Following our tenth anniversary last week, a commenter named Rachel asked me if there was anything in particular I would pass on to young people, anything I wish I’d known before marriage. Well, I’m still tremendously young myself, and I know that ten years is only a beginning compared to many godly, long marriages, but if there were one thing I would pass on at this point in my life it would be this:
There will come a time in your marriage, maybe as early as your honeymoon, more likely a few years down the road, when you will look into the eyes of your spouse and see a stranger, when you will wonder in horror and despair what happened to the person you thought you were marrying back when you walked down that aisle, all shimmering with satin and hope. Maybe the sensitive, loving man forgets to say I love you and cold, sullen days turn to cold, sullen years over a job he hates, or maybe he loves his job and would rather work endless hours than come home to you and the babies you’ve struggled with all day. Maybe the godly spiritual leader turns apathetic and doesn’t feel like praying, or the romantic gentleman stops opening your door and gets disgusted that you didn’t make sure he had clean dress socks. The noble Prince Charming with eyes only for you winds up addicted to porn, or the cheerful, fun, kid-lover becomes a seething ball of rage over your children’s foibles and punches a hole in your dining room wall.
This cuts both ways, of course. Your husband will look into the eyes of a stranger, too. Maybe his biggest fan becomes his biggest critic, or the doe-eyed darling so eager to submit feels the need to argue over every decision and calls him names and slams doors, or the cute little passion flower turns out to be as hot in bed as a dead fish. Maybe the stylish girl with the tight body and strappy sandals gains fifty pounds from childbearing and develops an affinity for baggy sweats, or the spunky sweetheart with the balmy smile succumbs to weariness and a furrowed brow.
Nobody thinks it will happen to them, when they are young and in love, when life is fresh and bright with promise, when they’ve found the one person in all the earth who is perfect for them. And how can they know, really? When we’re courting, excited and hopeful, it’s like planting a garden in the cool sunshine of springtime, and it’s hard to predict what it will be like when the weeds grow under an oppressive summer sun. We don’t know ourselves truly how we’ll be when the babies start coming and the job gets frantic, when the bills are high and the bank account low, when there’s yard work, and vacuuming, and morning sickness. And when we see that stranger sitting across from us, we’re shocked. We feel gypped. It was bait and switch. This wasn’t what we’d bargained for.
Some might say this sort of thing can be avoided by careful courtship and I’ll concede that it may be possible to some extent to avoid the worst of it. But the danger here is that when the stranger shows up, it’s tempting to think, “Well, I didn’t court carefully enough. I’ll just divorce this person who is so clearly wrong for me, and find someone better by paying a little more attention this time.” The problem there is two-fold. Number one, God hates divorce (Malachi 2:6). And number two, you probably won’t do much better next time because there’s a little bit of the stranger in all of us, and we never, ever marry the person we think we’re marrying.
The flip side of this coin can be even more devastating. The only thing harder than being married to a stranger is finding out that YOU are also a stranger, a disappointment, that the person you thought loved you more than anyone in the universe wishes you were different. The temptation here is to become bitterly defensive, indignant at not being loved like you’d expected, wounded that the one who sees your soul naked also sees the warts. There’s the desire to wrap yourself in steel, to hide from the one who does not find you worthy and to punish him for his unfair expectations.
Dismal. This is how a marriage fails.
But here is how a marriage succeeds: Both husband and wife commit to obeying the Bible and loving the stranger even when it’s hard, the wife to respecting even a man who yells and gets disgusted, the husband to loving without bitterness even a wife who has a recurring “headache” and never smiles. And they both commit to the self-sacrifice of being willing to change. They may be strangers today, but they can become beloved friends tomorrow if they are willing to give up their own preferences and become the person their spouse longs for them to be, to trade their indignation at having their warts seen for a willingness to cut them out. When the wife commits to submission even when it comes to trading in her sweat pants and trusting the Lord with her husband’s “unwise” decision, and the husband commits to Christ-like crucifixion of self even when it means leaving work in time for dinner and picking up a new package of socks.
If they will do this, loving and changing through the hard years, two strangers may wake up to find that they have the marriage of their dreams and that they are far more in love than they ever were when they were courting.
Note: we need to love the stranger that is our husband and be willing to change for him whether or not he ever reciprocates. We do what’s right to please the Lord, not because we want to manipulate someone else to do what’s right towards us. Sometimes, it can take years of one spouse doing the right thing before the other comes around, and sometimes the other spouse never comes around. But the Lord never forsakes those who are trusting in Him.
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