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Marriage allows us to live out the essence of the gospel, which is the particular way that God loves us. But we’re flawed, so loving our spouses in the same way proves forever challenging. In this chapter, I want to discuss some of the more important implications of the gospel for married people.

Our Flawed Condition

Everything you will read in this book is grounded in the following five affirmations:

1. You married someone who is flawed. In theological language, you married a sinner.

2. Because you too are flawed, so did your husband or wife. This is the human condition. Imperfect.

3. If you’ve been married and are now single, your spouse was most certainly a sinner, and he or she also married one—you.

4. None of us loves the Lord, our God, with all our heart, strength, mind, and soul.

5. Nor do any of us love our neighbor, including our spouse, as much as we love ourselves. This, too, is the human condition. Beset with egocentricity and self-centeredness.

Living Out the Gospel

What do Christians mean, exactly, when they refer to the gospel? There are many answers to this question, some of them excellent. These answers are not incompatible with one another and most provide helpful perspectives.

We might think of the gospel—Good News—as Jesus the Christ having reconciled us to the Father and so mended our relationship with him. Our debts have been paid and our guilt eradicated; we no longer have to exist split off from God. All of the petty thoughts we entertain in the privacy of our minds, and the less-than-gracious acts we occasionally engage in, are forgiven.

Or, we might conceive of the gospel as having released us from a kind of enslavement, from our inclination to exist egocentrically, according to what has been called the sin principle.6 I take this principle to mean instinctively inclined to ignore or rebel against the One True God. We are now free to live as God intended all along, united with him through his Spirit.

A third way to view the gospel is as having allowed us to triumph over death. We will live eternally in the presence of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

But, here’s still another way to think of the Good News: God loves you.7 The gospel is not just that God loves you, however, but that He loves you anyway.8 He loves you in spite of yourself. The idea behind a great marriage is to love your spouse anyway.

This implies that you will not exile your spouse, that he or she will not have to exist in a state of alienation from you, and that to the best of your ability you will accept the person you married as is. We come to each other just as we are. A friend is someone who believes in you, even when you don’t believe in yourself, and in marriage more than in any other relationship we are called to be our spouse’s closest friend.

Will you be able to do this consistently? Of course not! Remember. You’re flawed. You make mistakes and do uncharitable things. So do I and everyone else.

Marriage As Achievement

Regardless of how impressive an athlete’s abilities, without the drive to apply them diligently, there will be little or no peak performance. So it is with marriage. Genuine marriage entails abilities and motivations not everyone has. It reflects the gospel in at least three major ways:

First, it shows the willingness of a person to make a commitment to a life in common, with its implications for assets and liabilities. When you marry, you take on legal obligations. Anything you earn from then on, as long as you remain married, is in many states community property. The same applies to debts. Your spouse’s debts become your debts.

Second, there is public proclamation. Civil law requires that you proclaim this commitment before witnesses who become stand-ins for society at large. You must publicly declare your loyalty to the person you marry, and as with the willingness to commit, not everyone will sincerely do this. Some couples run off for the weekend and get married by a justice of the peace in a wedding chapel, but from Monday morning on, one of them acts ashamed of the person he or she just married—in which case you have to question the basis of the marriage. Those in genuine marriages are eager to announce them to the world.

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 or she is anyone other than the individual to whom we’re married. Do the hard work of taking the biblical injunctions as applying to you in relation to your spouse—because they do.

Rules of Engagement

At the start of any workshop or conflict resolution meeting, I ask participants to make two, sometimes three, commitments. These operate as rules of engagement. If you’re reading this book and doing the exercises together, you and your spouse may want to subscribe to them.

The first and most important commitment is to refrain from making killer statements. A killer statement is a disparaging comment without redeeming value. Such statements should never be made in a marriage. Nor, as much as possible, should you entertain them in your heart. They are neither constructive nor edifying, including for you, since what you think is what you become.

As we will explore in more detail, every marriage, like every family, develops its own subculture. What would be a killer statement in one marriage might be a term of endearment in another. The important thing is to avoid saying anything within your particular marital subculture that your spouse would experience as hurtful. Here are two examples of what all married people might regard as killer statements:

“You’re so lazy and useless, I can’t believe I married you.”

“You irritate me so much that I tune you out.”

It is also wise to avoid saying something hostile or critical, and then discounting it with, “I was only kidding.” Your spouse is likely to conclude, perhaps correctly, that you meant what you said. Disguised killer statements are still killer statements.

The second commitment is to agree that neither of you will break off the conversation without agreeing to continue it later. In chapter 4, we’re going to take a detailed look at how dismissive disengagement can do serious harm to a marriage. Agree in advance that, no matter what, both of you will always return to the work. By the work I mean whatever you intentionally do to cultivate your marriage.

The third commitment is never to utter a criticism camouflaged as a prayer or prayer request. “Father, I ask you to heal my husband’s temper” and “Please pray that my wife becomes more loving” and are both thinly veiled criticisms. So is, “My prayer for you is that you become more tolerant.”

These are all expressions of hostility. If you’re a Christian, you are part of the Body of Christ. This brings with it certain obligations about how to act toward other people, especially your husband or wife, which includes not dressing up nastiness in the language of caring.

Active Learning

If you implement the recommendations contained in this book, the quality of your marriage is likely to improve, perhaps dramatically. And, if you are not yet married, being aware of them may show you ways to help ensure that any future marriage you enter into will be successful and rewarding.

I am going to present plenty of solid content on marriage, but you can only gain so much from reading. At a certain point, to pursue the work, you have to begin actually to do something. I’m therefore going to give you many opportunities—occasions—to practice behaviors that will concretely strengthen your marriage.

It is important to understand the difference between two kinds of knowledge: knowing how and knowing that. Think of a motorcycle. You might know all about torque, gear ratios, tire traction, transmission systems, and how the gyroscopic effect keeps it upright when its wheels rotate. But none of this would get you one bit closer to knowing how to ride a motorcycle. You could spend three lifetimes becoming the world’s greatest expert on the physics of motorcycles, and you might still not know how to ride one.

Knowing facts is not the same as acquiring skills. This book is intended to be far more than an intellectual exercise.

Where We’re Headed

Here’s a preview:

• I first want to make clear what communication is and is not.

• We’ll consider the nature of good and bad marriages.

• I’ll outline the basic dimensions of all relationships, including marriages, and look at how, by what we say and do, we unconsciously teach other people how to treat us.

• We’ll discuss the nature of divorce and what predicts it. Research has shed light on the one thing couples do that often precedes marital dissolution.

• I’ll encourage you to recognize and reckon with what you most appreciate about your husband or wife.

• Then, I’ll ask you to express this appreciation.

• We’ll consider male and female differences and, along the way, mention a few realities that may surprise you.

• Others have written about languages of love. If you express your love in a mode that your spouse does not value, it will do little to strengthen your marriage. My intent, therefore, is to help you discover and use modes that will be most effective in your marriage.

• We’ll try to determine if you’re making incorrect assumptions about what your husband or wife wants or needs.

• Most if not all couples engage in conflict. For some, it takes the form of minor complaining, of nipping at the heels of a spouse. For others, it assumes the nature of all-out war. Regardless of where conflict shows up in your marriage, we’ll discuss some principles you should follow to prevent conflict from becoming destructive.

• I will encourage you to think of marriage as an ongoing negotiation, which implies that it would be good to know how to negotiate effectively and why doing so works for the benefit of both spouses.

• We’ll candidly discuss sex. There are some things you should never say to your spouse, and of course things that he or she should never say to you.

• I devote an entire chapter to why resentment is the lethal emotion, and why it’s pivotally important not to let it build up.

• We’ll briefly touch on humor—when to use it, and when not to.

• I’ll point to what I consider to be basic statements that every man and woman may want, and perhaps need, to hear.

• We’ll consider how best to offer support to and for your spouse.

• Near the end of the book, I’ll encourage you to develop a marital compact.

• I’ll then ask you to subscribe to that compact as a solemn and sacred act.

• I’ll conclude by sharing what I believe to be seven keys to enjoying a happy and fulfilling marriage.

If you ask people to describe their careers, most will tell you about their jobs. As suggested above, I recommend that you turn your marriage into a career. It is probably the most important one you’ll ever have. Unlike formal careers that may be cold, lonely, and competitive, marriage is the one in which love and companionship can be ever-present. There need be no competition, only cooperation, working together toward a set of common goals. Chief among them is to glorify God through your marriage.

I’d like to propose a thought experiment. What joy would it bring you to be wealthy or famous and own a large luxury yacht with the latest amenities, if you had no one with whom to share it, no one you loved and who loved you? Spending time on it might soon feel empty and depressing.

A great marriage is an exhilarating adventure. It need never become stale and it’s filled with incredible possibilities. Seize them.

6. Although his works remain controversial, I first encountered the idea of a sin principle, decades ago, in the late Watchman Nee’s Normal Christian Life.

7. This was roughly the title of a weekly television program featuring sermons by Lloyd John Ogilvie, then Senior Pastor of Hollywood Presbyterian Church. Ogilvie later became Chaplain of the United States Senate (1995–2003).

8. See McLemore, Honest Christianity.

9. Despite how people sometimes talk in casual conversation, nothing can be very unique—it either is, or is not, one of a kind.

10. Peck, The Road Less Traveled.