never the twain shall meet.
If this is true of our experience today — and sadly, for many, it is — then we need to remember that this is not the way God intended, or intends, it to be. In his Theology of the Body, St. John Paul the Great reminded us that before original sin entered the world, there was a perfect union and a deep, intimate connection between man and woman that was rooted in their mutual love for God and their desire to do his will. St. John Paul II referred to this state of intimate connection as the original unity of man and woman (St. John Paul II, 2006).
Illustrating this union, Genesis tells us that when God created woman, Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Please note that Adam did not say — to quote My Fair Lady’s Professor Henry Higgins — “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
The estrangement and confusion present-day men and women experience around one another is a direct result of original sin. Clearly, it is not the way things ought to be. The “regrettable apple incident” was to men and women what the Tower of Babel was to the world.
Winning the “Battle” of the Sexes
The good news is that God, through marriage, gives us the grace we need to begin to restore the authentic partnership Adam and Eve experienced with each other, and to overcome the false differences that keep men and women at odds (as opposed to the authentic differences that facilitate partnership between men and women). These false differences constitute the tension between men and women that people refer to as the “Battle of the Sexes.” True, we post-fallen people can’t achieve the complete union that Adam and Eve experienced with each other and God (at least not this side of heaven). But through God’s grace and our good efforts, there is much we can do in this life to bridge the gap that exists between genders.
Theologically speaking, this is the grace underlying what is known as the “unitive end” of marriage. When a man and woman freely and completely give themselves to each other, they commit to spending their lives becoming fluent in each other’s “languages.” By doing this, men and women can learn to celebrate the deep level of friendship and understanding that is born of helping one another become fully human persons. By learning to love and serve one another more perfectly, day-by-day, they help each other develop the missing parts of themselves. “And the two shall become one” (Mt 19:5).
Of course, saying that God gives us the grace to overcome false, or invalid, differences between men and women is not to deny that there are real differences between the sexes. But the true differences between men and women are much more subtle and profound than the polarized, overly simplistic definitions to which many in our society cling (e.g., “Men are rational, and women are emotional”; “Men don’t do housework and don’t take care of small children, and women shouldn’t work out of the home,” etc.). As moral theologian William May explains in his book Marriage: The Rock on Which the Family Is Built, gender differences are supposed to be differences in “emphasis.”
Celebrating the True Differences Between Man and Woman
What does this mean? In the beginning, at the dawn of creation, God shared the same aspects of himself (i.e., the same sets of characteristics and virtues) with both male and female human beings. Remember, Genesis says, “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27, emphasis ours). In other words, although men and women express their shared humanity in different and complementary ways, men and women have all qualities that make them both fully human and, therefore, completely understandable to each other — unlike those lions, tigers, and bears (oh, my!) that Adam was trying to chat up before Eve came along.
As St. John Paul II argued, the fact that Adam said of Eve, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23), dramatically shows that Eve — body, mind, and soul — was a being to whom Adam could relate completely. In Eve, Adam found a true helpmate, a partner who “got him” and whom he could “get” as well. At last! Someone made of the same essential biological, psychological, emotional, and spiritual stuff as himself! (Hip hip hooray!)
So, in the beginning, both men and women were given the ability to reason, emote, love, communicate, produce, set goals, nurture, and so on — all the qualities that made them a matched set of fully functioning and complete human persons. Likewise, both men and women were called to live out all of these qualities to the fullest. However, based on how God created their bodies, Adam and Eve had different styles of applying these qualities to everyday life. These complementary ways men and women live out all the qualities that make them human through the unique bodies God gave them are what we respectively call “masculinity” and “femininity.”
Complementarity: The “Genius” of Men and Women
Although God makes both men and women fully capable of doing many, if not all, of the same things as each other — and all the things that make them fully functioning, emotional, spiritual, psychological, and relational human beings — when men and women work together to bring their masculine and feminine gifts (what St. John Paul II referred to as men and women’s respective “genius”) to bear on a particular task, they do a better job of revealing the fullness of the particular quality and representing that virtue as it exists in God’s own heart.
For instance, God is fully nurturing to us, his children (cf. Lk 11:13), and he enables both men and women to be fully nurturing in their own ways through the unique body he gave each of us. God ordained a woman’s body to be able to nurse her young, to nourish them with her body like he nourishes us with his Body in the Eucharist. And he made mom’s body round and soft and cuddly to give baby a safe, comforting place to rest. But even though men cannot lactate (much as their wives might wish otherwise at 3 a.m.), God still requires them to be abundantly present and active in the lives of their children, just as God, our Father, is present and active in our lives. And dads have their own nurturing “genius.” For instance, because of their superior upper-body strength, dads can lift their children up over their heads and toss them gently in the air (and even catch them!), much to their little ones’ delight! Because men have scratchy faces/beards, they can put their cheeks under babies’ chins and on their tummies and — Bzzzzzzzrrrrrbbbbrrt — tickle them in ways moms can’t, making their children giggle with affectionate joy (“Do it again, Daddy!”).
God gave both men and women the ability — their respective “genius” — to be fully nurturing and loving (and every other quality), each in their own way; but he ordained the sexes to express this nurturance in equally valuable yet different and complementary ways, so that, taken together, their children could experience a more complete example of the nurturance that God exhibits in his own heart for all of us. As St. John Paul II taught us, men and women must prayerfully contemplate and emphasize their bodies’ unique capabilities to first understand true masculinity and femininity. Then, we must use our masculinity and femininity as the prism through which we express our full humanity. By doing this together, men and women reflect God’s image and likeness more perfectly. They create a deeper union with each other and with God — a union that shines out as a powerful witness to the world of God’s own glory.
False Differences: Mars vs. Venus
As you read above, the pre-fallen Adam and Eve fully exhibited all the qualities God gave them, although they tended to emphasize these qualities differently. But after the fall of humankind, masculine and feminine “emphases” stopped being that and became whole other languages that — because as Augustine put it, “Sin makes you stupid” (well, he said, “Sin darkens the intellect,” but same difference) — men and women couldn’t speak and didn’t understand.
After
