Rabbi Simcha Cohen
Marriage is a family partnership that unites a man and a woman for many years.
To bring them together within this partnership and to manage it properly, each must have a psychological inclination to form a bond with another person and to depend on that person. Do men and women have sufficient inner qualities to make it easier for them to unite as individuals and form a cohesive family?
This is all the more important given that marriage, by its nature, involves routine, mutual coercion, and a prolonged and substantial restriction of freedom, while a person, by nature, strives for freedom and independence and tends to lose interest in long, routine processes.
This question has an unequivocal answer. A woman’s psyche contains inner qualities oriented toward partnership that are suited to family life; however, these qualities are absent from a man’s psyche, which therefore does not, by its nature, meet the requirements of marriage.
This is the main stumbling block for a man and a woman who, despite the enormous differences between them, have decided to join their lives in a permanent, formal bond. We can recognize this problem in several frequently occurring situations.
Almost every man goes through a “freedom crisis” immediately after the wedding.
He says to himself: I thought that after the wedding all my problems would be solved, but now I see that marriage is another problem I am forced to solve. I have to tell my wife where I have come from and where I am going; I am forced to report to her what I have done and what I am planning to do, and if that is not enough, she also never forgets to ask what I am thinking about. After every phone conversation (and sometimes during the conversation), she asks me, “Who were you talking to? What did you tell him?” And if I answer that I told him nothing, she then wants to know why I told him nothing…
And when the wife notices her husband's displeasure and sees that her deep and sincere interest in his life surprises him, she thinks to herself: what has happened to him? Has he still not realized that he is married? Doesn't he know that we are one? Doesn't he notice that everything that happens to him matters to me? Doesn't he know that he has obligations toward me and responsibility for our relationship?
In principle, it is the wife who is right to take an interest in her husband's affairs and ask him about his telephone conversation: after all, in marriage, two people take on obligations toward one another for decades to come. They live in the same home, share finances, children, and descendants, and are in close and constant emotional contact.
Let us not forget that, after all, they are one soul!
Moreover, the wife feels that she is “bound to her husband”: she wears a ring on her finger symbolizing the bond between them, bears his surname, and often takes his opinion into account. She believes that a lack of interest on her part in her husband's life and affairs would indicate a weakness in their bond. She herself feels hurt if it seems to her that her husband takes no interest in her, and she enjoys it when he asks about what is happening in her life. So, to preserve and strengthen their bond, she showers him with questions every day.
The husband, however, is wrong to express displeasure and become irritated at having to satisfy her curiosity. He lacks the qualities of partnership that his wife possesses, and therefore thinks that she is sticking her nose into someone else's business.
Our Sages (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 13) beautifully expressed a woman's capacity for partnership when describing why Eve fed her husband, Adam, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge after she herself had tasted it and learned that anyone who ate from it would die. “She said: Perhaps I will die now, and the Almighty will create another woman and give her to Adam. But no, I will make him eat with me. If we die, we will die together; if we survive, we will survive together. And she took and ate of the fruit of the Tree, and gave its fruit to her husband so that he would eat with her.”
The inclination toward partnership that is present in a woman and absent in a man reveals itself in another way as well.
It is common knowledge that women, as a rule, talk more than men. A woman's psychological inclination to talk is more in keeping with the principle of partnership in marriage and contributes more to building a relationship than her husband's silence does. After all, it is precisely the ability to speak, which connects people, that distinguishes human beings from animals.
When people quarrel and argue, the clearest expression of separation and a lack of connection between them is silence and ignoring one another. At first, those who have quarreled shout at each other, but afterward they express their feelings through silence: they stop speaking to one another, sometimes for many days or even years. People who have quarreled feel an emotional aversion to one another, and by ceasing to speak, they distance themselves even further and sever their connection. Rabbi Meir Chadash expressed this beautifully: “There is no cry like the cry of silence.”
The Torah teaches us this as well: a lack of verbal communication creates division between people.
When people united for the negative purpose of building the Tower of Babel, the Almighty confused their languages so that they could not communicate properly with one another; this led to disunity and division among them.
Knowing that speech connects people, we will not be surprised that a woman, who has been given spiritual qualities for connection and partnership, speaks not only to convey information or ask for something, but mainly because the need to speak is part of her personality. To initiate and carry through the process of uniting the family through communication.