Three Ways To Be Happy In Your Marriage

Jesus when you try to explain that you’re just “speaking your truth.”

This is a fascinating tweet, most especially for many of the comments underneath. The twitter account is pretty profane, and I did not feel particularly edified by my thirty-second scroll. However, the tweet itself is instructive. Essentially, a father, upon being asked by his college-aged son for advice, divulged a lot more information than was necessary. The follow-up tweets are largely disagreements about whether or not this father should have said what he said.

In case you are not inclined to click the link, although it is a good case study in heartbreak, I will try to briefly describe what happened. Young college son is going away to college. Should he break up with high school girlfriend? Or should he try to make it work long-distance? Will he be missing out? Mother answers son’s question by saying, “Look at me and your father. We did just that and we’ve been happy all these years.” Father, privately to son says, “Actually I’ve always regretted this. Please don’t tell your mother.” Unfortunately, daughter overhears father and son and tells mother anyway. Mother deeply hurt. Father goes on twitter for affirmation, or maybe it’s Reddit, either way. Long comments ensue, people either castigating him for being awful or congratulating for finally speaking his truth. He should have gotten out long ago, not fair to live a lie, etc.

With everyone in the world stuck inside, I wanted just to quickly annesplain about how it’s possible to do something that you don’t really feel happy about doing in a truthful way, without “living a lie.” Your own feelings of happiness or regret are not really a matter of “truth.” They are subjective feelings that sometimes reflect the way things are, and sometimes do not.

The first thing you should do, then, is go read Green Dolphin Street. Every young person contemplating marriage or any serious relationship should read that book first, before they do anything. Older people should read it to, especially if they are unhappy. It is a book about a man who falls in love with a beautiful woman—his soul mate. But he doesn’t get to marry her. He marries his soul mate’s sister, a difficult woman who will be difficult to live with for the long years that stretch in front of him. The descriptions of scenery are gorgeous, but more than that, this is a very good vision of what the Christian life is really about. I recommend it because most people wandering around social media today have no idea how to endure a painful relationship with another person for the sake of that other person.

The second thing is to remember that people are not things. It is not really appropriate to think of relationships as “playing the field” because people are not meant to be “played with.” You shouldn’t have a lot of relationships with people as a way of passing the time and amusing yourself. All those people have souls. It’s fine to go out to dinner and get to know someone better, and to wonder if, in getting married, you would both make shipwreck of your souls, but the key is to remember that you do each have a soul. You are not a consumer, buying a product that will make your life better. You are a person and so is the other person a person. When you marry a person, that person is not there for the next fifty years to make you feel happy. That person is a partner in your life, a comfort in your sorrow, a counselor in perplexity, a person who cannot be managed or manipulated or cast aside for not “meeting your needs.”

So you might be able to see how this father went wrong, and is this moment steering his son wrong. The mother, in this scenario, is a person. Her purpose is not to make him, her husband, happy in the way that his boat might, or his new car, or any other kind of object that he could buy. Honestly, I feel a bit surprised about having to say this, but the conversation unfolding under this tweet illustrates rather beautifully how wretched most people seem to think about other people.

This is the third thing—you can be “happy” with any person by counting that person as “more significant that yourself,” by orienting your life in a manner that elevates and dignifies that person, by spending your days trying to plumb the depths of that person. You can make excuses for the things that irritate you. You can pull that person out of the dark and into the light when they are sinning against you or others. You can set yourself to one side and look to the good of that other person—over and over and over and over.

It is a very foolish idea that the path to happiness would be to put yourself and your needs first, over those of another person, especially a person to whom you are married. Many voices right now are crying that the only way to be happy is to put yourself first, that being “self-less” will destroy you. That’s not true. The path to salvation, honestly, is to climb out of your own narrow self and open the door for another person to go ahead of you. If that other person does the same for you, your life will be deeply joyful. If that other person refuses to do the same, your life will be painful for a long while, but eventually, it will dawn on that person that light has come into the world. Your deliberate, considered sacrifice for another is the means by which he or she might ultimately be saved.

I’m not talking about no boundaries, or countenancing abuse, or anything like that. I’m saying that every person, over and over, can let other people go ahead of them in all kinds of ways, can choose to let the soul of another person count, can refuse the paltry consumerist vision of the human family being peddled right now.