Public Service Announcement: A single woman does not strictly “need” a man’s leadership

Please hear me out! I promise I am not contradicting the Bible.

In the Bible, God has granted leadership in marriage to men. However, I have seen or personally experienced it a number of times that men (especially, but often women too) tend to develop erroneous mindsets, sometimes painfully erroneous mindsets because of that.

So because men have granted leadership in marriage to men, does that then mean that every woman then needs a man to lead her? No, no it doesn’t. This is one of those tricky issues where thinking easily falls into error so I will try to explain what I mean.

When a man exercises leadership over the marriage, it is not the woman that he is leading per se, rather it is the marriage itself, that is, the union. That might sound like semantics, so I will try to give an illustrative example.

In a company where there is a boss/leader/manager and there are employees, the boss can be considered the leader of the company. Yet being the boss only gives authority to that boss to lead the employees within the context of the company, within the set hours of company work and only on matters related to the company work. Because the boss is the leader, does that then give them authority to instruct the employee on personal matters that are outside the scope of the company altogether and completely irrelevant to the company? No. Now to be fair, the employee can make decisions about their private life and time which do impinge on company life, and depending on the decision the boss might be rightly entitled to be upset at the decision made by the employee or even to end the employee’s employment. However, it is still the employee’s right to make their decision.

I know that work is not a perfect analogue for marriage as marriage truly does touch every scope of your life. But please stick with me!

Here’s the question then: if you as a boss saw a previous employee of your company who was now unemployed, or self-employed, would you then insist that that person needs a boss over their life? Or would you then start directing them as to how to live their life? No, because being a boss was only relevant to the/a company. There is a leadership structure in a company because when human beings are trying to collectively achieve things, then practically speaking there needs to be a leader. However when you are self-employed or trying to achieve things on your own then you automatically exercise leadership over your own life, make your own decisions.

So yeah, this is the analogy that immediately springs to mind. So it is with marriage. A man is not the head of the marriage because every woman inherently needs a man to lead her, but rather because every union of people working together needs a leader. If the woman remains a single unit, then just as a self-employed employee she remains under her own leadership. If she is a Christian woman then she has access to the Holy Spirit for guidance as surely as a man does.

Some men apparently do not understand this though. It would appear that for some of them their thinking goes like this:
“Men are to be the leader in marriage. If you married me then I would be the leader over you. Since any (single) man might potentially marry any (single) woman then it follows that every woman should respect the authority of any man (as any man could be a potential husband) or any woman should respect any man. ”
So it is basically as if they infer from the instruction that wives are to submit to husbands that women generally are to submit to men. Or they deduce from the fact that God has called wives to submit to husbands that men are inherently superior to women, and from that they conclude that all of their ideas, their opinions and everything else are automatically superior. If you believe that a man is inherently superior, then that easily lends itself to the idea that an inherently inferior woman needs an inherently superior man to “lead” her in life. Many women also believe that men are inherently superior to women. I’ll concede that men are physically stronger than us women! But as far as I am concerned that is as far as the inherent superiority goes!

Additionally, I have heard many people say, or pray regarding a particular single woman, (eg myself) or sometimes a group of single women, that God would bring the man/men to lead her/them in life. As far as I am concerned that is wrong. It is subtly wrong, but it is still wrong.

I definitely do not believe that any man could marry any woman. Clearly there are going to be different levels of maturity that different people have attained regardless of gender, different levels of wisdom and different ages too. Are you suggesting that someone of the stature of, say Angela Merkel (I’ve been watching videos about Germany!) could marry, ie realistically submit herself to someone like Donald Trump, for instance? Even though they are both politicians, and he is even more powerful than she ever was, there is clearly not a compatibility there.

OK, now let’s talk about assumptions in church/among Christian people!
Now everyone knows, of course, that husbands are to be the leaders in marriage. Everyone knows that, and that is the one aspect of this topic that is incontrovertible. However, as I write this, I realise that not only do people make false inferences from that, but then they also assume that other people (ie I myself) believe the same way that they do! This is a related example, and apologies it is highly controversial but it is also very true: some Christians apparently believe that (and I’m going to be blunt here) White people are inherently superior to Black people. And then when I as a Black person innocently wander into their predominantly White church, they apparently take that as a tacit agreement from me about their inherent superiority. If it needs to be stated, I definitely do not believe that any ethnicity or skin colour is inherently superior to any other, and as it happens I am very proud of my cultural background. Furthermore I am all too aware of the atrocities that certain ethnicities have committed around the world. So I have not exactly been the queen of grace whenever I have found myself colliding with this assumption.

So in the same way I definitely do not think that men are inherently superior to women.
Now the unfortunate thing about when people make this assumption, is that they apparently do not realise that people could even think differently. So whenever they are interacting with you, it is almost like they take it as an absolute given that this is the only way to think. Thinking now about a particular individual, it is clear that this person does not expose themselves (oh whom am I trying to kid? Yes it’s a man, of course it is a man) – so it seems obvious to me that this man has different time priorities to my own, where I literally spend the whole day devouring and synthesising information on a wide variety of subjects from a wide range of sources. I can’t help it, that’s literally who I am. But that is clearly not who he is. He’s clearly a smart person but it is already clear to me that this is not the kind of person I would naturally submit to, or whose opinion I would seek out on any matter of substance. This is not a dig against this man by any means. I am not saying that I am better than him. I am just saying that this is a glaring incompatibility.
So firstly it is such a false premise to suggest that theoretically he and I could get married so I would have to submit to him anyway.

Furthermore imagine the scenario then when there is someone as outspoken as I am and someone starts trying to subtly assert their inherent superiority that I don’t actually believe in? “Surely Tosin by now you have realised that between you and me I am the man?” And some people apparently think that because they are male, their thinking, their ideas are automatically superior in everything and in every way. (I’m not saying that this is true of this particular man). So simply by offering their male opinion on the matter, they expect that opinion to be accepted as the conclusive answer. I have even experienced it in the past that some men act like they are magnanimously giving women a chance to talk first, to express the sweet little ideas in our sweet little heads, before they offer their powerful and conclusive male opinions.

To go back to the title of this post, I have subtly perceived an impression that as a single woman, a certain person or people think that I am bereft of necessary male leadership, so even though they are not my husband, they unconsciously assert their own male leadership, to make up for the male leadership I am missing out on by being single.

A younger version of myself would have been sassy about all these things, and I would have gone out of my way to make my point, and to fly high my feminist credentials.
However, thankfully I am a little wiser now, and I realise that all I need to do is to create firm boundaries around my time. If anyone wants to make assumptions, then let them! As long as it does not affect what I need to do and the decisions I need to make, they can think what they like!