Iffy Relationship
Theme of the Week: Ties that Dissolve
Sunday, October 4, 2009
 1 of 1
Who Said It … David Gudgel
As a high school senior, David shifted vocational goals from architecture to the ministry. First a youth pastor, he's since pastored a church in California (where he was deeply involved in youth soccer) and now in Arizona. Curriculum David wrote is being used to train pastors in Moldova and Russia. Before You Live Together (Regal, 2003) draws on his extensive counseling of couples considering marriage or living together.
Unmarried couples who live together have lower levels of happiness than married couples, both before and during marriage. It's hard to be happy when your relationship is built on the need to prove yourself. Yet when a boyfriend and girlfriend decide to live together before marriage, often they do so to prove their love and compatibility to one another. In this arrangement, commitment is day-to-day and month-to-month. "if" is the watchword: If you make me happy—if we are sexually compatible —if you meet my needs. What He Said … Iffy Relationship
"People who marry 'til death us do part,'" notes Jessie Shirley Bernard in her book, The Future of Marriage, "have quite a different level of commitment, therefore quite a different level of security, thus a quite different level of freedom, and as a result a quite different level of happiness than those who marry 'so long as love doth last.'The love-doth-last folks are always anticipating the moment when they or their mate wake up one morning and find the good feeling that holds them afloat has dissolved beneath them."
Adapted from Before You Live Together (Regal, 2003)
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
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Creator God, publicly uniting a man and woman for life was your plan. Please keep me from short-changing that relationship.
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