My wife, Kelly, and I will celebrate our 27th Wedding Anniversary on August 27th. There are couples who have been married a lot longer than we. Many couples we know have not been married as long but are working hard towards it. Other couples ended their relationships long ago for various reasons. All of us will testify to the fact that marriage relationships are hard work, especially good ones.
It seems that God has a sense of humor. When he instituted the idea of marriage between a husband and wife, he could not have picked a more odd way to bring people together in such close, intimate proximity to one another. Never mind all the issues surrounding the differences between the sexes in how the think, process reality, respond emotionally, communicate, and build relationships. There are also all the various personality differences to deal with too: introvert versus extrovert; saver versus spender; externalizer versus internalizer; task oriented versus people oriented; verbal versus non-verbal; emotive versus non-emotive; and this list goes on.
What was God thinking? Of course, dumb and numb with overwhelming passions and longings, most couples don’t even consider these issues until it is too late. This should be reason enough for seeking good premarital counseling before marriage. Even then, attempting to get two hormonal driven humans to stop and consider reality from an objective point of view is quite the challenge to any premarital counselor. After all, the couple is thinking, “Our love will conquer all.” They are too inexperienced to recognize the fallacy of that Disney storyline.
So, hurrying through the preparations for the “big” day, often the real issues of what makes marriage relationships successful are left for a later date. It is a guarantee that, ready or not, that day will come. And most unprepared couples are left stewing in separate rooms asking themselves, “What now?” It is then that they realize that it will take more than loving feelings and passions to get through the rocky places of their relationship.
It seems to be part of God’s great plan for marriage to use it as a way to transform individuals. He takes two – or perhaps more correctly, we take two – highly selfish individuals and throws them into the confines of a relationship where they must beat the selfishness out of each other. Anyway, that is the way it seems to happen. Then, just about the time that they think they are unselfish and more loving, along comes someone who is the epitome of selfishness – a baby, who then becomes a toddler, who becomes a child, then a pre-teen, and then finally a teen-ager. Each stage of growth only seems to be intended to increase the self-focused nature of the child to scrape any last remaining scraps of selfishness out of the parent.
White House, Washington D.C., Spring 2010 ©Weatherstone/Ron Almberg, Jr. (2010)
Perhaps this is one of the only ways God realizes that our sinful and selfish natures can adequately be dealt with – in the context of intimate relationships. It is not the stranger or mere acquaintance that drives me nuts. It’s my family. How many children have declared, “I’m not a part of this weird family!”? Or, wished that they had been born of different parentage? Alas, it is too true – you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.
So it is also in the marriage relationship – the most intimate of all human relationships. The very one that we often are passionate about and with – yes, that very same one – becomes the very one that drives us mad with frustration and anger. How many couples have looked at each to realize, “We are not on the same ‘page’ are we?” It is not unusual for couples at some point in their relationship to wake up some morning, look across the bed at the person sleeping beside them and think, “I really do not like him/her right now.” All of these are the attempts of our selfish nature to exert itself over us and our relationships. The only way to defeat it is to allow the relationship’s challenges to transform us.
Marriages that transform individuals and couples help them discover that the “we” is more important than the “me.” They realize that the strong emotions that conflict brings does not mark the end of the world or the end of their relationship. They know that time and determination are on their side. They embrace the fact that they cannot change their partner but can only change themselves. They act so that their feelings will follow because their commitments cannot be determined by ever-changing emotions. They choose to see the potential in their partner. They remember what character traits attracted them to their partner in the first place, even though those same traits may today be driving them to distraction. They recognize that their relationship problems cannot be blamed on either party but that they are common problems that each must work on separately and together. They grow comfortable with the fact that every relationship will experience times of drifting and times of intimacy, that there are different seasons for each stage of life, and that how their relationship began will not be how it appears in the end.
In short, not only will the relationship be transformed over time, but each partner within it will also be changed for the better if they are willing to allow their personal transformation to take place. It is when one or both of the partners in a relationship determine to hold on to their selfishness that unclimbable walls and mountains are created. This is often when we hear, “I’m just not happy anymore.” Or, “we are so incompatible with each other.” A relationship that was designed to do away with all selfishness only becomes the cause for greater selfishness in these individuals. This usually results in the most selfish of acts: relational suicide. This brings about the self-destructive acts that become self-fulfilling prophecy that affirms the relationship was doomed from the start.
Want to change your life? Go ahead; get married. It will surely transform you. You certainly won’t remain the same over the years. Further, add children to the mix and it is a sure-fire way to get rid of the last vestiges of selfishness. Are you single and think, “Ha! I don’t have to mess with any of that anyway.” Yes you do. You have family that will do that for you unless you safely remove yourself to some distant land. And even then, you have close friends, unless you become a monk or nun of some order that disallows communication. It seems that God intended all along for our closest relationships to transform us by beating the living selfishness right out of us.
©Weatherstone/Ron Almberg, Jr. (2010)
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