When I first was investigating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints my family had a LOT of concerns. The number one concern that was brought up was the roles and ideas surrounding genders within the Church.
I don't know how many times family members asked me if women were equal to men in the Church. I even had an Uncle tell me that men were told by Church Leaders that they were to rule over their wives because they were superior.
For a while this concerned me for really obvious reasons, but it also left me really confused. What my family was telling me was not fitting in with what Sister Olson and Sister Reyes were teaching me.
When I voiced my concerns about this to the the missionaries and the family that was fellowshipping me into the Church, they told me to do my own research on lds.org and to see what I thought. Nothing I found told me that I the Church I was looking into was what my family was telling me. Everything I was reading and seeing was showing me that this was the direct opposite.
When I was reading Richard Miller's article, "Who is the Boss? Power relationships in Marriage" I was instantly brought back to the experience that I just related. This article states that marriage should be a partnership between man and wife, not a dictatorship. I think that is such an important thing to be practiced in marriage.
A lot of times it is easy to dominate your relationship or to even be passive within your marriage and when that happens, you begin to lose the "partnership" and you venture into "leader and follower" or a dictatorship. And when that happens the happiness in the family can drain out and the Spirit can't be felt as much.
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