Roles — Bondage or Freedom?
One of the first things I noticed many years ago about my in-laws was that they lived with strict roles. A gift had been given to this couple, a two-tiered plate with a handle and separating piece with threads on both ends and maybe a nut for the bottom. My mother-in-law-to-be opened the gift and then handed it to her husband to put together, saying, “Here. This is your department.”
Dad is gone now and my wife and I are taking care of Mom in an independent living situation. It’s sad the things she can’t do because she can’t figure out how to approach the problem of fixing something. Dad used to say she was the world’s worst mechanic. Is this role-segregation to the extreme?
Wait a minute. Mom always took care of the family’s finances from budgets to check writing to investments. She’s still handling all that just fine. Maybe she just doesn’t have the particular skill of fixing things, and, well, Dad was so good at that. Is this an example of each couple’s gifts being given room to flourish? And boy, can she bake! Or is it the ol’ 1950’s role machine gone amuck?
Hard to say which it is. Depends upon the particular people. My great aunt, now deceased, settled into the “helpless” role in her marriage. And because of that she became dependant upon everyone in her later years.
I have found that personally, there are things I’m not that good at fixing and putting together that I’d prefer someone else do. But if left to my own devices I can indeed do them.
From my observations the strict role thing doesn’t work well. People are unique. We just don’t fit anyone’s prescribed ideas of how people should function together. Leave us alone, encourage us to complement each other, and likely we will all come out doing our “roles” somewhat differently.
I think TL says it well. But, boy, there’s more role expectations at church than just about anywhere on God’s earth. It’s lessened some in recent years, but I think it’s still there just below the surface, simmering, ready to break out in new and horrid ways that sadden God.
I have been married now going on 31 years and our ‘roles’ are pretty much stereotypical — he does the fixing and I do the doing. I mow, he makes sure the mower works, we both do house cleaning , especially since my girls left the nest. He a truck driver, I don’t drive, not physically able to, but I go with him and do everything else — cook, clean,help with his paper work, bills etc. I think if I was raised in the more modern climate and taught to do those ‘manly’ things, maybe it would be different. But we don’t do these things because he is a man and I am a woman. It’s just that he is better at those things, and I am better at mine.
Blessings, and salom.
I think all couples have roles they follow in the family. If they match their gifts and they enjoy doing them, then they are also probably happy and pleased with the roles. When the roles don’t match interests and gifts is when the situation gets more dicey. Unfortunately, there are some jobs that hardly anyone likes to do. How the couple deals with those issues says a lot about the marriage. I’m not sure, but I think maybe marriages that are highly role-based and where both are comfortable with their roles may be easier to live than those marriages where each have to battle out who does what every time another situation comes up.