Love stories have a way of creeping into the foreground and convincing us that their effervescent debut is just the overture to a marriage that will always rekindle, in a different intensity, the same fireworks of beginnings.
But the speed with which the shiny wrapping of love begins to fade makes it impossible to believe that the “happily-ever-after” formula could descend from the fairytale frame into the concreteness of a relationship with painfully imperfect protagonists.
For their wedding anniversary, Wanda and Joe Nelson were given the first photo shoot of their lives. Shalyn Nelson, their granddaughter, who is a professional photographer, said the gift to her grandparents was part of her effort to celebrate the love that continues to flourish after six decades, at a time when society has cast lifelong marriage in a nostalgic, vintage tableau.
Shalyn invited her grandparents to write an anniversary message. The grandfather penned a letter that revealed a love too little touched by the ravages of time. “The years have flown by. One morning you just wake up and you are OLD,” Joe wrote, ending his letter with a statement that is startling in an age when love seems to have lost its impact: “I wouldn’t trade them for all the gold in Alaska… I will close this letter to you saying I love you as much today as the day I married you.”
The enduring feelings and beautiful memories of the long-lived Nelson couple become a dream for thousands of couples who pledged their fidelity on their wedding day, unprepared for the dullness of their later relationship. As marriages are drained of the joy of courtship, the partners wonder where love has gone, how real it was to begin with, or how it can be resurrected from the ash heap in which its promises have been consumed.
Will love never die?
A broken marriage is always a painful event, but it is an even greater tragedy for those who entered into this covenant with the promised security of the “cord of three strands.”[1]
A 2014 study described a sad reality: only 46% of American children between the ages of 15 and 17 had the privilege of experiencing their childhood with both parents, due to the rising divorce rate among conservative Christians.
The fact that many Christians treat the Bible as a book of rules prevents them from discovering its true role of revealing a Person to us.
Outside the churches, this failure reinforces the idea that marriage has long since lost its sacredness and become obsolete, while within the churches it causes confusion and frustration. If God is the One who had the idea of marriage, why is it so difficult for His children to stay within the boundaries of a relationship governed by the One who does not change?
In his book[2], Tim Kimmel, founder of Family Matters, gives a definition of love even in hostile circumstances: “Love is the commitment of my will to your needs and best interests, regardless of the cost.” He argues that mere adherence to biblical principles regarding marriage does not guarantee a happy marriage, since there are families in which one spouse wields biblical texts like a hammer to get his or her spouse on the right track, while ignoring the fact that the godliness they invoke is merely an appendage of their own pride.
Josh McDowell and Thomas Williams suggest that failed human relationships may be merely a symptom of an inadequate relationship with the Word.[3] The fact that many Christians treat the Bible as a rule book prevents them from discovering its true role, that of revealing a Person to us. Eternal life itself depends on this knowledge, because to have a relationship with Him is to receive (and pass on) His life.
God is a God of relationships. The Bible presents Him as the friend of Abraham,[4] who spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend,”[5] and John is introduced to us in his Gospel as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” As both our Creator and the One who placed the hunger for relationship in us, God can teach and empower us to have a relationship with our partner in life, despite our perverted environment and our nature deprived of the Edenic perfection of the first couple.
Acknowledging that we carry imperfection in every part of our being can lead us to look at our partner’s shortcomings with tolerance, rather than demanding a perfection that we have not attained either.
When anger starts escalating
The ideal spouse that is engraved in our minds—sometimes even from childhood—can be glaringly different from the real person with whom we share our lives. In one of her books,[6] Nancy Van Pelt presents the example of a couple who loved each other but who repeatedly went through episodes of violent arguments without realising how they were slipping into this destructive behaviour and consequently failing to put an end to it. Anger, says the author, is the tool that couples can use when one partner’s expectations are not met; its recurrence and intensity providing a bleak prognosis for relationship satisfaction.
The psychotherapist Jamie Turndorf writes about the link that can exist between chronic marital conflict and childhood trauma.[7] Because we form our ideas about life, love, and family in childhood, we tend to recreate the family environment in which we grew up, no matter how harmful, reliving the anguish and pain of the past. The therapists at the Minirth-Meier Psychiatric Clinic stress the need of adults who are tormented by a traumatic past to reactivate a known family context as a result of the need to repair its dysfunction.[8]
Choosing a partner in adulthood who is similar to the parent with whom a dysfunctional bond was created, and the frequency and intensity of conflict in the newly formed family (even over issues that may seem insignificant to an outside observer), may, in Turndorf’s view, indicate old, dormant scars.
Regardless of the age or legitimacy of the reasons for anger, of the many options available, Christians have only two to choose from, notes author Gary Chapman[9]: Lovingly confront the partner with his or her wrongdoing and work with him or her to find a solution, or, if that choice is not possible (because the partner refuses to cooperate, or because the emotional damage was done by someone in the past), he or she can choose to offer forgiveness, giving up the right to retaliate for the hurt inflicted. Some wrongs cannot be repaired or have inevitable consequences, but allowing anger (however justified) into the relationship can only compound the losses and emotionally drain the partners. Ceding our right to anger to the One who knows how to heal is a sign of wisdom that produces patience.[10]
Promises that are impossible to keep
The impasse in which many relationships find themselves, even those that seem to have started well, has led specialists (and all too often pseudo-specialists) to offer a range of answers to the urgent problem of marriages that have been damaged either by life’s harsh blows or by minor misunderstandings that take on exaggerated proportions as they recur in everyday life.
Yet many family counsellors and therapists target only the surface of the problem—unwanted behaviour—trying to patch up the effects, while the real causes remain hidden among the remnants of a once-promising relationship.
The American writer Elisabeth Elliot describes marriage in terms of discipleship, pointing out that it is based on vows, not mere promises.[11] Despite the bright scenarios that each young married couple constructs for themselves, they are plunging into the unknown when they promise to love each other in all the circumstances of their lives, especially those that will include evil, poverty and sickness rather than good, prosperity and health. The conditions of discipleship are no more permissive, since the disciple promises to follow his master in good times and in times of need, without having been informed beforehand of their proportion. Both covenants—that of marriage and that of discipleship—are impossible to keep, Elliot concludes, because we are incapable of keeping a covenant on God’s terms with our limited resources.
Family therapist Jack Mayhall and his wife Carole recall the golden prayer that husbands and wives can pray, asking God to save their marriage by saving them first. Love can easily be lost, but its well never runs dry.[12] The title of the Mayhalls’ book is indicative: Marriage Takes More Than Love. But what could bind two hearts together more permanently than love? Dr Tim Kimmel offers a perspective-changing answer: marriages often fall into agony, or are a universe apart from what they were meant to be, not because they don’t have enough love, but because they lack grace.[13]
Every love story lives only through grace
Dr Kimmel, author of Grace Filled Marriage, explains the role of grace in the Christian family as the only factor that can prevent the marital relationship from becoming unloving.
Grace is the positive factor that cancels out all the negative factors inherent in any relationship. Treating a person with grace consistently, even one whom we have promised to love to death, is never an easy choice because grace is not our natural way of being. Moreover, we can never give more than we have already received, and for many Christians God’s unconditional love is a subject they are seriously behind in understanding, as is the power of grace to transform even selfish patterns of interaction with others.
This is not to say that the recipe for success is to put the partner first (Dr Kimmel believes this is more likely to guarantee failure), but to give primacy to God, that His love is the driving force behind the love given to the other.
The lenses through which we view our partner (and by which we form our attitudes towards them) need to be chosen correctly so that the overall picture is not distorted. The most common faulty marriage lenses are the ego lens and the “if” lens of love, says Kimmel. The former contradicts the very nature of God by placing the needs, expectations, and plans of one partner at the centre of the relationship. The Bible teaches that Jesus Christ never put Himself first,[14] even though He was the only one entitled to do so. This does not mean that the recipe for success is to put your partner first (Dr Kimmel believes this is more likely to guarantee failure), but to put God first, so that His love is the driving force behind the love given to the other.
Anyone who has entered into a covenant with God has choices to make, and they should not revolve around the actions of the partner, but around the actions of God.
One partner may choose to use the “only if you too” type of love (only if you too stop spending so much, stop criticising me, get more involved in the children’s education, and so on), putting the spotlight on the often necessary and legitimate changes that the other partner is putting off. This attitude nullifies the freedom of the partner to make mistakes, a dimension of grace that is “the hardest freedom for most people of faith to grant to their spouse,” probably also because in a couple the mistakes of one are paid for more or less by both.[15]
This attitude, however, prevents the partner from feeling loved regardless of his or her merits, forcing him or her to live under the tyranny of a love that keeps score with precision. Divine mathematics, however, has less to do with the bookkeeping and more to do with the grace that renews its offer no matter how blameworthy or painful our mistakes, separating the person from his or her actions.
Ultimately, Kimmel concludes, the grace lens gives us the right perspective on the relationship and the other person, because anyone who has entered into a covenant with God has choices to make, and those choices don’t have to revolve around the actions of the other person, but around the actions of God. Sometimes grace becomes strict: it does not ignore unacceptable behaviour and does not avoid its consequences, precisely because it desires the wellbeing of the loved one; but it always retains the hallmark of the attitude of the One who gave what He had best to those who were unworthy of such a gift.
The fine wine is decanted at the end
Unmatched declarations of love, the use of flash mobs to add sparkle to the proposal, weddings with budget-busting arrangements can only provide a dazzling backdrop for a love that is called to withstand all the storms of life.
Mr M., the character of a dystopian scenario by Matei Vișniec,[16] eagerly awaits the delivery of the first sentence of a novel promised by a mysterious literary organisation. The introductory fragment would be so well written that it would place the writer in the ranks of Nobel laureates, as it had done for other old clients, including Kafka, Camus, and Hemingway. The interminable wait ends when Mr M. finally receives the promised opening, only to discover that it is a double ending, of the novel and of his life.
There are no universal recipes for a happy marriage, any more than there is a sentence that will win the author the Nobel Prize, although merchants of illusion will always prosper.
But we are offered help to grow into a relationship cemented in His love and not in the fragility of human love, until it is time to say goodbye to the other, at the end of life and the beginning of the renewal of a love conceived in a shell of clay but enveloped in all the shades of grace.
Carmen Lăiu is an editor at Signs of the Times Romania and ST Network.
