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Tragically, we hear of many marriages today that fail to experience the life long togetherness of marriage. For some, after the initial few years, a creeping separation causes them to become disconnected. This may happen when children are young and exhausting or when they leave home. In the latter case a couple may discover that they have nothing to say to each other and they divorce, assuming that they should never have got married in the first place.
We grow up believing in a romantic myth: if Cinderella happens to meet her PrinceCharming, they will live happily ever after. Should friction arise and we fallout of love, then, the myth states, we have married the wrong person and we are destined to live unhappily ever after or get divorced. This message is reinforced for adults through love songs, books and films. Underlying this pervasive and dangerous myth is the belief that real love is something that happens to us, and over which we have little or no control.
This view is sometimes reported in the press as though it is beyond dispute. A Guardian article stated that some “lucky souls” keep an intimate marriage relationship going for twenty years or more, but the natural time limit is closer to four years. Once you’ve lost it, “nothing on earth will bring back that magic spark. . . You either feel it or you don’t, and that’s the end of the matter.” In apparent consolation the article ended, “It can always be re-kindled for somebody new." [1]
But anyone who has been in a stable marriage for more than a few years will say that a relationship has to be worked at. It has taken more than romantic feelings to keep them together. It has taken a daily choice, on some occasions having to talk through sensitive issues, on others having to control an attraction to another man or woman, and, if the romantic feelings left for a while, in time they returned at a deeper and richer level. Couples who get married thinking that the line in their vows “for better or for worse” will not really apply to them are in for a shock or a failed marriage.
Marriages that break down are usually the result of a process of growing apart over many years, as this anonymous poem entitled The Wall describes:
Their wedding picture mocked them from the table,
These two whose lives no longer touched each other.
They loved with such a heavy barricade between them
That neither battering ram of words
Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.
Somewhere between the oldest child’s first tooth
And youngest daughter’s graduation,
They lost each other.
Throughout the years each slowly unravelled
That tangled ball of string called self,
And as they tugged at stubborn knots
Each hid their searching from the other.
Sometimes she cried at night and begged
The whispering darkness to tell her who she was,
While he lay beside her snoring like a
Hibernating bear unaware of her winter.
Once after they had made love he wanted to tell her
How afraid he was of dying,
But, fearing to show his naked soul, he spoke instead
About the beauty of her breasts.
She took a course in modern art trying to find herself
In colours splashed upon a canvas,
And complaining to other women about men
Who were insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called the office,
Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures
And buried himself in customers.
Slowly the wall between them rose, cemented
By the mortar of indifference.
One day, reaching out to touch each other,
They found a barrier they could not penetrate
And, recoiling from the coldness of the stone,
Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies, it is not in a moment of angry battle,
Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting, exhausted, expiring
At the bottom of a wall it could not scale. [2]
Many marriages break down, not because of incompatibility, but because the husband and wife have never known what it takes to make their relationship work. In our society, fewer and fewer people grow up seeing a strong relationship modelled by their own parents.
We live in a consumerist age in which people are not used to mending things. If something doesn’t work, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new one. Powerful advertising encourages us to focus on wanting what we do not have rather than being grateful for what we do have. It increases the expectation that we should have our desires fulfilled quickly – as in the slogan for the credit card that promised to take “the waiting out of wanting”. [3] We are encouraged to believe that fulfilment comes through what we can acquire with as little effort as possible rather than through working at something.
Alvin Toffler, the sociologist and bestselling author, wrote that people today have a“throwaway mentality”. They not only have throwaway products, but they also make throwaway friends, and it is this mentality that produces throw away marriages. [4]
Marriage is viewed by many today as a temporary contract between a couple for as long as their love lasts. Our culture stresses the freedom of the individual. If the relationship is not personally fulfilling, then it is better to get out. If there is no more love in a marriage, it is better to finish it.
But we are discovering as a society that the consequences are not so easily discarded. The oneness of the marriage bond means that the two people cannot be neatly and painlessly divided. It is like taking two sheets of paper and gluing them together. They become one, and they cannot be separated without causing damage to both.
If you’re struggling in your marriage, we want to encourage you that reconnecting is possible. When couples have tended their relationship, we’ve seen things change dramatically, and they go on to experience a new connection and intimacy.
In an interview, the actor Michael Caine spoke of the breakup of his first marriage.He was desperately short of money and his wife, Patricia, tried to persuade him to give up the theatre, but, “rather than relinquish his dreams, he walked away from his marriage”. Later he said that, if he’d known the anguish involved, “I would have stayed at all costs. If I’d been as strong as Pat I think we could have made it.” [5] Michael Caine is right. A marriage can be made to work but it takes deliberate and determined action.
[1] TheGuardian, 24 October 1998, p. 3.
[2] Quoted on audio tape by Sam Thompson, “Communion in Marriage”, Part 2, tape 2,Anaheim: VMI, 1984.
[3] Access credit card, https: / / www.accesscreditcard.info/chApply7273.aspx.
[4] Quoted in Selwyn Hughes, Marriage as God Intended (Kingsway Publications, 1983), p. 13.
[5] TheDaily Mail Weekend, 9 January 1999 [Interview with Lynda Lee - Potter].
