Are you an anchor or a kite?

Before I got married, I knew that all good marriages need a kite and an anchor. One person, the anchor, has to stay firmly planted in electric bills and back issues of Consumer Reports so the kite, or free spirit, can fly off and beautify the world with a paintbrush or guitar. And in the models of marriage I built in my imagination, I was always the kite.

I mentioned last week that I fell in love with my husband during a hurricane. This is true enough. We had our very first long conversation over Facebook while sheltered from the downpour in our separate dorms. We talked together fluidly, and my hope began to mount—until he said this: “Maybe if we take an umbrella out into the hurricane we could use it to float all the way above the storm.”

Oh no! He wanted to be a kite as much as I did.

The second thing I have learned about marriage—which I thought I knew before I got married—is this: You and your spouse will complement each other, but not always in the ways you expect. Before your relationship takes flight, you may think you know exactly what you need. You may even try to prevent certain relationships based on the qualities you have narrowly assigned yourself or your suitor. But you do not really know. Only God does.

My husband Jonathan often jokes that people talk about marriages like they talk about cars—like they are just something to “work on,” like they come composed of nothing but regulation parts that always fit together in precisely the same way. He says that practical manuals of virtue corroborate this misguided approach by telling you that men in given situations act like Xwhile women act like Y.

This reminds me of something economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell said regarding race in a book I read my freshman year of college: “Race is one of many sorting devices used because of the costliness of individual knowledge.” Manhood and womanhood can function the same way. Well-meaning books built my idea-castle, offering advice that compared women and men to aliens from separate planets or to carbo-loaded foods whose differing shapes revolutionized their functions. I had never personally read any of these books. But I heard them quoted all the time. The older women dispensing advice around me said, “Your husband is a man, so he will communicate like X, though he probably will struggle a lot with communication in general. You are a woman, so you will communicate verbally and try to manipulate him like Y.”

Now, I have nothing against practical advice. But after marriage I learned with some relief that my man does not fit all the stereotypes books assigned him—much less the ones I did. We each have anchor qualities and kite qualities. Our stripes of practicality complement each other. One of us mows the lawn. The other keeps track of the electric bill. We both occasionally fly off and beautify the world with a paintbrush or guitar. This kind of individual knowledge could not be more worth the cost.