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Introduction

Marriage

and

Consumer Culture

Unlike a lot of books, a new book on marriage seems to require a raison d’être, some justification for adding yet another volume to the jam-packed-and-growing “Relationships” section in the bookstore. Mine is this: on the whole, marriage is taking a beating, and I want to defend it.

Very nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, and Christian marriages are no exception. I’ve seen the statistic cited so frequently that it doesn’t surprise me anymore, and yet every time I hear of another friend whose marriage has fallen apart, even if I’m not surprised, the truth always hits me like a painful blow. Marriage is intimate, and marriage is hard, damn hard. And our culture offers couples no meaningful encouragement to stay together through all the surprising, painful challenges they run into, the inevitable (and necessary) harsh realities of marriage. There are plenty of experts with plenty of advice, but not very many men and women seem willing to speak honestly about difficulties of married life, and journey alongside all of us non-experts.

It’s easy to cite the usual explanations for our culture’s rising divorce rate: a legal system that makes divorce easy and accessible, the rise of premarital cohabitation, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions, the seductive promises of sexual freedom in an increasingly promiscuous society. But I suspect that behind the widespread disintegration of marriage lies a deep crisis of meaning, a fundamental problem with our collective stories. Despite the postmodern undermining of the overarching metanarratives that have shaped and defined Western culture over the last five hundred years, we are still inheritors of stories great and small that help us locate ourselves individually and as a society. Whether we are always conscious of it or not, our culture tells stories that say where we’ve come from, who we are, and where we’re going. And, as the postmodern critics have made abundantly clear, those stories have profound, far-reaching consequences for how we live.

The Christian wedding ritual celebrates marriage as a gift from God. Every Christian wedding ceremony has its roots in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are brought together by God to love one another, work together, and make a family. I take it on faith that marriage is still a gift, a distant descendant of that first couple, but it’s not a blind faith: in the ongoing presence of my wife, I am reminded daily that marriage is a gift, the most beautiful, healing, transformative experience I have ever been given. It’s better than I could have come up with on my own.

And harder, too. No doubt Adam and Eve’s years together would have led to the usual unglamorous moments of everyday married life that all of us still face: drawn-out fights about little things and agonizing fights about big things, boredom, the temptation to break vows, the struggle to communicate openly, the challenges of sexual fidelity, disagreements over how to raise the kids, power struggles, hiding from intimacy, the ongoing effort to offer forgiveness and grace. Love isn’t easy. No doubt the ongoing dynamics of even the best marriages include plenty of hard times, but marriage has always been that way, and it always will be. Marriage isn’t meant to be easy; it’s meant to be good. Marriage was God’s idea from the start, and every marriage since Eden is an ongoing participation in God’s original idea of marriage, a lifelong covenantal union characterized by active, engaged love, underwritten by grace, and charged with mystery.

Somewhere along the way in my early religious instruction, I got the impression that nothing good survived the cataclysmic fall of Genesis 3. Although things here on this earth might sometimes seem good, these could only be temptations of my sinful flesh or deceptions that the devil throws my way to distract me from the true eternal glory that I will only know when I reach heaven, Amen. But I’m no longer convinced of the “total depravity” of creation. What makes more sense to me is that the original goodness that God created in the Garden of Eden has survived the fall. In Genesis, we see the goodness of creation and we also see how sin entered the world, and from that point on through to the end of Revelation we get an ongoing description of how creation is the battleground for the cosmic war between God and evil. It doesn’t say that when the sin came in, God packed up all that was good and put it away in a long-term, post-mortem celestial storage facility called Heaven. In Genesis, God pauses at the end of every day of creation to admire his work, and he can’t seem to contain himself. Creation isn’t good because God declares it so; God is making observations: “That crab apple tree is a fine piece of work, and that field of Ladyslippers is breathtaking. I really like those pronghorn antelope. Wow, that thunderstorm rumbling across that prairie landscape is breathtaking. And that man and woman down there falling in love—naïve, blissful, drunk on love—that’s just what I had in mind, that’s just right.” His excitement is obvious: “Good, good,” he says, over and over again, and when he gets to the end and makes man and woman, falling in love, he says, “Very good,” and takes a day off to rest and enjoy it all. God is the one who first says, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and all of us ever since have felt the truth of that right down to our bones. From the very beginning we are truly made for one another. That longing for love is no illusion or deception; it’s how we are meant to be.

I think we’re in a period of deep confusion about what marriage is because we’re confused about what love is. There’s a lot of talk in Christian circles about our culture’s view of things like sexuality, identity, gender roles, traditional values, and what legally constitutes a marriage, but I think some of our moralizing overlooks our deep misunderstanding of covenantal love, which is fundamental to marriage. Our confusion about the reality of love is largely due to the fact that covenantal love is in direct competition with the ubiquitous, seductive myths of consumer culture. Postmodern skepticism may have undermined the general mythological consensus of who we are and where we are going, but the ideology of the market has rushed in to fill the void. Though we have learned how to question hegemonic Western narratives like Christianity, Eurocentrism, science, and patriarchy, we are increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves fundamentally as consumers.

To describe our culture as a “consumer culture” is nothing new, but recognizing the ubiquitous force of consumerism and resisting its influence requires ongoing attention and effort. Consumerism as an ideology is a powerful and complex narrative with distinct values, assumptions, beliefs, and practices that set it in direct, irreconcilable opposition to true love. Consumerism says that the individual consumer is the center of meaning and everything that comes before each one of us—including our relationships—is an object of exchange that can ultimately be directed toward our satisfaction. Consumerism tells us that life is competitive and that love, just like every other valuable commodity, is scarce; that we must guard our interests, preserve our access to resources, and that we should be prepared to toss what we have when something newer and better comes along. We look for a love we think will suit us best, and expect to get just what we want. If we don’t, we walk away. Choosing a relationship becomes no different than choosing a new car: we look at what’s available, what seems interesting, what features we want, what style looks most interesting. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against a certain economic system, but when the values, beliefs, and practices of our culture’s economic system are applied to our most intimate relationships, the results are uniformly destructive.

We live by our narratives, collective and individual, and the more we imbibe the stories of consumer culture, the more we come to live by them. The image-obsessed Hollywood story of passionate, romantic love pulls on us so strongly we start to wonder what’s wrong with our own hum-drum love life; the happy, contented family in the car commercial turns into an ideal that we feel the need to emulate; the clean-shaven, muscular husband from the shaving cream ad and the breathless, seductive wife in the diamond necklace commercial define the roles and expectations of men and women and how spouses ought to display their love for one another.

The Christian narrative, which centers around the sacrificial, self-giving love of Jesus, is ultimately incompatible with the narrative of consumerism, but I think that a lot of us Christians have unconsciously located ourselves first and foremost in the narrative of consumer culture. This comes as no surprise. The ubiquitous messages and images of consumer culture are impossible to ignore and difficult to resist.

This is a book of passionate arguments and honest, true stories in defence of covenantal love. I want to expose the intoxicating consumerist assumptions we breathe in like air, and I want to find, instead, true, life-giving, meaning-filled stories for us to live and love by. I want to write honestly about what real-life marriage is like because I think the truth can shine some light on the sorts of lies that derail and destroy love. I want to tell personal stories of love, failure, confession, forgiveness, and renewal from my real life marriage as some alternatives to the commerce-driven stories that dominate our imagination and so profoundly mark the ways that we live. This book is my attempt to draw a direct line between the metaphors that shape our thinking and how we live our everyday lives and so recover the ancient practice of covenant.

A lot of the marriage books I’ve looked at try to make marriage seem straightforward, or they offer exaggerated promises based on secret knowledge or some special relational technique, and then provide supposedly straightforward steps for a husband and wife to follow to achieve some magical, otherworldly relationship. Psychologists, therapists, medical experts, relationship gurus, sociologists, and theologians all have something to say about marriage, and much of it makes not a stitch of difference in my relationship with my wife. Without question, we can benefit from some of the observations and discoveries of experts, but at the end of the day we need more than the research, statistics, and imperatives of specialists lobbed at us from a safe, clinical distance. We need loving testimony from men and women who are wholeheartedly engaged with the real-life stuff of marriage because marriage is essentially the layperson’s business. Marriage requires the ongoing, willed practice of love, and just like learning to play a musical instrument, simply wanting to be good at it doesn’t accomplish much. There is no substitute for time spent practicing. There are no shortcuts. No amount of expert advice can get us out of the hard work of marriage, and most husbands and wives are everyday people who are painfully aware that they don’t really know what they’re doing, that they’ve stepped onto the stage in a play they know very little about. “We are called to no rehearsals, only public performances,” says Robert Farrar Capon. “Everything that matters has to be read at sight.”[1] Husbands and wives are all amateurs in the truest sense of the word: marrying and living together through whatever life throws our way, for the love of it. I don’t put much stock in the techniques or step-by-step programs because in the end, after the books are highlighted, the seminars wrapped up, and the counseling sessions completed, it’s still the everyday decisions of everyday people living their everyday lives that provides the soil for the kind of strong, particular marriages worthy of our attention. I can tell you that my marriage isn’t perfect, but that’s a silly, hollow confession because a “perfect” marriage doesn’t exist. Perfection implies completion, and our marriages are only ever completed or “accomplished” by a funeral. You can only say that you have finally “succeeded” at being married when you have stayed faithful in love until one of you dies. In marriage, death is the peculiar finishing mark of success.

So here I am, an amateur husband, ten years into marriage, and my relationship with Erika is more surprising, fresh, and mysterious than it has ever been, as strong as the great elm tree in front of our house. I don’t know any rules about how to fix marriages or a formula for how to make them work, but I have tried to observe marriage closely, look at it from different angles and in varying shades of light. I haven’t figured it out, but I doubt that anyone else has either, not even the experts. In a decade of married life, I have discovered that I am susceptible to the same self-made traps that destroy other people’s marriages—resentment, pride, lust, envy, betrayal, selfishness, distrust, greed, unkindness, jealousy, bitterness—some more than others. But in spite of all that, my marriage is somehow healthy, life-giving, surprising, beautiful, consoling, comforting, and challenging, growing stronger every day. Thankfully, marriage is only for imperfect people. If I can do it, I suspect that just about anyone can.

If mapping out a kind of technical user’s manual for marriage, with goals, steps, and techniques, as though it were some kind of machine, betrays the poetic truth of marriage, then the opposite danger of not being concrete enough leads to dreamy, esoteric images of a disembodied ideal that make marriage seem like something best experienced in a trance-like state. God, save us from the champions of the mystical marriage! Marriage is for humans, not angels. We are physical beings, loving our husband or wife in all the commonplace details of day-to-day existence. Marriage, like life itself, is indeed a mystery, but it is inescapably fleshy. It only exists here in this world of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Warning us against the temptation towards escapist, otherworldly spirituality, Scott Cairns writes:

I think that you

forget the very issue which

induced the Christ to take on flesh.

All loves are bodily, require

that the lips part, and press their trace

of secrecy upon the one

beloved— [2]

Marriage takes place with our bodies, which we so often think of as burdens rather than extraordinary, exquisite gifts. But we do not have bodies: we are bodies. Nothing, except perhaps death itself, is a more poignant testimony to the significance of our bodiliness than marriage. The search for the deeper mysteries of marriage is a dangerous distraction if it carries our imagination away from this world and toward some unreal, disembodied ideal. Marriage should draw our attention ever closer to that which is right before us, this lover of flesh and bone, this most intimate other. As the poetic novelist and wise essayist Marilynne Robinson says, “With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”[3] This plunge into the miracle and mystery of marriage is not an escape from this world; it’s a headfirst dive into the deep end of fleshy physicality. And such an intimate encounter with mystery and miracle can never happen by buying some new and novel product, as the advertisers would have us believe. No, there is more to marriage than we will ever comprehend, but we can learn to live in wonder at the wholly human other, the man or woman before us.

Even as I have tried to find clarity as I put my thoughts into words, I’ve done more than just chronicle what has happened in my marriage. In writing, my senses have been awakened, and I have cultivated a deeper sense of wonder at this mystery of marriage—so rich, marvelous, and endlessly surprising, this grace that keeps overflowing from my life with Erika. I write to defend my particular, strong, fragile, and vulnerable love in a world that gives no honor to the kind of faithfulness and commitment that marriage requires. And at the same time I want to share these reflections with anyone who is interested, to encourage them to discover these mysteries for themselves. If I fail to give a faithful account, it is certainly not for having been given too little.

[1]. Capon, “An Offering of Uncles,” 127.

[2]. Cairns, “Loves,” 161–62.

[3]. Robinson, “Psalm Eight,” 243.