Tis the season for weddings and divorces, and I’m surrounded by both right now — as a minister, friend, family person and scholar who writes about marriage and divorce.
Each day brings a blushing bride, joyful groom and vengeful “ex” my way. Our society remains romantic about weddings and enthusiastic about marriage, so enthusiastic that for many just one is not enough. We continue to seek the marriage of our dreams — which remains just beyond our reach — again and again.
As a Christian minister, I am asked sometimes about the secret to success in marriage. Amid the carnage of modern-family life, what must a couple do to make marriage work? While there is no magic formula, here is my top five list:
1. Understand your marriage as a lifetime covenant. In these times, there is no longer such thing as “marriage,” but instead an almost infinite variety of versions of marriage. The biblical understanding of marriage is as a covenant relationship binding a man and a woman to each other for life.
Marriage involves the mutual exchange of promises in which two individuals freely bind themselves to one another and promise one another a pattern of behavior that will bring blessing rather than curse into one another’s lives. Marriage is a covenant, and it is for life. Do not marry someone who does not believe this.
2. Ground your relationship on spiritual and moral commitments. It is impossible to maintain one’s marital vows apart from a deeper set of religious and moral commitments. To use the language of my own faith community (while acknowledging that others might use different language): commitment to another person must be rooted in commitment to Jesus and to a life of following Him as Lord.
Prior vow to God
There are days in marriage when there is nothing in us that leads us to want to keep our vows other than the prior vow we have made of our lives to God our Creator. This is the rock-solid foundation upon which a life, and a marriage, can and must be built. All other ground is sinking sand.
3. Accept with grace your partner’s humanity — and your own. When the romantic haze wears off on the way back from Aruba, the real work of marriage begins.
Two sinful, fallible, irritating, fully human people must learn to adjust their lives to each other. There is nowhere to hide. Self-deception and spouse-deception both fail. I must accept that you are a fallible human being, but you’re my fallible human being. And you must do the same. We are committed to one another and must learn to live together as flawed humans who love each other and will do so always.
4. Avoid the self-destruction that leads to marriage destruction. Many times it is the self-destructive lifestyle of one spouse that destroys a marriage. I personally have seen alcohol, drugs, pornography, laziness, compulsive spending, pathological lying and uncontrolled rage destroy marriages of people dear to me. A lifetime is a very long time. A covenant can only be sustained for a lifetime if both people, as individuals, keep themselves together rather than self-destruct.
5. Learn the two most basic skills of marriage: communication and conflict resolution. The great majority of failed marriages go astray over an inability to resolve differences. An unresolved conflict acts like a toxin in the marital bloodstream.
Honest and gentle communication, confession and forgiveness, on the other hand, are amazing remedies. No marriage can be successful without truthful, gentle and open communication and timely, humble and gracious practices of confession and forgiveness. One scholar suggests only 7 percent of marriages truly flourish in our time. We must do better. Not merely in terms of our own happiness, but the well-being of our children and society.
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