If Your Marriage Isn’t Working, Try This

[Jesus, surprised you still haven’t noticed you need help.]

This interesting piece was drawn to my attention yesterday. It’s meant, of course, to be provocative and to shock you. But it gets right up to the edge of an actual christian foundational concept, and so I thought I would just have a few words about it.

First though, marrying someone and then insisting on labeling it an ‘un-marriage’ is, well, as helpful as deciding do be polyamorous (that is, Not Helpful). We swim in the tepid bath water of unfriending, unschooling, unfollowing, unchurching, and many other departures from good and useful human institutions (having friends, going to school, going to church, being interested in other people), some of them ordained by God. What’s to stop us from applying the ‘un’ to marriage? Nothing obviously.

But when you decide to put the prefix ‘un’ in front of something like marriage, you’re expecting ultimately to break it, even if you don’t think you are. You’re loosing a bond that isn’t meant to have any slack, any give.

Second, writing love notes to yourself and finding all your own satisfaction in yourself and who you are, depending only on Yourself as it were, is folly. If other people can fail you, how much more are you surely going to fail yourself. Pursuing that greatest love, yourself, is the quickest way to eternal darkness. Marriage between two people who each love themselves the best is a tragedy.

Nevertheless, I applaud this woman, and I guess her husband also for trying to understand, for happening upon the idea that not pouring all the expectations of life’s happiness into the other person might be a good idea. He calls it letting go of ‘co-dependency’ and that’s really great. Marriage can’t bear the weight of your needing the other person to make you ok. And yet so many people go into it with that hope. When you join your own self love with the requirement that the other person is going to facilitate your loving of yourself and making you happy all the time, you’re going to be unhappy. So detachment in that sense is an excellent idea. Letting go of needing the other person to fulfill you is wise and good.

But then you have a problem. Because you can’t make yourself happy, and the other person can’t make you happy, so what can you do? And here’s where Christianity can let you out of your pickle. Jesus, when you are called by his name, actually loves you more even than you love yourself. And he can give you everything you need–Everything. Instead of leaching off the emotional life of your spouse, taking and demanding, you can turn to Jesus and he will freely give all that your soul requires–love, hope, wisdom, satisfaction, eternal life, everything.

When you have Jesus as the source of your life in all its facets, he, in fact, gives you so much of what you need that you will have some left over, pressed down, shaken together, enough to pour out into the other person. He will use you to meet that other person’s needs. You can give the gift of yourself, drawing always on the eternal and abundant well of Jesus, without any need or requirement that the other person give anything back to you.

It’s a little bit like the Trinity, if you think about it (I mean, generations of Christians have thought about it), and the cross. It’s a window into an effulgent and wondrous divine love. If you’re married, you should think about it. If you’re not married, you can still do it. Honestly, it transcends all these troublesome institutions that we’re always trying to let ourselves out of. You don’t need to ‘un’ anything. You can tie yourself tightly to the people around you, not because they can give you anything, but because of the deep love of Jesus that fills you up even past the brim of who you are.