from others.” Here and throughout the book he challenges the individualism and alienation reinforced in our consumer culture. Relationships are not products we consume, they are the occasion to manifest our capacity for love. They allow us to become who we are.
In this book and in his marriage to Erika, Kurt has shown us a patience and kindness that stems from love. I am encouraged by his yearning to be faithful to his partner for life and to the Christian tradition that binds them together. His journey, displayed here with such vulnerability, is honest, humble, and earnest. These qualities surely enrich any life and marriage.
Aiden Enns is editor of Geez magazine and a sessional instructor at Canadian Mennonite University. Raised in Vancouver, he lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with Karen Schlichting, to whom he’s been married for over twenty years.
Sixteen
Myths about
Marriage
1. There is one person, somewhere out there, that you were destined for.
2. Everlasting bliss is possible if you find and marry that person.
3. Watch television dramas and sitcoms and lots of romantic-comedy movies to get an idea of what you’re in for when you get married.
4. If your marriage is mediocre, you must get out of your marriage if you happen one day to meet that one person you were destined for.
5. Beauty generally determines the quality of the marriage: ugly people have ugly marriages, ordinary people have ordinary marriages, gorgeous people have gorgeous marriages, and movie stars have movie-star marriages.
6. For marriage to be blissful, a wife must be thin, busty, sweet, beautiful, and nubile. A husband can be anything—ugly, hairy, smelly, fat, annoying, and rude—just as long as he is wealthy, witty, occasionally sweet, and “good in bed.”
7. Marriage is only one option, no better or worse than living together with your partner or having casual sex on a regular basis; but, should you choose to get married:
8. You must live together before you get married.
9. “Fidelity” has to do with stereo equipment.
10. Lasting romance and lots of sex are the essential ingredients that will keep your marriage alive.
11. Love has reasonable conditions and limits, much like your relationship with your auto mechanic: as long as you get what you want and the price is not too high, it doesn’t hurt to stick with what you’ve got.
12. If you aren’t having passionate, life-changing sex every time you’re in bed together, something is wrong with the relationship, i.e. you probably married the wrong person, and you should consider getting a divorce.
13. When the romance is gone, so is the marriage, and you should get a divorce.
14. Marriage is supposed to satisfy your needs. It should not inhibit you from achieving your goals for your education, your career ambitions, and being all that you are meant to be, and if it ever does, you should get a divorce.
15. Prolonged, difficult, unresolved differences are best solved with a divorce.
16. Your first marriage can be considered a “starter marriage,” a learning experience, and you should expect to get divorced at least once.
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are
and what we are doing and what we ought to do.
—Marilynne Robinson,
The Death of Adam
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
