Sermon Illustrations on marriage
Background
Cohabitation and the Definitely Maybe Relationship
The tension between autonomy and intimacy is most clearly evidenced in the trend toward cohabitation. Today, between 50 and 70 percent of American couples are cohabiting before or instead of marrying. Living together is now seen as the only mature way to begin an intimate relationship while preserving one’s personal integrity. This is the “definitely maybe” approach, whereby covenant is replaced with “wait and see” and “try before you buy.”
If intimate relationships were mortgages, we might call these sub-prime commitments. They are high-risk projects with little or no collateral security. Unfortunately, just like sub-prime mortgages, these relationships are designed to fail.
What is most startling about the trend of living together outside of marriage is that it is becoming increasingly popular, even though research shows overwhelmingly that cohabiting ultimately undermines relationships. Indeed, the evidence completely contradicts the popular belief that “testing” a relationship first is the best way to secure its future.
As a path to marriage, cohabitation is extremely unreliable, with only one in five cohabiting relationships ending in marriage, and these figures are getting worse over time. Even in those cases where living together does subsequently lead to marriage, cohabiting significantly increases the likelihood of an eventual divorce. Not surprisingly, serial cohabiters show radically higher rates of divorce in their subsequent marriages; women who cohabit multiple times before marrying divorce more than twice as frequently as those who live only with their future husband.
Demanding More and Satisfied Less
Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found a steady progression of young American men and women who demand more and more of love—yet we’re getting less and less out of our marriages.
In 1967, a study of college-age women found that 76 percent of women said they would marry someone if the man had every trait they were looking for, even if they didn’t feel “romantic love” toward them. In more recent research, 91 percent of women said “absolutely not.” That’s a huge shift. People have been pursuing such pairings for several generations now, and I’m asking you to be an astute and honest observer: how’s that working out for us?
Gary Thomas, The Sacred Search: What If It’s Not about Who You Marry, But Why? David C. Cook.
Emotional Nanocrafts in the Space Between Us
In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me, John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiative: to see if it would be possible to send one-gram “nanocraft” from earth to Alpha Centauri at 20% of the speed of light. Why? According to Hawking: “Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn to know…. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important to us to know if we are alone in the dark.”
Are we alone in the dark? Ortberg sees a connection between these nanocraft and what John Gottman calls “bids” for emotional connection: “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch—any single expression that says, ‘I want to feel connected to you.’” These bids for intimacy are profoundly powerfull, says Gottman:
We learned, for example, that husbands headed for divorce disregard their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time, while husbands in stable relationships disregard their wives’ bids just 19 percent of the time. Wives headed for divorce act preoccupied with other activities when their husbands bid for their attention 50 percent of the time, while happily married wives act preoccupied in response to their husbands’ bids just 14 percent of the time.
When we compared how often couples in the two groups extended bids and responded to them, we found another significant difference. During a typical dinner-hour conversation, the happily married people engaged one another as many as one hundred times in ten minutes. Those headed for divorce engaged only sixty-five times in that same period. On the surface the contrast may seem inconsequential, but taken together over a year, the additional moments of connection among the happy couples would be enough to fill a Russian novel.
Our responses to these little emotional nanocrafts can build or squelch relationships. Responsiveness allows those couples who frequently engage to draw on “a reservoir of good feeling” during arguments and maintain humor, interest, and affection—intimacy—during arguments. Even “innocent” inattention drains or fails to refill this reservoir, leaving their relationship unable to deescalate conflict and soothe hurt feelings.
These emotional nanocraft—bids—are not only influential in our marriages, they matter for just about every relationship we have. Gottman also points out how they can combat isolation in work environments. It also highlights the importance of our emotional and communicative life with God. We will be better able to weather the difficulties of life if we are sending and receiving input to God through prayer, church life and service, and the sacraments.
William Rowley, source: John Ortberg, I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me: Getting Real About Getting Close (Tyndale Refresh, 2017) and John Gottman and Joan DeClaire, The Relationship Cure (Harmony, 2022)
Happy Marriages
Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company. These couples tend to know each other intimately—they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams. They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in big ways but in little ways day in and day out.
Life Isn’t Fair
In this excerpt from Gillian Marchenko’s memoir on her battle with depression, Still Life, her husband, a pastor named Sergei describes the reality that both life, and marriage, are often not as would have expected, nor what we would have hoped. And yet, even in the midst of the disappointment, there is a lesson of grace to be learned:
Sergei preached a sermon from the book of Matthew once about the difference between fairness and faithfulness. In Jesus’ parable, a man employed people to work in his fields. Some worked from morning on. Some started at midday. Others came to work with just an hour of the workday left.
When the employer passed out the wages, all were surprised to see that they received the same amount. The full day’s workers objected. But he answered one of them, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last. (Matthew 20:13-16)
Sergei said that a lot of us are concerned with fairness in the world, and we want to mold God into our image of precise fairness. But the God of the Bible, the One who gave his only Son, Jesus, on the cross for our sins, isn’t in the business of fairness.
He does what he wants when he wants, and because of his great love and sacrifice for us, he is always faithful.
“Marriage, for instance, isn’t about fairness. Marriage is not based on an exchange of goods and services. It is not about each spouse pulling his or her own weight.
It is about grace.” I watched my husband stand in front of his flock and speak these words…Grace applies to all marriages, even if both people are mentally healthy…So to love someone is to serve him or her without the expectation of them loving you back. It is not based on the quality or even the reality of their love.
Taken from Still Life by Gillian Marchenko Copyright (c) 2016, pp.121-122 by Gillian Marchenko. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Like an Old Coat
On a little study table in my office, there’s a card with a quote from Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Misérables:
My coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has molded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and I only feel its presence because it keeps me warm. Old coats are old friends.
On the back of the card, written in pen, are four words: You are my coat. It is signed by my wife. That’s intimacy.
Our Aim in Marriage is Destructive
A man or woman’s aim is to find a mate who completes him or her. In this view, marriage is an end in itself, and sexual consummation is a celebration of such completion. Yet the Bible teaches that God created marriage not as an end but as a means to an end. . . . [Marriage] is a living portrait drawn by a Divine Painter who wants the world to know that he loves his people so much that he has sent his Son to die for their sins.
David Platt, Counter Culture: Following Christ in an Anti-Christian Age, Tyndale.
The Primary Problem of Marriage
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage.
It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is … learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
Stanley Hauerwas, Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and ‘Human Sexuality,’” Christian Century, April 19, 1978, 417-422.
The (Seeming) End of the Line
A few years ago Christian friends of ours, after several years of marriage, came to see Esther and me to explain that their relationship had reached an impasse and that they could see no alternative but to end it. After a downward spiral of conflict and loss of trust, they struggled to have a civil conversation with each other and had begun to form romantic attachments with other people.
They were surprised when we said that they had simply reached a normal stage in every marriage, the stage where going on together seems impossible and unthinkable, where you wonder what you saw in each other in the first place. This was a stage that we had reached early on in our own marriage and had repeated several times since. If happiness or emotional resonance had been our main interpretive dials for navigating our relationship, we would have split up many times.
Over the following weeks, we worked through some practical ways in which our friends could turn around the destructive dynamics that had taken hold in their relationship and, in their place, foster trust, intimacy, and commitment to each other. Many years later, their marriage is on a solid footing, and they are thriving with a family. The tragedy is that so many Christian marriages never recover from the same downward spiral.
We in the church have not spoken and ministered effectively into our culture’s prioritization of authenticity above all else in matters of sexuality and relationships. When a marriage ceases to make us happy or the traveling becomes heavy going, we have no other master story to navigate us through the storm.
So we take this as a sign that it simply “wasn’t meant to be”—that we are not among the lucky ones when it comes to marriage. Christian tradition emphasizes courage and perseverance in the face of suffering, but even within the church, seeking happiness and avoiding emotional pain have become our highest virtues.
The Ubiquity of Marriage
The ubiquity of marriage speaks for itself. There has never been a culture or a century that we know of in which marriage was not central to human life…This sounds like a controversial statement, but it is not. As all social history books will tell you, marriage had its origins in “prehistory”—in other words, the human race cannot remember a time in which marriage did not exist. There have been some efforts to make the case that this or that remote culture or small ethnic group has existed without marriage, but none of these efforts are widely regarded as successful.
What is Marriage For?
One day we were out running errands. The radio in my car was playing in the background, and between songs there was an advertisement for an online dating service. The spokesman-doctor-expert guy was doing his spiel on how to find the right match in marriage, and his punch line was “opposites attract, and then attack.”
I reached over and turned off the radio.
Awkward.
Not long after, I started having second thoughts. I was defining love as “deep feelings of affection,” and my “love” was fading. And that scared me to death. I’m an idealist. “Good enough” doesn’t cut it for me. I want my life to be spectacular. But my marriage was fast becoming ordinary. I wasn’t okay with that.
Questions started haunting my thoughts . . . Did we make a mistake? We were so young. Did we jump the gun? Are we really right for each other? Why don’t I feel the way I used to?
What’s wrong with me?
I was sailing without a rudder, blown off course by my doubts and capsized by my fears. In hindsight, my crisis of faith was based on a faulty understanding of marriage.
It wasn’t that my marriage was in trouble. It was more like my unrealistic expectations were in trouble. Ninety percent of the problem was in my head. In short, I had no idea what marriage was for. And I was not alone. I would argue that far too many of us have a decent idea what marriage is but are confused at best, if not clueless, as to what marriage is for.
You Can’t Completely Satisfy Me and that’s Okay
Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After reflecting a bit I said with a smile, “Yeah, I think I know what it is. I think I’ve been realizing deep in my heart that you can’t satisfy me.”
She got a big smile on her face and said, “Yeah, that’s it. And I’ve been realizing the same thing—you can’t satisfy me either.” I imagine anyone overhearing us in the restaurant would have thought we were about to get divorced, but to us that realization was cause for joy and celebration. We had never felt closer and freer in our love.
Christopher West. Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing.
Stories
A 25 & 50 Year Martyrdom
R. Paul Stevens, Professor Emeritus at Regent College, was visiting the Wedding Church in Cana of Galilee with his wife Gail when a hilarious event took place. After introducing himself to the resident Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Joseph, Stevens informed him that he and his wife were there celebrating their 25th anniversary. Joseph shouted: “Mama Mia, twenty five years of martyrdom!” Gail’s parents were also on the trip and shared that they were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Brother Joseph again shouted: “Mama Mia, a fifty-year martyrdom!”
While certainly meant to be a joke, the point is still clear: our call to sacrifice for each other should never be discounted. Father Joseph’s comments reveal a theology of vocation for all Christians, that whether we sacrifice by taking ordination vows or by marriage (or both potentially, as is the case for Protestants), we all are called to sacrifice in whichever covenant we choose.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The CEO & The Service Station Attendant
Not too long ago, there was a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who pulled into a service station to get gas. He went inside to pay, and when he came out, he noticed his wife engaged in a deep discussion with the service station attendant. It turned out that she knew him. In fact, back in high school before she met her eventual husband, she used to date this man.
The CEO got in the car, and the two drove in silence. He was feeling pretty good about himself when he finally spoke: “I bet I know what you were thinking. I bet you were thinking you’re glad you married me, a Fortune 500 CEO, and not him, a service station attendant.
“No, I was thinking if I’d married him, he’d be a Fortune 500 CEO and you’d be a service station attendant.”
Taken from John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998).
C.S. Lewis & Joy Davidson: A Mystical Way of Revealing God
One of the most compelling love stories in our time involves a couple who, in the beginning, lived an ocean apart. He was a scruffy old Oxford bachelor, a Christian apologist and an author of bestselling books for children. She, an American, was much younger and divorced with two sons.
After meeting during her visit to England in 1952, C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidson fed their relationship by mail. Intellectual sparks from the minds of each ignited their appreciation and respect for each other. When Joy moved to England with her boys, the relationship enjoyed the benefits of proximity. And when her departure from England seemed imminent because of a lack of funds and an expiring visitor’s visa, C. S. Lewis made a decision: If Joy would agree, they would be married.
Early in the marriage, Joy’s body revealed a secret it had kept hidden. She had cancer—and it was irreversible. The well-ordered life of C. S. Lewis suffered a meltdown. But in the process, the English man of letters realized how deep his love for Joy really was. Moving on with their lives, the Lewises sought and received the added blessing of the church on their marriage, which had originally been formalized in a register’s office.
They gave Joy the best treatment available. Then he brought her home, committed to her care. It is not surprising that Joy’s body responded. However, her remission was short-lived. Near death, Joy told him, “You have made me happy.” Then, a little while after, “I am at peace with God.” Joy died at 10:15 that evening in 1960. “She smiled,” Lewis later recalled, “but not at me.” If there is a lesson to be gained from this amazing love story, it must be that partners without a spiritual depth of oneness can never compete with the fullness of love that soul mates enjoy. Marriage, when it is healthy, has a mystical way of revealing God; a way of bringing a smiling peace to our restless hearts.
“Divorce? Never, But Murder, Often”
The British actress Sybil Thorndike was married to Sir Lewis Casson, another prolific actor. Their marriage was rather tumultuous at times, and after his death, she was once asked, “Did you ever think of divorce?” “Divorce? Never. But murder often!”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
A Dying Man’s Last Words
A man was dying and he called his wife to his bedside. He affectionately told her he loved her but he also had to confess something to her. “I haven’t been 100% faithful to you in our marriage. I’m so sorry.” Through tears, the wife replied, “I know. That’s why I poisoned you.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The Echo of An Argument
Philip Yancey writes of a friend whose marriage was choked by hostility. One night the friend reached the breaking point: “I hate you!” he screamed at his wife. “I won’t take it any more. I’ve had enough! I won’t go on! I won’t let it happen! No! No! No!”
Several months later, he woke up in the middle of the night to strange sounds coming from the room of his two-year-old son. He walked down the hall and stopped by his son’s door. What he heard sent shivers down his spine and took away his breath. Inside, his son was repeating in soft voice—with precisely the same inflection and intonation he had heard—the argument that had passed between his mother and father: “I hate you! … I won’t take it! … No!”
This is life without forgiveness.
Taken from John Ortberg, Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them, Zondervan, 2003, p.166.
Hearing God’s Voice in an Argument
A friend of mine named T (seriously, that’s his name) says something really weird happened to him once, right after he got married. He heard God say something. Or he thinks he did, anyway. The content of the short message smacked him in the face, he told me. “So my wife and I were having a big argument about something, and I was totally right,” he said.
“You know how most of the time you might be right or you’re both kind of right, or something, but this time—totally seriously—I was absolutely right, and I knew it, and it was incredibly frustrating. I was so angry.
She was absolutely being wrong.” So what happened? “I went in our bedroom and I was seething. And that’s when something popped in my head, and it practically knocked me over. I honestly think it was something God was telling me directly. Totally stopped me in my tracks.” And what was that? “It was, ‘So, do you want me to judge her right now?’” Whoa.
Brent Hansen, The Truth about Us: The Very Good News about How Very Bad We Are, Baker Publishing Group, 2020.
I’ll Wash the Clothes Every Night!
In his celebrated book The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman tells a story about a husband and wife struggling to relate. When the husband asked his wife, “On a scale of zero to ten, how’s your love tank tonight?” She said, “About seven.” When he asked her how he could help “fill it,” she replied, “The greatest thing you could do for me tonight is to do the laundry.” He told Gary, “Love and laundry? I don’t get it.”
Gary replied, “Perhaps you don’t understand your wife’s love language. What’s your primary love language?”
The husband replied, “Touch, and especially the sexual part of the marriage.”
“Listen to me carefully,” said Gary, “the love you feel when your wife expresses love by physical touch is the same love your wife feels when you do the laundry.”
“Bring on the laundry!” he shouted. “I’ll wash the clothes every night if it makes her feel that good.”
I’m not Your Mother
Their first night home after their honeymoon, Paul set his alarm clock, turned off the lamp, fell onto the pillow, and said to his wife of six days, Rachel, “I’ve got to leave for work at six, so can you have breakfast ready by 5:45?” “Excuse me?” Rachel said. “5:45. I think that should be enough time for me to eat before I have to leave.” “What do you mean ‘have breakfast ready’?” “Well, my mom used to make me breakfast every morning: eggs, sausage, and homemade biscuits. So I figured you would too.” “I’m not your mom.” Paul is somehow still married, and now he’s the one who cooks breakfast on our ski trips, because over the last six years, he’s learned how to eat breakfast without his mother. Who said miracles don’t happen? As the saying goes, expectations are nothing more than premeditated resentments.
Love Does not Insist on Its Own Way
Once, while on vacation, on our way to church, Terri and I got into a disagreement over something. When I felt I was losing, to make my point, I stopped the car and got out. We were on a country road. It was drizzling. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was going to do next. She and our kids looked at me wondering, “What’s he doing out there?” Lacking an alternative, I got back in. We put the kids in the nursery and sat down in the sanctuary. The pastor began to read, ‘Our text this morning is from 1 Corinthains 13, “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in the wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”‘ And just then, I felt Terri’s hand reach over and lay itself gently on my hand. In that moment, whatever had been wrong between us was healed. Her willingness to die to herself, breathed new life into our marriage. This is one of the Bible’s most powerful and profound truths—”Love does not insist on its own way.”
Dave Peterson
No Weaknesses?
One summer I spoke at a church in Pennsylvania, and a young woman came up to me afterward. She and her boyfriend were talking about marriage. She asked my advice, and we discussed her boyfriend’s strengths. I then asked her about his weaknesses. She blushed a bit and answered, “You know, that’s what’s so amazing. I don’t think he has any.” “Really?” “I know.
I can’t believe it either. I guess I just got lucky.” I reminded her of James 3:2, “We all stumble in many ways,” and said to her, “I’m going to trust the truth of Scripture—that we all stumble, including your boyfriend—more than I’ll trust your perception. Since you asked for it, my advice is this: don’t marry this guy until you can tell me how he stumbles, because I guarantee you—even more than that, God’s Word guarantees you—that he does stumble, and you might as well know what you’re signing up for before you marry him.”
Gary Thomas, The Sacred Search: What If It’s Not about Who You Marry, But Why? David C. Cook.
“Now You Can Write Your Book”
Had it not been for a confident wife, Sophia, we might not have listed among the great names of literature the great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Nathaniel, a heartbroken man, went home to tell his wife that he was a failure and had been fired from his job in a customhouse, she surprised him with an exclamation of joy. “Now,” she said triumphantly, “you can write your book!”
“Yes,” replied the man, with sagging confidence, “and what shall we live on while I am writing it?”
To his amazement, she opened a drawer and pulled out a substantial amount of money. “Where on earth did you get that?” he exclaimed.
“I have always known you were a man of genius,” she told him. “I knew that someday you would write a masterpiece. So every week, out of the money you gave me for housekeeping I saved a little bit. So here is enough to last us for one whole year.”
From her trust and confidence came one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Scarlet Letter.
David Jeremiah, The Power of Encouragement (Vision House Publishing, 1994)
The Prize Winner
One day the fair was in town and a father of five children decided it was a good opportunity to give his wife a break. When they arrived, the father, who was quite the shot, knew instantly what game he wanted to play. Arriving at the shooting gallery he quickly won a prize-a stuffed animal.
But which of the five kids should he give it to? After a few moments, he came up with a solution. Who does everything mommy asks? Who is the most obedient to mommy? Who never talks back to mommy?” Each of the five children answered at the same time, not without a sense of resignation, “you deserve the prize daddy.”
Source Unknown
A Promise of Marital Bliss
I challenge those who come to me for marriage counseling this way: “If you do what I tell you to do for an entire month, I can promise you that by the end of the month, you will be in love with your mate. Are you willing to give it a try?”
When couples accept my challenge, the results are invariably successful. My prescription for creating love is simple: Do ten things each day that you would do if you really were in love. I know that if people do loving things, it will not be long before they experience the feelings that are often identified as being in love. Love is not those feelings. Love is what one wills to do to make the other person happy and fulfilled. Often, we don’t realize that what a person does influences what he feels.
Dr. Anthony Campolo, in Homemade, June, 1988
The Promise Made Up for the Faults
In Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth the character Mrs. Antrobus says to her spouse, ‘I didn’t marry you because you were perfect. I married you because you gave me a promise.’ She takes off her ring and looks at it. ‘That promise made up for your faults and the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married, and it was the promise that made the marriage.”
Switching Seats
A businessman moved over slightly as a young man crowded into the airplane seat next to him. As they both fastened their seat belts, the businessman good-naturedly asked whether the young man was traveling on business or pleasure.
“Pleasure,” the young man replied. “I’m on my honeymoon.”
“Your honeymoon?” the businessman asked, mystified. “Where’s your wife?”
“Oh, she’s a few rows back. The plane was full, so we couldn’t get seats together.”
The plane hadn’t started rolling yet, so the businessman said, “I’d be happy to change seats with her so that the two of you can be together.”
“That’s OK,” the young man replied. “I’ve been talking to her all week.”
Timothy & Jessica
When my friend Wayne and his wife, Diane, were expecting their first child, they started praying for their baby. They believed prayer was their primary parental responsibility, so why wait till their baby was born? Every evening, Wayne would lay hands on Diane’s stomach and pray the promises in Scripture that they had circled for their baby. During the early stages of pregnancy, they came across a book that said it was never too early to start praying for their baby’s future spouse.
At first it seemed odd praying for a spouse before they even knew the gender of their baby, but they prayed for their baby and their baby’s spouse day after day until their due date. Wayne and Diane decided to wait until birth to discover their baby’s gender, but they prayed that God would reveal what the baby’s name should be. In October 1983, the Lord gave them a girl’s name. It was spelled Jessica. Then in December, the Lord gave them a boy’s name, and they started praying for Timothy.
They weren’t sure why God had given them two different names, but they prayed circles around both Jessica and Timothy until Diane gave birth. On May 5, 1984, God answered their prayers, and the answer was spelled Timothy. Wayne and Diane continued to circle their son in prayer, but they also kept praying for the girl that he would one day marry. Twenty-two years and two weeks of accumulated prayers culminated on May 19, 2006 — the day Timothy’s bride walked down the aisle. Her name? Jessica. Here’s the rest of the story.
Their future daughter-in-law was born on October 19, 1983, the same month that God gave them the name Jessica.
A thousand miles away, Wayne and Diane were praying for her by name. They thought Jessica would be their daughter, not their daughter-in-law, but God always has a surprise up His sovereign sleeve. For Wayne and Diane, Jericho has two spellings — Timothy and Jessica — but the same last name. In case you’re wondering, Timothy was allowed to date girls who weren’t named Jessica! Wayne and Diane didn’t even tell Timothy that God had given them the name of his future spouse before he was born until after he was engaged.
What Attracts us to Our Spouse Sometimes Also Can Drive Us Nuts
My husband says my ability to talk is what first attracted him to me. He loved how I could work a room, making the shy ones feel included. I could converse with the college president and yuck it up with the grocery store bag boy all in the same afternoon. Yep. My college sweetheart loved how I could talk. So this rather shy guy bought a ring, slipped it on my finger, grabbed my hand, and off we proceeded down the church aisle and into marital bliss.
My proficiency at all things linguistic hadn’t bothered him before. In fact, he had felt it was an asset. I talked and talked. He smiled and listened. And it really didn’t seem to bother him. Then, about three days into our honeymoon, he had this thought: “When is she ever gonna shut up?”
In fact, if I make it to heaven before he does, he’s decided just what should go on my tombstone: A period. Ask him why, and he’ll declare, “Well, she’ll finally be done yacking!” (He insists my language has no periods — just commas, colons, and semicolons — because there’s always more to come!)
What is Marriage For?
One day we were out running errands. The radio in my car was playing in the background, and between songs there was an advertisement for an online dating service. The spokesman-doctor-expert guy was doing his spiel on how to find the right match in marriage, and his punch line was “opposites attract, and then attack.”
I reached over and turned off the radio.
Awkward.
Not long after, I started having second thoughts. I was defining love as “deep feelings of affection,” and my “love” was fading. And that scared me to death. I’m an idealist. “Good enough” doesn’t cut it for me. I want my life to be spectacular. But my marriage was fast becoming ordinary. I wasn’t okay with that.
Questions started haunting my thoughts . . . Did we make a mistake? We were so young. Did we jump the gun? Are we really right for each other? Why don’t I feel the way I used to?
What’s wrong with me?
I was sailing without a rudder, blown off course by my doubts and capsized by my fears. In hindsight, my crisis of faith was based on a faulty understanding of marriage.
It wasn’t that my marriage was in trouble. It was more like my unrealistic expectations were in trouble. Ninety percent of the problem was in my head. In short, I had no idea what marriage was for. And I was not alone. I would argue that far too many of us have a decent idea what marriage is but are confused at best, if not clueless, as to what marriage is for.
You Can’t Completely Satisfy Me and that’s Okay
Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After reflecting a bit I said with a smile, “Yeah, I think I know what it is. I think I’ve been realizing deep in my heart that you can’t satisfy me.”
She got a big smile on her face and said, “Yeah, that’s it. And I’ve been realizing the same thing—you can’t satisfy me either.” I imagine anyone overhearing us in the restaurant would have thought we were about to get divorced, but to us that realization was cause for joy and celebration. We had never felt closer and freer in our love.
Christopher West. Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing.
Was I Supposed to Agonize Over Commitment?
Too many young guys are waiting for writing in the sky before they make a relational commitment. It doesn’t have to be that complicated. My grandpa DeYoung met my grandma on his paper route. Then they worked at the bowling alley together and started hanging out at the soda fountain. Eventually my grandpa proposed and they got married in 1948. When I asked him if he agonized over the decision to get married, he paused for a moment and said, “Uh … no. Was I supposed to?”
Studies
Cohabitation and the Definitely Maybe Relationship
The tension between autonomy and intimacy is most clearly evidenced in the trend toward cohabitation. Today, between 50 and 70 percent of American couples are cohabiting before or instead of marrying. Living together is now seen as the only mature way to begin an intimate relationship while preserving one’s personal integrity. This is the “definitely maybe” approach, whereby covenant is replaced with “wait and see” and “try before you buy.”
If intimate relationships were mortgages, we might call these sub-prime commitments. They are high-risk projects with little or no collateral security. Unfortunately, just like sub-prime mortgages, these relationships are designed to fail.
What is most startling about the trend of living together outside of marriage is that it is becoming increasingly popular, even though research shows overwhelmingly that cohabiting ultimately undermines relationships. Indeed, the evidence completely contradicts the popular belief that “testing” a relationship first is the best way to secure its future.
As a path to marriage, cohabitation is extremely unreliable, with only one in five cohabiting relationships ending in marriage, and these figures are getting worse over time. Even in those cases where living together does subsequently lead to marriage, cohabiting significantly increases the likelihood of an eventual divorce. Not surprisingly, serial cohabiters show radically higher rates of divorce in their subsequent marriages; women who cohabit multiple times before marrying divorce more than twice as frequently as those who live only with their future husband.
Demanding More and Satisfied Less
Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found a steady progression of young American men and women who demand more and more of love—yet we’re getting less and less out of our marriages.
In 1967, a study of college-age women found that 76 percent of women said they would marry someone if the man had every trait they were looking for, even if they didn’t feel “romantic love” toward them. In more recent research, 91 percent of women said “absolutely not.” That’s a huge shift. People have been pursuing such pairings for several generations now, and I’m asking you to be an astute and honest observer: how’s that working out for us?
Gary Thomas, The Sacred Search: What If It’s Not about Who You Marry, But Why? David C. Cook.
Emotional Nanocrafts in the Space Between Us
In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me, John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiative: to see if it would be possible to send one-gram “nanocraft” from earth to Alpha Centauri at 20% of the speed of light. Why? According to Hawking: “Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn to know…. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important to us to know if we are alone in the dark.”
Are we alone in the dark? Ortberg sees a connection between these nanocraft and what John Gottman calls “bids” for emotional connection: “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch—any single expression that says, ‘I want to feel connected to you.’” These bids for intimacy are profoundly powerfull, says Gottman:
We learned, for example, that husbands headed for divorce disregard their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time, while husbands in stable relationships disregard their wives’ bids just 19 percent of the time. Wives headed for divorce act preoccupied with other activities when their husbands bid for their attention 50 percent of the time, while happily married wives act preoccupied in response to their husbands’ bids just 14 percent of the time.
When we compared how often couples in the two groups extended bids and responded to them, we found another significant difference. During a typical dinner-hour conversation, the happily married people engaged one another as many as one hundred times in ten minutes. Those headed for divorce engaged only sixty-five times in that same period. On the surface the contrast may seem inconsequential, but taken together over a year, the additional moments of connection among the happy couples would be enough to fill a Russian novel.
Our responses to these little emotional nanocrafts can build or squelch relationships. Responsiveness allows those couples who frequently engage to draw on “a reservoir of good feeling” during arguments and maintain humor, interest, and affection—intimacy—during arguments. Even “innocent” inattention drains or fails to refill this reservoir, leaving their relationship unable to deescalate conflict and soothe hurt feelings.
These emotional nanocraft—bids—are not only influential in our marriages, they matter for just about every relationship we have. Gottman also points out how they can combat isolation in work environments. It also highlights the importance of our emotional and communicative life with God. We will be better able to weather the difficulties of life if we are sending and receiving input to God through prayer, church life and service, and the sacraments.
William Rowley, source: John Ortberg, I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me: Getting Real About Getting Close (Tyndale Refresh, 2017) and John Gottman and Joan DeClaire, The Relationship Cure (Harmony, 2022)
Finding a Mate
Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, similar attitudes, expectations, values, interests, and those with similar social and communication skills.
Helen Fisher, the New Psychology of Love.
A Promise of Marital Bliss
I challenge those who come to me for marriage counseling this way: “If you do what I tell you to do for an entire month, I can promise you that by the end of the month, you will be in love with your mate. Are you willing to give it a try?”
When couples accept my challenge, the results are invariably successful. My prescription for creating love is simple: Do ten things each day that you would do if you really were in love. I know that if people do loving things, it will not be long before they experience the feelings that are often identified as being in love. Love is not those feelings. Love is what one wills to do to make the other person happy and fulfilled. Often, we don’t realize that what a person does influences what he feels.
Dr. Anthony Campolo, in Homemade, June, 1988
The Ubiquity of Marriage
The ubiquity of marriage speaks for itself. There has never been a culture or a century that we know of in which marriage was not central to human life…This sounds like a controversial statement, but it is not. As all social history books will tell you, marriage had its origins in “prehistory”—in other words, the human race cannot remember a time in which marriage did not exist. There have been some efforts to make the case that this or that remote culture or small ethnic group has existed without marriage, but none of these efforts are widely regarded as successful.
What’s Wrong about the 50% Divorce Statistic
For years we’ve all heard the grim statistic claiming that 50 percent of marriages will end in divorce, but that bleak prognosis doesn’t apply to most couples getting married today or even most of those who married in the last few decades. Th truth about marriage is that divorce is getting less common.
Divorce rates have dropped sharply since peaking in the late 1970s, for a variety of reasons. In many ways, the marital bond is stronger and better than it ever has been…marrying before the age of twenty-five and dropping out of college predicted a whopping 51 percent divorce rate. What happened to couples who delayed marriage until after completing college and after the age of twenty-five? After twenty years of marriage, only 19 percent of them had divorced.
Taken from Tara Parker-Pope, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, Penguin Publishing Group.
Analogies
C.S. Lewis & Joy Davidson: A Mystical Way of Revealing God
One of the most compelling love stories in our time involves a couple who, in the beginning, lived an ocean apart. He was a scruffy old Oxford bachelor, a Christian apologist and an author of bestselling books for children. She, an American, was much younger and divorced with two sons.
After meeting during her visit to England in 1952, C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidson fed their relationship by mail. Intellectual sparks from the minds of each ignited their appreciation and respect for each other. When Joy moved to England with her boys, the relationship enjoyed the benefits of proximity. And when her departure from England seemed imminent because of a lack of funds and an expiring visitor’s visa, C. S. Lewis made a decision: If Joy would agree, they would be married.
Early in the marriage, Joy’s body revealed a secret it had kept hidden. She had cancer—and it was irreversible. The well-ordered life of C. S. Lewis suffered a meltdown. But in the process, the English man of letters realized how deep his love for Joy really was. Moving on with their lives, the Lewises sought and received the added blessing of the church on their marriage, which had originally been formalized in a register’s office.
They gave Joy the best treatment available. Then he brought her home, committed to her care. It is not surprising that Joy’s body responded. However, her remission was short-lived. Near death, Joy told him, “You have made me happy.” Then, a little while after, “I am at peace with God.” Joy died at 10:15 that evening in 1960. “She smiled,” Lewis later recalled, “but not at me.” If there is a lesson to be gained from this amazing love story, it must be that partners without a spiritual depth of oneness can never compete with the fullness of love that soul mates enjoy. Marriage, when it is healthy, has a mystical way of revealing God; a way of bringing a smiling peace to our restless hearts.
The Poisoner and the Pharmacist
A nice, calm and respectable lady went into the pharmacy, walked right up to the pharmacist, looked straight into his eyes, and said, “I would like to buy some cyanide.” The pharmacist asked, “Why in the world do you need cyanide? “
The lady replied “I need it to poison my husband.” The pharmacist’s eyes got big and he exclaimed, “Lord have mercy! I can’t give you cyanide to kill your husband! That’s against the law! I’ll lose my license! They’ll throw both of us in jail! All kinds of bad things will happen. Absolutely not! You CANNOT have any cyanide! “
The lady reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of her husband in bed with the pharmacist’s wife. The pharmacist looked at the picture and replied, “Well now, That’s different. You didn’t tell me you had a prescription.”
Source unknown
The Primary Problem of Marriage
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage.
It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is … learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
Stanley Hauerwas, Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and ‘Human Sexuality,’” Christian Century, April 19, 1978, 417-422.
The (Seeming) End of the Line
A few years ago Christian friends of ours, after several years of marriage, came to see Esther and me to explain that their relationship had reached an impasse and that they could see no alternative but to end it. After a downward spiral of conflict and loss of trust, they struggled to have a civil conversation with each other and had begun to form romantic attachments with other people.
They were surprised when we said that they had simply reached a normal stage in every marriage, the stage where going on together seems impossible and unthinkable, where you wonder what you saw in each other in the first place. This was a stage that we had reached early on in our own marriage and had repeated several times since. If happiness or emotional resonance had been our main interpretive dials for navigating our relationship, we would have split up many times.
Over the following weeks, we worked through some practical ways in which our friends could turn around the destructive dynamics that had taken hold in their relationship and, in their place, foster trust, intimacy, and commitment to each other. Many years later, their marriage is on a solid footing, and they are thriving with a family. The tragedy is that so many Christian marriages never recover from the same downward spiral.
We in the church have not spoken and ministered effectively into our culture’s prioritization of authenticity above all else in matters of sexuality and relationships. When a marriage ceases to make us happy or the traveling becomes heavy going, we have no other master story to navigate us through the storm.
So we take this as a sign that it simply “wasn’t meant to be”—that we are not among the lucky ones when it comes to marriage. Christian tradition emphasizes courage and perseverance in the face of suffering, but even within the church, seeking happiness and avoiding emotional pain have become our highest virtues.
The Ten Most Dramatic Sounds in Life
A group of motion-picture engineers classified the following as the ten most dramatic sounds in the movies: a baby’s first cry; the blast of a siren; the thunder of breakers on rocks; the roar of a forest fire; a foghorn; the slow drip of water; the galloping of horses; the sound of a distant train whistle; the howl of a dog; the wedding march. And one of these sounds causes more emotional response and upheaval than any other, has the power to bring forth almost every human emotion: sadness, envy, regret, sorrow, tears, as well as supreme joy. It is the wedding march.
James S. Flora in Pulpit Digest.
Humor
A 25 & 50 Year Martyrdom
R. Paul Stevens, Professor Emeritus at Regent College, was visiting the Wedding Church in Cana of Galilee with his wife Gail when a hilarious event took place. After introducing himself to the resident Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Joseph, Stevens informed him that he and his wife were there celebrating their 25thanniversary. Joseph shouted: “Mama Mia, twenty five years of martyrdom! Gail’s parents were also on the trip and shared that they were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Brother Joseph again shouted: “Mama Mia, a fifty-year martyrdom!”
While certainly meant to be a joke, the point is still clear: our call to sacrifice for each other should never be discounted. Father Joseph’s comments reveal a theology of vocation for all Christians, that whether we sacrifice by taking ordination vows or by marriage (or both potentially, as is the case for Protestants), we all are called to sacrifice in whichever covenant we choose.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The CEO & The Service Station Attendant
Not too long ago, there was a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who pulled into a service station to get gas. He went inside to pay, and when he came out, he noticed his wife engaged in a deep discussion with the service station attendant. It turned out that she knew him. In fact, back in high school before she met her eventual husband, she used to date this man.
The CEO got in the car, and the two drove in silence. He was feeling pretty good about himself when he finally spoke: “I bet I know what you were thinking. I bet you were thinking you’re glad you married me, a Fortune 500 CEO, and not him, a service station attendant.
“No, I was thinking if I’d married him, he’d be a Fortune 500 CEO and you’d be a service station attendant.”
Taken from John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998).
“Divorce? Never, But Murder, Often”
The British actress Sybil Thorndike was married to Sir Lewis Casson, another prolific actor. Their marriage was rather tumultuous at times, and after his death, she was once asked, “Did you ever think of divorce?” “Divorce? Never. But murder often!”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
A Dying Man’s Last Words
A man was dying and he called his wife to his bedside. He affectionately told her he loved her but he also had to confess something to her. “I haven’t been 100% faithful to you in our marriage. I’m so sorry.” Through tears, the wife replied, “I know. That’s why I poisoned you.”
Stuart Strachan Jr.
The Prize Winner
One day the fair was in town and a father of five children decided it was a good opportunity to give his wife a break. When they arrived, the father, who was quite the shot, knew instantly what game he wanted to play. Arriving at the shooting gallery he quickly won a prize-a stuffed animal.
But which of the five kids should he give it to? After a few moments, he came up with a solution. Who does everything mommy asks? Who is the most obedient to mommy? Who never talks back to mommy?” Each of the five children answered at the same time, not without a sense of resignation, “you deserve the prize daddy.”
Source Unknown
Switching Seats
A businessman moved over slightly as a young man crowded into the airplane seat next to him. As they both fastened their seat belts, the businessman good-naturedly asked whether the young man was traveling on business or pleasure.
“Pleasure,” the young man replied. “I’m on my honeymoon.”
“Your honeymoon?” the businessman asked, mystified. “Where’s your wife?”
“Oh, she’s a few rows back. The plane was full, so we couldn’t get seats together.”
The plane hadn’t started rolling yet, so the businessman said, “I’d be happy to change seats with her so that the two of you can be together.”
“That’s OK,” the young man replied. “I’ve been talking to her all week.”
What Attracts us to Our Spouse Sometimes Also Can Drive Us Nuts
My husband says my ability to talk is what first attracted him to me. He loved how I could work a room, making the shy ones feel included. I could converse with the college president and yuck it up with the grocery store bag boy all in the same afternoon. Yep. My college sweetheart loved how I could talk. So this rather shy guy bought a ring, slipped it on my finger, grabbed my hand, and off we proceeded down the church aisle and into marital bliss.
My proficiency at all things linguistic hadn’t bothered him before. In fact, he had felt it was an asset. I talked and talked. He smiled and listened. And it really didn’t seem to bother him. Then, about three days into our honeymoon, he had this thought: “When is she ever gonna shut up?”
In fact, if I make it to heaven before he does, he’s decided just what should go on my tombstone: A period. Ask him why, and he’ll declare, “Well, she’ll finally be done yacking!” (He insists my language has no periods — just commas, colons, and semicolons — because there’s always more to come!)