“Marriage should be a consistently close, happy and exciting relationship where being ‘in love’ with your spouse, being desired by your spouse and feeling generally happy are benchmarks for staying married and secure.”
If one prevalent message in our culture has been more damaging to marriage, I don’t know what it is. While no one states these words, almost every movie, show, book and song are preaching them.
In working with couples trying to learn how to love one another and build strong marriages, often the starting point is repairing broken beliefs about marriage and the ensuing damage they create. Hollywood, fairy tales and social media have all contributed to this messaging for sure. Family of origin and the marriages a person observed growing up also shape this internal thought. But I also find, even within myself, the desire for marriage to be something it wasn’t designed for comes from within more than outside influence.
I grew up in Orlando, Florida which is a rare thing- to be an actual native and not a transplant. As such, I was much less wow’d by Disney World than all the thousands of tourists that traveled to our area every year. But one thing I can affirm- Disney beats everyone with their end of the day fireworks display. (Oh, and Dole Whips! but I digress) Their fireworks are truly spectacular in size and variety and color, timed perfectly to music, lasting long enough to impressed but not so long you get tired of them- they really do create that magical Disney moment.
And then they are over.
Fireworks are amazing, but they burn out quickly. They draw you in and create a magic, albeit fleeting, memory. Similarly, the “in love” euphoria is an intoxicating experience, but not one that is sustainable at that same level of intensity. Marriage is by design a marathon- a long term relationship, meant to span a lifetime. God set it up to work that way. And within that design there IS room for fireworks: moments of sweeping romantic gestures, great sexual experiences and deeply connected moments. But they will not represent the bulk of marriage nor can they be the goal.
The day to day life in a marriage is much more like a bonfire than a firework. A lot less impressive at first glance, but sustainable through regular efforts. The warmth and protection and provision of a bonfire is good, really good in fact. It allows you to draw close, to take the chill off a cold night, to cook a hot dog or marshmallow and to quietly connect at the end of a day. And all that is required is some regular adding of wood and poking the logs occasionally where the fire starts to die out. Marriage is meant to be a relationship full of security, warmth and provision- which it requires some regular tending to keep the fire going. And that requires acceptance of a trade off- magical highs that quickly fade, for faithful commited love that lasts.
We are born with longing and need for connection, significance and security. While living in a broken world, we feel a lack of all of these at times- a parent that does not know how to connect emotionally, a friend that competes with us to feel better about themselves, a teacher that shames us for our lack of knowledge or ability, a crush that rejects us. And on and on. As we live through these painful moments the longing to repair these wounds grows and we often begin to seek out the solution horizontally- that is, in other people around us. But, as seen in scripture, the real solution is to first connect vertically- to God.
“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another…. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:9-11, 18-19)
Through Christ all the deepest needs and longings we experience can be satisified at a soul level, which frees up marriage to be a compliment and companion on our journey, instead of the solution to our brokenness. Our spouse can be freed of the pressure to fix and heal us and instead be a source of reflecting God’s love and care as they imperfectly love over the long haul.
Placing an expectation on your marriage, and therefore spouse, to make you feel significant, secure and constantly desired is the equivalent of pouring water on your bonfire. An reasonably healthy person will fizzle out under that kind of pressure. While those positive experiences can and should, at times, be found within a loving marriage, they will not be permanent. However, if each person in a marriage has a strong vertical connection to God, they will continue to know they are significant, secure and pursued by the love of their heavenly Father. Then instead of looking for fireworks elsewhere, they can do the work of tending to their own marriage- serving and loving even in the absence of magical euphoria, forgive and repair in arguments without fear of being abandoned, be vulnerable enough to admit when they are wrong and apologize. All these actions continue to keep the fire steadily burning for a lifetime and offer the stability and security fireworks cannot. A healthy marriage trades the pursuit of momentary magic for the beauty and warmth of steady and faithful love.