Complementarian vs. Egalitarian...

It took me awhile to move away from being a classical complementarian when it comes to a woman's role in leadership. I used to argue for it because it made so much sense based on conventional/ a priori arguments. "A Priori" is a Latin term used in formal logic (and philosophy) to mean a fact that is assumed to be true prior to any empirical research - i.e. facts are assumed before any research is done. I began to realize that a lot of the convictions I had were a priori because of my religious folk tradition.

I then moved over a period of about 2-3 years to an egalitarian position in my approach to gender relations. One main reason - a priori reasoning. It seemed conventionally true that women were in leadership in all capacities from economics to politics and education to information technology. Why would they be not permitted to exercise their gifts and abilities in a religious sphere if they were expected to do so in every other sphere? My new conventional thinking took me in the opposite direction and I became an egalitarian, rather I held the position of egalitarianism when it came to issues of gender.

The problem is that I'm married and will have been for 4 years this month. I have discovered that the marriage partnership is unique and exists nowhere else and to top that, it is the most difficult relationship to keep on a partnership status I've ever been in. It seems that human nature dictates that we would rather see people below us or above us. To see a human being in direct contact with us as an equal is truly one the hardest disciplines I've ever engaged in. Our marriage has been an experiment in egalitarianism and we've failed.

Don't get me wrong, we aren't giving up, but the binary categories of complementarian and egalitarian just don't work. There are days when my wife takes leadership in our home and there are days when I do. There are areas where I take the lead and she has to submit to me for our home to work well and there are areas where she takes leadership and I submit to her. Then there are the areas that we have to partner in and neither of us can take leadership - like parenting, like buying a home, etc. Those are the hardest to work on because we truly do have to be partners.

I wonder at times whether we need to be one or the other on the binary scale set up by gender partisanship battles. I'm not sure that I can stomach hyper-patriarchalism or hyper-feminism, but do some homes work better on different points of the spectrum formed between egalitarianism and complementarity? There are so many factors to consider when forming one's convictions. Is it possible to be functionally complementation while convictionally egalitarian or functionally egalitarian while convictionally complementarian?

 

I complement my wife and vice versa and that's what makes our home peaceful and provides an atmosphere of hospitality to our children and our guests. But the areas in our marriage where peace leaves and alienation begins is when we truly attempt to be partners, to be equal. Some may say that that's an a priori indicator that we are not meant to be equal. I don't know. Maybe it's our attempt to truly be partners that will refine us more than anything else and allow our marriage to be amazing. We also know that we can't always "work" on something and so our complementarity allows us some down time, some auto-pilot to get recharged for the difficult yet profitable work of partnership. Maybe in that way, partnership is an a priori conviction. Maybe