Feast, Fast, and Marital Complementarity

A meditation for Valentines Day + Ash Wednesday

This Friday, I’ll be speaking at the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard. I’m delighted to be paired with Monica Klem, author of Pity for Evil, to talk about pro-life feminism.

Next week, I’ll be in Minneapolis on Feb 22nd to speak on gender and Creation, and then I’ll be back in Minneapolis two weeks later on March 7 to speak on building Catholic community.

Image via Gala in the Kitchen

Today is both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. It’s an odd conflict of feast and fast, and I wrote a little about the experience of mismatch, complementarity, and marriage for First Things.

Even on Mardi Gras, when we make a two-person skillet cookie once our girls are asleep, I feel split between the prelude to Lent and the consummation of Good Friday. There’s no feasting that wholly occludes the sense that my body is given for the little boy resting below my heart, just as Christ’s body is given for me. Then, on Ash Wednesday, my husband and I change places. […]

On Ash Wednesday, he is the one who weakens his body for the sake of our family, fasting both from food, and from the consolations of a shared, corporate penance. Every other day, I depend more on him as I go through the privations of pregnancy, but on a fasting day, he offers his body for our family differently, as the spiritual head. It’s me who has (comparatively) more energy, and I look for ways to apply it in his place. 

We don’t quite get to meet in either feast or fast. Marriage has meant less time spent in synchrony, and more time following each other through a dance. If we try to mirror each other too exactly, we aren’t able to move together, shifting weight and sharing burdens as our family grows. The whole liturgical year, and our repeated, shared progress through the cycle of sorrow and salvation, is marked by the rising and ebbing feast and fasting seasons. Even when the Church's calendar brings us into sync, our sexed differences and complementary roles mean we celebrate or sacrifice together but not identically. 

(Yes, this is an announcement of one of my two secret projects. He’s due in the summer.)

I’ve appreciated marriage advice that reminds couples to not think in terms of a 50-50 split but about each giving 100 percent. Certainly, with a growing family, it seems like it takes our whole selves to keep up with work and the girls.

Thinking about being “even” makes it hard to compare our incommensurate sacrifices and needs. And, as I wrote in Comment, the language of being even is closely linked to the concept of being “quits,” where exchange partners can walk away, neither owing the other. Marriage is a commitment to continued, sloshing, mutual indebtedness.

Equality expressed as sameness is easier to assess. Judging equity requires trust and intimacy, to see the the members of a partnership in the particularity of their needs and strengths.

Where have you experiences strong seasonality of need in a partnership? (marriage and friendship both count) How did you navigate the turbulence?

Where (if anywhere) have you run into trouble trying to make “fair” mean “identical”? How did you resolve it?

How do you talk within a partnership about adjusting the split of your responsibilities?