Many people complain about their marriages… or complain about their spouse, which works out to be the same thing. We all enter into marriage with grand dreams and desires, often to find ourselves disappointed when it doesn’t work out the way we think it should. What happens to our love and why can’t that other person be who we thought they were? I thought this was the “godly thing to do;” shouldn’t it work out better than this?
We all have a fairy-tale idea about marriage, especially women. Everything from Hollywood to those fairy-tales tells us what marriage should be; but it rarely works out that way. Countless couples start off great, madly in love with each other, but eventually end up “falling out of love” with each other. It’s as if the person that they went to the altar with at their wedding has changed into someone else, after the wedding.
Is it actually possible to have a good marriage that lasts long after the wedding vows seemingly become a dusty relic, sitting on a shelf in the closet?
Did God Create Marriage?
The first question we have to ask ourselves is whether marriage is a creation of God or not. Although it doesn’t use the word “marriage” in the verse, we find a description of marriage at the end of the creation account, after God created woman out of the rib of the man.
And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” – Genesis 2:23-25
Based on this, marriage is a relationship where a man and a woman come together to be joined as one, to the point where they act as if they occupy the same body. Nakedness, as is mentioned in verse 25, not only refers to being physically naked, but not having anything to hide from one another. They are comfortable with this, rather than being ashamed.
How many people get married these days, without anything to hide from the other or be ashamed about? At a minimum, there are usually previous relationships and people don’t want to talk about having been intimate with another person, besides their spouse. So, they try to act like it never happened, even though it still has an effect on them.
This gives us the first hint about what might go wrong with marriages. While the marriage relationship is created by God and should therefore be perfect, we humans get in the way, with our own failings causing harm to the marriage. What starts out to be good is still good; but the people in it aren’t necessarily as good as the marriage needs them to be.
The Dating Game
If we honestly want to answer our questions about marriage, we need to start with dating. The idea of dating is actually a fairly new one in the world, only going back 150 years or so. Before that, marriages were arranged by the parents. While the children often had some say in the proposed marriage, it was mostly the parents looking for a suitable mate for their child. That worked better in some cases, than in others, but if there’s anyone who knows that young man or woman and can pick a good mate for them, it’s the parents.
We tend to think of this idea of arranged marriages as something that only happened with royalty, as those marriages were used to form alliances. But in reality, that was only the tip of the iceberg… and not all that attractive a tip either. Political alliances don’t leave room for looking at what sort of spouse that person is going to be.
What dating has done is change the choice of a mate from a thoughtful process, looking at the individual’s traits and character, along with their family history; and turning it into a meat market. We supposedly date in order to find someone to marry, but all we’re doing is looking at how beautiful or “hot” they are, not whether they would make a good mate or parent for our children.
In reality, dating is about sex, not about marriage. People are looking for someone to have a good time with; and in this day and age, that means a sexual relationship, regardless of what God has to say about it. That may end up leading to marriage; but the intent of that marriage will be a relationship based on sex and fun; not on facing and overcoming life’s problems together. While there’s nothing wrong with fun, it’s not a good basis for a marriage and if all that other person can do is have fun, they may not be able to do what’s needed to make the marriage work.
Here’s the thing, sex will make anyone fall in love. Biologically speaking, the hormone oxytocin is released in our bodies through physical contact. The more intimate the contact, the more oxytocin is released. This hormone, like all hormones, affects our emotions. In this case, it causes the feeling of being “in love.”
Why Do We Get Married?
Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that they got married because they were “in love.” That idea has become so widely accepted, that it seems to be the only reason for anyone to get married. But just what does it mean to be “in love” and is that the same as loving the person?
The Bible provides us with a definition of love, that is the most complete, unselfish description of love that can be found.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. – 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
Few of those characteristics are thought of, when someone talks about loving the person they are going to marry. Rather than that, they talk about the emotional feeling of being “in love,” as if that is all that matters. But it is possible to feel in love with someone, without actually loving them. The reason for that, is that what we are really in love with is how that person makes us feel. The definition of love in 1 Corinthians is about how we treat the other person, when in fact we get married for how they treat us. Theoretically that should make an impact on how we treat them; but it can’t overcome our own failings.
Besides wanting love and sex, people expect for their marriage to make them happy. Many blame their spouses for their own unhappiness, even if they brought that unhappiness into the marriage with them. They will divorce, calling their marriage “bad” and their spouse too, because their spouse is unable to make them happy.
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Clearly there’s a discrepancy between what God created marriage to be and what it often is. While God created marriage to be good, the people in the marriage often come short of living up to what God intended. It appears that either God made a mistake here or someone else did.
But that’s if we define marriage on our standard, rather than God’s. There is nowhere in the Bible that it says that we marry because of love or happiness. The closest we can come to that is when the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians about marriage.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is the head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. 24 Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. 25 Husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, 26 That He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. – Ephesians 5:22-26
Entire books have been written about what it says in those verses; but we’re going to stick with just a couple of key points. First, I need to say that although the wife has been commanded to submit to the husband, there is nowhere in the Bible where God tells or even permits the husband to lord over his wife. Rather, he is to love his wife in the same way that Christ loved the church, giving himself for her.
God telling women to be subject to their own husbands wasn’t for the husband’s benefit, but for the wife’s. Submission and obedience aren’t the same thing; obedience is about the actions, while submission is about the heart attitude. One can submit, but not obey, if they are incapable of doing what is asked of them. So, God is saying to have a heart attitude of desiring what the husband desires, just as to desire what Christ desires for us.
The Greek word used there is hupotasso, which not only includes the idea of submission, but of adapting to. Wives are to both submit and adapt themselves to their husbands. Looking at that in a spiritual light, If the man is doing what he is supposed to be doing and growing in the Lord, he will become an example for his wife (and children) of Christ-likeness. So, the more she adapts to him, the more she is becoming like Christ.
Husbands, on the other hand, are told to love their wives, in the same giving way that Christ loved the church. That doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what the wives are told to do. For that matter, women submitting to their husbands really aren’t dependent on men loving their wives, even though many women think it is. It’s clearly much easier to submit to him if he is loving; but the fact that Paul wrote to the women first, makes it rather clear that their submission isn’t dependent on how loving their husbands are.
If we look at our marriages, we find that none of us are perfect at fulfilling these roles. Not only are we selfish, wanting the other person to do their part, before we do our own; but we struggle to fulfill even one of the items mentioned in God’s description of love, let alone all of them. The problem with our marriages isn’t the marriage itself, it’s us.
We are imperfect humans, trying and failing to fulfill God’s perfect plan. He knows that we are imperfect and doesn’t really expect us to reach the fullness of what He has called us to be. Rather, He expects us to be on a journey towards becoming more perfected, allowing Him to work His perfect will in our lives.
For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. – Romans 8:29
Another Purpose for Marriage
Could it be that we have the wrong idea about God’s purpose for marriage? Could there be purposes more important than to feel loved and happy? There is nothing in the Bible which claims that either of those were His purpose, so the short answer to those questions is “Yes.” Now all we have to do is encounter that other purpose.
As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. – Proverbs 27:17
If God’s biggest purpose in our lives, after salvation, is to transform us into the image of Christ, then could it be that marriage is a part of that process? There is nobody with whom we have as much of an opportunity to have our rough spots rub up against their rough spots, then with our spouse. As that happens, the rough spots become smoothed out, making us into what God wants us to be.
That’s not a process that we necessarily like and our spouse likes it even less. But if we accept the fact that God wants to remake us into the image of His Son, then everything in our lives should become part of that process. That includes our marriage.
Marriage doesn’t come easily to anyone. Your marriage isn’t the only one that has problems. Everyone has problems with their marriage and most people have the same problems. Perhaps that’s because God needs to work on pretty much the same things in pretty much all our lives.
But most people today don’t give God the time needed to work on their marriage. They assume that they have the only “bad marriage” there is and that the only solution is to get away from their horrible spouse. Many of those people then remarry, finding that they have the same problems with their new spouse that they did with their old one.
In past times, rather than divorce, people would either put the effort into making their marriage work or at least find a way of living amicably with one another. As one woman said, when asked how she and her husband had reached their 70th wedding anniversary, “We got married in a time when if something didn’t work, you didn’t throw it away; you fixed it.” Maybe our problem isn’t that our marriages are broken or that marriage is bad; maybe it’s just that we aren’t putting in the time and effort to fix them.
Turning a Bad Marriage into a Good Marriage
One could create an entire library, filled with books about nothing more than marriage. It would be impossible for me to try and condense all that here. Nonetheless, I want to give a few general points, not in how to be romantic or how to be a better lover; but how to be a better person towards the spouse that you have, so that you can have a better marriage.
Fix Yourself
It’s easy to look at other people and see their failings, making it easy to think that whatever problems you have are actually their problems. But you can’t do a thing about their problems, other than complain about them. All that does is create friction between the two of you.
The only person that any of us can change is ourselves. Being fair, half of the problem with your marriage is you, not them. So, work on fixing the part that you can. Not only will that help whittle down the overall problems in the marriage, it will also help to motivate your marriage partner to work on them. When they see you changing, they won’t want to be left behind.
Watch Out for Misunderstandings
Most marital strife comes from misunderstandings, rather than from one partner intentionally doing something to hurt or anger the other. Before flying off the handle or getting offended, make sure that you properly understood what they intended to say, rather than what you think they said.
Taking that a step further, if your spouse is talking in an offensive tone of voice, find out why they are talking that way. It can be that something else entirely has upset them and it’s just coming out at you, unintentionally. Many times, people don’t realize the tone of voice that they are using and don’t use it intentionally.
Have Realistic Expectations
Perhaps the greatest gift that you can give is to give your spouse permission to be imperfect. They will make mistakes, just as you will. When they do, realize that God is still at work on them and that He gives them permission to make those mistakes; in fact, He uses those mistakes to teach them how to be better. Allow that process to happen, without your interference, as your input could very well derail what God is trying to do.
Watch out for your expectations as well. While there are some expectations that are righteous, such as expecting your spouse to remain faithful, most of our expectations come from our own imaginations. We expect our spouse to live up to those imaginations, which they often don’t know a thing about. None of us live in a fantasy world, so our spouse doesn’t have a crew of 20 people writing their scripts, shopping for presents, doing their hair and taking care of their wardrobe. Hollywood is Hollywood, not real life.
Decide to Love as Christ Loved
We looked at the Bible’s definition of love earlier. That’s the way we all need to love our spouses. If you’re like most, you’re probably not living up to that list. Okay, that’s something you can work on. Pick one or maybe two things at a time, no more, and learn how to live them out in your own life. Don’t overload yourself though. It’s better to do well on one or two things, than to blow it on everything.
Be a Blessing
If you truly love that person, then learn how to show that love to them. Much of marital love is a system of give and take, where we each meet our partner’s needs, only as long as and to the degree that they meet ours. It’s time to change that pattern and just love for the sake of loving. That can take on many different forms, so you’ll need to find out which ones work best for your spouse.
Remember that not everyone understands love in the same way. Some understand love through gifts, while others want to be told that they are loved; still others express love through doing things for other people. You probably have a specific way that you show love, which they might not understand. Likewise, they might have a way of showing love, which you don’t understand. What that means is that you can be working hard to show love and it isn’t recognized, just as you might be overlooking the things they are doing to show you that you are loved. Keep your eyes out and find these differences.
A Final Word
In all, remember that God created marriage to be good and to be a blessing. That means your marriage too. It’s up to you to become part of the solution and to stop being a part of the problem.