WALSH: My Marriage Is Not An Equal Partnership, And I Don’t Want It To Be

The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn in my marriage is that my wife is not me. She is herself, emphatically. And her self is a very different self, an unequal self. The joy and challenge and pleasure and hardship of the marital vocation — the whole point of it, really — is found in this fact: that I am not her, and she is not me, and we are not equal because we are not the same.

So many marriages fall apart these days because both partners have been raised on the lie of marital and gender “equality.” They’ve been told that there is no difference between a husband and a wife, the two are interchangeable, exactly the same in every way that matters, and so they approach the altar with the expectation that they’re marrying mirror images of themselves. They imagine that they won’t need to make any serious changes or sacrifices in their new life as a married couple because they’ve partnered with someone just like them. Everything can just be split down the middle, they think, 50/50, easy as pie.