There’s a temptation in marriage that almost nobody names, because on the surface it looks like devotion.
It’s the temptation to treat your wife as though she were given to you and you alone. Instead she’s given to the world, given to your children, given her own life and her own calling that happens to run alongside yours. She’s not just yours: for your comfort, your household, your needs, your peace and quiet at the end of a long day. She is not a treasure kept where nothing can happen to it.
I’ve come to believe that this one of the quietest ways a husband can fail.
I think somewhere in there is going to be: I gave you her. What did you do with that?
The parable nobody applies to marriage
Scripture puts two ideas side by side in a way I found confusing the first time I really sat with it.
Proverbs 31 gives us the worthy wife, the one whose “value is far beyond pearls.” Psalm 128 calls her a “fruitful vine” and the children the fruit of that vine. Both are about the blessing of a good wife, and both are often printed in wedding programs and then quietly forgotten after the ceremony.
But hold those next to Matthew 25, the parable of the talents. A master goes on a journey and hands his servants his property. Two of them put it to work and double it. The third — the careful one, the one who didn’t want to lose anything — digs a hole and buries what he was given. When the master comes back, that servant has exactly what he started with, and not one thing more. He is the one who gets called wicked and lazy.
Put those together and something uncomfortable comes into focus. If my wife is the treasure entrusted to me, then she is the talent. And the parable is unambiguous about what the Master thinks of a man who takes a treasure and buries it for safekeeping.
What burying her looks like
Nobody sets out to bury his wife’s gifts. It happens by default, and it usually happens for reasons that sound perfectly sensible at the time.
It looks like the household running so smoothly on her labor that the question of what else she might be made for never comes up. It looks like her interests becoming the thing that gets cut when the calendar tightens, because they’re hers alone and therefore the most negotiable. It looks like a husband who is genuinely proud of his wife and has somehow never once cleared a Saturday morning so she could use the gift he’s proud of.
It rarely looks like contempt. It usually looks like inertia, and it’s her husband’s job to do something about it.
Because she has a vocation of her own. My primary vocation is husband and father — that’s first and it doesn’t move. But I also have a secondary vocation as a disciple, someone who is supposed to serve and evangelize and put whatever gifts I have to work in the world. If that’s true for me, it’s true for her. She has a calling from God that is not exhausted by being my wife and our children’s mother, and it doesn’t wait politely until the kids are grown.
It rarely looks like contempt. It usually looks like inertia.
Notice that Proverbs 31 says so directly. The worthy wife isn’t praised only for serving her family. She “reaches out her hands to the poor and extends her arms to the needy.” Her heart goes past the doorway of her own home. That’s in the text, right alongside the wool and the flax and the rising while it is still night. The passage everybody reads as a portrait of domestic containment is actually a portrait of a woman whose work runs outward.
Melanie
My wife Melanie studied poetry and literature. She has read more of it than I ever will, and she thinks about it more carefully than I do. She has been writing online for almost as long as I have, first at her own blog, The Wine Dark Sea, and now at her Substack, Singing Each to Each. She homeschools our kids, which is a full-time job that most people mistake for a scheduling arrangement. She not only manages the medical care and special needs of five children, she also mentors other women who are struggling with many of the same issues she’s had to deal with over the past two decades.
Some of that is unmistakably her vocation as a mother. But some of it is hers alone — the reading, the writing, the particular way she sees a poem — and it existed before me and would exist without me.
So here is the practical version of everything above, and it isn’t complicated. My job is to make room. To take the kids so she can write. To treat her work as work and not as a hobby she gets to have if there’s time left over, because there is never time left over; time has to be taken on purpose. To ask what she’s reading and actually listen to the answer.
That's not me being generous. That's the difference between the servants who were praised and the one who dug the hole.
And she does exactly the same for me. That’s the part I’d underline for any husband reading this and feeling accused. This isn’t a one-way ledger where the husband pays out and the wife receives. Everything I’ve been able to do — the writing, the work, all of it — exists because she made room for it, usually without being asked, and often at real cost to herself. A marriage where both people are doing this doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It feels like being on the same side.
The accounting
The parable ends with a reckoning, and I think about that more as I get older.
The Master comes back and asks what we did with what he gave us. And I don’t think the question is only going to be whether I provided, or whether I was faithful, or whether I got the kids to Mass. I think somewhere in there is going to be: I gave you her. What did you do with that?
I’d like the answer to be that I didn’t bury her. That she is more herself for having been married to me and not less. That whatever the Lord planted in her when he made her actually grew, and grew partly because I watered it.
When that collaboration bears fruit — in a happy home full of children, yes, but also in people who see the love of Christ at work in the two of you and can’t quite account for it — then I think we get the line every servant in that parable was hoping for.
“Well done, my good and faithful servant. Come, share your Master’s joy.”
Adapted from a post first published at bettnet.com in November 2020.
Well done. This subject, of course, has a danger of becoming a gigantic, sentimental eye roll, but your essay is far from that. I like your point about how you feel you’re on the same side. I’m so sick of hearing couples talk about taking care of the kids or doing anything around the house as if there is some great debit and credit sheet. Nothing is more sad who than the husband who is afraid of asking his wife for “permission” for something. Same with the wife. You’re supposed to be a team.