Differences in Marriage, Part III: Areas of difference.

As I pointed out previously, some disagreements can have clear right/wrong answers; if one spouse wants to quit his or her job to be a full time videogame-playing couch potato or to expand their sexual repertoire to include the neighbors, then the other spouse can quite rightly claim a moral high ground.  But when a couple is trying to live righteously and considerately of each other, the greatest disagreements can come from matters in the following or other categories in which one preference is as “right” as the other.  Knowing that there can be equally defensible  alternatives, especially before a couple has any specific disagreement in those areas, can help defuse tension and lead to a solution.  Here are some common subject areas in which both A and B can be right:

Finances.  Even within the bounds of responsible financial management, there can be different opinions.  Who should balance the checkbook and make sure the bills are paid, or should you both do it?  Should you have separate or combined bank accounts?  Is there a threshold above which one spouse should not spend unilaterally, without counseling together beforehand?  Should each spouse have an “allowance” of spending money, or should every penny be accounted for?  If either or both partners are still pursuing education, should they pursue their degree at full speed and live very frugally for a number of years, or take some time off school to work full time and gain a cushion?  Church leaders have constantly cautioned for the past century against frivolous or needless debt, counseling Church members only to go into necessary debt — but each person brings his own definition of “necessary.”

Entertainment.  A married couple should enjoy spending time  together, but what if their ideas of “fun” are divergent?  What if one spouse habitually spends far more hours in recreation than the other (either active, such as exercise or sports, or passive, such as broadcast sports, television or videogames) and the non-indulging spouse feels resentful?  What if one spouse simply enjoys something that the other does not?  How much time apart in their individual entertainment pursuits can their marriage withstand without showing stress because of time not spent together?  (Entertainment can also blend into finance, if the activities one spouse prefers cost money that the other feels should be allocated elsewhere.)

Togetherness.  This category is the twin of entertainment: how much time do husband and wife expect to spend together?  Typically (though obviously not necessarily), men prefer to spend more time in solo, non-social pursuits than women; is there a happy medium at which the man won’t think his wife is being to “clingy” and the woman won’t think her husband is being “cold?”  How about outside friendships, especially those which pre-exist the marriage: does the husband or wife spend time with “the gang” of same-sex friends that the spouse resents? (It should go without saying that neither husband nor wife should have opposite-gender friendships from which his or her spouse is excluded.)

Childrearing.  This is such a common source of tension and outright conflict that dealing with it in a single paragraph seems almost to trivialize it.  Do the husband and wife — the father and mother — have the same ideas regarding boundaries of behavior, freedom vs. safety, rules and punishment, family responsibilities and privileges, exposure to media, etc.? Will the lenient parent and the strict parent present a unified front to their children so that the children can expect consistency and order in their family rules?  Will both parents participate fully in being parents, even if employment responsibilities differ?  For that matter, have they decided before children are born what how they will structure employment during the children’s formative years?

Sex. You can almost transplant my paragraph from the post on sources of difference right here.  In addition: Thanks both to a Puritanical strain in American religion (to which Mormon culture is not immune) which equates all pleasure with sin, and to some of the kneejerk reactions against the coarsening of popular culture and the widespread weakening of sexual boundaries and standards in society at large, Mormons along with other Christians absorb contradictory messages about sex, both consciously and inadvertently taught to them.  Sex is characterized as (a) a holy act, (b) something to be embarrassed about, (c) a woman’s duty in order to bear children, (d) a forbidden subject you need to spend the years from puberty to marriage not thinking about, (e) something that’ll just “come naturally” so no one needs to teach you about it, (f) only “righteous” and “pure” within certainly vaguely indicated bounds.  And that’s just within the Church!  Add in the self-contradictory philosophies of the world which encompass both “casual sex” and “the right to sexual fulfillment” and the imagery of sex-for-entertainment that are virtually unavoidable in modern society, and it’s no wonder that husband and wife often come to their marriage bed each with a mess of unexamined and mutually exclusive ideas about what their sexual relationship is supposed to be.  (Or as one wit has put it, young men and women can come out of the Church’s youth programs with the idea that “sex is shameful and wicked and should only be engaged in with your eternal companion.”)

Given that the prophets have stated that the joy and intimacy of husband and wife is at least as important as procreation as one of the God-ordained purposes of marital sex, I don’t think that one needs to worry overmuch about the “appropriateness” of various sexual practices, so long as they don’t involve fantasies of adultery or abuse.  But it can take a while for a newlywed, just introduced to the whole idea of intimacy, to feel comfortable with even bread-and-butter sex, much less anything more “exotic.” There is an idea known as “sinning against conscience,” which is simply that it can be damaging to one’s spiritual health to engage in practices which, deep down, one feels are sinful, even if they are not technically sins. (As an example, an LDS convert from Judaism may know intellectually that the Lord does not require him to keep kosher, but may still feel uncomfortable eating pork, having associated that stricture with faithfulness for years.  If eating bacon makes him feel less worthy of God’s love and approval, he shouldn’t feel obligated to eat it.  Plus, more for me!)  The bottom line in these circumstances is that spouses should be sensitive to each other’s feelings and deep-seated reactions, and never turn sex into something about which one or the other feels uncomfortable.

Next: Resolving difference

Differences in Marriage, Part II: Sources of difference.

Part of dealing with differences is recognizing their legitimate sources.  This is especially true when examining one another’s assumptions on occasions when not only do you each think you’re right, but never really considered that there was another option than the one your automatically backed.  Most of these, again, are not “right/wrong” differences.

Religion.  This blog is aimed at active Mormon couples, but not everyone LDS has always been LDS.  Given the difference in emphasis and perspective which LDS doctrine puts on marriage and families, it’s obvious that someone raised in an active Mormon family will have different assumptions than someone who converted after their childhood. Please note that this does NOT mean that the opinion of the Mormon from birth is automatically more legitimate than that of the convert; unconscious or assumptions, even when based on truth, can lead to erroneous conclusions, especially when simply assumed without examination.

Culture. Religion and culture are closely intertwined, but not synonymous.  As an example, my wife and I were both raised from birth in active LDS families. However, she was raised in a Utah farming community with an overwhelming Mormon demographic and a meetinghouse half a mile away.  I was raised on the East Coast, where my sisters and I were the only Mormons in our grade, junior high, and high schools.  A lot of the cultural traditions which were simply the way that my wife assumed Mormons always observed were completely alien to me; I was surprised by the amount of culture shock I experienced when I married her and stayed in Utah.  If that level of cultural disparity can be present between these two people raised in active LDS families, can you imagine the differences between people each raised in a different state with a Mormon minority, especially with differing levels of family activity?

Education. It’s important to note that education equals neither intelligence nor wisdom.  Education can sometimes result in a breadth of knowledge which is disparate to one’s spouse; at other times it can result in an academic or objective/purpose-driven mindset which is applied whether or not it is appropriate to the situation or not.  If one spouse has received significantly more education than the other, the less-educated spouse might have feelings of inadequacy or inferiority, and express it either as unhealthy acquiescence or insecure defensiveness.

Gender. I’m not interested in the whole nature/nurture debate here; obviously some tendencies are endemic to one’s physical gender, and just as obviously some behaviors are entirely the result of cultural roles.  In both cases, there are differences between the typical male and female mindsets, roles, and worldviews.

Sex. Again, the typical male and female in Western society have widely differing urges and expectations of sexual relationships through a combination of nature and nurture.  It’s extremely important for each spouse to realize that this does not make their husband or wife wrong, sinful, or frigid if their desires for frequency, novelty or other variables in sex are significantly more or less than their own.  It’s just as hard for typical men to understand their wives’ relatively muted sexual wants as it is for typical women to understand their husband’s relative sexual aggression.

(I’m in a rare position to see both sides of this issue.  I’ve always been, shall we say, a red-blooded male; however, as part of a serious medical condition a couple of years ago, I was on a medication which had as one of its announced side effects a significant decrease in libido.  Within a week I was walking around the house singing, “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”  The experience taught me two significant things: 1) Men need to realize that a lack of sexual aggression on their wives’ part does not equal lukewarm love or affection; the emotion and commitment is their, even though there is not the urge to express it in the same way. 2) Women need to realize that their husbands are  not oversexed, sex fiends, or prospective porn addicts — their bodies are  chemically predisposed both to express love and to experience love in a physical manner.)

Health. Differences in health between spouses, and the stresses which health conditions bring, can contribute mightily to differences in marriage.  Dietary needs, fatigue, pain or discomfort, and related lifestyle factors can come between husband and wife.

Other experience.  Good or bad, any experience which was not shared by the spouse can obviously be a source of difference in worldview, emotional reactions, life goals, and faith.  If one spouse has served a mission, or broken a limb, or tended relative’s children frequently, or endured abuse, or was responsible for livestock on a farm, or struggled with an addiction, or watched a lot of PBS, or played high school football, or experienced homelessness or abuse, or served in the military… any experience not shared can be a source of difference.  Sometimes, actually, it’s the smaller differences which can cause more conflict because they don’t show up as early on the radar.  In a marriage between a fourth-generation Mormon from Southern Utah and a convert from sub-Saharan Africa, both participants obviously would (or should) expect multiple differences from the beginning of the relationship.  On the other hand, a pair of high school sweethearts who grew up a block apart may be blindsided by unforeseen differences that result simply from them being different people despite all of the outward similarities.

Next: Areas of difference