The Freedom to Be Yourself: Personhood in Marriage

God’s creation is full of surprising variety. Such diversity extends to human creation. Each person is made in God’s image, each fallen and finite, each body and soul destined for eternity, each valuable, but each different. The wonder of personhood is dim to us only because it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere we look and we are part of it, so it can be hard to see. We climb mountains or visit remote coastlines to marvel at creation, when the driver’s license office may be even more spectacular—if we only had eyes for the wonder of created personhood.

God did not make people clones. While humans are one “kind,” the variety within humanity is staggering, and evidence of how particular God is in His creation. Between nature and nurture—we might call that small-scale creation and providence—God fashions each particular human. The image of God in every person expresses aspects of the Lord who made us and takes care of us. Some shared attributes, such as anger, are often twisted through the fall, but the capacities for creativity, innovation, love, thought, and dominion all find varied expression in the human creation that was the crown to the six days of God’s creative work. Each man, woman, and child has unique being and purpose and thought.

This has implications for marriage and is part of God’s design for the relationship. A recognition of our spouses’ personhood really is a lived-out acknowledgment of their fundamental identity. As part of God’s creation, our spouses have individuality: unique status as human beings made in God’s image. This extends far beyond their created bodies. God also made their minds, hearts, and souls. Each person is a different mix of genetics and family culture, history, and experience, which make the person who he or she is. The person has his or her own gifts and abilities, likes and loathings, interests, strengths, and failings. Personality is a large part of this, but personhood goes even deeper. Before this person is your spouse—and long after he or she is your spouse—the person is his or her own self before God, totally apart from you.

This concept might not sound like the fast track to oneness, but Scripture teaches both things: unity in marriage and a sanctified individualism. We have looked at oneness already. Unity is fundamental in a marriage. It is a source of great joy. The idea of personhood in Scripture is repeatedly shown in the importance of everyone’s individual choices in Psalm 1; the consequences of our actions in Matthew 25, Luke 12, and Romans 2; and the primacy of our relationship to God, both as a creature and as a redeemed sinner. Even after the best, holiest marriage, each person will stand on his or her own before God to give an account and receive a reward for deeds done in the flesh. A biblical marriage promotes unity and values personhood, as Scripture itself does.

In some passages, such as 1 Corinthians 7, the two concepts of unity and personhood overlap: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor. 7:3). Here, even corporeal individuality in decided giving creates oneness. Unity and individuality become tangled in a way that can make it difficult to discern where one starts and ends, but they are both there.

So biblical individualism is not autonomy. In other words, it is not my calling the shots, defining myself, and pursuing independence. Instead, it is a recognition that we are each created by God for a particular purpose, and each in need of His saving grace and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Biblical individualism involves accountability and distinct roles, value, and limitations. This is why it is compatible with and complementary to oneness.

Since the Bible teaches both unity and individuality, they will not be contradictory in a Christian marriage. Instead, the idea of personhood brings blessing. It gives our marriages interest, allowing us to enjoy variety. It gives us freedom, releasing us from burdens that we are not designed to bear. And it also gives us responsibility, understanding Scripture’s requirements of us in relation to personhood.

The idea of personhood in marriage gives us the happiness of enjoying our spouses’ gifts as deliberate blessings from God in their unique callings. Because our spouses are each their own person, we can be interested in their strengths and talents not just as they relate to us as our spouses, but also as who they are as individuals, serving the Lord in church and community. So often, these are the things that attract us to someone before marriage: conversational skills, a healthy work ethic, creative involvement with friends and family, athletic ability, or musical talent. After marriage, we can enjoy these even more. We can see service and gifts and talent and particular sacrifice better than anyone else, and so we can be more thankful for it and encouraged by it. We can more deeply enjoy the display of gifts in this person with whom we share life. We can be drawn into the person’s interests—our own horizons broadened by another set of utilized strengths and gifts.

And being interested fosters being interesting: there is a healthy feedback loop here. As we enjoy our spouses’ use of their unique gifts, they feel and value it and are encouraged in using them. Someone who tries to use his or her gifts in an atmosphere of inferiority or invisibility will soon lose zeal: practicing a skill or exercising a gift in an environment of criticism or dismissal makes further effort feel pointless. But the opposite is also true. Even common skills that we use daily—in work, parenting, or recreation—become sweeter when they are met with recognition and appreciation. Encouragement blesses even the most independent people, and unity becomes a fruit of recognizing individuality.

Being conscious of personhood also gives us the freedom of getting to know this other human being on a level that nobody else does. Another person, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, is something that we will never come to the bottom of in this life. We do not fully understand ourselves, let alone someone else, so in marriage we can enjoy the privilege of a lifetime of study and discovery. It is true even in the constant closeness of a marriage; there is always something new. Despite established life patterns and personalities, people are always changing. So there are always new things to observe. Sanctification is an incredibly interesting process! And it is a joy to watch, even if it comes, as it so often does, through pain. If you are in a Christian marriage, then you have a front-row seat for watching God make another believer increasingly Christlike. Things are always changing, and it is an exclusive honor to see this up close.

Knowing that your spouse is his or her own person will also give you the freedom to respect the unique likes, dislikes, and interests that your spouse has. Daily disunities in the little things have the potential to create friction and resulting heat. Maybe it is a preference in how the laundry is folded or the grass is cut or what is for supper, but respecting your spouse’s personhood can smooth things out here. Our spouses were made in God’s image, not ours, and they have their own preferences!
We live in a time when cheerful, adaptable, mildly extroverted personalities are the cultural gold standard. They are the easiest to live with! Even John Owen, writing centuries ago, noted this: “Some are naturally of a more tranquil and quiet temper than others. These people are comparatively peaceable and useful to others.”1

This perspective is especially true in the twenty-first-century West. People who do not fit this profile tend to be seen as aberrant. We have fewer eccentrics: people whose personalities make others uncomfortable by their intensity or introversion or grief. The characters who populated Dickens’ novels do not live in middle-class America, at least not publicly. This does not mean that there is never a time for behavioral intervention. And though certain personalities are prone to certain sins, we can never blame a personality for sin any more than we can blame circumstances for sin. Personality itself is part of divine creation and divine creativity. Each personality, though fallen, has something unique to offer, some role to play that another cannot, some perspective to show that another is unable to see. In marriage, personality is a factor that affects daily life and gives it great interest. Respecting that gives both spouses freedom to enjoy activities and ideas and blessings that we might not naturally see or appreciate. There is happiness in appreciating our spouses for being themselves.

Winston Churchill was not an easy man. The story goes that one female MP actually told him, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee!” (He retorted that if she were his wife, he would drink it.) But a biographer wrote about Winston and his wife, Clementine: “Their completely different temperaments … found a clear appreciation of each other.” “Their marriage never would have worked had it been otherwise.”2

We can value our spouses for who they are, not just what they do. It is easy, as the years flow on and husbands and wives follow the same routines, month after month, to blur our spouses with their role, to confuse who they are with their function in the relationship: the one who primarily cares for the children, or makes the bulk of the income, or schedules everyone’s social lives. While associations can be inevitable, making a human synonymous with a function or limited role is degrading. An older couple in a congregation I was part of had been empty-nesters for decades but never used each other’s names. Instead, it was “Mamma” and “Papa.” Their marriage had revolved around their children, and though those children were long gone, with older children of their own, this couple was unable to separate each other from the roles that had been most important in their lives. They had lost part of each other’s personhood and could not—or would not—regain it. That is a relational as well as a humanitarian failure. We get to value our spouses as God’s creation, not as a relational function.

But then we can value what they do because they did it, and that makes it more valuable to us than mere functionality. The order matters—personhood, then role—and there is great freedom in this logic, a freedom that brings closeness as we recognize, appreciate, and enjoy. When spouses continue working day after day to faithfully fulfill their calling out of love to God but also care for the family, love makes that work more valuable to us. They are doing it because they care, not simply because they have to. There is certainly blessing in that.

And this idea of individuality also gives us the responsibility to challenge our spouses in places where they need that. Because marriage is not an end in itself, and because we will each stand alone before God at the end, we have the freedom to challenge and question wrong things, even if this temporarily disrupts the peace in our marriages. The pattern set out in Matthew 18 is not only for church relationships, but for marriages, too.

Perhaps this is especially important for women to remember. Very often, believers who rightly value the Bible can push past what is written, falling into reaction against cultural norms. A very unbiblical, imbalanced headship can be the ugly fruit. As Christian wives, we are to respect our husbands—not be in awe of them. Part of respecting them as people means that we respect the reality that they live before God’s face, and they need to be respectfully confronted if they start to forget that. Sanctification and the fight against sin do not neutralize a personality: they use the strengths and root out the weak parts. They maximize this aspect of creation for God’s glory. Our job is not to conform our spouses to ourselves or to some extrabiblical ideal that we have for them but to facilitate their conforming to Christ as whole persons, body, mind, and soul. Kindly and humbly calling out our spouses’ sin helps them put to death the old man—actually helping them become more human, more fully who they were created to be and who they really are in Christ.

It also helps us to become more balanced. We are all prone to little quirks and obsessions that distort us, in all sorts of facets of our personhood. The Lord told us that it is not good for man to be alone—and that was in unfallen Eden! In our sinful state, our personalities need the balance of a spouse to help keep them in proportion. A good understanding of personality combined with loving truth can keep us from becoming caricatures of ourselves and help us stay proportional in ways that are spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and socially healthy.

At the same time, a sanctified individualism also takes away the burden of feeling that we are ultimately responsible for our spouses. Now, we are certainly responsible for the way that we live with our spouses, the way that we treat them and help them grow in the fruit of the Spirit. But we are not all-sufficient. We are creatures, too, and do not bear ultimate responsibility for our spouses’ safety, joy, satisfaction, sanctification, or evaluation. We cannot bear another human’s fallen personhood. We cannot be everything that he or she needs. That burden is too great for one mere human being to bear for another, so it does not have to come between us or slow us down as we walk beside each other. Instead, Christ offers Himself as the infinite Person who bears and redeems fallen personhood. We are not a savior; we have a Savior. Living in that reality gives great freedom in a marriage.

And this is connected to something deeper. A biblical view of personhood also means, despite the closeness that this reality fosters in a relationship, that some things are off-limits to us simply because we are another creature. We need to be careful here, because this cannot mean that there should not be free openness, honesty, and ability to ask questions, express concerns, confess sin, and share our deepest dreams, disappointments, frustrations, and joys. There should be that; there must be that—it is all essential in a marriage, and it needs to happen. Unity should be deep and extensive. Friendship must be genuine and trusted. But our spouses, like us, are fully known only to God. We may know them better than any other human does, but even after a lifetime, it will not come close to God’s knowledge of them. And that is the relationship that has primacy, because that relationship is the source and chief end of personhood. That is the relationship that cannot be violated or usurped, especially by a godly marriage.

Our culture holds up the idea of a soulmate: that one person who knows everything about you and whom you tell everything. We have imbibed so much of this concept that we often cannot see that it is not only impossible but also not right, simply because the spousal relationship should not be the ultimate one. The idea that spouses do not and should not have 100 percent access to each other shocked me the first time that I heard it verbalized, but I have heard it from several elderly, godly people with long and happy marriages and seen it in many more. This idea can be twisted, used as an excuse to conceal or withdraw, but that will not bring trust or joy. And this acknowledgment of these relational limits makes biblical sense. As much as we are to study each other and know each other and share each other, there are places that we are not able to go, simply because we are another creature. We are not absolute. Personhood was made for intimacy, not omniscience.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland,” he describes a couple who are sitting at home in the evening, and the wife keeps nattering on:

Speak to me …. Speak.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.3

She erodes the relationship by her constant grasping at her husband’s mind and heart. If we were called to be the ultimate sanctifiers and managers of our spouses, we would need omniscience. Since we are not, we do not need it. We would not be able to bear such a burden. Instead, we can release our spouses to the Lord by acknowledging this primary relationship. We do it not in blind faith but out of love for our spouses and trust in our Creator.

In a healthy marriage, a respect for personhood and the Lord’s absolute right in each other’s lives means that you both have the freedom to go to the other out of a need for fellowship and companionship—a willingness to share and be shared—not because you have a need to control what is going on in the other person’s heart and head. This goes back to the idea that before this person is your spouse—and long after he or she is your spouse—the person is his or her own self before God, totally apart from you. Respecting the primacy of this relationship is part of respecting our spouses’ personhood and seeing how we can help them grow in it.

Personhood itself is a gift. In this fractured and changing world, our personhood means that our link with our Creator is unbreakable and permanent. It gives us an anchor. In marriage, that anchor of personhood gives stability and healthy limitations. It adds depth and color to the blessing of union. And it respects not only the Lord’s creativity in crafting each of us but also the bounds that He has included in that creation and the happiness for which He designed them.

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Ligonier Ministries