Clinton and Anna McLemore
1. This chorus, written in the 1960s by Peter R. Scholtes, is also known as “We Are One in the Spirit.” Several performances of it are online.
2. See McLemore, Honest Christianity, 112.
To the Reader
Marriage is the most important human relationship many of us will ever have. It’s also like a garden. To get good results, you have to tend it.
When I first heard people talk about working on their marriages, I didn’t like it. Marriage, it seemed to me, ought to be anything but work. It should be light and breezy. I have come to recognize that great marriages don’t happen by accident. They require effort and commitment.
Good marriages are rich. If heaven can be thought of as eternally desiring what you already have, a rich marriage is like that. Such marriages resemble long engaging conversations and are anything but impoverished. Good marriages are also rewarding rather than punishing. They are satisfying, pleasurable, and worthwhile. And, they are resilient as opposed to brittle. Good marriages endure. Emerging from the tunnel of whatever adversity life brings, the couples in them remain standing. Staying One contains what I believe it takes for a marriage to be rich, rewarding, and resilient.
This book contains twenty exercises and activities that are designed to strengthen your marriage. If you are about to attend a workshop built around Staying One, you will be given the opportunity to complete them during the workshop. If you are not scheduled to attend such a workshop, you can easily do them on your own. The publisher offers a Workbook for Staying One, and I recommend using it to write down and save your responses.
There is a brief topical outline for a workshop based on Staying One at the end of the book. A comprehensive Leader’s Guide is available to workshop leaders from the publisher.
Whether you’re reading this book on your own, with your spouse, or in conjunction with a workshop, I pray that what follows will significantly enrich your marriage.
Chapter 1. The Relationally Dead
You can see them in diners and coffee shops. They rarely look at each other and have little to say, apart from, “Pass the salt.” She stares off into space, while he keeps his nose in the newspaper. Or, both are absorbed in their tablets or phones, perhaps checking e-mail.
Once in a while, one of them grunts, but this has no communicative value, other than to remind the other that a second person is sitting at the table. They may be in their twenties or thirties, but more often they will be middle-aged or even on social security. Whatever decade of life they’re in, and however long they’ve been married, they are parties in a burned out and impoverished union, representatives of the relationally dead.
They are not at all sure how their relationship devolved into the stale and lifeless thing it now is. Neither one, in fact, may have given this much thought. They are mostly aware of how they’re lonely. All that remains is a certain sense of familiarity and a shared history. There is no romance left, and they may remain in the marriage out of religious conviction or for the sake of children. It may be that the desire to avoid the embarrassment and costliness of divorce is too strong to allow them to pursue dissolution, so they remain in their diminished marriage out of habit and inertia. Each has become to the other like an old pair of jeans, easier just to put on, ignoring the rips and tears, than to mend.
One or both may remember, now and then, how they once fell in love and couldn’t wait to be with each other. They would count the days and the hours, impatiently watching the clock. But that was long ago, when they were still living what they now consider to have been immature lives in fantasy rather than the real world. They regard such memories with cynicism, as nothing but the temporary insanity that accompanies infatuation. The relationally dead no longer believe in romance, which they regard as unrealistically juvenile. They have convinced themselves that only fools subscribe to all that. For their part, they see through it.
Unless, of course, one of them meets someone else, perhaps at the office, club, or even church. Now, suddenly, he or she has another chance, a new opportunity for happiness that, until now, seemed unlikely if not impossible. Romance, he or she again decides, is as necessary as breathing, and what used to be the lifeless shell of a man or woman is emotionally resurrected. Alive! This, however, rarely turns out to be the paradise it initially seemed.
Investing in What You Have
When you read some of the statistics contained in this book, you are likely to develop a certain caution if not skepticism about second or third marriages. Remarriages do sometimes work out well, but there is no guarantee that they will, and the odds of bettering your lot through another marriage are below 50 percent.1 Even at the practical level, therefore, it makes sense to invest everything you can in your present one, whether or not it’s your first. And if you’re about to get married, to do the same thing, for the same reason.
But, how might you do this? How would you go about it? What steps should you take to ensure that the marriage you’re in, or are about to enter, will not only survive but thrive? What are the keys, if there are any, to enjoying a fulfilling and lasting conjugal relationship? These are the questions this book will address.
Co-Dependency and Enmeshment
I am going to devote considerable space to how two married people can continue to grow closer, which I take to be highly desirable. Some of my colleagues, however, have called this into question, suggesting that growing ever closer in a marriage is an unhealthy goal, one likely to be embraced only by the weak. In doing this, many of these practitioners have loosely used two terms that, like OCD and bipolar, have entered the culture and become trendy.
The first of the two is co-dependency. It originated with Alcoholics Anonymous and is properly used to describe a relationship in which two people depend on each other to perpetuate mutually dysfunctional behavior. One person might, for example, obtain satisfaction and validation from rescuing a spouse after bouts of heavy intoxication, protecting that spouse from real-world consequences. Instead of leaving him or her on the floor in a drunken stupor, possibly to wake up the next morning with constructive remorse, the enabler helps the spouse into bed and may even call that spouse’s employer the next day to lie about why he or she can’t make it to work.
Covering for a problem drinker just makes it easier for that person to avoid coming to terms with the alcohol abuse. It also makes it more likely that such abuse will continue. To feel valued, the rescuer needs the abuser, as much as the abuser needs the rescuer, even though both would be far better off refusing to meet these dysfunctional needs. Sooner or later, they both may suffer, since eventually there is likely to be loss of employment, or worse, avoidable illness and premature death.
The healthy and holy intimacy found in a genuine marriage bears no resemblance to co-dependency. Except by broadening the definition of co-dependency so that it becomes meaningless, it is difficult to see which unhealthy needs two married people are meeting by deepening their intimacy. Contrary to a psychological weakness or a personality flaw, the capacity to relate intimately is a strength, the very one this book is intended to foster. Some of my colleagues have, I fear, turned the world inside out by calling what is healthy a kind of sickness. Inter-dependence is a far cry from co-dependence. The two have little or nothing in common.
This brings us to the second term, enmeshment, which was coined to describe family units in which members have little autonomy or sense of self apart from identification with the family. Might it be that married people, who are deeply involved and share a great deal with each other, not only give up their freedom but also sacrifice their individual identities by being so close? Not at all. While enmeshment entails abdication of identity, deep mutual involvement balances