Having written on topics related to marriage, I sometimes receive criticism and sometimes requests for advice. Marriage advice is about as thorny a topic as one can imagine. As friends of mine have observed, in the arena of marriage, it’s difficult to provide advice specific enough to be helpful without being presumptuous or scandalous in the particulars.
One of the reasons marriage counseling can prove fatal to a marriage—or at least decidedly unhelpful—is that one spouse seeks to gain an ally in the counselor to take down the adversary, meaning the other spouse. When someone proclaims loudly the need for an “objective third-party” in the marriage relationship, he or she means “someone who will see I’m the sane one here.”
I’ve come to think there should be a “shining barrier,” as Sheldon Vanauken put it, around that union. Intimacy within marriage is not merely physical. Privacy is essential. Is there a private sphere of interpersonal connection—yes, physical but also encompassing the entire persons?
That’s not to say that you should never seek advice on marriage matters. Other people have helpful ideas and strategies you may not have considered. How you go about implementing good ideas has some unique considerations for those living out the vocation to marriage.
What It Means to Be One Flesh
When an elderly neighbor was near death, I was naively surprised by his wife’s surprise. He was approaching 90 and had health problems. In a moment of what can only be described in retrospect as callousness, I observed to someone how unreasonable his wife was. Didn’t she realize he would have to die some day and that day was probably not far off?
The response was more patient and gentler than I deserved. The person I was speaking with, married for more than three decades, explained that the longer people are married—truly married, not this sham and artifice stuff—the more the two spouses come to feel like one single person. It wasn’t that the woman did not know rationally that her husband was close to death; it was more likely that she could not fathom continuing to live as only half of who she had become.
I heard another person describe his grandmother, married for 60 years, who struggled to breathe after the death of her husband. She felt deprived of one of her lungs having lost her other half.
This lived experience of becoming one flesh in a marriage of mutual commitment also explains why it is so rare. To open yourself up to such loss and pain is a risk most people are probably not willing to take. It can be easy to spend years living defensively, making sure you can operate without your spouse—just in case. What if he dies or leaves? You may think you’re just being logical. Women are often berated with this warning: have a separate bank account—just in case. Keep one foot out the door… (Being a woman in a marriage partnership does not, contrary to popular belief, inherently expose you to extreme financial risk, but that is a subject for another day).
A lifelong marriage in the true sense involves becoming one.
What if Your Spouse is Wrong?
If there is an area of married life in which spouses differ and one sees, perhaps rightly, error on the part of the other, pushing on the subject too hard will probably fail. Why? There is that mysterious and sometimes infuriating principle by which the more we want a certain outcome, the more our actions and attitudes preclude the desired result.
As we’ve established, though, there is a unique advantage of being married: you are one. When you improve yourself through developing virtue, you improve your spouse, full stop. It’s tempting when a spouse is floundering for the other spouse to coddle himself or herself. But there are many marriages in which you see the spouses compensate in a good way. When a husband is withdrawn and sad for a time, the wife continues sleeping well and exercising, holding down the fort until he is on firmer footing. When the wife is neurotically researching a child’s health condition and working herself up into a frenzy, a husband might demonstrate patience and take the kids out of the house for the evening. Instead of falling to the lowest common denominator, the other spouse can uphold the standard for the relationship. If one descends to name-calling, there is no need for both to partake.
In marriage, as some say in economics, a rising tide lifts all boats. Growing in virtue will never harm your spouse. At worst, it might bring friction to some interaction, but it is the type of suffering that invites positive growth.
Fixating on a spouse’s shortcomings or trying to involve outside parties to set them straight are likely to damage the relationship. Improving yourself is the path to improving your marriage.
I am not a man and would not presume to give advice to men on being men. Go find them in real life. However, I would venture so far as to say a good beginning is to fast and pray. Men who poo-poo the challenges women have while they refuse to subdue their own flesh do not impress me. Any man who wants to improve his marriage can start there.
