Marriage is theater.  It is the stage and the back stage.  It is the play and also the players.

A few years back the prophets declared that

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.

And they declared that

In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.

-thus the Proclamation on the Family.

When they did, the usual suspects argued that the prophets were contradicting themselves. Unlike things can’t be equal, by definition, they complained. Since mothers and fathers are declared to be designed for different roles by God, it follows that they are unlike.  Especially since one of the roles assigned to men was presiding, i.e., being in charge. Logic 1, Prophets 0, they said.

The usual suspects went too far, I thought. There were ways of threading the needle, usually involving quibbles about the metaphysical meaning of equality. But in the privacy of my own thoughts, I conceded a partial point to them. It would have been better, I thought, if the wording had been flipped to say that having different roles didn’t mean inequality. While positively asserting that two unlike things are equals requires finessing, denying that the two unlike things are unequal doesn’t. The denial merely asserts that the equality/inequality paradigm doesn’t apply. (Yes, my poppets, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I steady the ark like a champ.)

The surprising twist ending is that the prophets may have known what they were talking about.

A few days ago I learned that marriage is best understood as an art. The best marriages, like the best art, have some touch of divine inspiration that comes from outside the artist. Call it the muse, or the spark of creative genius for artists, or romance or love for marriages. The best art also requires a lot of technique and hard work, and there are things the artist can do to invite inspiration, even if the artist can’t command it. So with marriage: it is a lot of hard work and practice, but it is also ethereal romance.

Understanding marriage as an art is the key to understanding both the equality and the different roles of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives.

Theater is the secular art where there are roles.   Liturgy and ritual and ceremony is the religious art where there are roles, such as in the temple.

Marriage has two roles. Man and woman. Husband and wife. Father and mother. At their root, these roles are basics of the cosmos. Their conception is divine, beautiful, artistic, touched with genius. But the roles are only a concept and the art can only happen if actors perform them.  Biology writes some of the script for the actors and provides a few of the properties for their play. So does society; so does the Church; so do our individual family cultures. Heaven help us, so do advice books and marriage counselors and such, and not always for ill. But the two actors themselves mostly have to write the script as they go along. They have different roles—the nature of the play demands it, and their own abilities and nature make them better suited for a variant of one role if they are a man, or a variant of the other, if they are a woman. If no roles, then no interaction, and no play.  The ritual of marriage doesn’t end with the wedding, and it doesn’t begin with it either.

It is unintelligible to call those roles equal, or unequal. At the same time, the roles are inhabited by two actors who jointly own the theater company, and who are equal partners in putting on the play.

After explaining the roles and declaring that husband and wife are equal within them, the Proclamation states

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.

Improvise, improvise, improvise. The show must go on.