A Companion Who Helps and Opposes
This is the third part of Chapter 2 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here are links to The Intro and the second part of Chapter 2.
Husbands, does your wife often oppose you?
Mine does, about 2-3x per day.
A few minutes ago my wife sent me a text about an email blast I sent out that she felt was a bit off.
This is an annoyance if you’re trying to construct a life where you easily get your own way.
But if you’re trying to build a household this is essential.
It’s not good for a man to rule a household alone.
We are incomplete without a spouse.
But we’re growing terribly confused about the primary purpose of marriage. The culture says marriage exists for personal fulfillment. One of the most destructive ideas ever devised by our Enemy. The direct result of this new ideology is that Pew research recently reported that in a study of 130 different countries the United States ranked #1 in single-parent households. That doesn’t make us #1, it makes us dead last. My country is the worst country in the world at building intact households.
The church has fired back that marriage is not about being happy, it’s about being holy. While there’s definitely truth to the reality that growing in holiness is one of the best byproducts of marriage, its functional purpose, to establish a multiplying and ruling household is primary.
We discover the essential components of marriage in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, “Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” (Genesis 2:18 ESV).
There are three things that are revealed about the design of marriage in this verse.
A Companion: Men should not be alone. We are designed to be paired with one woman. God says this in the first book of the Old Testament and in the final book of the Old Testament, “the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.” (Malach 2:14 ESV).
A Helper: We don’t have what it takes to build a household. We need help. It’s OK for men to make bad mothers and women to make bad fathers. That’s by design. We need each other and men must have a wife to help him. But help him do what? To build a fruitful, multiplying, filling, subduing, and ruling household.
An Opposite: The word for “fit” in this verse is fascinating. It’s the Hebrew word kenegdow which literally means “according to the opposite of him”. A husband needs to be opposed by his opposite in order to build a household. Picture the pitched roof of a house that is stabilized by having two sides that are opposed to one another. We build a household through the constant opposition between opposites. This continual friction is going to wear out both partners if they lose sight of why this opposition is a feature and not a bug.
Most modern people misunderstand the purpose of authority in marriage. They feel the idea that the father has a greater degree of authority than his wife signals her inferiority. That’s often because they’ve never seen a household ruling with a great degree of power. The modern family is more like a recreation club and giving authority to one member is like forcing the whole club to bend around the preferences of one person. Why, only because he’s male? Of course that makes no sense.
But a ruling household, like any ruling entity, needs the freedom to take quick, decisive action while having checks for times when important factors are being ignored or when an authority degrades into tyranny.
One reason the founding fathers in America provided protection for a free press is to allow them to oppose those in power. Not to erode governmental authority or to damage the country but to make the country stronger. Would it work better if the press was given equal authority over the country? Of course not. Does that make the press less valuable? That’s a category mistake. Both are important for different reasons.
While this analogy is not perfect I receive a stream of regular “press releases” from my wife.
Sometimes they’re negative.
“We’re going way over our food budget.”
“Our daughter is showing a pattern of disrespect.”
“The kitchen is a mess again and I’m left alone to clean it.”
“I’m concerned about this child’s reading level.”
“Our tenant is five days late in paying the rent.”
At first, I was tempted to almost punish my wife for sending these kinds of reports to me. Now I ask for them. Send me everything. Every problem in our family is my problem. We work as a team to solve these problems and sometimes I need to fully delegate things back to her but I have both the authority and responsibility over all things in my house and the buck always stops with me.
But wives please be kind. In order for your husband to embrace shouldering all of this responsibility he needs you to have compassion for the challenge. The Proverbs warn of the wife who’s a “dripping faucet”. I also receive another kind of “press release” of positive progress being made and we celebrate those wins as a family.
Remember that the biblical ruling household is a monarchy, not a democracy. But it’s an accountable monarchy. The monarch will answer to God and God out of love for the monarch has given him a companion to help and oppose him whose awareness and intuition are broader and more active than his own. She sees more details and sends signals, his gaze is more focused and he leads in finding solutions.
Every couple must craft a rhythm and an arena to tackle the many challenges of household building as a united team.
We call this the Co-Founders Meeting.
Tool: The Co-Founders Meeting
I learned this practice while trying to run a complex business.
The goal of every leadership meeting was to facilitate constructive conflict.
Every business has serious issues to solve and having a whole team present to find the best possible resolution meant everyone had to freely speak their mind.
But this takes three things to do effectively: time, connection, and a repeatable process.
Let’s consider each:
Time - Many marriages suffer from the frustration of constantly violated expectations.
If you think a marriage is designed to be a dynamic team overseeing a complex enterprise then constructive conflict is beneficial and to not only be expected but cultivated.
But if you imagine the ideal marriage is a state of continual romantic bliss then every tough conversation feels like a violation of expectations. You might even see it as a signal that you weren’t meant to be together.
We must embrace the fact that the early flush of infatuation was designed to get us into marriage but the covenant that sustains marriage is there to help us form a lifelong, highly functional partnership that is both romantic and productive.
So enjoy the process.
Give it space to breathe.
Go on long walks.
Have extended lunch meetings.
Schedule all the time you need.
You’ll get it back in huge measure as your team flourishes under the dynamic leadership of your opposing strengths and aligned vision.
Connection - The effectiveness of those intense conversations must be balanced by the feeling of constant connectedness.
When I left my last leadership role as a CEO I wasn’t prepared for the sudden severing of so many connections. It felt unnatural. I had spent years working with the management team and most of those relationships simply ceased to exist. I tried to figure out how to maintain many of those connections but we all were so busy and when the context for those relationships disappeared so did most of the closeness.
It’s in those moments when I thank God for having a better idea—marriage.
We do our productive work from a state of connectedness and the nature of that connectedness is for life.
That means we:
Have date nights without trying to be productive
Take off on getaways to grow our relationship
Enjoy frequent physical intimacy
Reach out multiple times a day to remind each other “I’m thinking about you”
Our productivity doesn’t permeate all we do but our connection does.
Love is the ecosystem within which a couple rules.
Repeatable Process - Too many couples reinvent the wheel every time they have a meeting. They think it’s more authentic, more relational, more fun.
It may be those things, but it’s also a bad strategy.
Save your spontaneity for the bedroom.
A team with important things to do and precious human beings relying on their decisions needs to be able to snap into business mode and get stuff done.
My favorite framework for our meetings borrows some elements from the Level 10 meeting popularized by the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Here’s the framework:
First Connect: Let’s start by experiencing our connection. (5 minutes)
How’s your morning going?
What’s one thing you’re looking forward to?
What’s a win from the past day?
What’s something you’re thankful for?
Metrics that Matter: What are the important facts? (5 minutes)
How are our kid’s hearts?
On a scale of 1-10 how connected do you feel to me?
What’s in the bank?
Let’s review the budget.
To Do Review: Did we do what we agreed at our last meeting? (5 minutes)
Household Issues: What’s not working right now? (45+ minutes)
What seems to be repeatedly breaking down?
Do any of our kids feel like they’re drifting?
Gather all the issues of the family and pick 2-3 to discuss and try to solve together.
Don’t try to solve everything. Trust the system of problem-solving.
You’re learning to rule as a team.
You are co-founders of a startup called a household.
The better you get the more you’ll be given to steward.
(Click here for the next section of chapter 2)