

I think this makes Capon’s reference to St. Paul’s “anti-feminist prejudices” even more problematic. If St. Paul is expressing a deep insight about the nature of men and women, and by extension married intimacy, then it really confuses things for him to say, “oh by the way, St. Paul was probably a bit of a misogynist. But don’t worry he also says some really good things, too.”. This admission undermines his appeal to Paul’s supposedly great insight.

Fair enough. I will not dispute this point.

Brad C.,

Well, first of all, I tried to make clear that I don’t give an absolute full Clara endorsement to the passage in question. For example, I don’t really think St. Paul had any unfortunate sexist tendencies (and why on Earth would women be speaking in church, anyway? At a Catholic Mass there’s no reason for it.) I said that I found the piece thought-provoking, and I do.

As I understand it, you are agreeing that our society has lost sight of proper gender roles, but protesting indignantly that the blame doesn’t lie with men. May I take it that you think the blame lies pretty squarely with women?

Well, as a matter of fact, I think women can be blamed for much of the mischief, and they have many important questions to weigh and consider. But if the sexes are supposed to be complementary, we will tend to find that neither side can properly play its part if the other does not. I find on this blog and among conservatives generally, we women have come in for a pretty fair amount of criticism already, for being too prideful, hard, independent, uppity, ambitious, educated, and in general too much like men. Some of the criticism is overdone, some is legitimate, but either way it seems fair to occasionally turn the mirror back at the men. Note that I didn’t presume to do it myself, but only to quote someone else’s perspective on the matter (a husband’s, in fact), which I humbly invite you to consider as you will.

As for the is and ought business, I will back Capon up on that one. His point is that God has himself invested husbands with both authority and specific responsibilities. He will likewise give them the graces to enable them to play their parts, if they will open themselves to those graces. Whether or not individual husbands (or wives, or Cornell undergraduates) know and believe that is irrelevant. People have lots of wacky ideas about love and sex and marriage, but such things are not decided by majority opinion.

If you’re simply protesting that it’s difficult in the present climate to live by these types of norms… fair enough. I sympathize. It’s a confusing time for all of us. But discussing how things at least ought to be is a place to start.

As for what Capon is really saying… well, I think he’s saying in large part that the erotic element in marriage (an important one, by the way) cannot be trusted to take care of itself. It requires work and thought and planning. On some level most women enjoy being treated like women; maybe if men put more time and conscious effort into doing this, they’d be happier about playing their roles as well?

Well, that’s what God prefers we call these laymen. The real hypocrisy is that he belongs to a sect created for the sole purpose of rationalizing a divorce.

“And while both husbands and wives are responsible for the debacle, it is husbands who have done the most damage, and it is they who can, if they will, do the most good.”

I’ve got to say that laying most of the blame at the feet of husbands is unjust (full disclosure: yeah, I’m a husband). First, what are we being blamed for? Although it was a little unclear to me, I think it is that husbands are not taking the lead in erotic love. By “erotic love” is meant more than merely initiating sex, but continually expressing to the wife, through words and actions, that she is desirable. (Is that accurate?).

Well, it’s pretty obvious why there’s a problem here and it has to do with the sexual revolution. The fact that husbands are more passive in expressing erotic love is surely an effect of the confusion of gender roles, not the principal cause of confusion. As a man, I can tell you that there is great confusion in these matters: do you hold the door open for a woman, or is it an assertion that she is powerless?; do you automatically reach for the bill at dinner?; what about the “Sex and the City” mentality that women are powerful (”sexually autonomous) and ought to be the ones initiating erotic love?

With the dissolution of traditional gender roles, you no longer know which behaviors are expected of you. That being said, this is clearly false:

“The husband is head over his wife as the head is over the body. It isn’t a description of what ought to be; it just says what is. He is the head. He will be a good one or a bad one, depending; but if he isn’t the head, there isn’t any other.”

It obviously is a description of what ought to be, because we are living in a society in which this model of headship is not constitutive of how most people understand marriage. As the undergraduates at Cornell would probably put it, Paul’s view on the husband’s headship is SO “heteronormative”. In this cultural atmosphere, it is crazy to believe that husbands will naturally conform to a certain model of marriage that is not being conveyed by tradition.

I am interested to hear what Clara and the other ladies out there found of interest in this article. By my lights, it didn’t seem to get at the root of the problem, although, perhaps, it contains some useful tips for husbands.