It’s a great visual image often used in sermons and pastoral counseling: If you want to dance the tango, you need two able dancers working together.
This is true when applied to spouses working together in love, but there is a problem with this illustration. Most often, we apply this not to cooperation, but to who is responsible for marriage problems. Essentially, if there is a problem in a relationship, both people are a part of the problem.
Joy Clark
When there is a problem in a healthy marriage, you likely realize how you played at least some part in the situation. Of course, there always is room for improvement. Maturity is admitting your part in a problem. Drawing on personal experience, a well-meaning minister might easily be unaware of the harm this illustration can cause to those not in a healthy marriage.
Advice that works in a marriage between partners who want the best for their spouse can be extremely harmful to those in abusive marriages. In these unhealthy marriages, one partner has good intentions toward their partner and plays the role of giver. The other “partner,” however, intends only to take from the relationship, and possibly even to harm.
These abusers will keep this hidden from outsiders and often from their spouses. They may even believe their own delusions. They do not take responsibility for problems and will not accept the blame for their mistakes or ill will. They take the good and give little in return except blame and increasing demands.
The danger is that with skillful manipulation and much repetition, their spouse may not even be aware of the imbalance. Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing! They will harm their spouse and then turn around and blame the victim for the problem.
For example, “I wouldn’t have to yell at you all the time if you would just keep the house straight.” So, instead of seeing verbal abuse, the accused spouse accepts his or her inadequacy as the problem and vows to try harder.
So when you say it takes “two to tango,” what does the abused man or woman hear? This message is: “You are at least equally to blame for any problems in your marriage, so you must try harder,” an echo of what an abusive spouse says.
Both the pastor and the abusive spouse seem to say the abused partner is the problem and must do more. Abused spouses already over-function in the relationship, taking more than their share of the blame for problems for which they usually have no fault.
“It does take two to tango, but it only takes one partner to ruin the dance.”
How do you illustrate the relationship accurately in terms of the tango? In marriage to an abusive spouse, one partner is trying to dance with dead weight. All the responsibilities and burdens of the unhealthy partner are put onto the other spouse. It does take two to tango, but it only takes one partner to ruin the dance.
In an abusive marriage, the giver in the relationship is like a dancer who tells their full-grown partner to just stand on their feet while they try to dance for both of them. Ouch! Every time you tell an abused partner it takes two to tango, you are encouraging them to do more work while their partner continues the “dance” as dead weight. The result of that dance would not be pretty or safe. And neither is that approach to a marriage with any kind of selfishness or toxicity.
In recent years, I have heard more pastors adding in notes about abuse to their sermons, such as, “This does not apply if you are in an abusive marriage.” It may help some, but think about this: One of the top reasons people stay in an abusive relationship is because they do not see the abuse.
One online survey found more than a third of young women said they had been in an abusive relationship, but when those same women presented with specific abusive behaviors, almost twice that number reported experiencing them in their relationships. People do not see the abuse when they are slowly conditioned to accept it. We must consider these unaware victims when we are preaching or counseling.
Maybe you do not seem to have any victims of abuse in your church. The Institute for Family Studies found more than one in five highly religious couples report abuse in their marriage. These statistics are the same for those inside or outside the church.
As hard as it is to imagine, the odds are extremely high that more than one person who sits in your pews or listens online is, in fact, currently living with abuse. Not only that, but the reach of parents and grandparents offering advice to younger generations of newlyweds will extend far beyond the walls of your church.
It is essential to consider what messages you (or your church members) are passing on to this vulnerable population. Pastors and church leaders do not intend to tell victims they are responsible for the abuse in a relationship. Hopefully, we all know the victim is never to blame. But as they sit in our churches, do they hear in sermons and lessons that they alone must carry the responsibility for their marriage problems? In truth, they have no real power to change the dynamics.
A dance or a marriage takes two willing partners who will both give. While some learn the dance of marriage more slowly than others, remember those we assume are just clumsy may be refusing to dance despite a loving partner’s best efforts.
Be careful in your words. Church, let’s avoid unintentional victim-blaming and bear one another’s burdens as we support these precious members of the body of Christ.
Joy Clark is a Baptist minister and guest preacher in central Texas committed to trauma-informed preaching and the ways pastoral language shapes those impacted by unhealthy marriages. She holds a master of divinity from George W. Truett Theological Seminary and is trained as an abuse advocate. She and her husband enjoy road trips and a good mystery.