Owen Strachan recently wrote a post entitled “Pursue Complementarity, Not Compatibility.”
Here is how he began:
Compatibility.
Has any concept done more to hinder the development of love? We hear that once we discover our perfect physical and emotional match, we’ll taste ceaseless fulfillment, experience sizzling romance, and meet one another’s deepest needs. A world of bliss.
Compatibility.
Actually, this approach is fraught with pressure and flawed from the start. Tim and Kathy Keller said it well in The Meaning of Marriage [review]: “Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socioeconomic status unfortunately can change almost overnight.” In such relationships, cracks will show, and soon the “compatibility foundation” falls apart. So people rip up their marriages and start over again, believing they married a person they weren’t compatible with.
How tragic! The real issue before every couple is this: none of us is compatible. We’re sinners. That’s why we need something much better and sturdier as the ground of our marriages.
We need complementarity, not compatibility.
Jen Wilkin responded with a post entitled, “Are Compatibility and Complementary at Odds?”
She writes:
Owen Strachan has penned an interesting piece in which he states that perhaps nothing has been more damaging to male-female relationships than the notion of compatibility. He opens with this thought: “Compatibility. Has any concept done more to hinder the development of love?” Such a statement must surely have in mind a narrow working definition of compatibility, something along the lines of a Match.com profile and the self-serving search for the perfect soulmate. And I get how that’s not healthy. But in complementarian marriage, is the desire for compatibility out of place? In the minds of most, the two terms Strachan juxtaposes would be defined briefly like this:
Compatibility: what is shared between a man and a woman
Complementarity: what is different between a man and a womanSo, do these two ideas live in opposition to one another? We find a carefully constructed story in Genesis 2 that I believe addresses this question directly. . . .
No one goes on a first date and remarks, “Wow, we had nothing in common. I can’t wait to go out again.” Same-of-my-same is what keeps man and woman in relationship when differences make them want to run for the exit. Same-of-my-same is what transforms gender differences from inexplicable oddities to indispensable gifts. Because my husband is fundamentally like-me in his humanness, the ways he is not-like-me in his maleness elicit my admiration or my forbearance, instead of my disdain or my frustration.
Compatibility. Has any concept done more to nurture the development of love?
I suspect the differences here are partly owing to talking past each other (using similar terminology to refer to distinct concepts) and partly owing to genuine differences of emphasis.
So, for example, Jen’s point seems to trade on an equivocation when it comes to her use of the word compatibility, defined as “what is shared between a man and a woman.” She is stressing the common bond of created-in-the-image-of-God humanity, where Owen is stressing non-ontological differences of preference and personality. Owen is concerned about married couples who want to throw in the towel because they see and process and prefer things in such different (and the world might say, “incompatible”) ways, whereas Jen is concerned about a form of complementarianism that so stresses how we are different that it neglects to start with the foundational issue of how men and women share something more foundational and fundamental in common, which is what allows our God-given differences to flourish.
I think Owen could have been clearer, and his binary language (“We need complementarity, not compatibility”) set him up for this critique. A single blog post can’t say everything, but it is a deficiency to cite the recognition of our common sinfulness without going deeper to the foundation of our common humanity.
And yet Jen perhaps could have been more generous in her reading of Owen, understanding that his focus was more on personality and practice than ontology, and that he seems to be referring to a problem of those who want to end their marriages because husband and wife feel so incompatible with each other.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that both posts are compatible, and in fact complement each other.
I want to end by quoting a bit more of Jen’s reflection, because I think she articulates her point so well and that it is something complementarians, in their eagerness to push back on the leveling of sex difference, often fail to emphasize. She quotes Genesis 2:23, where Adam waxes poetically after naming the animals and discovering incompatibility and then receiving the gift of a wife:
“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ishah [woman] because she came from ish [man].”
Jen comments:
Don’t miss what Adam is saying. After the animal parade of one not-like-him after another, at last he sees Eve and rejoices that she is wonderfully, uniquely like-him.
“Same of my same, same of my same. She shall be called like me because she came from me.”
The Bible’s first word on man and woman is not what separates them, but what unites them. It is a celebration of compatibility, of shared humanness. Ours is not a faith that teaches “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” Rather, it teaches that both man and woman are from the same garden, created by and in the image of the same God, sharing a physical, mental and spiritual sameness that unites the two of them in a way they cannot be united to anything else in creation. Before the Bible celebrates the complementarity of the sexes, it celebrates their compatibility. And so should we.
And here is her conclusion:
So, no, complementarity and compatibility are not at odds. And it is precarious to pit them against one another. Compatibility is the medium in which complementarity takes root and grows to full blossom. Until we acknowledge our glorious, God-ordained sameness, we cannot begin to celebrate or even properly understand our God-given differences as men and women. This is the clear message of Genesis 2, so often rushed past in our desire to shore up our understanding of what it means to be created distinctly male and female. But we cannot rush past it, any more than Adam could rush past the parade of animals that were not-like-him. As Genesis 2 carefully reflects, a world which lacks the beauty of shared human sameness between the sexes is a world that is distinctly “not good.” But a world in which compatibility undergirds complementarity is very good indeed.
Amen.
