Thoughts on Character Choices in Twin Promises, #3

SPOILER ALERT

This post discusses events through Part 2 (chapter 40) of Twin Promises.

I am not a complementarian. My own theology is mystical and philosophical, a long way from the conservative Southern Baptist world that Felix and Donna Anderson inhabit. I’ve spent decades studying religious communities of all kinds, and I’ve taught courses designed to make theological thinking accessible to people of any faith and none. I say this so you, my reader, understand: I wrote Felix and Donna from the outside, with respect, and with a specific purpose.

My purpose was to make John’s spiritual journey cost him something.

Complementarianism is the belief that husband and wife hold distinct, divinely ordered roles: the husband as provider and spiritual head, the wife as the center of the home and family. It is easy to caricature, and contemporary fiction almost always does. The controlling husband, the silenced wife, the children who flee as soon as they’re old enough. That version exists in the world, and I think it deserves the criticism it gets. But it is not the only version, and it is not the one I wanted to write.

Felix Anderson communicates in micro-expressions. He is a man of few words whose every action is precisely calibrated to protect and provide for his family. He doesn’t dominate Donna. He defers to her judgment on virtually everything that happens inside their home, because the complementarian framework, at its best, gives her genuine authority there. Critics of complementarianism might be skeptical but it is not delegated authority and not permission; it is ownership – again, at its best. Donna runs the Anderson household with warmth, competence, and a quiet fieriness that surfaces when her family is threatened. She chose this life. She is not trapped in it – at least not in the way the caricatures suggest.

What makes their marriage work on the page is that both Felix and Donna inhabit their roles comfortably. Their gentleness with each other is the settled tenderness of two people who decided decades ago how they would live and have never had reason to regret the decision. Felix’s hand on Donna’s back. Donna’s glance at her husband before she speaks to a room. These are not the gestures of domination. They’re the gestures of a partnership that happens to be structured in a way most of my readers – and I – would not choose for ourselves.

What matters for the novel is not whether the framework is correct, but whether it is lived well. I needed John’s parents to be genuinely admirable, because John’s slow differentiation from their world is the novel’s most important spiritual arc. If Felix and Donna’s marriage were brittle or oppressive, John’s departure would be easy – a young man escaping a bad situation. That story has been told many times, and it cheapens the real experience of millions of young people who leave conservative religious communities not because those communities failed them but because they outgrew them. John doesn’t reject his parents. He can’t replicate them, either. He wants much of what they have – the steadiness, the affection, the settled certainty that this is how to live – but in a form where roles are negotiated rather than assigned.

That tension – loving what you’re leaving, honoring something even when you don’t want it for yourself – is the quality of the spiritual journey I’ve watched in so many students and friends, and in some ways lived myself. I wanted it in the fabric of Twin Promises. And it only works if the thing being left behind is beautiful enough to make the leaving hurt.