Husbands and Wives were made to Work Together

This is the sixth part of Chapter 2 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here are links to The Intro and the fifth part of Chapter 2.

In a podcast interview that I conducted with Rabbi Daniel Lapin (author of Thou Shall Prosper), he said something that has stuck with me ever since. His wife had a successful and lucrative career before they were married but during their courtship, Rabbi Lapin asked if she would give him the honor of being the sole provider for their family. He wanted 100% of the responsibility for provision both because he felt it was his responsibility and because he wanted her attention to be on raising the children, caring for him, and managing their household.

Now before we consider whether Rabbi Lapin’s beliefs are intended to be universal I first want to ask a husband or future husband reading this to consider how this makes you feel. How do you feel about the prospect of being solely responsible for the provision of your family? 

I can tell you in one word how I felt about accepting this level of responsibility — afraid.

I grew up on the West Coast and in my native culture, the money-making responsibilities were most often shared between the husband and the wife. My wife however made clear to me that the moment we began having kids that responsibility would be mine alone and this prospect terrified me. But do you know what else it did? More than any other experience in my life, accepting this responsibility is what practically transformed me from a boy, to a man and from a man to a husband and father.

Men, we are built for this.

And to not willingly accept this responsibility results in men being complicit in their own emasculation. 

A recent study in Denmark that tracked 200,000 couples using Viagra discovered that a wife who even slightly outearns her husband doubles the likelihood of erectile dysfunction.

Even hyper-egalitarian European societies cannot overcome reality.

If we don’t accept this challenge our bodies will rebel against us.

Remember, we come from a story where Adam’s first instinct was to blame his wife and even God when he dropped the ball, “The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12 ESV). 

God’s response to that was to give this husband the responsibility to provide, 

“And to Adam he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:17-19 ESV)

“But providing is hard and requires a lifetime of hard work.” Yes, that’s why it takes a man to do it. There’s no way around this. Husbands must choose to accept the challenge.

The good news is something amazing happens when husbands take this on. 

Few things have been studied more in recent years than the phenomenon of how fathers in every country consistently out-earn every other group by a wide margin.

The much-politicized wage gap between women and men is actually a gap, not between men and women but between fathers and mothers. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “The Fatherhood Wage Premium”. But the deeper you go into the research you see fathers willing to work longer hours, stay at jobs for more years, and take on jobs that are dangerous or create lifestyle challenges in order to provide for their families.

Instead of celebrating what fathers have achieved on behalf of their wives and children, we see it as some form of nefarious discrimination.

But what we’ve really learned from the research is this: the best way for families to create wealth is for men to get married to an amazing woman, have lots of kids, and keep responsibility for provision squarely on his shoulders for life.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

But one thing husbands taking on the responsibility as the primary income earner must consider is how to provide in a way that scales with a multiplying family.

If your family is going to grow then so must your income, and wages made through employment tend not to grow exponentially the way children do.

Fortunately, there is something that does.

This other way of providing income not only multiplies, it provides a pathway for your wife to help the family economically in a way that is fully integrated with her role as mother and homemaker.

Tool: First Cultivate Your Field then Build Your House

One of the reasons today we have consumer families instead of producer families is the story we tell young couples about what they are to do in the early years of their marriage.

We tell them to buy a starter house.
We tell them to delay having children
We tell them to enjoy their freedom and have fun together.

We send the message to a young couple that they haven’t founded a productive team but a consumer club.

Contrast that with the advice the wisest man in history gave his son.

“Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.” (Proverbs 24:27 ESV)

Solomon is saying we must first ensure our family’s income-producing engine is healthy before we acquire a home to make our family comfortable.

What would happen if Christians actually believed this? Imagine if we helped a young couple acquire and develop their first income-producing asset instead of encouraging them to take out the biggest mortgage a bank would allow.

Like the Amish coming together for a barn raising we need to help young married men on the path toward asset ownership and stewardship.

This focus on family-owned assets helps the newly married husband and wife to think of themselves as a team that builds things together.

When our oldest daughter got married they moved into a multi-family house and worked together to rent out the other units. They would have enjoyed the privacy and the part of town where the single-family starter homes were located but prioritized income production over consumption.

Focussing only on employment leads to individualism.
Focussing first on housing leads to consumerism.
Focussing on asset ownership leads to teamwork.

The vision of a family team owning and scaling assets is the opposite of the 1950s vision of the father enduring life-long wage slavery to a corporate overlord while his wife is sentenced to decades of self-imposed house arrest.

Husbands and wives were meant to rule together and pass on their land to fully trained sons and daughters who continue to expand the family’s influence.

Each generation’s job is to make their ceiling the next generation’s floor.

And in the most extensive description in all of Scripture of what a noble wife does with her time, we don’t read about an idle woman or a woman overwhelmed by child-rearing but a woman stewarding and expanding the family’s portfolio of assets.

 “She rises while it is yet night
and provides food for her household
and portions for her maidens.

 She considers a field and buys it;
with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

 She dresses herself with strength
and makes her arms strong.

 She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.” (Proverbs 31:15-18 ESV)

Too many wives are forced to choose between an economically productive life away from the home or an economically unproductive life within the home.

For this reason alone we must acquire, steward, and expand a field.

Short-term employment can be an effective strategy for building up enough income to acquire assets but long-term wage slavery is a poor strategy for family provision. 

It forces husbands and wives to live disintegrated lives.

We need to stop thinking of the household as a group of consumers and work together to produce economic value the way God intended.

Every time a couple gets married they’re co-founding a new startup.

Every household must find a way to produce more than it consumes and the best way to figure out how to do that is to maximize the yield of your field together.