Your Ideal Marriage Is Killing Your Sacred Marriage

I was so moved reading a passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer recently, and saw some clear analogies for marriage, that I wrote this longer post on it. It may seem a bit theoretical (and perhaps boring) to some, but for those of you who like to dig into these things, it could start a great conversation in the comments. Let me know what you think. 

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What if disillusionment is a necessary way station to a holy, rich, and sacred marriage?

I’ve been re-reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, and everything he says about community is equally true for Christian marriage. It’s possible to value the notion of community in such a way that you undercut the reality of it, and the same is true of marriage.

Bonhoeffer writes, “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

Idealistic notions of what Christian community “should” be are the enemies of us embracing what it really is—a group of needy, fallen believers, living together under the direction, grace, mercy, and forgiveness of Christ. Holding onto idealism, by definition, keeps us from living in reality, in what is.

Isn’t the same thing true of marriage? When we forget that marriage is about two people who stumble in many ways (James 3:2) gradually growing in sanctification, being forgiven and forgiving, raising a family and serving God, we hang on to the counterfeit notion of what we’ve been told marriage should be—and thus miss out on God’s most glorious alternative.

In this light, disillusionment with our ideal marriage is an essential step toward adopting a truer and more powerful vision of marriage. “By sheer grace,” Bonhoeffer writes, “God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.”

Don’t let that last sentence jar you: God is both, and emotions aren’t necessarily antithetical to the truth, but they can be, and when they are, truth must win out.

To get to true community, we must die to false notions about community, which usually result from being disappointed by the fallen reality. The same is true of marriage: “The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.” I’ve written elsewhere that it’s essential for cherishing (a chosen mindset, attitude, and disposition) to replace infatuation. Infatuation is doomed to die and must die before the choice to cherish can begin.

As you read Bonhoeffer’s words about community, just replace the word “community” with “marriage”: “Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

Is your determination to hang on to an idealistic notion of marriage—all the expectations of what your spouse should be and do and say—keeping you from building a real marriage with a real person? Every time your thought begins with “A husband is supposed to…” or “Shouldn’t a wife…” you risk turning true but idealistic statements into a roadblock for building a genuine marriage. It’s not wrong to have expectations; there are things husbands and wives are supposed to do and should do. Of course. But what if your spouse doesn’t? Does that mean the marriage is over? Or does it mean your chance to build a real marriage can begin?

If we don’t die to our idealistic views, we become “proud and pretentious.” When we demand that our spouse help us create this idealistic marriage and he or she fails, we set up our own law, and then fault our spouse for not meeting that law. Instead of being a fellow sinner on the path toward Christ, we become a sinless judge pointing out our spouse’s faults. “So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”

We think our spouse has failed, then we blame God for calling us into a failed marriage with a failed person, and eventually bear the guilt of a failed person in a failed marriage. But in reality, it’s not the case that our marriage has failed; it’s that our idealistic notions of marriage were a mirage—the vision failed, but like the crumbling cocoon it was, out can fly the Monarch.

What is a realistic marriage? A place of genuine and constant forgiveness. I think all my readers should know this by now, but in case there are some new ones, I do not advocate for any spouse to stay in an unsafe marriage. Marital abuse should be confronted by the church, not coddled, and the abused spouse should be protected and supported, not made more vulnerable by being told to stay in an unsafe situation. With that caveat, forgiveness is the spine of a sacred marriage. Teaching us to grow in forgiveness may even be one of God’s purposes for calling us into marriage.

“Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together—the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

Forgiveness is so very hard, but Jesus says it’s not an option for a believer (Matthew 6:14-15; Colossians 3:13, et. al.), and it’s the only way to sustain a long-term relationship with a fellow sinner. What keeps us together with someone who sins against us regularly? The forgiveness of Jesus Christ. It is about building your marriage on a necessary spiritual reality rather than a fanciful emotional infatuation. And how do we learn to forgive, if there’s never anything to forgive? Think about that for a moment!

Little Things

When disillusionment kills our idealistic notions, we can gradually become grateful for the “little graces” of marriage—what it does give us—rather than become fixated on the ways it doesn’t meet our idealistic demands. But this, ironically, leads to a better, more fruitful, and more connected marriage: “Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good.”

When you think marriage is supposed to be one great, unbroken, emotional high, you overlook the fact that your spouse works hard, comes home, stays home, helps with the kids, and is there for a hug in the morning and at the end of the day. These small graces are indescribably beautiful when you open your eyes to them.

I write in Cherish about doing a daily journal of things to thank Lisa for. I recorded 365 entries of “small graces” over the course of an entire year. Writing that journal was a gift to me as much as it was to Lisa, as it opened my eyes to the daily blessings a normal, non-idealistic marriage offers. Instead of comparing my days to what could be, I focused on what was and discovered that that was richer and deeper than I could have imagined.

Without this mindset, “We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.” Attempting to hold onto the big idea of an idealistic marriage is killing your appreciation for the small gifts of a real marriage.

Can I ask you to pause and write down your ten favorite things about your real marriage? Remind yourself of these small daily graces that we often take for granted.

Complaints and Temperature Taking

This view of embracing and valuing real community means that every pastor (and every spouse in marriage) needs to realize the inherent danger of complaining. Addressing an unhealthy situation in a redemptive way is not complaining, but living with a complaining spirit while doing nothing about it is ruinous to the Christian community, marriage, and even our own souls.

“This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations. A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.”

A pastor complaining about community or a spouse complaining about their marriage betrays that their focus is on what they aren’t getting from their community/marriage rather than what they can give and learn.

Did God and your spouse invite you into the sacred intimacy and privacy of marriage to become your spouse’s accuser?

If your primary talk about marriage is complaining, you’re resisting the great and necessary disillusionment instead of embracing it. Has complaining ever improved your attitude or your marriage? Has it ever drawn you nearer to God, your spouse, and made you feel more content and joyful? If God never promises that our spouse will be perfect, why do we complain when they aren’t? Every spouse has something to complain about, but every complaint takes you further from wholeness and intimacy.

Some of us, in our zealous pursuit of the ideal marriage, are constantly evaluating it, which naturally leads to complaining. Instead of surrendering to the reality and power of forgiveness, we resent that our marriages need forgiveness. “Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community [and marriage!] has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature.”

The more you adopt a realistic view of marriage (which I try to present in Sacred Marriage), the less you’ll be motivated to complain, and the more you’ll gain from the soul-building disappointments of marriage.

This is why I am, unapologetically, a believer that the deeper we grow in Christ, the deeper we grow in community and marriage. There are techniques to learn for growing in marital intimacy, and I don’t fault them or deny their effectiveness. But the atmosphere in which we exist needs to be the Spirit’s presence and the Kingdom of God’s priorities. That’s where marriage prospers.

“Christian brotherhood [marriage] is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship [marriage] and pray and hope for it.”

So, is your marriage based on idealistic hopes and fanciful dreams, or the reality of Jesus Christ, His Spirit, and His path of forgiveness, grace, and mercy?

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