its existence. I suspect they’ve never been in love and wouldn’t recognize a romantic feeling if it struck them in the heart. They are like a person who, having only watched television, insists that seeing a movie in a big-screen theater is overrated. To fall in love, to be caught up in that blissful romantic tornado, requires being able to invest your psychic energy in another person, and in a certain fashion to idealize him or her. Not everyone can or will do this.
Notice that I didn’t use the word idolize, although idealization can sometimes become so powerful that it turns the beloved into an idol. No one should take the place that rightfully belongs to God, the Creator-Provider-Sustainer. Yet, falling in love, being smitten, and the idealization that goes with it, can be a highly desirable condition because it prompts you to believe the best about the person you love. It is also a condition that is possible to sustain.
Such idealization will inevitably suffer the corrections of everyday life, which is to say, of reality. The one we idealize will turn out to be less than perfect after all. He or she will disappoint us. How could it be otherwise? But the positive perceptual distortion that infuses romance is, for the most part, a good and noble thing. It, too, reflects the gospel by assuming the best (see 1 Corinthians 13).
Romance is infused with the erotic. Like the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, there is sexuality running all through it. But romance is far more. It’s where several kinds of love blend with each other. Friendship, affection, and erotic longing become comingled. At least that’s what occurs in a well-tuned and vibrant marriage. We’ll return to the nature of romance in chapters 12 and 13.
Life Is Hard
A friend of mine once wrote a book entitled, The Road Less Traveled.10 Its opening line is, “Life is hard.” So is marriage. It takes work and lots of it to come anywhere close to perfecting a marriage. Cultivating one is like cultivating a child. To do this well, you have to express your love by what you do.
Such cultivation, therefore, requires focusing on the marriage, devoting time to it, and spending resources on its development. You have to give it plenty of your life energy, which means that you have to treat it like a vocation rather than an avocation. The marriage has to become a career in contrast to a hobby that you take up now and then, but mostly neglect when there are important things to do.
If you work outside the home, I am not recommending that you quit your job, end your formal career, and spend your waking hours staring into the eyes of your spouse. But I am recommending that you undertake two careers and that one of them be your marriage. This, I believe, is what God desires.
Engaging with the Biblical Passages
As we move through the various topics, I’m going to cite short passages from the Bible. Try to apply them to your relationship with your spouse, not just to those you might encounter next Sunday in church.
It’s often easier to love another person at a distance, if for example that person doesn’t live with us or know our faults. In other words, if he or she is anyone other than the individual to whom we’re married. Do the hard work of taking the biblical injunctions as applying to you in relation to your spouse—because they do.
Rules of Engagement
At the start of any workshop or conflict resolution meeting, I ask participants to make two, sometimes three, commitments. These operate as rules of engagement. If you’re reading this book and doing the exercises together, you and your spouse may want to subscribe to them.
The first and most important commitment is to refrain from making killer statements. A killer statement is a disparaging comment without redeeming value. Such statements should never be made in a marriage. Nor, as much as possible, should you entertain them in your heart. They are neither constructive nor edifying, including for you, since what you think is what you become.
As we will explore in more detail, every marriage, like every family, develops its own subculture. What would be a killer statement in one marriage might be a term of endearment in another. The important thing is to avoid saying anything within your particular marital subculture that your spouse would experience as hurtful. Here are two examples of what all married people might regard as killer statements:
“You’re so lazy and useless, I can’t believe I married you.”
“You irritate me so much that I tune you out.”
It is also wise to avoid saying something hostile or critical, and then discounting it with, “I was only kidding.” Your spouse is likely to conclude, perhaps correctly, that you meant what you said. Disguised killer statements are still killer statements.
The second commitment is to agree that neither of you will break off the conversation without agreeing to continue it later. In chapter 4, we’re going to take a detailed look at how dismissive disengagement can do serious harm to a marriage. Agree in advance that, no matter what, both of you will always return to the work. By the work I mean whatever you intentionally do to cultivate your marriage.
The third commitment is never to utter a criticism camouflaged as a prayer or prayer request. “Father, I ask you to heal my husband’s temper” and “Please pray that my wife becomes more loving” and are both thinly veiled criticisms. So is, “My prayer for you is that you become more tolerant.”
These are all expressions of hostility. If you’re a Christian, you are part of the Body of Christ. This brings with it certain obligations about how to act toward other people, especially your husband or wife, which includes not dressing up nastiness in the language of caring.
Active Learning
If you implement the recommendations contained in this book, the quality of your marriage is likely to improve, perhaps dramatically. And, if you are not yet married, being aware of them may show you ways to help ensure that any future marriage you enter into will be successful and rewarding.
I am going to present plenty of solid content on marriage, but you can only gain so much from reading. At a certain point, to pursue the work, you have to begin actually to do something. I’m therefore going to give you many opportunities—occasions—to practice behaviors that will concretely strengthen your marriage.
It is important to understand the difference between two kinds of knowledge: knowing how and knowing that. Think of a motorcycle. You might know all about torque, gear ratios, tire traction, transmission systems, and how the gyroscopic effect keeps it upright when its wheels rotate. But none of this would get you one bit closer to knowing how to ride a motorcycle. You could spend three lifetimes becoming the world’s greatest expert on the physics of motorcycles, and you might still not know how to ride one.
Knowing facts is not the same as acquiring skills. This book is intended to be far more than an intellectual exercise.
Where We’re Headed
Here’s a preview:
• I first want to make clear what communication is and is not.
• We’ll consider the nature of good and bad marriages.
• I’ll outline the basic dimensions of all relationships, including marriages, and look at how, by what we say and do, we unconsciously teach other people how to treat us.
• We’ll discuss the nature of divorce and what predicts it. Research has shed light on the one thing couples do that often precedes marital dissolution.
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