Nowadays it’s common to see marriages where a woman looks actually more qualified than the husband. We see cases where the woman maintains the family, and the husband just stays at home, incapable of even getting a job. We also see cases of women who are more emotionally developed, having to take care of husbands who are little more than grown-up children, and even cases of women that are better at controlling their senses than their husbands.
Of course, people are free to live in the way they like, but we can see that frequently such unions are usually not very happy. The women are usually not happy to have an unreliable husband that can’t properly take care of the family, and the men are usually also not happy with being relegated to a secondary role. It’s also questionable if such a conflictive situation is favorable for their spiritual advancement.
Apart from the usual astrological matching and other considerations related to the compatibility between the spouses, the Vedas advise marriage between equals. A Brahmana should marry a Brahmini, a Ksatriya a Ksatrini, and so on. This assures the most harmonious situation, where the husband and wife have a similar worldview, share a similar culture, and have similar goals in life.
The Vedas also explain the natural psychological mechanism in which a woman should have a husband that she perceives as more qualified than herself, and in this way be able to trust and follow him. In this way, a woman can learn to better deal with her desires and her emotional nature and progress in her spiritual path. Just like a spiritual master should be higher than the disciple in qualification, in an ideal marriage the husband should be more qualified than the wife, and thus be able to properly guide her and the children.
Marriages between unequal spouses are called anuloma and pratiloma. Anuloma happens when the wife has a lower varna than the husband, like a Brahmana marrying a Ksatrini or a Vaishya woman. This type of marriage is not considered very harmonious, because their culture and life goals will be different. We can imagine a Ksatrini complaining about her Brahmana husband’s lack of political ambition, for example. However, anuloma marriages are still considered acceptable, because there is the chance that a woman may gradually progress to a higher level due to the association of the husband. A Ksatrini may then gradually become a Brahmini, for example. This type of marriage also doesn’t violate the general psychology of a wife seeing the husband as more qualified than herself.
The second type, pratiloma, happens when the husband comes from a lower varna than the wife. There are a few cases, like in the marriage of Yayati and Devayani, but these are exceptions. Usually, this type of marriage is not accepted in Vedic culture. It’s so rare that even Pariksit Maharaja was surprised, and inquired how this marriage between Yayati, a Ksatriya, and Devayani, a Brahmini, could have happened.
What is the problem with it? The point is that men are not psychologically fit to follow a woman. There is a fundamental psychological difference that is described in Vedic literature. Women can grow by agreeing to follow a qualified man, this is a natural position that is profitable for them. A woman can flourish when she gets a qualified husband and agrees to follow him. Men, however, operate in a different way. Men can grow by accepting responsibility and performing their duties. To flourish, they need a wife that poses as lower than them and reinforces their ego. That’s usually the secret of women who are successful in marriage.
When the woman poses as a superior, it creates a mother-and-child relationship, that stimulates the men to act in an immature way. A man put into such a subordinated position will regrade into an infantilized and immature level, which will not be positive for him, nor for the wife. Part of the marriage problems we have nowadays are caused by men not being qualified, but a great deal is caused by the women themselves, who don’t understand this basic psychological mechanism. Frequently women have to go through one or more failed marriages to be able to understand this.
Men can (and should) relate to senior ladies, and learn to treat them with respect, but it doesn’t work very well when the senior is his own wife. A senior wife doesn’t help a man to grow, on the opposite, it makes him fall, becoming insecure and losing control over his mind and senses. This is also not good for the woman, who is forced to take charge of the family, instead of concentrating on her natural role as a mother. Without a proper role model from the side of the husband, it’s also hard for the woman to grow.
The only way to avoid such a situation in an unequal marriage is for the woman to suppress her higher qualifications and put herself in a lower position than the husband. If she is able to do that, then the husband can still flourish and learn to properly perform his duties, but this is still bad for the wife, who will be forced to permanently suppress herself and act at a lower level than she otherwise could. We can see that in the marriage of Yayati and Devayani, Devayani started acting like a Ksatrini, abandoning her higher qualification as a Brahmini. This also brought other problems, like the natural attraction between Yayatri and Śarmiṣṭhā, who was a Ksatrini and thus more in sync with him, which resulted in further problems.
In conclusion, we see that although anuloma is not very harmonious, it is still acceptable, because it can lead the woman to grow in qualification, while papilloma is condemned because causes degradation, forcing the woman to act in a lower level, or forcing the husband to live in an infantilized subordinate position.
Some romanticize such situations, suggesting that marrying a woman of higher qualification makes the men grow to a similar level, but unfortunately, this rarely happens. The women frequently just see themselves in a situation where they see the husband as unreliable and are frequently forced to work outside and fill up the gaps left by the husband. This leads to resentment, fights, and other problems, creating a situation that is also not healthy for the children.
Of course, very few things are ideal nowadays, and frequently women are forced to marry unqualified men due to the lack of a better choice, but this is something one can take into consideration.
There is however something even worse than papilloma, which doesn’t even have a name, since apparently, it didn’t exist in other eras. This is described only in the prophecies about life in Kali-yuga. That is when a woman, although less qualified than the husband, acts in an arrogant way, posing herself as superior. This is unfortunately common nowadays since there is a whole culture that stimulates this kind of behavior. What it causes is that it simply destroys the marriage, with the husband being gradually destroyed in his psyche, becoming like a small boy who is constantly hiding from the “mother”, which in turn makes the woman even angrier and unhappier. If you want to understand better this mechanism, a good reading is the book “The Surrendered Wife” by Laura Doyle. That’s a book written by a woman who learned all these lessons the hard way, after almost destroying her marriage.
Just like a man needs to learn how to deal with a woman if he wants to be successful in his marriage, women similarly need to learn how to deal with a man if they desire to find happiness in married life.
These different points apply to general material qualifications and roles performed by the husband and wife in the relationship. There is an extra dimension to this question which is spiritual advancement. Here I’m not speaking about external aspects of spiritual practice, but about true spiritual advancement, the ability to always remember Krsna and never forget Him. Such true spiritual advancement is internal and it doesn’t interfere with the roles of wife and husband. A man can be a pure devotee, but at the same time continue to perform his family duties, acting as an affectionate husband and father, and similarly, a lady can be a pure devotee and still act as an affectionate wife. When spiritual advancement comes together with maturity, the two things don’t conflict with each other. We read about the example of the wives of the Brahmanas, for example, who being spiritually more advanced than their husbands went to bring the food to Krsna after the husbands refused to donate it. We can see that in this case, the example of the wives helped to change the consciousness of the husbands, but didn’t prevent them to continue living harmoniously as couples. Living with a pure devotee is always beneficial for the partner, regardless of whether the pure devotee is the husband or the wife.