Interdependence: My Needs, His Wants

I got Botox injections in my arm a few weekends ago. I am supposed to avoid as much repetitive motion with that arm to avoid the Botox spreading and causing overall weakness instead of treating the spasms cause by my focal dystonia. Fortunately for me, my husband was home to help me with as much as I needed. Did I let him help me? No, not really. He offered, and even repeatedly asked to help, and I still tried to do most things myself. Why? Because I have self-worth issues, because I don’t want to need to be helped, because I hate being needy. Basically, because I am prideful. Over the course of the weekend, though, I had a realization. I need to be needed. I want to be needed, especially by my husband. What if he needs and wants the same things? What if I’m furthering my own issues, and by proxy, causing issues for us as a couple by refusing help? There may be more to need than I thought.

We are created in marriage to be interdependent. After all, help for the man Adam was cause for God to create Eve. The husband’s care for his wife is supposed to image Christ and the church (Eph 5:25-33). Paul tells readers that carrying one another’s burdens fulfills the law of Christ (Gal 6:2). We are not to be codependent, depending on each other for identity and worth, but to be each other’s helpers. 

I tend towards codependency, towards needing my husband to need me to feel worthwhile. That is not healthy, especially since my husband is pretty independent and as he puts it, "has very low needs." There are certainly ways I can serve him, but sometimes I stake my worth on him needing me, which in a basic sense, he does not. But what if, because of marriage, he needs me in a different sense? In a co-laboring sense? To be my helper. That would not be co-dependence, but interdependence, a sharing of the load. That would be right.

I talked to my husband after my realization, and he reported that he indeed does not need me to need him. He is fine with me being independent. He reported that he wants to help me, though. He wants us to be interdependent, and he recognizes that this requires work on his part.  And here I am trying to do all the work because I am prideful and do not want to admit my weakness, even when it is medically induced. (Believe me, I have plenty of other weaknesses in my body, as well as my character.)

Marriage is a lifelong and messy process. As Mike Mason writes in his book, The Mystery of Marriage, “The wedding is merely the beginning of a lifelong process of handing over absolutely everything, and not simply everything that one owns but everything that one is” (p. 21). I have not gotten there yet. I am very independent, and at the same time, dependent. I need the beautiful emptiness of myself that occurs in interdependence. To get closer to that, I am going to have to let my husband help me. And I am going to have to look for ways to help him, not just wait for him to need me. We have work to do, but that is marriage. Working together is marriage, until the marriage supper of the Lamb when we will no longer be interdependent, but rather forever dependent on Christ, the Bridegroom of the church.