Ch. 16: Couples Behind Closed Doors

The Roles We Play, a Serial Memoir

Between Season 1 and Season 2 of the Brave Marriage Podcast, I worked with over 200 couples of all denominational backgrounds in my private practice. Nondenominational, Christian, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Mennonite, Greek Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian. Though not exclusively, the couples who sought my services tended to be white, heterosexual, lower-to-upper middle class, and range in age from early 20s to late 60s. From premarital counseling to couples coaching to marriage therapy cases, I had a ready-made sample of couples from whom to learn and draw patterns and themes from in my work.

Of course, reflecting on cases outside of session was not my primary objective. My objective was helping couples grow in health and hope in their marriage relationships. I’d long been taught the value of separating my work life from my personal life; I believed myself to be pretty good at “not taking clients home with me” as my former supervisor used to say. But I was not as good at leaving behind the larger, thematic questions that loomed.

Egalitarianism or complementarianism? became somewhat of an informal research question for me. Questions surrounding the interplay of Christian teachings and couple dynamics lingered long after hours because of what I was seeing and hearing. Some couples conveyed the sexist content of the church sermons, book studies, and marriage conferences they were attending. Others referenced the books they were reading in an effort to be a better Christian wives—books that were precisely the opposite of what they should have been reading given their circumstances of sexual dysfunction or infidelity, for example. Others recounted the “Christian” marriage advice that had made their original matters worse before seeking out my services.

These couples felt like islands, while there I sat, hearing similar story after similar story, recognizing their struggles not just as attributable to sin on a personal level (as the church had mostly conveyed) but to structural issues and the limitations of churches to sometimes know how to best help those who are hurt. This was the burden—not individual cases, but the accumulation of evidence that something had gone deeply wrong in our churches—that I carried home with me. It was a phenomenon I desired to better understand.

Due to the fact that the majority of couples I saw for marriage counseling attended complementarian churches (whether they’d ever heard the word complementarian or not, their churches taught gendered roles from the pulpit paired with male headship as servant leadership), I focused my informal research questions at better understanding couple dynamics and their religious convictions. What were the psychological and relational effects of these teachings on Christian couples? What fruit was their lived theology bearing?

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