Marriage is one of the fundamental aspects of dyadic human relationships defined by the role and type of a wife and husband. The husband and wife play roles that reciprocate to meet each other’s spiritual, sexual, material, psychological, and emotional needs for the relationships’ survival (Ademiluka, 2021). Marriage is based on competent, mutual, dependent, sympathy, fellow feeling, evaluation, self-exposure, regard, commitment, touch, interpersonal trust, and obligation between the man and woman or same-sex marriage. Based on different cultures, a husband and a wife have dissimilar moral commitments in the family. The basic unit of a society is the family. Hence, the two people will combine their worldviews and give rise to a new generation.
Although marriage is a universal form of human relationship, there are cultural orientations in marriages in different world regions. The cultures have specific duties and obligations that only belong to the husband, those belonging to the wife alone, and those that either can perform. The roles and responsibilities that each party can perform may be acceptable in one community and be treated as a taboo in another (Ademiluka, 2021). With no right or wrong cultural practices, the couple has all the opportunities to ensure that they can fit into the culture they want to share. To ensure that there are no chances of cultural clash in marriage, each community may have guidelines that people follow when they want to get engaged.
Literature Review
Some cultures practice arranged marriages, while others allow the individuals getting married to have the autonomy to choose their partners. Understanding your own culture and the individual you want to marry helps avoid conflicting situations and leads to unity and love. The roles that the husband and wife play to ensure that the marriage continues to exist happily are mainly defined by their cultural backgrounds. Some communities believe that the husband must work hard and provide essential and luxury needs for their families (Ademiluka, 2021). The role of the wife, in that case, is to take care of the children at home. With all roles assigned logically, the couple makes it easier for their children to learn from them.
The roles of a husband and a wife can be taken from a biblical perspective as well. The Bible says that woman was made to be a companion and helper to her husband. In that case, the husband is given the larger mandate to perform more duties where the wife offers help and support. The wife can offer emotional, psychological, religious, or financial support with the main aim of helping their husband succeed in their duties (Mackenzie, 2018). Although the wife may help at times, it should not be their primary duty to provide for their own needs when the husband is alive. According to the biblical arrangements, Christians in the marriage bracket are advised not to be equally yoked with unbelieve to avoid cultural clashes. It is ideal for Christians to intermarry because they share the same principles and beliefs. Marriages between people emanating from different religions are prone to ideological frictions because of the parity in values.
In the contemporary world, things have changed majorly due to advances in technology and education. Many societies did not educate the girl-child as much as the boy-child in the traditional world. Nowadays, both men and women have equal access to education (Mackenzie, 2018). This access to education, including higher levels of education, has made men and women work in places that compromise the traditional role of husband and wife. In a situation where both husband and wife are working in a busy environment, they both get back home very late, the traditional roles have to be changed. In the current world, both a man and a woman can provide for the family by working (Mackenzie, 2018). The situation has been tightened by the ever-hardening economic conditions that make it necessary for both husband and wife to work hard and bring to the table something. In some situations, the wife may be lucky to secure employment while the husband is not employed.
The increasing rate of urbanization has also led to changes in wife and husband roles. Traditionally, in most cultures, the woman was to perform home chores that included taking care of the children, the kitchen, and the homestead (Mackenzie, 2018). Men used to take care of animals, hunt, gather and play a political role. However, with urbanization, there are no lands to farm, forests to hunt and gather, and both women and men have joined the political arena. Urbanization has forced husband and wife roles to change over time.
Further, there is an increase in same-sex marriages, divorce, crude marriage rates, and the age to marry. Divorce and crude marriages leave one parent, either husband or wife, to play the role of both. Marrying and getting divorced at a young age makes the grandparents take care of the young family. Same-sex marriages mean that both the husband and wife are of the same gender, meaning that some of the roles traditionally or biblically played by the other gender may not be played rightly or not be played at all.
Intermarriage is affecting the cultural roles of a husband and a wife. Different cultures have different roles that the husband and wife play in marriage. Demand for education and job search makes young people move from their homes to other towns or countries for higher learning or job searching. These relocations have led to people intermingling as the young people get their life partners in different institutions. This means that unalike cultural practices from the two communities can be expected to assemble. Intermarriages are leading to large cultural role changes in both wives and husbands.
Husband and Wife Roles across Cultures
The increase in educational ventures has made people view marriage as a form of union whereby each person contributes equally to the family’s wellbeing. Initially, people were not schooled to the extent of getting the enlightenment of appreciating coercive union. It was not ideal to have just a wife in other cultures, and many wives were categorized as wealthy. Education has revoked such thinking analogies as people have realized the best form of wealth is economic empowerment and good saving techniques.
Roles in a Family according to Western Culture
Different communities have different cultural beliefs and practices regarding husband and wife’s duties. Western culture views a man as resorting to collective social standards, including taking care of the children they fathered and the women they impregnated after marriage. This belief led to the Western people changing with time to mandate the mother to become the primary person providing for the child. The mother is to nurture for moral values and character development of the children. Both the husband and wife must provide financial, medical, and medical support for their children. In western culture, family is getting a new face due to changes in the family setup. Husband and wife might not necessarily live together as in the traditional marriages, divorce rates are increasing, work, and same-sex marriages.
In the Western culture, marriages are structured in a manner that kids come as a blessing. Children are a secondary objective in the marriage institution in many of the Western homes. The increasing desire for education, jobs, and same-sex marriages can be attributed to this change. The wife does not have the duty to take care of children as children are missing in some families. The wife remains with the duty to obey the husband. Many cultural husband and wife duties are missing or changing due to the change in the family set up in the Western culture. Equity and equality are greatly practiced where both the husband and wife have to bring in the same resources for the family to co-exist where marriage still exists.
In the Chinese marriage setup, an Eastern culture, the role of husband and wife is very different from their roles in the Western culture. The wives were viewed as inferior beings to men in the Chinese culture. The husband had the duty to make decisions for their marriage and the family, while the wife was to follow the orders or decisions that the husband made. The wife had just one role of staying home and taking care of the household under decisions made by their husbands. A wife could only stay home, take care of her parents-in-law, cook, and heat the wine. The female gender had three submissions to strictly do throughout her life (Cheng & Yang, 2021). When growing as a young girl, she must submit to her father; when married, she submits to her husband, and if widowed, she submits to her son. The Chinese culture viewed called these submissions as the principles or rules of property.
The same was the case in many of the Eastern cultures. The husband had more duties and authority in the marriage setup and even the society at large. The husband looks after the family by bringing in food, providing security, housing, education, and decision-making (Cheng & Yang, 2021). This husband and wife cultural duty in Eastern families is very different from the Western culture as both the husband and wife have a say in decisions that relate to the marriage set up.
Data Collection for the Research
In the role of a husband and wife in the western and eastern cultures, to gather data for studying the cultural differences, observation and interviews are the best methods to use. With observation, the research moves to the culture where they want to study and stay there for some time. The research collects firsthand information based on what they see during that period for analysis. With interviewing, the researcher plans a list of questions to ask several participants about their understanding of the marriage’s husband and wife culture roles. However, this method has disadvantages as the data collected may be biased and not true. The participants may give false information intentionally to cover up things that they feel are not friendly.
Lessons Learnt on Family Cultures
Although Eastern culture is very different from Western culture, it has so many insights that various marriages can envy. The Eastern culture reports lower divorce cases as the family is still valued than in the Western culture. The increased equity and equality in the role of husband and wife in the Western culture have led to increased divorce (Cheng & Yang, 2021). A woman can perform most of the roles that a man performs, such as providing food, education, shelter, and medication for the family. Women in the Western culture have been empowered such that the traditional role of a man is changing and leading to women not minding losing their men.
Eastern culture believes that the man should make most of the decisions while the woman submits. Empowerment makes it possible for women to make decisions in the marriage setup as they have sufficient knowledge on most family issues. The woman learns that they should submit by respecting their husbands but not by fearing them. A marriage relationship based on love and respect grows and flourishes more than a family built of fearful submission.
Increasing divorce rates experienced in Western cultures make it safe to say that ethics and values have to be incorporated into family education. The inclusion of lessons from religious books such as the Bible will help instill some positive values into women and men to ensure that when they enter the marriage life, they will be able to respect each other for the family to co-exist happily.
From the biblical aspect of husband and wife lessons, I have realized that the wife must submit to the husband while the husband must submit to the wife (“1 Corinthians 11:3,” n.d.). The marriage union in the religious teachings is one where the husband is the head while the wife is the helper making the husband the decision-maker with the wife’s help. The husband cannot make decisions or implement them independently as the marriage is a union of two people who need each other. The husband needs to seek the wife’s opinion in making some crucial family decisions, unlike in Eastern culture.
Another lesson I learned that is applicable in the real world is that the husband and wife have duties that each has to perform. Understanding and appreciating this fact is a primary thing for the marriage setup to co-exist. The husband needs to understand what role they need to play culturally and the wife and ensure that they perform their duties accordingly.
Conclusively, there is a difference in husband and wife duties across cultures. It is prudent that a wife and husband identify any cultural differences between them for them to work on them and choose one culture or make decisions that can support their marriages. The husband and wife need to play their duties at times. However, it is good to help each other where possible as many cultures have been revoked over time in the contemporary world.
References
1 Corinthians 11:3. biblia.com. Web.
Donehower, K. (2020). Reconsidering power, privilege, and the public/private distinction in the literacy of rural women. In Women and Literacy (pp. 91-108). Routledge.
Ademiluka, S. (2021). ‘For the husband is the head of the wife’: A contextual re-reading of Ephesians 5:22–33 among Nigerian Yoruba Christians. In Die Skriflig / In Luce Verbi, 55(1). Web.
Cheng, Y., & Yang, C. (2021). Continuity and changes in attitudes toward marriage in contemporary Taiwan. Journal of Population Research, 38(2), 139-167. Web.
Mackenzie, S. (2018). Reframing masculinity: Structural vulnerability and HIV among black men who have sex with men and women. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 21(2), 175-187. Web.