Third, marriage requires choreography, working out the steps to the dance. You have to learn to live together, and if you cannot do this, the marriage will fail. The two of you must settle into the serious business of fine-tuning the moves, countermoves, and accommodations required in marriage, and learn how to negotiate everything from which shows to watch on TV to how best to squeeze the toothpaste (we decided to use two tubes). Learning these steps can be challenging. It often involves the awkward and potentially painful process of stepping on each other’s toes. You have to be willing to stick with it.
What, for example, will the rules be in each area of your marriage? Will you go to sleep at 9:00, 10:00, or 11:00? Will your cuisine be carnivorous or vegetarian? And, how about church—which one will you attend? Next, who makes these rules? Are you or your spouse going to decide where you live? Or, how much you save versus spend? Finally, who determines who makes the rules? Will you or your spouse decide which of you casts the controlling vote on whether or not to have children?
All three—commitment, proclamation, and choreography—come together to make true marriage an achievement.
Marriage As Opportunity
Marriage is also a singular opportunity to live out the gospel. It allows you to develop and enjoy a sacred and unshared community of two. In marriage, you have the chance to get to know another person thoroughly, with a depth that is otherwise unattainable. You can also be known the same way in return—fully known, in a way that no one else on earth can or will ever know you. Your relationship, therefore, will be unique.9
If you have successfully worked out the steps to your particular dance, the level of emotional and sexual intimacy the two of you enjoy can prove immensely satisfying. And, if you are Christians, you may also experience an extraordinary level of spiritual intimacy, one in which both of you can express your deepest hopes, fears, and doubts without having to worry about being renounced or condemned.
All of us, including your spouse, need at least one friend who will accept us in our craziness. I don’t mean this literally; it’s merely a way of suggesting that, to be complete persons, we need to experience something resembling unconditional acceptance. No one on earth is in a better position to provide such acceptance than a spouse. By fully accepting your spouse, you act as Christ’s ambassador. You enjoy the privilege of listening, offering support, and refraining from making him or her feel stupid, foolish, or incompetent.
Whomever you marry is in the best position to correct your misperceptions of the world “out there.” As we grow up, friends play this role, sometimes by telling us bluntly that our perceptions are a bit off. Marriage, therefore, provides you not only with the chance to feel understood and accepted, but also with the opportunity to see the world more realistically.
Marriage carries with it at least one other opportunity. It can be a wonderful antidote to loneliness. As they age, people seem to be increasingly aware of this benefit. Not everyone is cut out to live alone. Though many people do it and don’t feel lonely, others thrive on the companionship and camaraderie of living with and loving another person.
Fraudulent Marriages and Their Redemption
I’m presupposing in this book that both you and your spouse have entered into, or will enter, marriage honestly. I mean by this that neither of you is pretending or has pretended to have feelings you don’t.
This is not always the case. I know several people who married each other without much in the way of love or romance. In one instance, the husband wanted the status of marrying the prom queen, but from the beginning he found her uninteresting. But he never gave her even a hint of this. As the years passed and her beauty faded, they had less and less to talk about, and so they too joined the relationally dead. In another instance, the wife wanted to get married when her friends did, but the man who asked first was superficial and two-dimensional. He had economic promise but completely lacked charm, style, and grace. She married him anyway and, as you might predict, their marriage also turned out badly.
In a fraudulent or quasi-fraudulent marriage, at least one person will carry a mental burden about which he or she may remain silent. That person will live in undeclared turmoil, which is likely to come out in other ways such as chronic irritability. The two of them are married according to the state, but perhaps only in that way.
The good news is that it is possible for love to develop in just about any marriage. It certainly does in many arranged marriages. It just takes cultivation.
Romantic Love
In the West, where arranged marriages are unusual and freedom of choice is the norm, people typically marry in the glow of romance. Cynics tend to treat romance as a psychophysiological aberration that can’t be sustained, and the more skeptical among them go so far as to doubt its existence. I suspect they’ve never been in love and wouldn’t recognize a romantic feeling if it struck them in the heart. They are like a person who, having only watched television, insists that seeing a movie in a big-screen theater is overrated. To fall in love, to be caught up in that blissful romantic tornado, requires being able to invest your psychic energy in another person, and in a certain fashion to idealize him or her. Not everyone can or will do this.
Notice that I didn’t use the word idolize, although idealization can sometimes become so powerful that it turns the beloved into an idol. No one should take the place that rightfully belongs to God, the Creator-Provider-Sustainer. Yet, falling in love, being smitten, and the idealization that goes with it, can be a highly desirable condition because it prompts you to believe the best about the person you love. It is also a condition that is possible to sustain.
Such idealization will inevitably suffer the corrections of everyday life, which is to say, of reality. The one we idealize will turn out to be less than perfect after all. He or she will disappoint us. How could it be otherwise? But the positive perceptual distortion that infuses romance is, for the most part, a good and noble thing. It, too, reflects the gospel by assuming the best (see 1 Corinthians 13).
Romance is infused with the erotic. Like the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, there is sexuality running all through it. But romance is far more. It’s where several kinds of love blend with each other. Friendship, affection, and erotic longing become comingled. At least that’s what occurs in a well-tuned and vibrant marriage. We’ll return to the nature of romance in chapters 12 and 13.
Life Is Hard
A friend of mine once wrote a book entitled, The Road Less Traveled.10 Its opening line is, “Life is hard.” So is marriage. It takes work and lots of it to come anywhere close to perfecting a marriage. Cultivating one is like cultivating a child. To do this well, you have to express your love by what you do.
Such cultivation, therefore, requires focusing on the marriage, devoting time to it, and spending resources on its development. You have to give it plenty of your life energy, which means that you have to treat it like a vocation rather than an avocation. The marriage has to become a career in contrast to a hobby that you take up now and then, but mostly neglect when there are important things to do.
If you work outside the home, I am not recommending that you quit your job, end your formal career, and spend your waking hours staring into the eyes of your spouse. But I am recommending that you undertake two careers and that one of them be your marriage. This, I believe, is what God desires.
Engaging with the Biblical Passages
As we move through the various topics, I’m going to cite short passages from the Bible. Try to apply them to your relationship with your spouse, not just to those you might encounter next Sunday in church.
It’s often easier to love another person at a distance, if for example that person doesn’t live with us or know our faults. In other words, if he