Headship requires a Wife’s Willing Submission.

Readership: All
Theme: Headship
Author’s Note: This essay was written on 2021/7/13 and 2023/4/25.  Edited by Jack.
Length: 1,500 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Introduction

I’ve noticed that a lot of what thedeti, Jack, and the Eye of Sauron have written about in the past has come out of their own experiences with marriage.  I am getting to that point myself lately.

I don’t know why I was thinking through this, but I was having a running counter argument in my head when I had an idea about the influence feminism has on marriage.  It was driven by me feeling tired, because of poor sleep which often happens to me after my wife has one of her rebellious heart fits.

The question that came up in my mind was about what it costs a man to live in a Biblical Headship role compared to what it costs him in a feminist marriage (I know, it’s an oxymoron) which is essentially a tentative liaison within serial monogamy.  As the saying goes, “She’s not really his, it’s just his turn”, and here, the husband gets a long, formal “turn” with bells, and whistles, followed by a hefty soul-crushing price tag.

Long time readers of the Christian Manosphere are probably well acquainted with the high costs of a feminist marriage, however, we are not so familiar with the burdens of Headship in marriage, which are great.  The responsibilities of it weigh on the heart, soul, and mind, even when the home is peaceful.  When the home is NOT peaceful (often because of the wife’s antics), that burden is amplified 10-fold as you pull the weight of your own responsibility and also pull the weight of trying to enforce what is right against considerable resistance from the wife.

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Free Market vs. Communist Marriage

We can describe these two situations in economic terms, in which having a freely submissive wife is like a free market system, while a husband asserting Headship against a non-compliant opposition is like a communist system.

In a free market economy, everyone is trying to do their best in order to beat the competition and maximize profits.  In a free market marriage, both husband and wife perform their respective roles to the best of their ability. He pursues his work and his mission, and she functions as a companion and helper to him.

In a truly free market, everyone is out for themselves, but outside of rare circumstances, the interactions are not isolated one-move games but games that involve multiple interactions over time.  So the strategy to make the most money for yourself is to actually do what is in the best interest of the customer, even to your own minor short-term deficit, because you’ll make more serving them long term than fleecing them once.  This incentivizes self-regulation and organizes economic systems very efficiently compared to other options.

In a communist economy, everyone works as little as necessary and relies on “others” (presumably an abstract entity, “the government”, but ultimately from the redistributed wealth of others) to take up the slack. In a communist marriage, the wife has her own independent pursuits or she does practically nothing at all except spend and consume, and she relies on the husband to provide for the family and make everything work out. Another variation of a communist marriage is when the wife is the dominant figure in the marriage, and he has to follow along with her plans and schemes or else nothing will be accomplished.

Communism’s top-down structure demands people work against their self-interest and this design in the system requires heavy compliance enforcement costs in order to implement it. The way to deal with this will be discussed in the next section.

A free market system always beats a communist system in quality, efficiency, and output.

As shown in the graph below, authoritative Headship and the willing submission of the wife is what determines a free market home economy.  Any other arrangement results in communism, characterized by compliance enforcement and mutually leeching off the other with little progress.

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Compliance Enforcement

In the analogy of the Free Market vs. Communist systems, the cost of compliance enforcement is contentiousness and a general lack of peace in marriage.  This is almost solely on the wife because contentiousness is a combination of (1) a lack of faith in God because she is disobeying God’s commands, (2) that lack of faith leading to a sinful grasp for control, and then (3) her general distrust of her husband which ties back in with a lack of faith in God.

When you think about this, a woman looking to her husband to be “perfect”* in order for her to follow him is a form of idolatry in that she is substituting God’s commands with the quality of the husband’s performance. Worse, she sets herself up as the judge of his performance! The crux of the matter is that God gave her a man to follow and she does not trust God’s sovereignty in the matter.

* As Christians, we are to grow in maturity and to become “perfect” (Leviticus 19:2; Matthew 5:48; Philippians 3:12-15). However, the lack of maturity of others should not be used as an excuse for not obeying the Lord in one’s faith.

With a man, the same idolatrous notion shows up as him putting her on a pedestal in which he substitutes God’s mandates with his desire to serve her, and in doing so, God’s standards are either deprioritized, ignored, or lost in the fray. Instead, he should uphold his role as the Image bearer and serve God to the best of his abilities without worrying about how she’ll feel about his performance.

However, if a husband thinks he can transform the system by subscribing to a free market arrangement solely through his own efforts without any on her part, all he accomplishes is being the work horse for the farm. The inevitable failure occurs when some aspect of his performance does not measure up to her standards and her thoughts and emotions surrounding her perception of his “inadequacy” spiral out of control without him having an inkling of the $h!t storm raging between her ears.

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Rebuilding the Economy

The sphere tends to focus on men improving themselves to combat a woman’s general distrust of her husband, which will always be a failing endeavor due to every man having flaws a woman can pick apart with some Monday morning quarterbacking.  Even the highest status, most accomplished men, due to the reality of limited resources and human weaknesses, will have areas in life that will fall short of some women’s standards.  She’ll overlook those for the guy who is good enough in his strong areas, but any stumbling at all in those strong areas, which is bound to happen at some point, and she now will justify her free-for-all picking him apart, especially on his weaker areas or areas which can deliver her an advantage.

The good news is that God has built into marriage a means of mitigating her spiritual immaturity.

The logic is simple.  God is sovereign over all of his creation down to the number of hairs on our heads at any moment in time, which means he is most certainly in control over who we marry.  That means, for his eternal purposes, he gave a woman a husband to follow and obey and he is in control over their marriage and family.  She does not have to try and control, not because her husband will never make a mistake, but because God is perfectly in control and it is her inadequate faith in God that causes her to not follow her husband.  It really is that simple.  Show me a wife who won’t obey God’s commands for her in marriage, and I’ll show you a woman of weak faith.  Every time.  No exceptions. 

OTOH, if a wife can be taught to trust in God’s provision instead of relying solely on her husbands performance, then she will understand that the power of faith is available to her whenever she doubts her husband’s capabilities. So, a husband’s role is to guide her through the bible to blunt the effects of her hypergamy through directing her gaze to God and not on himself.

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Epilogue

In summary, the only way to combat the male performance aspect the sphere purports as necessary for female submission is for husbands to embrace their God given role as one of the primary drivers of their wives’ sanctification per Ephesians 5:22-33, “washing her in the Word”.  The husband guiding his wife to a deeper faith in God is how he combats her hypergamy and her drive to usurp control.

Making this transition is no simple feat. Consider how the satellites of the former Soviet Union required large sums of investment capital and took more than 30 years to reposition themselves from communist states into functioning free market economies.

Men, if you are not actively guiding her to a greater faith in God and insisting she follow God’s role for her in marriage, you leave the door open for her to believe with unwavering faith that her emotions and thoughts are correct and the small furry rationalization hamster wins with relative ease.

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