We're not Protestants. There certainly is a "Traditionalist" stream that thinks we should be quiverfull with no work outside the home for the wife, but this is not at all obligatory or truly traditional. We all have our own vocations and don't need to submit to the control of others, though we do submit to one another in love and are willing to lay down our lives for each other.
We're not feminists. There certainly is a "Progressive" stream that thinks that there should be no distinction between men and women in any aspect of life, and that the Pauline injunctions for the men to love self-sacrificially and women to submit should be indifferently applied to both sexes, that Paul should have just come out and said, "Everybody love and submit to each other, women and men are ultimately interchangeable", though they don't follow the thinking through and say that God messed up in making two sexes, He should have just made one.
There is this conception you seem to hold that being on the receiving end of submission means "controlling" the submitting party.
You said "The thing is, if, at the end of the line, you have, at some point, an obligation for the woman to obey the man, you need a means of control. That is simply not healthy. You need the marriage to be about communication, cooperation, and kindness, not having a locus of control at the end of the line, because control is an extremely unhealthy relationship dynamic."
You set up a dichotomy here that we who do believe in Tradition, and do think that there is something distinctive in the Scriptural words that address one specific injunction to men, and a slightly different one, with a different emphasis, to women, do not accept. We think being the head does NOT mean "controlling" a wife any more than our own submission to Christ as the Head means that He "controls" us.
And I think I will look in vain among the fathers to find them talking about marriage being about communication and cooperation as such, or about healthy or unhealthy "relationship dynmics", although submission is cooperation, and generally healthy. Obedience at its root is a positive virtue. Sure, it might be abused, obeying commands to do evil is wrong. But you might as well rail against monastics submitting to elders and doing obedience, because obedience is central to our Faith.
It is the rejection of hierarchy that is rebellion, either in the Church, or in the family, "the little Church". In both, the prescription is love and obedience, with one being more clearly prescribed to the man as something he, generally speaking, has a harder time with, and the other prescribed to the woman as something she generally has a harder time with. Christ, as the Head and Groom of the Church, has no problem with love, but WE, as part of the Church, the bride, definitely have a problem with obedience, as our sin demonstrates. This is mirrored in the home and the Church. Yes, we are all equal before the Lord, but egalitarianism is not part of our Faith, not what we are supposed to be concerned with. We are supposed to leave that to God and focus on seeing everyone else as more important than we are.
We have all come into the Church infected with the mind of the world, which is opposed to the Church. This results in both extreme Traditionalists declaring that all men should have beards, all women ankle-length skirts, all fasting rules should be impeccably carried out, etc, and extreme Liberals saying that we can ignore all injunctions and do,whatever we want as long as we love (something we do poorly or not at all, and so need those injunctions), that the Church should mirror Western civilization. But what we want to do is to acquire the mind of the Church, and we can, at least to a degree, over time, if we submit and lay aside our own political and social prejudices, and ask what has always been taught, and how we need to conform ourselves to that, rather than conform the teachings to our tastes.
