1 of 11
One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one.
—Three Dog Night
Marriage was designed by God in creation to meet certain fundamental needs of the human being. When those needs are richly met, we flourish. Covenant is the structural principle of marriage, holding weak and fickle human beings to the promises they have made. When the marriage covenant is sturdy, it provides a stable and enduring context for the pursuit of the creational blessings of companionship, sex, and family partnership. Strong skill and virtue development in meeting creation-related needs and fidelity to covenant promises can lead to genuinely joyful marital partnerships. Such relationships reach near the pinnacle of what God created humans to be.
But as we all know, the story does not always go this way. In fact, it seems that it does not often go this way. Marriage becomes not a context of joy but of misery. A husband or wife wakes up each morning with heaviness of heart, saddened by the perception that the marriage is not working, perhaps even terrified by the oppression they experience. They are suffering. In some marriages, suffering is a daily and enduring reality. In almost all marriages, there are episodes or seasons of suffering.
Nobody tells the engaged or newly married couple to expect that marriage will bring suffering. Instead, what I call the "Love Incorporated" marriage technique books usually offer 1001 ways to achieve marital bliss. This leaves couples poorly prepared for the suffering that will almost inevitably come. And so, when suffering hits, the couple is bewildered. If the suffering lasts for very long or feels very intense, they may be tempted to abandon the marriage to relieve their pain. But abandoning a marriage brings its own form of suffering, and creates new suffering. Yet is such abandonment in every case wrong?
Experiences in ministry and personal life persuade me that this question—how to understand and deal with suffering—may be the most significant issue to be considered in thinking about marriage today.
Simone Weil made the striking observation that besides the physical element of suffering, and what she called the psychological element of suffering, there is a third element: the social.1 This is the experience of social degradation, ostracism, abandonment, or exclusion from community. German theologian Dorothee Soelle, reflecting on these themes, notes that most biblical accounts of suffering involve a confluence of all three themes. The psalmist (for example, Psalm 22, 73, 81, 116) laments the coming of illness into his life, bringing great pain. He feels a growing sense of psychological or spiritual suffering. And he feels abandoned by friends and intimates, excluded from the community of which he is a part.2 For Weil, affliction is the best term to use for the combination of these three dimensions of human suffering. Marital suffering certainly takes this particularly potent form at times: extreme spiritual anguish, physical distress, and social isolation.
Because suffering is a subjective and personal experience, it is often the case that the spouses do not experience the exact same level or type of suffering, even though they are enduring the same marriage. Harsh words may hurt one spouse more than the other. Chronic lack of communication, or lack of sexual intimacy, or lack of spiritual partnership, could be experienced as deeply painful by one spouse and not by the other. An act of sexual infidelity or violence may be experienced as creating an unbearable suffering, or it may not, depending on the way individual spouses interpret and react to these particular painful events.
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