Your spouse has sent you the following message:
Question: What does it mean?
- It is literal. Your spouse hopes to speak with you.
- It is conciliatory. You had a fight earlier, and he/she would like to patch things up.
- It is aggressive. You had a fight earlier, and he/she would like to continue it.
- It is seductive. “Talk” is a euphemism.
- None of the above.
Why should this message require interpretation in the first place? It’s not as though the message is complex. No, indeed it is a plain enough sentence. The issue is that the people involved are complex. Maybe if humans were simpler we wouldn’t have to work to understand each other. We could take in messages like a computer receives data. We’d have no need for a hermeneutic – a way of understanding the words and glances that pass between us.
A hermeneutic is like an interpretive filter, and you don’t have to know the word to master the skill. As advertisements and talking points fill the air around us, we constantly filter them without a conscious thought. One such filter has been called the “hermeneutic of suspicion.” We protect ourselves by casting a suspicious eye at news headlines, marketing messages, and (especially) the pronouncements of our political enemies. We need this protection. Without it we would be forever duped, clicking links to learn the one weird trick for curing diabetes.
And yet the armor that protects us from the world should be shed at the threshold of our homes. A hermeneutic of suspicion won’t do when speaking to the people we love. Still, we can’t dispense with interpretation altogether, even at home. Think of that text message. We still need some way to understand the people around us. So, what would happen if we traded a hermeneutic of suspicion for a hermeneutic of love?
Go ahead and check 1 Corinthians 13 if you like, but you probably already know how it works. Patience, kindness, and deference toward the beloved are the marks of love. This isn’t a checklist so much as a posture, a way of being.
The hermeneutic of suspicion takes every slight as an act of aggression. And there are no shortage of slights. Maybe your spouse makes you late, they fail to do a chore they said they’d do, or they frown at the meal you’ve just made. The hermeneutic of suspicion warns you not to let any insult pass unnoticed and unremarked upon. Your spouse is being unreasonable, it tells you, and you would be unreasonable to ignore it. And so you respond, not out of love, but out of self-defense.
Of course your spouse has a hermeneutic too. He or she will interpret your response. They can assume the best about you, extending patience, or they can be suspicious, mining the worst possible meaning from your words. If they opt for the latter, then the cycle continues and your home bristles with hurt feelings and hurtful words.
But the hermeneutic of love shows a more excellent way. Maybe one’s spouse has a valid reason for being late. And perhaps the time spent waiting could be profitably used. It’s easy to occasionally forget a task. Maybe you could gently remind them, or even do it yourself. And who doesn’t get fussy about food now and then? It’s a visceral reaction, not a judgement about the worth of the work you’ve done.
Employing a hermeneutic of love requires surrender. It demands that we give up the eternal struggle to be seen as the most correct, the most mistreated, or the least ridiculous. It requires the acknowledgement that the only way to “win” at marriage is as teammates rather than opponents. The alternative is to turn our families into “a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended,” as Wendell Berry put it.
The week of Valentine’s is a good opportunity to try out the hermeneutic of love. Commit to gracious and loving interpretations of your spouse for just a few days. I don’t doubt that it will be hard, but take heart. Love never fails.