A Self Before a Spouse
What the church never taught women to look for...
This is Part 2 of 2 in an essay series examining the "choose better" counsel; where it falls short, who it burdens, and what the church should expand it teachings into. Part 1 asks why the argument so often travels in one direction. Part 2 asks what it would actually look like to teach women to choose well.
Part 1: “Choose Better” The wisdom that became a weapon.
There is a huge difference between being told to choose better and being taught to choose better.
“Choose better” is a verdict that is dished out after something has gone wrong and places the blame on a woman’s discernment.
Being taught to choose better is formation. It is what should have been happening all along in our homes and ministries, and in the spaces where women and men are formed before they ever make the choice or are a choice.
The church has been remarkably thorough in preparing women for marriage. It has been far less thorough in preparing us to understand identity or equipping us to discern how to “choose better.”
Know Who You Are
Before I tackle the discernment issue, I want to dive first into something more fundamental that the church has too often failed to give women.
A self.
A self identity rooted in who Christ is and not in wifehood or motherhood.
It is a failure that steals from a woman the ability to discern who she is.
A self! Not a role, a function, an office, a title or a name that belongs to someone else.
I came across a video clip recently in which a pastor listed what he called the four levels of submission every wife must undergo.
The first on his list? Submission of identity.
His evidence? Not scripture but a last name change.
I am responding to the clip, not the full sermon. There was enough in it to engage with directly.
He said, a wife takes her husband’s last name, therefore her identity is now found in him.
A name change is a legal and social tradition. It is a Western legal convention, not a divine ordinance. It varies across cultures and appears nowhere in biblical text as a spiritual requirement or a picture of how God identifies a woman. In many cultures around the world, including cultures represented throughout Scripture’s own context, women did not take their husband’s names. Presenting it as the mechanism by which submission of identity is established, recognized or acceptable is not scriptural.
She will henceforth, according to this pastor, find her identity in her husband.
This claim also has no scriptural foundation. A woman or a man should not find their identity in their spouse. Identity is not something you locate in another person. It is something you bring to them and if you are a believer, it is something you have in Christ. Genesis 2:24 says “the two shall become one flesh.” One. Not the wife becomes the husband. Not one absorbing the other. The text does not say she becomes him. And a woman who has been taught to find her identity in her husband has not been equipped for partnership. She has been set up for disappearance. And the church that teaches this is not protecting women; it is diminishing them. This is erasure with a theological frame around it.
Lastly, heaven, he said, recognizes her only through her husband.
God recognized a woman before a man entered the picture. She was known, named, and called before any covenant between them was ever made. A marriage that asks a woman to surrender that is not modeling the union Scripture describes. It is modeling something else entirely.
I want to be generous here. The instinct toward unity in marriage is not wrong.
Genesis 2:24 says: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
The word translated “one” there is echad in Hebrew. It also means “first” or “single.” It is the most common Hebrew word for the number one.
The same word appears in Numbers 13:23 for a single cluster of grapes.
One cluster, yet made of hundreds of distinct grapes. Nobody looks at a cluster and concludes the individual grapes have ceased to exist.
The same word is used in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,
The primary meaning in context and from my interpretation here is exclusivity and integrity. There is one God, not many. He is not divided against himself, and he does not shift or compete with rival gods.
And that echad, as we understand it through the nature of God himself, holds distinction within it rather than collapsing one into the other. Father, Son, and Spirit are one and each remains fully themselves; unity does not mean uniformity. They do not collapse into sameness. They are unified without erasure.
Echad describes a real and genuine oneness that does not require the erasure of what is held within it. Which means the oneness of marriage does not require one person to disappear into the other. Two people become one thing. But they remain two people within that oneness.
A woman who knows who she is does not walk into a relationship looking for someone to define her. She brings herself, whole, into the covenant. She asks different questions and notices different things. She is not so hungry to be chosen that she overlooks what she is choosing. She is not so afraid of being alone that she mistakes availability for suitability. She already knows she is wanted by God, before any of this. And from that place, she can choose. Not from fear or scarcity or the pressure of a church culture that treats unmarried women as incomplete, but from wholeness.
Identity is the foundation.
Formation is what gets built on top of it. The church has invested heavily in one kind of formation while leaving another almost entirely untouched.
What the Church Taught Women to Prepare For
For generations, the formation offered to women in the church has been oriented almost entirely towards service. Women have been taught how to be good wives, mothers, and women. How to serve, submit, and sacrifice. How to wait well and pray for a husband who has not yet arrived. How to prepare, purify and make themselves into the kind of woman worth choosing.
What is often missing is the identity piece and the equipping of women to discern from a place of who they are. That gap is not neutral and it has consequences.
A woman who has been formed entirely around becoming a good wife but has not been taught what a good husband, outside of a provider and leader, actually looks like is not choosing from wisdom. She is choosing from hope, pressure, and the signals the church gave her about what counts as a godly man. And those signals have often been incomplete at best.
What the Church Taught Men to Be and Where It Stopped
The formation offered to men in the church has its own incomplete edges. Men have been discipled toward authority, leadership, and provision. Those are not unimportant callings, and that is where the teaching usually stops.
A man arrives and announces himself. Good job. Man of God. Does not drink, smoke, or party. Abstains from sex before marriage. And the church has trained both him and the woman across from him to treat that list as sufficient.
But that checklist is almost entirely about what he does not do.
Hence, a man arrives and announces himself. He has a good job and can provide. He is a “man of God.” He does not drink, smoke, or party. He abstains from sex before marriage. And the church has trained both him and the woman across from him to treat that list as sufficient credentials to choose him.
But that checklist is almost entirely about what he does not do and It says almost nothing about who he is.
Shared faith matters, but it is not enough on its own. What he does not do matters, but what he does or cannot do also matters.
Do your values align beyond Sunday morning?
Does his vision for life match yours?
What are his visions for marriage, parenting, and building.
How big a life does he want?
How does he handle money, conflict, inconvenience?
Is he kind in ordinary moments? Does his lifestyle leave room for yours?
A Christian woman is not obligated to choose a man simply because he shares her faith. Faith is the foundation. It is not the full picture.
The church has also shared men around authority, but Ephesians 5 does not just call a husband to lead. It calls him to love, nourish and cherish, verbs of care, not management. Daily, embodied, and attentive love. Women deserve more than a man who cleared the minimum bar with a checklist of abstentions.
Above all, Economic Viability Is Not Optional
I want to say something directly and without apology: the church should be teaching women, if anything, to be economically viable. Not as a feminist statement, but as a wisdom statement.
This is not an argument for any particular financial arrangement in marriage. Whether a household runs on two incomes or one, whether a wife works outside the home or not, whether the division of financial labor looks traditional or egalitarian, those are decisions that belong to each couple.
This is about a woman who, regardless of what her marriage looks like, is not financially helpless. Who has skills, earning capacity, and enough understanding of money to function if the circumstances around her change. Because they can and will change. Provision can disappear. Health can shift. Marriages can fracture. And there are women right now who need to leave situations that are harmful and cannot leave because they have no economic ground to stand on.
The church that teaches women to wait for a man to provide without also teaching them to build their own capacity is not protecting them. It is leaving them vulnerable.
There is no version of this where economic dependency is a spiritual virtue. Proverbs 31 did not wait to be provided for. She built. Invested, and generated. Her household was not sustained by her husband’s provision alone. She was an active participant in its economic life. That is not a modern feminist reading of the text. That is what the text actually says.
And beyond the practical argument, there is a deeper one. A woman who can provide for herself is not choosing a partner out of financial necessity. She is choosing from freedom. That changes everything about how she chooses and what she is able to see clearly.
Motherhood Is a Season. Your Calling Is a Lifetime.
The church has often spoken about motherhood as though it is the primary vocation of a woman’s life. And I want to honor what motherhood actually is. It is demanding, it is costly. The early years especially require a kind of presence that reshapes everything else around it. That is real and it deserves to be named.
Motherhood never ends. But the season of active mothering does. Children grow and leave. Wifehood can end too, through death or divorce, or seasons of distance. And a woman who built her entire identity around those roles finds herself on the other side without a framework for what comes next or how to stand.
This is not an argument against motherhood. It is an argument for a woman who has something of her own that no season can take from her. A calling. A capacity. An identity rooted in who she is before God, not in the roles she holds for others.
Because seasons shift. And you will still be here.
What Learning to Choose Better Actually Requires
The church has prepared women to be chosen for generations. It is past time to also teach them how to choose.
That means doing the harder work of forming women in their identity before forming them for wifehood. It means defining what a godly man actually looks like beyond the abstention checklist. It means expanding the discipleship of men into the full picture of what love, partnership, and shared life actually require. It means investing in women’s economic capacity not as a concession to feminism but as a matter of basic wisdom and dignity. It means honoring motherhood without reducing a woman’s entire calling to it.
And underneath all of it, it means trusting that a woman who knows who she is will choose differently than a woman who is still looking for someone to tell her.
She will ask better questions. She will notice different things. She will not be so eager to be chosen that she stops paying attention to what she is choosing. She will not be so afraid of being alone that she mistakes a warm body for a worthy partner. She will bring herself, whole, into the decision. And that wholeness changes everything.
Choose better is what we say after something goes wrong.
Learn to choose better is what faithfulness requires before it does.
The church has the infrastructure to do this work. It has the pulpits, the ministries, the relationships, and the trust of the people sitting in those seats. The question has never been whether it is possible.
The question is whether it is willing.
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