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Myths of Marriage No. 1 There are myths of marriage that keep us from entering into the real joys of this good gift. Our misconceptions bind us, but the truth Will set us free to enjoy marriage even more than we have already. One such common mistake is to think of the purpose of marriage as being our happiness. When we think in this way we can be readily disappointed when there are crosses to bear and struggles to endure and painful disappointments to undergo. It seems that our marriage then is not fulfilling its promise to us and something must be wrong with our mate or with us. But the goal of marriage is not our happiness but our oneness. Jesus taught us this when He said, "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." (Matthew 19:62) The happiness that comes from marriage is a wonderful by-product, but it is just that. The end in view is our oneness and when we fulfill the purpose of God in this way, He rewards us with happiness and blessing. To seek after oneness is costly to us. It means being drawn out of our isolation into close fellowship. It involves the sacrifice of the ego, so that human pride is crushed until it has no life of its own anymore. It means being stretched so that one is hardly recognizable to one's own self. But the end is being achieved. God is creating pure lovers with no agenda of their own, whose goal is to love this one other person as "they love themselves." The very times when marriage is the most stressful are the times when God is putting pressure on us through our mates to give up our independence and our willfulness and submit wholeheartedly to Him in the thing which our mate is asking. That is often the time we most feel like reneging on our commitment. We want to back away from such a demanding intimacy. But God won't let us. He is at work and the work is only half done. We are not yet the lovers God wants us to be. In these times our best solution is to yield our rights and complaints and let God shape us as a couple into the oneness which will reflect His image most closely.
No. 2 We are considering together some of the common misconceptions about marriage that have found their way into our thinking. They influence our expectations and our behavior and may even threaten the health of our homes. They must be revealed and dispelled. This second myth might be stated this way: The goal in married life is to get one's mate to submit to one's own way of thinking. We recognize that we are to be one flesh, that these two are to become one, but we want our mate to be "just like me." We would like to make our mate over into our own image. If only I could change her into my way of thinking and deciding and acting and then things would be just fine. It is natural to think this way, but our minds must be changed if our marriages are to be successful. We have to give up the mentality of winning, for married happiness does not come from winning, but from losing! We have to get rid of our own expectations and insistences and gripes and decide that in so far as possible we are going to become like the other person instead of making her into a replica of myself. Marriage is an exercise in learning how to submit to another person when we don't feel like it. It is practicing that great sentence, "Let's do it your way." If you think of marriage as a kind of tug-of-war, then drop your end of the rope and push it hard toward your spouse. Determine that she will win. That whatever happens, you will not emerge as victorious in this tussle. Mike Mason calls marriage an exercise in "one downsmanship." The goal is to see how often and how completely you can give in to the likes and desires and longing and dreams of the other in such a way that you lose your own selfish agenda, and begin to meld into true oneness with this one whom God has given you. This submitting ourselves to one another, in the spirit of Ephesians 5: 21, is the most demanding, most difficult, and most important assignment in the school called "Marriage." It is to be done not with gritted teeth, but with a heart of love and meekness and joy, in the belief that one is fulfilling the very will of God for one's life. Another way to put it is to say that marriage is all about the giving up of rights. Instead of standing up for them and insisting on them, we gladly give them to our mate and thus draw very close together. As Christians we are called to give up rights anyway and in marriage we have a grand opportunity to practice! That is not to give up our responsibilities. Those can never be
forsaken. Those too, are clearly outlined in the Word of God. Rights are dispensable and
should be dispensed with. Responsibilities are God-given and we shall be held
accountable to God for them. No. 3 In these articles I have been trying to reveal and remove some of the more common misconceptions that exist in our society about the married life. The more we free ourselves from fantasy and myth, the more we can embrace the truth and live in touch with die reality which the Bible commends to us. The third myth I would drag into the light is the idea that it is love that holds a marriage together. Granted, without love a man and a woman ought not to enter into marriage. That is the terrific pull that draws them together and enables them to leave the familiar arms of their families and cast their lots in with a relative stranger. Yet once that step is taken and the commitments made to one another, it is those commitments that hold the marriage together, not love. Love may actually wax and wane and there may be moments when it is quite absent altogether, but that does not mean the marriage is over. If marriage depended on love as its basis then it would signal the end but we look further for the bedrock on which a marriage rests. Its foundation is not love but loyalty. That loyalty remains steady even when feelings toward the other are strained and stressed. Love may come and go but the loyalty continues. Loyalty is embodied in the vows taken on the wedding day. They are sacred promises, which God takes very seriously (Ecclesiastes 5: 4-5). They are a couple bringing their own marriage under the standards that the Church has set over the years and repeating similar words as thousands of Christian people before them have done. They are saying, "We bind ourselves to these standards, until one of us dies." All the days of your marriage are spent learning what is the meaning of these vows. That meaning is only discovered as they are worked out in daily living. And as the meaning is found the couple is held in the grip of the vows. They are kept faithful and working and loving and cherishing by the vows. The vows keep the couple in the embrace of marriage. They are precious and essential. In the vows each person removes himself from circulation effectively. They are no longer available to anyone else. The vows declare that I will continue to love you whatever happens. Even if you begin to show signs of aging, or are disabled in a terrible accident, I will be by your side. I will not leave you nor forsake you. In a way. the vows are a formal way of giving up one's rights: to the single life, to a mate that is healthy and attractive and able to work and enjoy life, to a flirtatious life style. All these are over when one utters those sacred words. That's why it is loyalty as expressed in the vows not love that is the foundation of the marriage God has designed and gives to His children.
No. 4 In this little comer of your favorite publication, we are examining some of the muddled thinking about marriage that keeps us from taking advantage of this most exciting and wonderful gift which God has given us. I have called them "The myths of marriage." The fourth fallacy about our married lives might be put this way: "Each of the mates deserves her/his own space." And we may be thinking that we need "room" in our marriages to be apart a little and to have a breather from this one who is so close to us. But that is to miss the agenda of marriage which is to draw us out of our aloneness our separateness into community with another person. Our desire for "space" is a retreat from that process back into separateness and solitude. That is the great temptation in married life: to renege on our decision and commitment to be one flesh with another person back toward being an individual again. Mike Mason has likened the presence of our mate in the home to a great tree around which a house has been built. It is there in the center of the living room now. It is a beautiful thing and adds charm and beauty to the living room and a loveliness to the whole house. But it is also a problem to us. When we want to walk through the room, we must go around it. It affects the way we can arrange things in that room and how we must clean that area. It requires adjustments and it will not go away. In something of the same way, our husband/wife is always there. Sometimes it seems they are right where we want to be — and in the way, as it were. And they do not go away. This is their place. their home with us and they are always there. We must learn how to live with the reality of their presence always present. We gave up our right to "space" when we married. Now we are in a new condition and we must build our lives around the "tree" that is always there. The constant and ubiquitous presence of our mate in the home is a reminder of God to us and of His purpose in our lives. He too is always there. And we must live our lives in the light of that fact. This is what the Bible calls living in "the fear of the Lord." And we cannot forget what He is doing in us through our mates. He is coaxing us out of the shadows of our selfish and private lives into the light and joy of fellowship and community. He is relentless in this and arranges it so that our mate is "always there." When you begin to think this way, you realize how deleterious to a
marriage is the idea of "personal space." No. 5 In this little corner of Fourth Press I've been seeking to illuminate some of the misunderstandings that are generally found in the hearts and minds of people with regard to marriage; even their own marriages. One-by-one to try to show the other side and perhaps bring reality where there has been fantasy. A fifth misconception is that each partner needs to make some minor changes in order to adjust to the marriage and to the other person. We think just some little fine-tuning will bring everything into good shape but that is a grave mistake. What is required is a major change — a whole reconstruction of the person for this venture called marriage. Marriage was created for an innocent state. It was created for Adam and Eve in the Garden when there was no sin in their hearts but everyone now who enters marriage enters as a sinner. We are a fallen race and we live in a fallen world so that there are no compatible marriages. Every marriage needs major reconstruction for both persons in order to become truly one. For example, the ego must be crushed. How proud we are! How selfish and self-centered we can be! How much we gauge events and experiences in terms of their effect upon us and whether or not we were pleased by them. It is necessary for that pride within us to be destroyed so that we can become true lovers of the other person and not those who love themselves. In addition, marriage means death to the single point of view which may have occupied one for many years before marriage, and which many within the bonds of matrimony still embrace. They still think of themselves as independent operators and they have joined their life to another person to a degree but they haven't given up their individuality, their independence, their singleness, really. That means that the two lives in such a home are "marinated" together but they are not married. That is, they haven't really lost their individual properties in a new entity. It takes major upheaval and reordering of life to marry another person rather than simply becoming roommates with them. One's whole inner life has to be restructured in order to please another person and to love them as we promised to do in our vows. But the happy result is that the new personality that emerges out of this process is a far better one than the one that entered - more tender, sensitive and gracious and loving. And the love that is exerted is purer and truer than that which had the admixture of self-love with it. So within your marriages be ready for "major reconstruction." In fact, invite it. Ask God to help you with it so that you can be all that God wants you to be as a marriage partner and as a new person in Christ.
No. 6One by one we have been exposing fallacies in our thinking and conversation about marriage. These errors can occur in the thinking of single people, as they think about marriage for themselves or observe the marriages of others. The sixth myth that I would bring before you is that "it takes work to make a good marriage." On the face of it, that sounds most plausible and one hears it often. Sometimes you will see couples who roll up their sleeves and grit their teeth and determine to "work at their marriages." The motive is an excellent one. It means that they are committed to give attention to what perhaps has been neglected, and to resurrect some things that may have died in their relationship. One has to commend this attitude and rejoice in the aspirations that are behind it. But "work" is not what a marriage needs. The crucial ingredient for regenerating a marriage or making a good marriage even better is time, not work. I mean by that, lavish, huge, extravagant, wasteful amounts of time given to each other. What a precious commodity time is, and we dole it out parsimoniously. But when it comes to the most important connection with any human being, all these measures of conservation are thrown to the winds. We splurge time on one another, investing it, as it were, with reckless abandon because we know it is the way to spell "love." Sometimes we make a distinction between "quality" and "quantity" time. For our purposes here, these two must be rolled together. We must think of large amounts of time filled with happy and interesting moments. It is not a choice between which kind of time, both quality and quantity should be merged for the sake of our beloved. When you think about your courtship, it was a very time-consuming activity in your life. You thought nothing of giving long stretches to each other for walks and activities or for just talking together, just looking at each other’s faces. You didn’t keep glancing at your watches to see whether you could afford the time or not. You delighted in it and gladly gave it, because you were being drawn into the tender confines of human love and ultimately into marriage. What is needed to rejuvenate marriage is to go back to the courtship model, to once more be together with or without program, to be in close proximity as genuine companions to one another. How needful that is! Nothing on earth is more important than the way you love your spouse. Nothing is worth cutting short or crimping this precious time given to each other, because marriage is doing whatever it takes to love one person. This is the cost of loving that one person: great amounts of time given without regret or resentment; opening up in one’s life areas, vast areas, where the other person can find a home, a friendly space, an unhurried peace, and a serenity within the heart of the beloved.
No. 7We are seeking to expose myths that develop in the minds of people regarding what constitutes a successful marriage. These popular ideas that we live by, if implemented in married life, are detrimental to the overall well-being of the home.Today, let us look at the mythical goal of marriage as the "fulfillment" of the individual. That word is a common desire in the hearts of modern men and women. Everyone seeks fulfillment, and many see marriage as a path to finding it. It is not wrong to seek that fulfillment. It is the will of God for us. But it would be wrong to think of marriage as the vehicle. Where does that leave our single friends? Do they to fall short of this goal because they are unmarried? Rather, fulfillment comes from doing the will of God. This "fulfillment" conception about marriage can lead us to a kind of selfish approach. That is, I want the "freedom to be me." I want to exert my own way and my own agenda and be fulfilled in my own person. This sort of attitude is deleterious to the functioning of a dynamic Christian home. Instead of seeking our own fulfillment, what we need to seek is our own abandonment. That is, giving up ourselves so fully that we almost forget who we are. We surrender our own individuality so completely in the task and in the love before us that we can barely remember the outlines of our own individuality. This is, after all, what the Lord Jesus did. He, who was in the form of God, took on the form of a servant, and He humbled himself and became obedient even unto death. He was unrecognizable after He was incarnated. He emptied Himself and became like us in human nature, though He remained divine. Surely in this our Lord found His fulfillment. That is, He surrendered to the will of God for Himself and in that surrender, He was satisfied. We are all created to surrender ourselves, and in that sense, marriage can help us find fulfillment. In marriage, we must surrender ourselves to our particular mate, as well as to God’s agenda for the marriage. Since, in His surrender, our Lord Jesus became like us, it must be our goal to become like each other. That doesn’t mean that we take on each other’s sins, but that we face them head-on, the very worst of them, and forgive from the heart. In this way, we are bearing the burden of our mates’ sins with them. That’s what our Lord Jesus did with us. He became sin for us, but He did not sin in the process. He faced our sins and forgave us fully through His blood and by His grace. Our tendency in a marriage is to want our mates to become like ourselves. We think, "if only she/he were like me," but that is mythical thinking. How much better to follow Christ in freely seeking to become like the one you love, finding all possible ways to grow into the likeness of your spouse. There is really only one question that we need to ask ourselves about our marriages.
Can I love my mate enough so that I will consent to be made like her/him? That’s the
question Mike Mason addresses to us in his book, The Mystery of Marriage, and it is
a profound question to ponder. For after all, Christ was made like us. He loved us that
much. Let us so love one another. No. 8We have been seeking to expose some misconceptions in our thinking about what constitutes a really successful and dynamic marital union. Popular myths abound, and we can follow them unwittingly only to discover rabbit trails that really lead nowhere. I encourage you to look at the previous seven of these articles and to review them often until your own mind and heart embrace the truths that are found there.We are in a technique-oriented age in which we are tempted to think that applying the right strategies to any situation can solve it. It’s part of the peril of technology that has seized us. We can easily apply this pattern to our marriages and think that better techniques will make for better marriages, and so we read "how to" books to help us be better partners or to make our marriages sweeter. Now it is true to say that better techniques never hurt a marriage, at least usually, and many of us could profit from the "how to" emphasis of conflict resolution or intimacy. But to put one’s faith and trust in the technique as being the savior of the marriage would be a mistake. What is called for is not better technique but better hearts. The answer to troubled marriages is not learning how to assert yourself, or to make boundaries, or to promote your own agenda, but to give yourself up. Jesus said to us, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." (Luke 9:23) That applies very much to marriage. There has to be the willingness to be utterly nothing in the marriage so that one can give himself/herself more fully to the other. A kind of willingness to be utterly naked and transparent before your mate is the spirit that will lead naturally to right techniques. Our tendency in a marriage is to back away from that intimacy into our own isolation. Sometimes the strategies or techniques that are given to us only fortify the walls of that isolation and set forth the demands of that ego. What God wants to do is to take down the walls of isolation so that we are utterly wall-less and to crush the ego so that we are completely willing to coalesce our own will with that of our mate. In fact, it might be said that every problem in marriage comes about because one or both of the mates wants to go back on his/her commitment to give himself/herself up to each other.This attitude of eschewing technique in favor of heart self-giving applies to every area of married life: conversation, the marital union, planning, decision-making, and the submission of husband and wife to each other. I’m not suggesting that you abandon tried and true ways of expressing disagreement or helping your mate understand your feelings. Those techniques that have been useful to you and which do not assert your own self-will are good. But don’t put your trust in gaining some new technique in a certain area of your marriage as if that’s going to make the difference. Give up yourself entirely to your mate so that you truly belong to him or her, so that you want to become like him or her. That’s the greatest technique of Christian marriage. February embraces Valentine’s Day. What a time -- Valentine’s month, a season
to refresh and renew your marriage and to rediscover the romance that there is in giving
up of yourself to someone else. Actually, the step of finding out how different your mate is can lead to real growth. Now you are relating to the person whom you actually married, not to the one you saw through the rose-colored glasses. And that person is very different from you. But the differences are something to celebrate and thank God for. They are God’s tools to shape and refine you. They stretch you to experience life in some new and wonderful ways, so that you are to build upon your differences. Rejoice in them and use them to add variety of interest, perspective, and attitude to your life. As much as you can, try to find out why your mate feels the way he or she does about certain things and, as far as possible, enter into that world. Then, you will discover a oneness that rises out of the diversity. And that is the strongest oneness of all. A key difference between you is your maleness and femaleness. That is a polarity on which God wants to build. Therefore, make the most of this difference. Seek to be as much the man as you can be and as much the woman. Let there be no blurring of the lines and the consequent loss of this blessed polarity. That means cultivating manliness and femininity for all you are worth so that your mate can delight in you as the precious gift God has prepared. A danger sets into a marriage when a husband and a wife cease being attracted to one another. Work at being as attractive to your beloved as you can be, accenting the differences God has put within you. This polarity is the essence of your union. Your marriage is built on this difference. Differences are not something to wish away in your marriage. They are great treasures to be enjoyed and for which to be profoundly grateful. No. 10We have been seeking to express truths about marriage which come into direct conflict with our own usual understanding of it. These "myths of marriage" get us into trouble because we follow our own idealized vision and not the marriage that is actually before us -- the one God has given us and the one that is asking so much of us just now. The tenth myth might be put this way: "My home is the place of my refuge." That is, it is a castle where I may retreat from the world, a kind of haven from the struggles, pressures, and tensions of the world. I return there to be recharged, refreshed, and sent forth out into the world again. In a certain sense that is true. Our homes are to be places of rest, love, and hospitality; places where we can just be ourselves and find relaxation and the restrengthening of our lives. But if we see that as the sole function of the home in our lives we will fall into the common misunderstanding that is often described in the words, "a man’s home is his castle." Mike Mason likens the home to a monastery -- a place in which people are changed from one type of person into another; a school where vows have been taken and life is ordered toward the developing of the spirit and the soul into something higher and finer. If we follow that analogy, then the home becomes the harder sphere as opposed to the workplace. How easily we think of the workplace as where the really tough decisions and actions take place. That’s where the action is and the home is easy. The home is soft and lovely to us and requires little of us. But that is to invert God’s order. God puts the priority on the home and calls us to establish it and to focus on it first and then to go into the fields of labor. In fact, in Deuteronomy 24:5 a man is told not to engage in outside activities, like war, for the first year of his marriage so that he can be happy at home with his wife. He is to make the necessary adjustments and give careful time and attention to the laying of the foundations of the home. War in Israel’s history was to possess the land and/or to defend it from its enemies so that there could be marriages and homes established in it. To give up the marriage and the home in order to fight the war would make the battle pointless. If we continue along Mason’s line of the home as a monastery, we would understand more about the nature of our vows in marriage. When a monk or a nun enters monastic life, they take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Our vows at the altar in marriage are similar. We no longer own anything ourselves, even our own bodies. Everything we have belongs to our mate. It is a vow of poverty. This is also vow of chastity because we forsake all others in favor of our own. We give up covetous desires of other people and devote ourselves solely to our mates. We become a "one-woman man" or "one-man woman," and we delight only in the one whom God has given to us and to whom we have taken sacred vows. We also take a vow of obedience in the sense that a true marriage obeys God’s order for the institution of matrimony. We are not only committed to each other but to marriage itself as it is outlined in the Scripture. That is a call for husbands to live in self-sacrifice and in self-denial as Christ did for the Church (Ephesians 5:35). And it is for wives to obey the biblical mandate to follow the leadership of their husbands, to throw a support under the things they do, and to be a genuine helper to them. When we begin to see the home as a monastery, a training school for the soul, we will not resent the pains and sufferings and sacrifices that come along. And when deprivations come or when some of our visions have to be scuttled in favor of our spouse, we will remember that God is shaping us into the image of our Lord Jesus Christ who laid down His very life for us. Let us not see the home as simply a place for the fulfillment of our own desires for pleasure or for rest and refuge, but as a finishing school in which God is working with the soul of His people so that they may become more like the Christ that is found in the Scriptures. So that after years of marriage, trained in the monastery of the home, an obedient couple will not only resemble each other but will resemble the Lord Jesus.
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