SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE IN FOUR HOURS OR LESS! (Don’t Try This At Home)

I’m still pondering an article I read this morning in The Onion, that irreverent newsmagazine which specializes in theatre of the absurd.  The headline reads:

Zip-Lining Day Trip to Somehow Save Marriage

 The featured fantasy couple were facing a plethora of tough marital challenges:

• An “increasingly hopeless, angst-ridden relationship”
• A deepening communications gap
• The husband’s temptation to have an affair
• The wife’s dissatisfaction with her dead-end job
• Their indecision regarding whether or not to have children
• Radically divergent views on religion
• A virtual impasse regarding the wife’s parents, who should either enter a nursing home (as he thinks) or come to live with the couple (as she thinks)
• Her self-consciousness, which negatively impacts their sexual relationship

 Some of you old married folks, facing this perfect storm of emotional, physical and financial crises, might be tempted to throw in the towel.  But not this couple!  No, no—thank goodness, they have a reservation to a New Hampshire “zip-lining center” where, for a few glorious hours, they will fly through the trees with gay abandon, communing with nature and restoring the love they once felt for one another.

Darn!  So that’s what it takes!

My poor husband and I have floundered for days and years taking an alarmingly different path!  We have prayed together, talked together, laughed together.  We have listened patiently, tolerated one another’s differences, kept quiet when we disagreed, forgiven one another’s foibles, encouraged one another’s strengths.  We have saved when we might have splurged; lived within our means; shared our disappointments and celebrated our successes.  We have loved the children God gave us, and have faced family and parenting issues with one consistent voice.

When we faced our own personal difficulties (oh, yes, we’ve had our share!), we held fast to the promises we had made before our families and before our God, and we looked forward to a better day. 

But never—I repeat, never!—did we remember to fortify our love with aerial acrobatics, with flights of fancy, with Zip-Line Zen!  Oh, the hours we wasted on old-fashioned techniques like trust, love, kindness, patience and forgiveness! 

Enough of this!  We begin our skydiving lessons next week.