Marriage: Minefields on the Way to Paradise

Once Clyde Kilby of Wheaton College was asked one of those inevitable questions about literature: “Dr. Kilby, I just can’t understand why you spend so much time and attention on these fantasies by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams. What good do they do? They’re about an imaginary world; they don’t tell us how to cope better with this one. Why read them?”

With the longsuffering smile of a teacher speaking to one who had not seen the light, Dr. Kilby replied, “If I went down the street to a magazine rack, I could probably find two hundred articles on how to live better. How to improve my marriage, how to lose weight, how to attract a lover, how to succeed in business, how to banish guilt, how to get rich, how to love myself. People gobble up those articles. But does anyone really change? Another magazine will print the same advice next month, and people will still writhe with the same problems. These books by Tolkien and Lewis and Williams bypass all that good advice. They don’t tell me how to do something; they tell me what to be.”

I have almost (but not quite) come to the same conclusion about advice on marriage. I spent a year studying the first five years of marriage, the period when the divorce rate is highest. I began by interviewing nine couples who revealed to me the struggles of their first five years. Then I read every marriage book I could find, Christian and secular. The advice contained in most of them was compact and well-blended, a convenient pill I could offer to each couple. But the best advice cannot solve a problem without the cooperation of the people whose problem it is.

I remember well the long interviews my wife and I had with the nine couples. Most started at a restaurant with polite chatter about how they met and what attracted them and where their inlaws live. By midnight, however, back in our living room, the conversation had changed. Unresolved conflicts oozed open. Often a session intended to gather helpful information for others turned into a plea for help.

Listening to them, I sometimes questioned the whole notion of marriage. We have placed greater demands on marriage now than in previous generations. Besides satisfying the need for asexual relationship, marriage is now being asked to supply needs for comradeship and partnership as well. Added to this is the weight of ideals our romanticizing culture excites in us. It’s no wonder many marriages cannot bear the strain.

Some marriages seem cursed with a time bomb of impossible expectations that must soon explode. As I encountered these time bombs, both in the couples I interviewed and in written accounts, my first reaction was to lower the ideals. There must be, I thought, some way to disassemble marriage and put back only certain pieces of it—say, sexual release and companionship—without insisting that marriage bear all the pressure of two souls becoming one.

But a strange thing is happening. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, described his spiritual journey as a long, romantic, tempestuous sea voyage. When he finally sighted land, however, he discovered he had ended up exactly where he started—in cozy England. Something similar is occurring among observers of the marriage scene. Counselors who were once offering new visions of open marriage and sexual license are starting to use words like “fidelity” and “commitment.”

As I talked to the nine couples with their varying degrees of conflict, I discovered that the ones whose marriages were in severe trouble were not those who expected the most from marriage but those who expected the least. Those with the highest ideals seemed to have the closest relationships, and after a year’s study I have come to the conclusion that our marriage ideals have been set not too high but too low.

The Bible at first reading seems to say little about marriage, but I found that God does show us what marriage requires and how we are to exercise the principles that build sound marriages. God himself embodies the ideal in three areas that encompass most of the marital conflicts of the nine couples I interviewed.

1. Ego sacrifice. The fundamental human need, says John Powell, is “a true and deep love of self, a genuine and joyful self-acceptance.” But marriage calls us to transcend that fundamental human need. The beloved’s needs and pleasures must take equal if not superior status to our own.

From our toddler years we learn to protect ourselves. A child grabs a toy and clutches it to his chest, yelling “Mine!” As we grow older, if someone criticizes us we want to lash out in revenge, or perhaps we begin to doubt ourselves. Our egos must be protected.

We go through life like so many clenched fists, striving to prove ourselves to one another, striking out when thwarted. As children we learned not to expose our deepest secrets even to a best friend, for they might be broadcast all over school the next day. Marriage, however, calls us to unclench the fist and allow someone to see what lies inside. We must expose our nakedness, physical and emotional, to another person. The secrets are out. Marriage calls for utter transparency and trust in a world where we have learned that these are a sure path to pain.

The ego sacrifice required by marriage does not, of course, entail a forfeiting of ego. I do not lower my self-esteem and think less of myself for the sake of my wife. Rather, I should raise my esteem of her so that in a thousand areas—squeezing toothpaste, picking up socks, buying records, tolerating dripping pantyhose, eating out, selecting TV shows—I sometimes consciously opt for her convenience or pleasure above my own. My will bends as I sublimate my own needs and desires for her sake, or the sake of the relationship.

The absence of this ego sacrifice manifests itself in great power struggles between husband and wife. Each fights for his own territory. Each insists on being “right,” with the result of devaluing the other. One couple I talked with, Brad and Maria Steffan (these names and the names given to the other couples I interviewed are fictitious) periodically fought emotional wars that could last a week. Says Maria, “It’s as if I’ve built a protective shell around myself I can’t let Brad enter. I have always been competitive. I can’t stand the image of the submissive, boot-licking wife. I despise the seductive, baby-doll wife taught in books like The Total Woman. I want my independence, yet I want to lean on Brad. Marriage is so confusing.”

She continues, “We read books on marriage which say the key is the self-sacrificing giving of each partner. But in our relationship, that’s dangerous. It’s like there’s a giant power struggle going on and we’ve both only got so much ammunition. If I take the peace initiative and let Brad through my defenses, he might hurt me. I might lose.”

In contrast, the biblical ideal shows God, the All-powerful, creating human beings almost as parasites who would require attention and a constant giving of himself with little in return. You can see the awesome figure of a sacrificial God in the Old Testament prophets’ description of him as the Wounded Lover. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?… Mine heart recoils within me …” (Hosea 11:8).

The best example of God’s self-sacrifice on behalf of his beloved creation is found in a New Testament passage that gives a profound insight into the Incarnation: “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5–8). God took a risk, exposing himself, becoming vulnerable, to the point of joining the human race to show us how it’s to be done!

One couple I talked to described a horrible two-year period of angry quarrels, temper tantrums, and walkouts. The wife, Beth Pestano, had come from a troubled family. Her father had left and her mother had died. Beth used the first few years of marriage to unleash her pentup anxieties. She would fly into irrational rages over insignificant details. Somehow Peter rode out the violence of those first few years and continued to show her love. Today they have one of the happiest marriages I know of.

I asked him, “Peter, how did you do it? What kept you from cracking in those long months of giving a lot and getting very little in return?” He then told me the story of his conversion, when God had tracked him down after months of angry rebellion.

“The most powerful motivating force in my life,” he concluded, “was the grace of God in loving me and giving himself for me. When I hated coming home to face Beth, I would stop for a moment, think of God’s sacrifice on my behalf, and ask him for strength to duplicate it.”

Marriage, as taught by God’s good example, challenges our lust for power and ego gratification. It requires sacrifice. The well-known prayer of St. Francis could be directed toward this aspect of marriage: “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; not so much to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.”

2. Acceptance. The world teaches us that worth is a quality to be earned. In school you earn a grade, or perhaps a starting position on the varsity team. In business you work your way up to a plush office and a good salary. In the army you earn stripes on the sleeve; those with few stripes take orders and those with many stripes give orders. Everyone understands the system and his own ranking within it.

Against this background, God carves out a unit, the family, where worth is not earned but given, determined by the mere fact of birth. A moronic son has as much worth as a genius—he deserves love simply because he was born into the family. At least that’s the theory of the family. The prodigal son who squanders his father’s riches is welcomed as eagerly as his older brother who followed all the rules. (And the lesson of the older brother is the lesson of one who tries to inject the world’s value system into the family, demanding that behavior determine worth.)

What does this have to do with a couple groping their way through their first few years together? Everything. The principle of assumed worth begins with marriage. If it is not present there, it cannot be passed down to the children. The sense of worth in marriage is set squarely within God’s value system, not the world’s. I should accept my wife totally. I should love her because she is my wife. Nothing is unforgivable. Nothing can sever the love—she can count on that. This is the bedrock ideal on which God built the structure of marriage.

A devout young Christian husband, Mark Parsons, told me how he almost pushed his wife away by jabbing at traits in her that he disliked. “You chit-chat too much; you’re not serious about things that are important to me; you don’t always make sense when you talk.”

Cynthia felt trapped. “When a problem came up,” she recalls, “Mark would want to talk about the causes immediately, just like an instant replay on TV. I couldn’t talk about it—I would lash out, attacking him personally, anything to avoid the issue. He would bring up the comment I made in anger and ask for an explanation. How could I explain my anger without showing more anger? So I would clamp shut and be silent. Then he’d want to talk about why I was so silent. I felt smothered, hounded, attacked, as if I was in a wind tunnel with hurricane-force winds coming from every direction.”

Just in time Mark realized that his pressure on Cynthia would never help her change. She needed to feel accepted and loved before she could make adjustments. He saw this by considering how Christ brings about changes in us. “Naturally Christ wants the church sinless and perfect. But how does he accomplish that? Not by pressuring us and berating us and sternly rebuking us. He is loving and forgiving toward us. He wants our growth, but he refuses to reach in with a magic wand and drive out all imperfections. He allows us the freedom we need to turn to him voluntarily.”

The Christian Gospel offers unearned acceptance, but many Christians seem to demonstrate that quality very poorly in their marriages. Husband and wife become self-righteous judges of each other’s behavior and attitudes. I know of a man who is completely turned off by the church because his Christian wife complains so relentlessly about his smoking habits. Another husband inspires unimaginable guilt in his wife. After the wedding he discovered she had had sexual relations with other men. Refusing to forgive her, he uses the fact as a dagger in arguments.

We forget that though Christianity sets our ideals high, it sets our forgiveness quotient even higher. There is no limit to God’s grace in accepting our failures.

I think of a married couple in their mid-fifties who have endured twenty-five years of difficulty in marriage. They are of opposite temperaments; they moved overseas unprepared for a new culture and suffered tearing family tragedies. Yet their marriage today exudes open, accepting love. Once the wife told me, “I used to think I loved Jack because of certain things about him—his good looks, his winsome personality, his dedication. But it didn’t take long to see through all that. I found out over the years there can be only one reason to make me love him. That reason is because I want to. We’re together, I believe, because God put us together, and I’m going to make it work. I will to love him and accept him regardless.”

Somehow a husband and wife have to learn to communicate love, a love that stretches around any bulges of failure and disappointment. Love and acceptance are not like rubber bands that weaken as they are stretched; they become stronger as they are tested and the partner perceives trust and faithful love.

In the book of Hosea, God showed that his fidelity was so great it could forgive gross adultery. Does God’s love seem weaker for forgiving such behavior? No, it is unfathomably greater. Similarly, active, accepting love within marriage can build unbreakable bonds of trust.

In my interviews, I encountered one beautiful example of this kind of acceptance. John and Claudia Claxton, a couple in their early twenties, were faced with the specter of cancer after just one year of marriage.

Claudia’s body quickly began to deteriorate. Surgeons removed her spleen and some lymph nodes. Even more draining than surgery were the radiation treatments that followed. Claudia was exhausted by the daily regimen. She would go to bed at 10 P.M. and sleep till noon the next day. The radiation damaged good cells as well as killing the diseased cells, so her energy was sapped. Her throat was raw and so swollen she could barely swallow. Areas of her skin turned dark, and the hair at the back of her head began falling out.

I talked with John and Claudia about the inevitable pressures. Claudia experienced waves of self-pity, questioning her worth because she was a constant concern to everyone around her. Yet somehow John managed to communicate an overpowering love. He would come and sit for hours on her hospital bed, holding her hand, touching her face, telling her he loved her. (She ultimately responded to treatment and now seems cured.)

John said the love was not an effort, merely a natural outgrowth of patterns that had been set even before their marriage. “When a couple meet a crisis,” he told me, “it’s a caricature of their relationship and what’s already there. We love each other deeply. We had always insisted on open communication; when something bothered us, we would talk it out. We trusted each other. Therefore when the Hodgkin’s disease came, there were no lingering fears and grudges to undermine our relationship. My love for Claudia would continue regardless of what happened to her body.”

3. Freedom. This third battlefield was the most common one among the couples I interviewed. A newlywed daily discovers something about his spouse he doesn’t like. Our natural human tendency is to want to control the other person, to squeeze him into our mold. We want to seize his freedom.

Here are some areas of skirmish that the nine couples brought up:

• frequency of sex (in most cases the husbands wanted their wives to change by wanting sex more often);

• moodiness;

• sloppy habits of dress and housekeeping;

• a desire to have “old” friends without involving the spouse in the activities;

• physical appearance, especially weight;

• verbal attack of the spouse in public;

• styles of settling conflicts;

• irritating hobbies or avocations;

• a complaining attitude;

• failure to talk things over.

I was amused to read of the adjustments Paul and Nellie Tournier worked through in their first years of marriage. “I’m an optimist and she a pessimist,” Paul Tournier reported in Faith at Work magazine (April, 1972). “She thinks of every difficulty, misfortune, and catastrophe that might happen, and I cannot promise her that such things will not happen. But God is neither optimist nor pessimist. The search for him leads one beyond his own personality and temperament to a path that is neither optimism nor pessimism.

“Little by little I have learned that God speaks to everybody—men and women, adults and children, blacks and whites, the rich and the poor. To discover the will of God, you must listen to him in all men. Of course, I prefer to have God speak directly to me, rather than through my wife, and yet in truly seeking his will I must be persuaded that he speaks as much through her as through me; to her as much as to me.”

Most of the problems about Christianity that puzzle so many people pertain to this issue of human freedom. How can God allow sin? How can he allow unjust rulers? What about pain and suffering? How can God allow people to go to hell? We want God to reach down with a wrench and forcibly fix things.

There is no adequate way to describe the premium God places on human freedom. But the Bible does contain some glimpses of the freedom ideal. One is in the analogy I already spoke about: the faithful, persistent wooing of an adulterous lover in Hosea. God respects freedom so much that through all of human history he has allowed human beings to play the harlot against him.

Another glimmer of God’s respect for freedom is captured in the scene of Jesus weeping as he contemplates the people of Jerusalem who have rejected him. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem …,” he explained. “How often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not” (Matt. 23:37). Reading that, we may forget that the speaker is the all-powerful God. He could have charged into Jerusalem on a stallion of fire, streaking the skies with lightning, causing earthquakes with the resonance of his voice. He could have demanded their allegiance. But Jesus chose not to. He respected human freedom so much that he allowed himself to be rejected.

The final, most compelling glimpse of all comes in the image of the cross. God, eternal and omniscient, could see from the beginning the ultimate sacrifice our redemption would require. The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. He could feel the sharp slap on his cheek and the crusted blood on his back and brow. He could hear the hooting and jeering as the world voted to murder him. And yet, knowing all that, he sacrificed all, spilling his own blood, to allow man the choice of responding freely to the love he offers.

Does it do any good to spiritualize about how marriage is like the Christian life and how true love is God’s love? Does it do any good to enlarge the ideals of love to divine proportions? Only if you believe marriage can be a crucial settlement in God’s Kingdom. It is exalted, not because it is so different from the rest of life, but because it allows us a frontier to practice God’s value system of ego sacrifice, acceptance, and freedom, so that we derive strength to present that system to the rest of the world.

The exalted nature of marriage assures us that it will involve strife and conflict. In marriage we are tiptoeing through a field of land mines on the way to paradise.

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