How to Save Your Marriage: Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Marriage
(This is Article #3 in the series, 12 Things a Husband Can Do to Save His Marriage. But wives, you’re welcomed here too. Also, this is a reflective list. It’s simply what worked for me. I hope you find some of the insights helpful.)
If you are anything like me (and oh, by god, I hope you are in some ways), you've had those moments where you look back at your younger self and think:
What in the world was I thinking?!?
This is me when I consider marriage.
You know, if I’m being honest, I can’t really place a finger on what I thought marriage was when I decided–at the ripe old age of 20–to get engaged. I really can’t.
It's just a blurry hodge-podge of ingredients I didn't really know how to put together. A cup of love…
…a dash of commitment…
…one scoop of engagement ring…
…two scoops of wedding rings...
...add in a heaping tablespoon of premarital counseling (barely stirred)...
...fold in some shared bank accounts…
…three cups of a premarital commitment to sexual purity…
…twelve gallons of confessional prayers and reboots for all the failed attempts at sexual purity…
...sprinkle liberally with well-meaning advice from married couples...
...toss in a marriage license...
...garnish with a carefully-curated registry at Service Merchandise1...
...an hour or so baking in a ceremony and...
...voilà! Wedded bliss!
[Adjust ingredients to taste.]
Here's the thing about that recipe: I was just following one that had been handed down to me.
This is what my evangelical culture was in the 1980s and 90s. A series of “how-tos” and “what-not-to-dos” in an effort to make God happy and go to heaven when I die.
For sure, marriage was an expectation for me. Not that I was pressured to get married, it was just…understood. The way clothes are understood as necessary when one goes out in public. So, of course I was going to get married. It’s what we evangelical Christian men did. The recipe wasn't just for marriage - it was part of a larger formula for life that went something like this:
Be a kid until you graduate from high school.
Go to college and pretend you’re not a kid anymore.
Prove you’re not a kid by finding a spouse and getting married while in college or shortly after graduation.
Get a job and start a Christian family.
Sure, I'm simplifying things here, but honestly? That's about as deep as my understanding of marriage went. I entered into wedded bliss with the kind of naivete necessary to make it possible.
The two of us entered the marriage with innocence and optimism. We didn’t have the perspective that would have helped us fully acknowledge the complexities of married life.
We were twenty-one years old on our wedding day. We had a recipe; a formula. About a decade later–with two kids, a mortgage, and one failed attempt at a puppy–things fell apart. (Not because of the puppy. Don’t blame the puppy.) My wife told me she didn't love me, and couldn't imagine getting to a place where she would again.
And so, the formulaic approach hadn’t worked for us.
The difficulty is, we humans want formulas. Consider the title of this piece:
How to Save Your Marriage…
It’s a common practice to use “How To…” in creating blog articles and titles because readers instantly know the article will guide them through a process or teach them something.
It’s the promise of a formula. If you read this article I’ll tell you how to…
I click on articles titled with How To all the time. It’s likely you often do an internet search that begins with, “How do I… .”
Perhaps you see the problem I’m facing as I write today. I’m about to answer the question, "How do I fix my marriage?” with, “There is no formula.”
Surprisingly, as my evangelical forebears should have noticed, we can see that there’s no formulaic answer to some of the most important questions we might ask.
On several different occasions, someone asks Jesus how to enter the Kingdom of God (or inherit eternal life). He gave a different answer to each person, which is a bit awkward for those of us who like consistency.
He told a rich, young ruler that what he needed to do was sell all his possessions and give to the poor. But he didn’t even mention possessions to an expert of the law, instead telling him to continue to love God and live by the golden rule. He told his disciples to be more humble, something they seemed to struggle with on multiple occasions.
Maybe the most famous response was to the religious leader, Nicodemus. This guy was an expert in his shared faith with Jesus. He knew it all when it came to Judaic law. Jesus’s answer to him was that he needed to be born again. For obvious reasons this was confusing to Nic. How (there’s that word again) does a person once again enter his mother’s womb to be born for a second time?
One imagines Jesus rolling his eyes and thinking to himself, “Dude. It’s called a metaphor.” You’ll note he didn’t provide a formula. There was no mention of “The ABCs of Christianity.2” Instead, he explains that Nicodemus needs to look at the world like a baby would, knowing nothing and ready to learn. To do this he would need to, in essence, forget everything he knew.
Or, forget everything you think you know and look at things from a different perspective.
This is where I was in my marriage. I was beginning to understand I needed to look at everything differently than I had before because what I’d understood before wasn’t working. And, as I began to do this with my marriage, I began to see some other parts of my life that were in need of new understanding as well.
Not only was my marriage failing, but so too was my career. The thing God had “called” me to do wasn’t coming to fruition. Perhaps I needed to reexamine this too.3
I might as well. The career I believed God had called me to at the time likely wouldn’t have been possible if I was divorced anyway.4 Something had to give. Something did, and I’ll tell you about it in a moment.
But first, I must insist you remember one thing. While there might be similarities between what I experienced as a dissolving marriage and what’s happening with you in yours, my marriage is not your marriage.
Much like Jesus responded differently to the people asking him important questions, what exactly needs to happen to fix your marriage might be a different answer than what I found worked for me in my marital relationship.
But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that if your marriage is floundering and you’re feeling desperate, being willing to forget everything you know about marriage is a great way to begin to learn some new ways of approaching something important to you.
Here’s what happened when I capitulated to looking at things from a different perspective.
I’m afraid the best metaphor I can muster to help illustrate what happened is a house of cards. The two central cards leaning upon each other in the center of the bottom level of my house of cards represent my marriage, and were the foundation for everything else in my life. If I removed the foundation, I believed everything else would crumble.
What I failed to recognize was that it was already crumbling, and for an obvious reason.
You might consider the two cards which made the foundation to represent my wife and me. Together we held up the rest of the structure. Problem was, our two cards weren’t balanced. My wife’s card was carrying more structural load than I was. I won’t belabor this point because I’ve discussed it before. When she told me she wanted to divorce, it was because she was done pretending the marriage was working. She’d lost hope that things were going to change for us.
She was, in fact, crumbling.
I didn’t want that to happen. So, I became willing to let everything but her crumble.
The question was whether my decision to take action was soon enough, or meaningful enough to make a difference.
Obviously, you know the answer to those questions. (We’re still together, decades later.) But at the time, we didn’t. In fact, Joy had begun to look for answers elsewhere.
With other people.
Another man.
I’ll get into this next time when we discuss the importance of grace and forgiveness for people who want to save their marriage.
This is series of personal reflections about some things I did to help save my marriage. Here’s where we’re going:
12 Things A Husband Can Do to Save His Marriage
Unlearn everything you thought you knew about marriage.
Let grace abound.
Decide if the person you are married to is the person you want to be married to.
Put your spouse’s needs before yours, including granting a divorce if it means she will be healthier.
Apologize for the things you know you did wrong.
Listen to the grievances your spouse has and decide if they are things you can change.
Reassess your goals in life.
Be honest about your addictions.
Learn to give her an orgasm.
Give her an orgasm every day.
Previously…on The Unfiltered Scribe…
It’s a store, kids. Or, it was a store. They’ve long since gone out of business.
I did in fact do this. The reexamination of my career calling gets its own blog post.
I’m not sure if this statement is true or not. At the time I believed God had called me to the President of a Christian College or University. Divorce was taboo for Christian leaders. So, at the time I assumed divorce and Christian leadership positions were mutually exclusive. Still, I’ve not done any research as to whether or not there are any Christian College presidents who have experienced divorce. I hope my assumption back in the day was wrong.