Dear Married One

This post is dedicated to my sister and her fiance who will be married this week. May God grant you many years filled with bravery, peace, and love.

Dear married one,

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that marriage is hard. While this is probably the most common phrase spoken about marriage, it is quaint as it hardly captures the whole picture of two fully grown adults, each possessing equal autonomy over themselves, their lives, their decisions, careers, and their own bodies, coming together to mysteriously become one while simultaneously still being separate human persons. In light of this truth, I’m sure you have heard that marriage takes compromise. That you’ll have to make sacrifices. Maybe you’ve even been indoctrinated into the idea of strict, inflexible roles for husband and wife. The master and the maid. The head and the neck. The leader and his supportive subordinate. Maybe you’ve heard the joke of, “The sooner you realize she’s always right, the better off you’ll be.” Maybe manhood, husbandhood, or fatherhood has been conveyed as a perpetual childlike state…one where he needs a wife to take care of him and his belongings, taking on the dysfunctional role of mothering a grown “man.” Maybe you’ve heard the opposite…that to be woman is to be shackled to a chaotic, childlike foolishness in nature which needs a man to guide it.

And maybe, in all of this, the underlying idea of passivity, of standing down to allow the other to have their way, has prevailed as the wisdom of a happy marriage…an idea that the individual will and identity must die for this thing called “marriage” to work.

However, I have come to understand that marriage, an earthly image of the divine mystery of Christ and His Bride, plays out quite differently than the aforementioned sentiments. I have come to understand that the surrendering of will, which is certainly a characteristic of any union, is more of an active behavior than a passive one. The raising of a banner, not a white flag. That self-sacrifice comes from a place of fullness and maturity, not chronic depletion. It isn’t the death of individuality but the emergence of one’s true self…done in intimate communion with another…with the goal of embracing the untainted humanity of Christ, for man and woman alike. That behaving in subservience to one another, husband to wife and wife to husband, is an active undertaking that promotes unity and vibrant life through connection, collaboration, interaction, and mutual respect…NOT through silence or subjecting ourselves to habitual exploitation. It is a sort of wrestling towards understanding and oneness…just as Jacob and the Psalmists didn’t blindly submit but righteously wrestled with God.

Marriage mirrors the same type of “surrender” in which the church rises up to align itself to Christ just as Christ’s human will was perfectly aligned with His divine will. One will is never meant to have dominion over another in which freedom disappears and true unity becomes obsolete. Instead, they align and mutually serve…not by force, driven by entitlement, but in an act of freely choosing. As Christians, we are to engage in the struggle to align our will with Christ and we can only do that willingly for it to be an authentic and holy union. There is no coercion in Christ. Not now, not ever.

In this same way, there is to be no coercion or domination in marriage if it is to be a holy and authentic union. The act of aggressively overpowering the will of another, whether overtly or covertly through manipulative means, has destroyed not only marriages but also the image bearers of God who are in them, male and female alike.

Marriage IS hard. Because it is a place where the passions are welcomed to come and die. Pride, greed, lust, rage, gluttony, envy, and sloth are met with nuanced opportunities for humility, liberality, chastity, mildness, temperance, joy, and diligence as each looks to manage themself, not to overlord the other or force the other into virtue while abandoning it themselves. Moderation, however, is almost forced upon us so long as we choose to be faithful in mind and body, based on the sheer fact that we are now linked with a separate person who has needs, ideas, identity, feelings, hopes, dreams, past hurts, pain, a body, joys and sorrows, etc. that are separate from our own. To diminish these things is to do dishonor to our spouse and to become tyrannical. To allow these things to control unchecked our every thought and behavior is idolatry that will destroy us.

We can answer the call to moderation, to actively considering the other. Or we can take up whatever model of marriage that best serves the passions I’ve already listed and allows us to approach the sacredness of the other person, to whom we are now bound, with the mentality of usury and with the sole pursuit of self-satisfaction and personal gain. As if God has gifted us this person to satisfy our appetites instead of for the sanctity of our souls.

These models exist. Many of them employ Scripture in their defense. Some of them are near dogmatic for certain religious sects. Please, be wary of them. They do not serve your union and pursuit of Christ. You will know them by their fruit.

In summary, I pray you don’t get lost in this marriage. Becoming phantom versions of yourselves, either depleted or overindulged, and completely missing the point. My prayer is that God will use this marriage to help you both find yourselves, not by looking for yourselves, but by searching for Christ. I pray that this holy union will be a vessel through which you are enabled to throw off the foreign invasion of sin which corrupts the humanity of us all. That together, so long as it is safe to do so together, you will journey into the likeness of Christ and ultimately return to God who is our destiny.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else.”

Be well.